​5 reasons to choose a Udemy alternative

If you want to offer online learning courses to attract more customers and strengthen your branding, chances are you’ve heard about Udemy. They’re the biggest marketplace for online courses, however not the only solution with a compelling offering.
 
Their size – with more than 50 million registered users worldwide – is impressive and an argument for many companies to offer their courses there.

But Udemy is not perfect. Depending on what you’re looking to achieve with your online courses, you might want to consider one of the best Udemy alternatives which offer different features and benefits.
 
Following we list the top five reasons why you should consider a Udemy alternative: 

​1)  Restrictive content forms

Udemy is quite limited in ways you can present your course content. It needs to be a video course and must come with narration. We know some course creators that would favor a combination of other content forms to educate their audience in a better way. There’s no flexibility to create individual ways of teaching an online course

Furthermore, you need to have at least 30 minutes of content divided into 5 high-definition videos (minimum 720p) to create a course.

2)  Limited business model

​Whoever is consuming your content on Udemy is not your customer but remains merely a Udemy customer. You neither get access to their emails for retargeting campaigns or upsells nor can you see detailed analytics as we’re used to with our own website. Obviously this is a major downside as email addresses and other personal data are money in today’s world. Many course creators therefore try to bring their course audience to their own Facebook group or similar in order to gain access to their contact details in exchange for offering additional value. This means additional effort for you, of course.

3)  No customization or control

The Udemy interface is quite basic and doesn’t offer any customization like your own branding, whitelabeling or similar. This can make it hard to stand out in the sea of different course alternatives and people might get bored after attending several of similar looking courses. Udemy also requires you to fit your course into the predefined Udemy structure of categories and you also need to use Udemy’s standard structuring of lectures.

On Udemy you’re also limited to promoting your courses. Users can’t subscribe to your courses, buy a membership or purchase several courses plus informational products in a bundle. 

4)  No specialisation

​Udemy is the biggest player and therefore offers a quite broad selection of topics and courses. This means users pay less attenttion to each individual topic or course and your course not only competes against other courses within the same area but also a whole lot of courses about different topics.

This makes Udemy more of a generalist platform and people who want to specialize in a topic will probably go to a more specialized marketplace, for instance Pluralsight for technology skills.

5)  Pricing

Udemy doesn’t make any restrictions on pricing, however a big share of your revenue goes directly to Udemy – up to some 50-80%, crazy right? For that reason Udemy is probably not the right platform to get rich by selling courses. Therefore, many course creators try to use Udemy as an entrance door to their own funnel, for instance by bringing the audience to their own website or Facebook group.
 
In conclusion: We showed that Udemy has some major downsides – next to many upsides, no doubt! It depends which goals you pursue with offering online learning courses. If the above mentioned points are critical for you, you should consider one of the Udemy alternatives.