Heights Platform Review – Should You Use This Course Platform?

You need to read this entire Heights Platform review if you’re looking at various solutions to sell your knowledge and expertise online.

Heights Platform is relatively new to the online learning space but they aim to provide everything you need to create and sell your courses online.

As an all-in-one solution they provide the tools to sell not only courses but communities and digital products. This means you get a website, analytics and student management as well as popular integrations. Gamification is also a big part of Heights Platform so that you can make learning fun and to encourage student retention.

In this review, I’ll give my opinion on the most integral features of Heights based on my own testing and also my thoughts on support and pricing, pros and cons as well as alternatives to Heights.

By the end, you’ll be able to decide for yourself if Heights is the course platform for you to run your online business.

This post may contain affiliate links. TrialBear earns commissions at no extra cost to you when purchases are made through links on this page. For more info, visit the disclosure page.

Table of Contents

What Is Heights Platform?

Heights Platform is an online course creation platform that provides everything for creators to monetize their knowledge.

Their main focus is to help learners engage with your content and with each other to improve learning outcomes and results. This is done through a number of features provide such as challenges, projects, community and gamification.

There are also a lot of features included that you would expect from a course creation platform. Some of these features, which are integral for success with creating and selling courses, include:

• payment processing
• email marketing
• community building
• student analytics
• customizable landing pages and blog
• support and help

There’s also a useful feature that’s unique to this platform called Climb Outline which helps you to outline how your entire program is structured.

Help is provided at every step of your creation journey and includes assistance from artificial intelligence. Integrations also allow you to connect Heights with external software that you already use.

Heights pricing is similar to other course platforms and they offer a full 30 day free trial so that you can test the platform and start building your course, setting up your sales pages and more.

Who is Heights Platform For?

Heights Platform was built for course creators who want everything in one place so that they can monetize their knowledge with courses and digital products.

The learning platform was also made so that students can get real results by engaging with content in a practical way.

Heights, although still growing and developing as a platform, contains everything from course creation tools and community, a website builder with blogging capabilities, gamification, ecommerce tools, affiliate marketing management and useful integrations.

If you’ve considered platforms like Kajabi, Podia, Thinkific, Teachable or LearnWorlds before then Heights is a worthy alternative.

Other creators that can benefit from using Heights as their course platform of choice are:

• Bloggers who want to take a more structured approach to teaching what they know.
• Digital product owners who want to launch their own affiliate program.
• Course owners who want to migrate from course marketplaces like Udemy and Skillshare
• YouTube creators who want to have their own community and courses on one platform with less distractions.

Want to see examples of people who are already using Heights? Check out how Michelle Reeves, Shelly Coffman, Paris Hansch, John Vasta and Barb McGrath among others are using the course platform with success.

Heights Platform Interface

A platform’s interface plays an important role in how creators get work done and manage their business. If it’s too cluttered and cumbersome to navigate and key settings and controls are too hard to find, it could create frustration leading you to be less productive.

It also needs to be very user-friendly for the student even more than to the creator.

Heights Platform’s interface allows creators to see the same view that students see so they can understand how their program is presented. The creator dashboard and outline are visible only to the creator as well as other admin controls throughout the dashboard.

On the dashboard, when you first log in, the area to the left has placeholders for courses, projects and digital products. They’re filled in after you’ve created each product type and this is where students can navigate and access all your products easily.

In the same area to the bottom, you have tabs for bookmarks and notes which are student features they can use while taking courses. They can access their bookmarks and any notes they’ve taken through these tabs.

Students can also navigate your program using the menu at the top. They can see courses, access your community and see other members via this menu.

Creators can also use both the menu and the sidebar section to view and edit their courses, access community and see their members. Additionally, from any page, you can go to the creator dashboard or see your program outline using the two buttons at the top.

In the top right hand corner, you’ll find the personal profile and settings links which include your name and avatar, your points through gamification, notification, messages and a drawer that contains personal and admin links. Students have all these same links except for the admin links present in the drawer.

In the admin links, you’ll find links to the affiliate program, Heights billing, students billing, creator support and your account settings.

The menu running down the center of the left half of the dashboard gets you to different features and is divided into three sections – review, create and settings.

Under review, you can click the dashboard button from any page to get back to the creator dashboard, see the student list and other information related to students and also see and configure awards like badges and certificates that you can give out.

“Create” menu items would include your outline, new products (such as courses, challenges, projects etc.), website and email marketing campaigns.

Finally, within settings, you’ll be able to configure payments, bundles and other payment related functions as well as access different account settings.

One the dashboard, you can see a chart and other info that will give you a glance at how your business is performing. You can see stats like total active students, revenue earned, students enrolled and most and least popular lessons.

One of the things I like best about the interface is that on every page, you’ll find a help button pinned to the top right hand corner of the dashboard for the particular feature you’re using. So if you’re using the dashboard for instance, the button says “dashboard help” and opens a popup that shows the help info about the dashboard.

The interface for both creators and students is very easy to navigate and is also well laid out. Creators should have little problem working with the Heights Platform interface.

Heights Platform Features

As an all-in-one course platform, Heights has some great features that are essential for creators looking to profit from their expertise.

Most of these features are available in other platforms but they are different in terms of user experience and the features that they have also. For example, a community in Heights does not have live video and event creation as you may find with Mighty Networks but they both provide a place where students can interact and offer peer-to-peer support.

Here is a look at some of Heights Platform’s most essential features and how they work.

1. Course Builder

There are several ways to start building your course on Heights Platform. I loved that you can access the course builder in a number of ways because after all, it’s a course platform and starting a course should be easy.

Here are three ways in which you can start creating a course at Heights.

1. Click on the courses link in the top menu. You’ll be able to see all the courses if you have any already created and you’ll also be able to start a new course.
2. In the Climb Outline, you’ll be able to create a course as it represents part of the overall outline.
3. In the creator menu, you can click the “New Product” menu item to see a collection of all the different products you can create which includes creating a course.

When you use the Outline (#2), you’ll get a form to quickly setup the course after which you can edit it to add all the details.

The other two methods send you straight to the course manager.

The course manager is easy enough to use as everything is on one page and all fields and buttons are labeled so that you know what goes where.

There are also “course help” tips available so that you know what you’re doing. And, like on all other pages in the creator dashboard, there is a green button in the top right hand corner that corresponds to the feature you’re using. In this case, it offers help with courses and course creation.

In the course manager, you can add course info, set whether you’re offering the course for free or paid, add a cover image, customize the join button text, automatically create a landing page and more.

Once these are filled out, you can then click on the “Create Course” button to start adding lessons.

When previewing the course, you will be able to go back to the course manager to edit the settings or access the course editor to add lessons. A course view switcher lets you preview your course landing page, upsell page, purchase page and course page.

In the lesson editor, you can click the + icon on the page to start adding and naming your lessons. Lessons can be dragged and dropped to reorder and you can click the title to open the lesson to add your content.

By default, there’s a text editor where you can add your lesson content but you can change this to one of four other media types: video, audio, download or assignment. All these media types are native and you can add them directly to the lesson where they’ll appear above the text lesson.

For each lesson, there are some settings where you can add the number of points students get after completion. This works towards the gamification rewards and motivates students to complete your course.

You can modify the lesson URL, add a thumbnail image or set the drip release if you don’t want your students completing the course all at once.

Heights Platform course builder is very easy to use and does have everything needed to build engaging lessons. You can organize your lessons into modules and display them directly in the Climb Outline.

In comparison to course builders on other platforms, Heights is one of the easiest ones I’ve used.

In the Preview, my incomplete course looks like this and is starting to take shape. If only I could have had sections, I think it would have looked better and be more organized.

Using Heights AI For Course Creation

With almost every business racing to take advantage of AI after the ChatGPT craze, it didn’t take long for Heights to introduce their own AI bot.

You can now use AI right inside Heights to help you create your online course. Just give the AI a rough concept of your course or a title and it will generate:

• a detailed recommendation about your course title
• a full course outline that you can use as inspiration or a starting point to create and complete modules and lessons.
• a catchy course description that you can use to promote your course on your website or on the course page.
• a cover image

Heights AI is a time saver for course creators and you should definitely utilize it when building out your course. It is currently in beta but anyone on any paid plan can request access to use it by going to Creator Climb.

2. Program Outline

One feature that is unique to Heights Platform is the Climb Outline feature. It gives you an overview of the way your entire learning program is set out.

The outline shows the student’s journey from enrollment to completion of your program. All of your products are listed within this outline so you can see and make adjustments as well as create courses or even lessons to fill any gaps.

This outline is very useful and allows you to create courses, lessons or modules directly within the outline.

There are help tips that you can follow and also you can click the button in the top right hand corner for “outline help”. This brings up the knowledgebase article to answer any questions you might have about the feature.

3. Website Builder

Previously, Heights Platform only allowed you to create and customize landing pages for your products. With their latest update, which happened while I was free trialing the platform, you can now build an entire website with a blog.

This feature is available on Pro and Academy while Basic plan members get the landing page feature that was previously available.

There are three steps to creating your first website with Heights.

1. Add a page
2. Choose a template
3. Edit your website.

You start by adding your first page to the website. I decided to add an About page to see where it would take me. At this point it doesn’t look too promising but then you get to the next step.

Heights Platform has a handful of website templates that you can use to create a beautiful website. There are only 6 right now because they just launched the website builder during my free trial period but they plan to add more.

The templates themselves are very well designed and look great. They include a Coming Soon template and a product pre-sale template as well.

Finally, the third step is where the website builder becomes even more powerful. This step lets you edit the details on your website page.

You can switch between adding blocks to the page using the block editor and using the open style manager to edit elements on the page such as fonts, dimensions, colors and more.

With the block editor, you can add text, headings, video, quotes, columns, images, maps and even custom code.

There is also a tab for editing the page settings which include things like the page title and description for SEO as well as the page URL. You will also be able to change the page’s visibility status to published here or delete it if you choose.

Websites on Heights are fully responsive and you preview edits on desktop and mobile from the editor.

There is a button in the top right hand section of the site where you can get website builder help if needed.

Website Navigation

Site Navigation is also a new feature of the website builder where you can manage the site menu and site footer links in one place.

By default, your website will have a Login and a Signup link in the menu for students who enroll in your courses. You can add more links such as Home, About, Contact and so on.

You’ll be able to choose the type of link that you want to add as a menu item. Contact, for example is a site page – one I created while I was building the website in the previous step. You can also add course pages, custom links and more.

Footer links can also be managed in the navigation panel. Terms and Privacy links are added by default once you’ve added content to their pages.

Blogging

Blogging is one feature that isn’t available by default on most course platforms but thankfully, this feature is available natively in Heights Platform. It’s part of the website feature and you can create blog posts through the web pages tab.

Blogs are easy to create inside the rich text editor and lets you add categories, see the word count, change the publish date and add SEO description as well as edit the URL.

You can choose an optional cover image or insert one through the editor.

The blogging tool inside Heights isn’t perfect but I’m just grateful that there is one so I’m not going to complain much about it.

To wrap up, Heights does a decent job with their website offering. Courses are added to your website once you check the box while creating them and the websites are very presentable and easy to edit.

4. Community

Community is done differently from course platform to platform. Community platforms also have the capability to offer courses.

Having a community attached to courses allows students to become more motivated and engaged as they can connect with peers and get help, feedback, encouragement and more. They can also have fun and compete if the community is gamified.

Heights offers community channels as a product. Channels are available by default to all students taking your course but can be sold or made private if you add it to a bundle. For example, you can bundle a course and a channel to have students of that particular course access the channel.

No fancy features like live streaming and events here. Heights community channels are just message boards which allow creators to connect with their students.

Creators and students can create posts and everyone can get involved in the discussions.

To create a community in Heights, you can click on the “New Products” menu item in the creator dashboard and then choose “Community channel” from the options that pop up. Alternately, you can click on the Community menu link at the top of the dashboard and go from there.

You’ll then be able to add channels to your community.

Students will be able to find the communities through the link at the top of their dashboard (same as yours) and will be able to post discussions unless you lock the channel so that you’re the only one who can create discussions.

You can moderate or check direct messages and notifications using the sidebar menu. It’s not as sophisticated and feature-rich as some other platforms but it works.

5. Gamification

Gamification makes learning fun and engaging. Students complete simple tasks such as finishing a lesson or making a community post to earn points. They’re then awarded with badges or some other reward.

Heights was designed to help students get results and features like gamification allows for a higher level of participation. Course completion is much higher when you’re rewarded with badges and certificates.

In Heights, there are default badges that are given to students for things like completing all lessons in a course, being a member for a set period of time, completing your first lessons and so on. These system badges are awarded automatically one the conditions are met.

Creators can also set up their own badges which you can either grant manually or automatically when a course is completed.

Under the Awards tab, you can view and edit custom badges by renaming them, choosing a description for the badge and uploading a custom badge image.

To edit badge images, you can either upload the image from your device or import from a number of services.

Students earn points that they can view in their dashboard and on their profiles.

I love the idea of gamification on a course platform and wish other platforms would make it a primary feature instead of just allowing creators to give course completion certifications. This is one of the strongest pros of Heights Platform and one of their defining features.

6. Email Marketing

Heights platform has native email marketing built into their platform. If you don’t already use an email marketing suite like GetResponse or ActiveCampaign then you can use this as an option.

The email marketing system allows you to communicate important messages, either as announcements or as part of an email campaign with scheduled messages.

You can find this features under “Notifications” in the creator dashboard menu.

You will find system templates for automatic notification emails like student enrollment welcome messages, canceled subscriptions, new private messages and so on.

Announcements can be created here as well. These can be important messages you want your students to see when they log in. They’re posted at the top of course pages but you can opt to send an email when you create an announcement.

Finally, there are email campaigns which are your email marketing messages that you’d send to students as part of an autoresponder sequence.

Heights email marketing tool is a bit basic but does have limited segmentation. You can’t apply tags to your students to make them part of a segment but you’ll find audience types such as leads with no orders, course enrollees, digital product buyers and so on when you’re creating messages.

You’ll find email marketing help in the top right hand corner of the page to help you use this feature.

7. Sales Features

There are a number of sales features available in Heights Platform to help you earn more from your marketing efforts.

Once you connect your payment gateway, you can start accepting payments and also enable some of these features.

Bundles allow you to set a single price when combining two or more of your products. You could offer all or a few of your courses as part of a bundle or offer a course, digital products and a community channel for a bundled price.

“Pay What You Want” pricing lets creators accept donations from students or price products and bundles using this pricing model.

Coupon codes are another popular sales feature used by creators and this feature is available in Heights. You can create coupon codes to give discounts or offer sales during times like Black Friday. This can increase sales and enrollments to your products and courses.

Heights also lets you choose whether you want to sell individual products and bundles or use a paid membership model. The former option is enabled by default but you can change it inside your payment settings. You can offer one-time payment, installments or subscription plans using this latter option.

8. Affiliate Marketing Management

One feature that I always like to see on these course platforms is affiliate marketing. Creators can allow students to refer others and earn a commission for their hard work.

Heights has a basic affiliate program that you can use. There is not much to configure but you can set approval types, commission percentage, payment threshold and whether you want to offer commissions on future subscription payments.

You can see a list of student affiliates in your student list as well as referrals they made and revenue from referrals.

9. Integrations

Heights integrates with a number of different external apps and websites. This is because they can’t offer every possible service in their all-in-one setup and some external services (like embedding a YouTube video) are just necessary.

There are some native integrations which include:

• Stripe & PayPal – for collecting payments
• Unsplash – you can search and add from thousands of royalty-free images to include in your course material.
• Active Campaign – for email marketing
• Dropbox & Google Drive – upload and add content from these cloud storage services
• Facebook ads – add your Facebook pixel to track conversions on student enrollments
• Google Analytics – track activity across your program
• Gravatar – this is used to display creator and student avatars
• Wistia, YouTube, Vimeo and more – embed video content from these video hosting sites.
• Third-party embeds – eg. forms from Google Forms and Typeform, spreadsheets from Airtable and more.

And if you’d like to use a service that isn’t natively integrated, you have Zapier, from which you can connect with over 2000 apps including your favorite email marketing provider and more.

As long as it has some functional use for running your course business, you can probably connect with almost any service or application on Heights.

What’s Missing?

There isn’t a lot missing from Heights Platform but I have to say that even though they provide a lot of great features that are missing from some platforms, most of them are very basic.

For example, the affiliate program management feature only lets you configure about four settings and you have to work with it like that. I have seen other platforms where you can set up an affiliate registration page or change the commission type from a percentage to a flat rate.

The important thing though is that the features are actually present and there is always a chance that they will be improved in the future. Heights Platform is still pretty young and are growing so they’re probably always trying to add new features and improve the ones they already offer.

Heights Platform Help and Support

Finding help and support on Heights Platform is simple as they provide guidance on all their pages as well as a support button.

There are a number of other channels through which you can get help, support and education.

These include:

• Creator Climb – This is Heights Platform’s educational learning hub for creators.
• On-page help – a button in the corner of the page gives you help on the feature you’re using.
• Heights AI – use the AI to help answer questions about the platform and about building and growing an online course business.
• Email support – You can email Heights Platform support to talk to a real person about your issue
• Knowledge-base – a knowledge-base with help articles gives you guidance and answers you need to get unstuck.
• Private Facebook community – creators can get together and get peer support and discussion through the private Heights Platform Facebook community for creators.
• Heights Platform blog – a helpful resource for creators to build their knowledge of course building and promotion strategies as well as how to use the platform.

Creator Climb

All the top course platforms have a dedicated space for creators to learn more about the platform that they’re using and how to use it to achieve their online course business goals.

Heights Platform recently launched Creator Climb which is their learning hub for creators. Inside Creator Climb, members can get access to:

• a community of course creators using Heights Platform.
• Heights’ own online course for creators – T-30: Launch Your Course In 30 Days
• A collection of interviews from the Heights Platform podcast, Creator Adventures.
• resources for course creators
• newly added and updated training and courses.

Creator Climb can be easily accessed from the dashboard by clicking on the draw icon in the top-right corner and then clicking on the Creator Climb banner.

You can also access Creator Climb from the Creator dashboard button at the top of the screen.

Heights AI for Support

Heights AI is available on all paid plans and is trained on everything from using the Heights platform to building and growing an online course business.

The AI can help you to create your course but it can also give you support when you need it.

Examples of questions you can ask the AI:

Heights Platform is one of the first course platforms to adapt the AI technology that is currently making waves on the internet. It’s like having your own assistant helping you build your online course business.

On-Page Help

On any page you go to inside the Heights Platform creator dashboard, you’re just a click away from getting help on whatever feature you’re using.

In the top right hand corner of the page, there is always a green help button that leads to a knnowledge-base article displayed in a popup on the screen.

This is a great way of getting help without waiting on an email from a member of the support team.

Email Support

If you click the green support button to the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you would probably expect to access live chat services.

However, there is no live chat with a human available. You would instead get knowledge-base articles displayed as instant answers. You can then search for a more relevant set of answers. A tab away, you can ask for help which leads you to email support.

They promise to respond in a few hours.

Knowledge-base

When you click the “creator support” link in your account settings, you will get sent to the Heights knowledge-base for creators.

The knowledge-base contains lots of useful guides and articles on various topics about course and product creation and using the platform. They’re organized in topics like:

• program structure
• program creation
• program settings

The Heights knowledge-base is a good place to spend your time if you want to get familiar with doing various tasks within the platform. You’ll find videos and screenshots with text instructions and explanations in many of the articles.

Facebook Community

Like many other course platforms, there is a private Heights Platform creator community on Facebook.

This Facebook group is only for members and require approval. The group contains discussions and announcements from Heights Platform staff.

It’s a good place to go to connect with other creators using the same platform and to get peer-to-peer support.

Blog

The Heights Platform blog is an excellent source of information for Heights Platform members or any course creator regardless of which platform you’re using.

There are three main categories under which articles are posted.

• Build and promote your course contains marketing and promotion articles to help you gain success after creating your course on Heights.
• How we learn contains educational articles for creators so they could gain more knowledge of how the course business works.
• Heights product contains information and announcements about the platform itself. This is where they’ll announce new features and talk about how to use existing features.

This is a great place to go if you want to be constantly learning new things about the online course business. The support channels available should be enough for any course creator to get the relevant help that they need.

Heights Platform Plans and Pricing

The Heights Platform free trial doesn’t ask for billing information so you’re not automatically charged when the trial is up.

This means you have total freedom to choose from any of their four plans depending on your business needs. Plans start at $29/month on the Challenge plan and go all the way up to $499/month on the Academy plan. Three of the plans cost less than $100/month before the big jump to almost $500/month.

Besides the monthly plans, you can also subscribe to any of the plans at an annual rate and get a 20% discount.

On all of the plans, there are no transaction fees which make Heights Platform a great alternative to any platform where there are transaction fees on paid plans.

All plans include:

Additionally, you can unlock features and limitations as you go up each plan. Here’s a brief look at what’s available on each of the Heights Platform plans.

Challenge Plan

This is the entry plan on Heights Platform and it’s great for continuing your set up after the trial if you’re not quite ready or have limited resources to work with.

On this entry plan which costs $29/month (or $19/month with annual billing), you cannot create any courses, only a challenge with unlimited lessons. Challenge courses release on a fixed calendar date so that the majority of your students can take the challenge at the same time and complete it by a certain date.

Although it’s not a hard limit, you can have up to 100 active students on this plan. The operative word here is active, meaning you can have unlimited students with access but up to 100 who log in each month.

You can also have unlimited emails sent but only to 1000 contacts. This is another limitation to being on the Challenge plan which might be great if your business is still small and growing.

Basic Plan

The Basic Plan is an introduction to the core features of Heights Platform. For $49/month ($39/month on annual billing), you can now add unlimited courses along with challenges. You can offer both free and paid courses to up to 200 active students per month.

Basic also adds unlimited community and discussion so that you can charge membership fees or add dedicated message boards for your course students. Creation and sale of digital products is another feature available on this plan as well as student projects.

Sales features available on this Basic plan include the ability to bundle programs for sale and add hidden courses and products for specific audiences. You will also be able to manage your own affiliate program where you pay commissions to people who refer your products to others.

All of these features are available on the Heights Platform free trial.

Pro Plan

The Pro plan is Heights Platform’s most popular plan. It costs $119/month ($99/month when paid annually) and unlocks even more features and resources not available to Basic plan members.

On the Pro plan, you can start using a custom domain which comes with a free SSL certificate. You can also add a blog to your landing pages which is great for SEO and content marketing.

White label branding is available on this plan as well so that you can replace any mention of Heights Platform with your own brand logo and colors.

In terms of plan limits, you can now have up to 2000 active students logging in each month, 2 lesson authors including yourself and send emails to up to 10,000 contacts.

There is a massive jump in pricing from the Pro plan to the next available plan, the Academy plan which is available for brands and organizations with high volume and huge requirements.

Academy Plan

The Academy plan is really the Pro plan on a larger scale. It doesn’t really add many new features but increases the allowances that are limited on each plan.

For example, you can now have unlimited active students and being able to send unlimited emails to 100,000 contacts should be more than enough for most brands. Lesson authors are increased to 25 so you can provide courses from multiple instructors with different expertise.

The only additional feature available on this plan are customizable student roles while you have the additional benefits of a personal setup consultation and priority support.

Heights Platform Pros and Cons

No course platform is perfect and that goes for Heights also. There are going to be things that aren’t as well done as you would like and there will be features that you wish were available.

Here I’m going to go through some of the things I liked about Heights and some I didn’t.

The features that I really loved inside Heights Platform include the on-page help buttons on every page and the strong gamification features that some to define Heights.

I also loved that there are products like projects and challenges that are geared to getting students results based on the goals they’re trying to achieve. I would expect that there would be higher course completion rates with Heights than other platforms.

On the negative side, I noticed that most of the features are more basic than with other platforms. This isn’t to say that they wouldn’t get the job done but more customization and controls would be better.

For example, the affiliate program only lets you control only a few settings. communities are just message boards with not many advanced features and you’d have more control doing email marketing with your external email marketing software.

Regardless, Heights strives to be an all-in-one platform and does a lot of things well enough to compete with other top platforms.

5 Best Heights Platform Alternatives To Try

Heights Platform may not be the perfect platform for you and this could be for a number of reasons. Heights is just one of dozens of course platforms available to creators who want to get their courses in front of the audience that needs them.

Here are five of the best alternatives you can use for courses instead of Heights. They all have either a free trial or a free plan to get started.

1. Thinkific

When it comes to course platforms, Thinkific is one of the best options you can go with. It’s a great alternative to Heights as they offer courses and a very powerful community product. And though digital products aren’t available for sale as a core product, they can still be offered through integrations in the Thinkific app store.

Thinkific has lots of integrations via their app store that you can use to add even more features that are not on their official feature list. You can integrate with apps you already use and third-party apps that allow you to offer more to your students.

Not only does Thinkific offer a free plan unlike Heights, but they also offer a full 30-day free trial on their Start plan. There are no transaction fees on any plans including their free plan.

Heights is relatively more affordable than Thinkific when it comes to their paid plans. Thinkific plans start at $49/month or $36/month when you use annual billing. The $99 plan on Heights has everything the platform has to offer while Thinkific’s $99/plan still has a few limitations when both platforms are compared.

2. LearnWorlds

Like Heights Platform, you can start with a 30 day free trial without having to submit your credit card details if you want to try LearnWorlds.

LearnWorlds has some great features available for building and marketing your courses. Their most popular plan seems to be the Learning Center plan which is also their most expensive plan apart from the Corporate plan. It costs $299/month which is more than Height’s most popular plan but about $200 less than the most expensive plan on Heights.

With LearnWorlds, you can also get your own branded app for both iOS and Android devices which is something not all course platforms offer. There’s an additional cost for this but it’s worth all of the benefits that it brings.

Finally, if you’re looking for a course player that has interactivity built-in, LearnWorlds is a great option.

3. Kajabi

This is a popular alternative to Heights Platform. They also have some great features but there are caps on how many students you can have on each plan and limited number of products.

Heights Platform doesn’t have caps on how many students can be enrolled but they do limit the number of active users logging in each month.

Kajabi does have 0% transaction fees on all paid plans which is a plus. However Kajabi starts at $149/month about five times the cost of Heights Platform’s cheapest plan. You can join with a 14 day free trial before upgrading to one of their three paid plans.

Kajabi has a great email marketing product, possibly the best of any course platform. They also have a very good community product as well. While Heights does have both email marketing and community, they don’t shine as much as this alternative’s offering.

4. Podia

Podia is another great option that lets you offer unlimited courses. They don’t have a free trial anymore but you can sign up for a free account to test drive and get started.

As an all-in-one platform, you can also sell courses, downloads, webinars, coaching and memberships. They also do not have transaction fees on any paid plan. The only thing you can sell on the free plan are downloads and this comes at a cost in the form of 8% transaction fees on sales.

This platform has three paid plans which appear to be much more suited for creators on a budget. The platform is also much simpler to use than Heights and has a focus on creator-friendliness.

5. Teachable

Teachable is a very popular choice for many creators and a good alternative to LearnWorlds. You can have unlimited courses and sell unlimited downloads on all plans (except for the free plan).

Users on Free and Basic plans are charged transaction fees while there are no fees on higher plans. LearnWorlds wins on pricing as the plans are way cheaper than Teachable’s.

You can start using Teachable with a free account with limitations. This is your only way of trying Teachable as there are no trials for any of the paid plans.

Final Words

Heights does a great job at providing an all-in-one course platform that creators can use to effectively build and market their courses and other digital products.

Being rather new in comparison to other course platforms, some of the features may come across as more basic but the fact is that they’re available. Integrations are provided so that you can have more options.

Overall, they can compete with other top course platforms and do a lot of things better than some. Gamification is a defining feature of Heights and a good reason to choose them over other platforms. Heights also has some features in place that aim to help students achieve more success and meet their goals.

Heights Platform gives you a 30-day free trial (no credit card necessary) to get started so there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t give it a try.