Updated: April 24th, 2017

Many people ask us, “Is Zippy Courses any good? Can I teach an engaging, successful online course using Zippy Courses?”

You should take our opinion with a healthy pinch of salt, since we develop a competing online course platform.

That said, we’ll try to be as fair as we can. We’ve written an in-depth Zippy Courses review here — it includes a complete Zippy Courses feature comparison and decision guide.

Why use Zippy Courses?

Zippy Courses is useful for businesses with strong web development resources who wish to integrate a membership site or course content directly into their existing WordPress website.

This can be helpful if your goal is to host your content on your existing site, or to create a custom design or custom functionality for your course pages.

Because it is a WordPress plugin, Zippy Courses can be customized or extended by developers with WordPress development skills.

Because Zippy Courses allows for “self-hosting” a course on your own WordPress installation, it can have lower hosting fees than dedicated course platforms in some cases.

Possible concerns about using Zippy Courses

Zippy Courses is designed to be added to a self-hosted WordPress installation. Typically, WordPress sites are hosted on commodity web hosting platforms that cannot host video directly.

So, if videos are important to your online courses, you would need to research, purchase and integrate a separate video hosting solution to use in conjunction with Zippy Courses.

Zippy Courses is focused on delivering content, and does not include discussion or online community capabilities. This can make it challenging to run a scheduled course with an active, engaged community.

Zippy Courses does not track how participants are progressing in a course — you can’t see how many activities people have completed, or get insight into how engaged participants are in your community. This can make it difficult to assess how well your courses are serving your participants, and improve them over time.

Zippy Courses does not offer any conferencing or webinar features for running teleclasses or webinar classes within your course. You would need to research, purchase, and manage a separate conferencing tool.

For further details about each of these concerns, please check out our in-depth Zippy Courses review here. The article includes an extensive Zippy Courses feature comparison and decision guide.

Alternatives to Zippy Courses

Here are some alternatives to Zippy Courses you could consider: