6 LearnWorlds Alternatives in 2026 and What Each Takes Per Sale

The strongest LearnWorlds alternatives are Thinkific for a like-for-like swap that takes no cut of your sales, Teachable for the most familiar move, Podia for courses and community on one bill, and CartMango if you only need the checkout. They separate on what each one takes per sale. Every price here was read live at the vendor.

The $29 LearnWorlds Starter plan adds $5 every time somebody enrolls in a paid course. Sell 40 courses in a month and that is $200 on top of the $29, which is what usually sends people looking for a LearnWorlds alternative.

What catches people out is that 4 of the 5 cheap plans you would move to charge you again per sale too, just by a different method.

Teachable’s entry plan takes 7.5% of every sale. Podia’s takes 5%. Kajabi’s takes 2% if you bring your own Stripe. Swap without checking and the new bill can be bigger than the one you left.

This post prices 6 alternatives on one basis, shows what each one takes per sale, and says plainly where staying put is the cheaper answer.

Key Takeaways

• LearnWorlds Starter is $29 a month plus $5 per paid enrollment. That flat $5 is 25% of a $20 course and 1.7% of a $297 one.
• The Starter plan cannot sell subscriptions at all. LearnWorlds documentation puts those on Pro Trainer, at $99 a month.
• Thinkific Basic at $54 a month takes no cut of a sale. It is the only one of the 5 entry plans compared here that does not.
• Pro Trainer and Learning Center share the same 2,000 monthly active learner cap. Paying $299 rather than $99 gets you 20 more admin seats and the same 2,000 learners.
• All 7 pages ranking for this search are published by a company selling a platform in their own list. 2 of them get LearnWorlds’ own price badly wrong.
• Do not connect a different Stripe account once you have started selling. LearnWorlds says you stop receiving payments from customers who bought under the old one.

What LearnWorlds costs you before you compare anything

LearnWorlds sells 3 self-serve plans and a custom Corporate tier. On month-to-month billing they are $29, $99 and $299. Paying for a year up front drops the displayed rate to $24, $79 and $249 a month.

If you would rather find your own leaks before comparing anything, the free 5-day Online Selling Mistakes Challenge walks through the 5 places solo sellers lose money on their own products, platform fees included.

Every price in this post is the month-to-month rate unless a row says otherwise. LearnWorlds, Teachable, Thinkific, Podia and Kajabi all load their pricing pages on the annual toggle by default, so the number you remember seeing is the discounted yearly rate rather than what you would pay to try a platform for a single month.

On Starter, LearnWorlds charges $5 on top for every paid enrollment. That fee disappears on Pro Trainer.

Starter and Pro Trainer cross over at 14 paid enrollments a month on month-to-month billing. Below that, Starter is cheaper. At 14 the 2 plans cost exactly the same $99. From the 15th enrollment onward, the $29 plan is the more expensive one.

If you want the full breakdown of what each tier gates, we have a separate LearnWorlds pricing deep-dive.

The sentence on LearnWorlds’ own pricing page that does not survive its own table

LearnWorlds answers “Are there any extra fees?” on its pricing page with this:

At LearnWorlds, we strive to keep our pricing straightforward and transparent. There are no hidden or extra fees. The pricing you see is what you pay, allowing you to plan your budget effectively.

The answer then names payment gateway fees and stops.

The $5 per paid enrollment never appears in that answer. It is on the Starter plan card a few screens above, so it is disclosed rather than hidden. But a reader who scrolls to the FAQ to check for extra fees, which is exactly what that FAQ is for, gets told there are none.

Before you go looking for a cheaper platform, know that nearly every cheap course plan is priced this way. LearnWorlds is not the odd one out.

The cut most cheap course plans take

4 of the 5 entry plans a leaving LearnWorlds seller would actually consider charge you again on every sale, on top of the monthly price. Only Thinkific Basic takes nothing beyond what your card processor charges.

You cannot compare those fees at a glance, because a flat charge and a percentage behave in opposite directions. LearnWorlds charges a flat $5, which hurts on a cheap course and barely registers on an expensive one. Teachable and Podia charge a percentage, so the pain grows with the price.

On a $97 course, LearnWorlds takes $5.00, Podia takes $4.85, Kajabi takes $1.94 and Teachable takes $7.28, while Thinkific takes nothing.

Card processing sits on top of every row. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on standard US card payments and PayPal publishes its own comparable rate. No platform in this table removes that.

A flat fee and a percentage swap places at a specific price. LearnWorlds’ $5 equals Teachable’s 7.5% at a course price of $66.67, equals Podia’s 5% at $100, and equals Kajabi’s 2% at $250. So the honest version of “is Teachable cheaper” is: cheaper per sale below $67, more expensive above it.

Kajabi’s 2% only applies if you connect your own Stripe. Use Kajabi Payments instead and the platform cut goes to zero, but the card rate becomes 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, which is where a normal processor already sits. Our Kajabi pricing breakdown walks through which of the 2 is cheaper at different volumes.

So run the arithmetic on your own numbers before you move anything.

What the swap actually costs at 20 sales a month

At 20 sales a month of a $97 course, Thinkific Basic costs $54 a month all in, LearnWorlds Starter costs $129, Podia Mover costs $146, Teachable Starter costs $184.60 and Kajabi Basic costs $217.80. The cheapest sticker price in that list is attached to the second most expensive bill.

Thinkific Basic beats every option including both LearnWorlds plans, and it does so purely because it does not charge per sale. And LearnWorlds Pro Trainer at $99 beats the $29 Starter plan you are probably on by $360 a year, which means the cheapest fix might not involve leaving at all.

Almost nobody prices a switch that way. Your number to beat is whatever LearnWorlds is taking from you right now, the $5 per enrollment included, and not the plan price you remember off the pricing page. Compare against that, never against zero.

Run your own numbers before you trust that ranking, because the order really does move. Drop to 5 sales a month of a $29 course and Teachable Starter becomes the cheapest at $49.90, while LearnWorlds Starter and Thinkific Basic tie at $54.

That happens because 7.5% of a $29 sale is only $2.18, while LearnWorlds’ flat $5 is a 17% cut of the same sale. Cheap products punish flat fees and reward percentages.

The 6 LearnWorlds alternatives, and the job each one does

Thinkific, Teachable, Podia, Kajabi, LearnDash and CartMango are the 6 covered below. Before the detail, one thing about every other list you will find on this search. I opened all 7 pages Google currently ranks for “learnworlds alternatives” and checked who publishes each one.

All 7 are published by a company selling a platform that appears in its own comparison, including LearnWorlds’ own blog at position 6. There is no independent review on page 1.

2 of them get the price badly wrong. One states LearnWorlds’ lowest plan as $99 a month when it is $29. The other says pricing starts at around $2,400 a year, when 12 months of Starter at the monthly rate is $348.

I have been on the wrong side of page 1 before. For years I believed you could not get a promotional email out of Gmail’s Promo Tab, because that is what every blog post on the subject said. I wrote about it at the time: “If you Google this topic, you’ll find blog posts telling you there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Then I noticed other people’s promotional emails landing in Primary anyway. I spent whole days for weeks testing, and found a way out. Page 1 had repeated itself until it sounded like a fact.

I run a checkout platform myself, so I am on that list too. The difference I can offer is that every price below was read on the vendor’s own pricing page this week, and I have shown my working above.

Thinkific Basic is $54 a month and takes nothing per sale, Teachable Starter is $39 but takes 7.5%, Podia Mover is $49 and takes 5%, Kajabi Basic is $179 and takes 2% on your own Stripe, LearnDash is $259 a year with no per-student fee, and CartMango is $10 a year with no cut on any tier.

Being upfront about the last row: CartMango is mine, and it is the only one here that cannot host your course yet.

Thinkific

Thinkific Basic is $54 a month. Paying for the year is $475, which Thinkific displays as $40 a month and states as a $173 saving on the monthly rate. Start is $109 a month and Grow is $219. No plan charges a platform cut of your sales.

That last point is why Thinkific wins the arithmetic above. Its own processor, Thinkific Payments, charges 2.9%, which is the ordinary card rate rather than a platform fee on top. Using an outside processor adds a gateway fee that varies by plan, and Thinkific links out rather than printing the number, so check it against your plan before you assume zero.

One thing to correct, because 2 pages on this SERP still get it wrong: you cannot sign up for a Thinkific free plan. It left the pricing page in May 2024 and a 30-day trial replaced it, which we cover in what happened to the Thinkific free plan. If a roundup tells you that you can stay on Thinkific for free forever, that roundup is out of date.

The catch that does not show up in pricing tables is portability. A commenter in an r/elearning thread on course platforms describes Thinkific’s course format as proprietary, separately from the content: build a quiz or an interactive activity there and it cannot be moved without making it again from scratch. You are trading one lock-in for another.

Teachable

Teachable Starter is $39 a month and takes 7.5% of every sale, the steepest percentage of any plan on this page. Builder at $89 and Growth at $189 drop that to 0%.

Teachable is the easiest platform to move into if you are coming from LearnWorlds, because the structure maps closely: courses, lessons, quizzes, certificates, and a checkout that behaves the way you expect. Nothing surprising to relearn.

The way to use Teachable well is to skip Starter. The break-even against Builder arrives fast, since 7.5% of $667 in monthly sales already equals the $50 gap between the 2 plans.

If you are selling anything at all, Builder is the honest entry price. Our Teachable pricing breakdown has the full tier-by-tier math.

Podia

Podia Mover is $49 a month and takes 5%, Shaker is $99 with no cut, and Earthquaker is $179. Billed annually those become $42, $84 and $150 a month, which the page states as $504, $1,008 and $1,800 for the year.

What you get for that is more than a course platform. Every Podia plan includes courses, digital downloads, coaching, community, events, a website, a blog and email marketing, with the email list capped at 100 subscribers on Mover and 500 on Shaker.

For someone running a course plus a community plus a newsletter, that bundle can genuinely replace 3 bills. For someone who only sells courses, you are paying for a lot of surface you will not touch. Our Podia pricing breakdown prices it against the alternatives properly.

Kajabi

Kajabi Basic is $179 a month, or $143 billed annually, which the page states as a $432 saving over the year. Growth is $249 and Pro is $499.

Kajabi is the most expensive option here by a wide margin, and the reason people pay it is the marketing stack: funnels, unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails, automations and a community, all on one login. If you are currently paying for LearnWorlds plus an email tool plus a funnel builder, the comparison is closer than the sticker price suggests.

The fee to watch is the 2% Kajabi takes on Basic when you use your own Stripe, dropping to 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro. Kajabi’s own pricing page opens with “No hidden fees. No revenue sharing.” and lists those percentages further down the same page.

LearnDash

LearnDash Essentials is $259 a year, Pro is $399 and Elite is $599, with no per-student fee on any of them. It is a WordPress plugin, so it runs on a site you already own.

This is the only route on the list that gets you off monthly software entirely. Essentials includes the course builder, quizzes, memberships and subscriptions, certificates and Stripe and PayPal payments. One licence covers unlimited courses and unlimited learners.

The honest cost is the part the licence price hides. You need WordPress hosting, you need to keep the site updated, and when something breaks it is yours to fix.

For a technically comfortable seller that is a fair trade for owning the whole thing. For someone who wants to record a course and get on with it, it is a second job.

CartMango

CartMango does not host courses today. The CartMango learning management system is in development and is planned for October 2026, on the $30 a year Platinum plan. If you need a course player right now, one of the 5 platforms above is your answer and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Where CartMango fits is the other half. If your course already lives somewhere that is fine and free, a private YouTube playlist, a Notion page, a set of Vimeo links, then what you are actually paying LearnWorlds $29 a month plus $5 a sale for is the selling: a page, a checkout, and delivery. CartMango does that part for $10 a year once the beta ends, with no cut of any sale on any tier.

I run CartMango, so discount my opinion and check the specifics instead: order bumps on every tier, upsells, downsells and cart abandonment from the $20 Gold tier, one-time and subscription selling on all 3 tiers, and payouts that land in your own Stripe or PayPal rather than being held. CartMango file storage runs 2 GB, 10 GB and 50 GB across the 3 tiers, and CartMango does not host video, which is exactly the limitation that makes this a fit only when your video already lives elsewhere.

3 limits on LearnWorlds that no ranking page mentions

LearnWorlds caps your monthly active learners, blocks subscriptions on the Starter plan, and ties you to the first Stripe account you connect. All 3 come from LearnWorlds’ own pricing page and help centre. None of the 7 pages currently ranking for this search covers any of them.

Pro Trainer and Learning Center share the same learner cap

LearnWorlds caps monthly active learners at 1,000 on Starter and 2,000 on both Pro Trainer and Learning Center. An active learner is anyone who logs in or interacts with your content during a billing month.

So the jump from $99 to $299 a month, which triples your bill, buys you 20 more admin seats, full white-label, client groups and scheduled reports. The learner ceiling stays at 2,000. Past that you are into the Corporate tier, which is quote-only.

A user on the r/elearning subreddit flagged this same cap independently, describing it as the point where LearnWorlds pushes you onto an enterprise plan with unclear pricing. You can read the r/elearning thread on LearnWorlds limits.

The Starter plan cannot sell subscriptions

LearnWorlds’ help centre states plainly that subscriptions are available with the Pro Trainer plan and above. The $29 plan sells one-off course purchases and nothing else.

For anyone planning a membership or a cohort with monthly billing, the real entry price is $99 a month rather than $29.

LearnWorlds’ own blog post about its own alternatives lists “sell courses, course bundles, memberships, and subscriptions” as a LearnWorlds advantage, with no mention of which plan you need. Its help centre documents the restriction. Its marketing does not repeat it. The pricing page does list “Subscriptions, memberships, and payment plans” under Pro Trainer’s extras, so LearnWorlds does say it. It reads as a feature you gain by upgrading, which is easy to skim past when you are looking for reasons the cheap plan might not work.

The Stripe account you connect is the one you keep

LearnWorlds’ Stripe documentation carries this warning: once you connect your Stripe account and create your products, you should not connect a different Stripe account, because you will stop being able to receive payments from users who bought while the original account was connected.

For most sellers that never comes up. It comes up hard if you ever change business entity, move country, or sell the business, because at that point every existing customer has to be cancelled and re-subscribed by hand.

A seller in an r/elearning thread on LearnWorlds and Stripe hit exactly this, warning that if you sell the business or move its headquarters, every subscription has to be cancelled and every subscriber has to resubscribe by hand. Their summary was that a business built this way is no business at all. That is one person’s view rather than a verdict. The constraint underneath it is in LearnWorlds’ own documentation.

Switching your gateway to Shopify does not break existing subscriptions, because those keep billing inside your Stripe account. Connecting a second, different Stripe account is what causes the problem.

When staying on LearnWorlds is the cheaper answer

Staying on LearnWorlds is cheaper more often than a list of alternatives will admit, and there are 4 situations where it clearly is.

You sell an expensive course. At $297 a course, LearnWorlds’ $5 flat fee is a 1.7% cut. Teachable Starter’s 7.5% on the same sale is $22.28. The flat fee is the best deal in this comparison at high prices, which is the exact opposite of how it behaves at $20.

You need the things LearnWorlds is actually good at. Interactive video, SCORM packages, certifications, a branded mobile app as a paid add-on, and up to 25 admin seats on Learning Center. Nothing else on this list matches that set. If you are running a training academy rather than selling a course, those features are the reason you picked LearnWorlds and no cheaper plan replaces them.

You can fix this without leaving. If the $5 enrollment fee is what is hurting, moving from Starter to Pro Trainer removes it for $70 more a month. Past 14 enrollments a month that upgrade pays for itself, and it costs you nothing in migration time.

You have live subscriptions. Moving a course is tedious. Moving active subscribers is worse, because in practice they have to cancel and re-subscribe on the new platform, and some fraction of them never do. At 20 sales a month the gap between LearnWorlds Pro Trainer and Thinkific Basic is $45 a month. Price the churn before you move for that.

FAQ

Is LearnWorlds worth it for a solo creator, or only for teams?

For a solo creator selling 1 or 2 courses, LearnWorlds is competitive at the Pro Trainer tier and awkward at Starter, because Starter cannot sell subscriptions and adds $5 to every sale. Learning Center at $299 a month is built for teams: 25 admin seats, white-label and client groups. A solo seller is paying for seats nobody is sitting in.

Which LearnWorlds alternative is cheapest?

At 20 sales a month of a $97 course, Thinkific Basic at $54 a month is the cheapest of the platforms compared here, because it is the only entry plan that takes no cut of a sale. At very low volume LearnWorlds Starter can still be cheaper, since $29 plus a handful of $5 fees beats a $54 flat plan until you pass 5 sales a month. Run your own volume rather than trusting a ranking.

Can I export my courses and students if I leave LearnWorlds?

You can export your content and your learner list, but not as a single package that another platform will import cleanly, so expect to rebuild the course structure by hand. Quizzes and interactive elements are the worst part, on LearnWorlds and on most alternatives. Active subscriptions are the real cost: they generally cannot be transferred, and each subscriber has to be cancelled and re-subscribed.

Does LearnWorlds have a free plan?

No. LearnWorlds runs a 30-day free trial with access to core features, then Starter at $29 a month is the cheapest paid plan.

None of the 5 course platforms here has a free plan either. Teachable’s own pricing FAQ says it is “a paid service that includes a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee”.

Podia and LearnWorlds both give 30 days, Kajabi runs a trial with no free tier, and Thinkific’s free plan left its pricing page in May 2024. If a comparison table promises you a permanent free tier on any of them, check the date on it.

What happens if I go over the 2,000 active learner cap?

You move to the Corporate tier, which is quote-only, so there is no published price to plan against. Both Pro Trainer and Learning Center share that same 2,000 cap, which means upgrading from $99 to $299 will not solve a learner-count problem. Only the custom plan raises the limit.

The bill that does not grow when you do

A course platform charges you twice: a monthly plan price, and a cut of every sale you make. Rank the LearnWorlds alternatives above by that second charge and the order comes out different from the sticker prices.

Thinkific Basic, LearnDash and CartMango all take nothing out of a sale, so that second charge is optional.

CartMango takes nothing on any tier, which is the whole reason I built it. You made the product and you found the buyer, so the software that takes the payment has no claim on the sale. CartMango is free until the beta ends in October 2026, and then $10 a year.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

Related Reading

• LearnWorlds pricing, tier by tier: the $5 enrollment fee, the learner cap, and both crossover points, for anyone weighing LearnWorlds alternatives against simply changing plan
• What an LMS for online courses really costs: real fees for 7 platforms and the crossover point on every entry plan
• Thinkific alternatives: for readers who land on Thinkific here and want to check it against its own rivals
• Membership site platform costs: 8 platforms priced at 100 members, and who keeps your subscribers if you leave
• How to sell online courses: the selling side, once the platform question is settled