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Squarespace Courses vs LearnWorlds
The course creation platform industry is highly competitive. As a content creator, it’s not easy to decide which course platform is the best choice for you. To ease your research and decision-making process, we compare two popular platforms in this article – Squarespace Courses and LearnWorlds.
We compare the two platforms against a host of important features to help you choose the right fit. Before we jump into the comparison, note that LearnWorlds offers a 30-day free trial while Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial.
Table of Contents
Squarespace Courses vs LearnWorlds - A Summary
Both tools enable you to create courses and market them to potential customers. However, Squarespace Courses have stunning templates that make it a breeze to create attractive landing and checkout pages while LearnWorlds comes packed with many features like a built-in social network and a daily news section. Each of these platforms has its strengths and weaknesses, and it’s best to evaluate them against your needs.
Let’s now jump to a detailed comparison of different parameters.
Website Design Templates
Landing pages are the gateway to your offering and are the first thing that potential customers see. This is why a lot of emphasis is placed on designing beautiful and intuitive landing pages that create the best first impression about your brand and offerings.
Squarespace Courses
Since Squarespace started as a website-building platform and later expanded to include courses, its templates are just out of the world. Its wide variety of more than 100 templates across different industries makes it easy to create a website for anything you want to sell. Plus, its drag-and-drop editor makes customization super easy. You can add your logo, include your brand colors, and customize every part of the web pages within just minutes. No coding knowledge is necessary.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds also comes with many templates, using which you can quickly design a web page that aligns with your organization’s branding and logo. It also comes with a pop-up builder for creating engaging pop-ups that will direct your users’ attention to specific aspects of your business. The survey builder feature is also handy to gather information about your visitors.
So, which of the two is better?
Verdict
When you compare the two, Squarespace Courses is the winner because of the sheer variety and design of its templates. Though no coding is necessary for both platforms, LearnWorlds offers about 50 designs as compared to the 100+ templates of Squarespace. Furthermore, the flexible sections and layouts of Squarespace offer greater flexibility. Due to these reasons, Squarespace Courses is the better one when it comes to website templates.
Marketing Tools
Marketing tools are an important part of your digital business as you’d want to get your courses to the people who are likely to sign up. You can use a wide range of tools to market your courses, and the key aspect is to know what tools work best for you. Let’s see the kind of tools that both platforms offer.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace Courses offers a ton of different marketing tools that you can leverage to sell your course. Its built-in SEO tools ensure that your courses are displayed on search engines for relevant keywords. It also helps with paid advertising. Another key aspect is the social media integration. Your customers can know the latest news about your business and can even buy directly from Instagram or Facebook. Additionally, you can create banners and promotions that look seamless on your website, but at the same time, take your visitors’ attention to the information that matters the most to them.
LearnWorlds
With LearnWorlds, you can bundle many courses and sell them for a single subscription. Additionally, you can offer coupons and subscriptions to bring in more visitors. It also offers pre-built forms and widgets that you can use to collect information about leads. Social media integration and a daily news feed for students are other marketing tools that LearnWorlds offers.
Verdict
In this aspect too, Squarespace is the winner simply because of the wide range of choices available to market your courses. Though LearnWorlds offers features like bundling and coupons, they tend to be more helpful in retaining existing customers and their spending on your website. But, Squarespace’s features help you bring on more customers, and this is why it is a winner here.
Blogging and Email Marketing
You can use blogs to educate your audiences and help them make informed decisions about choosing your courses. Likewise, email marketing involves sending regular updates and newsletters that will keep your customers engaged with your business. When you use both these strategies well, you can have a growing base of satisfied and engaged customers.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace Courses offers both blogging and email marketing natively. This means you can create a blog right from this platform and integrate it with your website. The same is true for email marketing too. You can manually add email addresses or collect information from the lead generation pages, and enroll them in your email marketing campaigns. The advantage is that you have complete control and visibility and at the same time, it’s cost-effective as all these features are a part of your subscription.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds, on the other hand, does not offer blogging or email marketing natively. It integrates with tools like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, etc. for email marketing.
Verdict
Here too, Squarespace Courses is the winner because LearnWorlds doesn’t offer blogging and email marketing as a part of its subscription. While the makers at LearnWorlds argue that integrating with existing email marketing platforms can avoid learning new platforms and offer the flexibility to pick the one you love, it’s not the same as having the control and visibility of a native email marketing feature. This is why Squarespace is the winner in this category.
Course Creation
The course creation platform you choose must be easy to use. Also, it must support using different content formats like videos, audio, and text to enhance the learning experience of your customers. Let’s see how the two platforms fare on this front.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace allows you to upload rich multimedia content including videos to keep your students engaged. You can use these formats to explain concepts and keep them hooked to your lessons. Furthermore, you can easily track student progress through your lessons and chapters.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds also supports the use of multiple formats to make your courses engaging for students. Plus, this tool offers high levels of flexibility in navigation. Your students can follow a sequential path or you can put restrictions on how students must progress through your course. Accordingly, you can schedule the delivery of your content. Course evaluation forms, SCORM packages, live sessions, and 1:1 meetings are other aspects you can offer on LearnWorlds.
Verdict
When it comes to course creation, LearnWorlds has an edge over Squarespace courses. It offers more flexibility in the progress pathway and makes it easy to extend the course to live sessions and 1:1 meetings.
Analytics and Reports
In-depth analytics about your courses can provide insights into your students’ performance and expectations. You can also know more about your students’ geographical area, how they came to your website, how much time they spent, and other behavioral aspects. Using all this information, you can better plan your future offerings.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace offers detailed analytics to help you make informed decisions. On this platform, you can monitor the number of visitors and their behavioral patterns. Also, you can check the trends over time and even sign up for alerts when there is a sudden spike or drop in traffic. Furthermore, you can track sales and conversions easily to stay on top of all that’s happening with your business. Above everything, you can check these statistics in the Squarespace app, which is available for both Android and iOS. This gives you holistic website analytics even when you’re on the go.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds also generates meaningful insights on user progress, engagement, financial metrics, and course insights. You can use this information to identify bottlenecks in your content and optimize them for improved user engagement. Additionally, you can generate automated reports and distribute them to key stakeholders. It also comes with 70+ filters to help you get to the insights that matter the most to you.
Verdict
Both tools are winners in this category because they provide the insights that users need to make informed decisions about their courses and audiences, and can lay the foundation for future planning. Moreover, both platforms allow you to access insights and reports through mobile devices, and this helps to stay on top at all times.
Scalability and Extensibility
As your business grows, you’re sure to come up with additional ways to monetize your offerings. The platform you choose must support this growth and extensibility to help put your ideas into action. Read on to know which of the two platforms provides this scalability and extensibility.
Squarespace Courses
With Squarespace, you can extend your platform to sell anything. Let’s say, one of your courses is super popular, and you want to create additional revenue streams from it. You come up with the idea of creating merchandise like T-shirts and mugs and want to sell them along with your course. Squarespace makes this a breeze for you. With its digital add-on feature, you can extend your platform to monetize any idea.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds enables you to expand by adding more courses and bringing on more students. Moreover, you can provide membership content, offer subscriptions, bundle courses, and make your offerings more attractive to your potential customers.
Verdict
When you compare the two platforms, Squarespace is the winner as it offers extensive flexibility to sell any product along with your courses. Though you will have to pay an additional fee for selling other products, you can use this platform to sell both digital and physical products.
Pricing
The cost of a platform is an important factor as it will help you to plan well while keeping the price of your offerings attractive to potential customers. Which of the two platforms is more cost-effective? Let’s see.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace Courses pricing includes the following plans:
- Personal: $16 per month.
- Business: $23 per month
- Commerce Basic: $27 per month
- Commerce Advanced: $49 per month.
The Business plan has a 3% transaction fee while both the Commerce plans have no transaction fees, allowing you to keep all the money you earn.
If you’d like to sell more digital and physical products, you can choose from the following add-on plans.
- Starter: $9 per month + 7% transaction fee.
- Core: $34 per month + 3% transaction fee.
- Professional: $119 per month. No transaction fee.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds pricing also includes four plans:
- Starter: $24 per month + $5 per course sale.
- Pro trainer: $79 per month.
- Learning Center: $249 per month.
- High Volume and Corporate: Custom quote.
The remaining three plans have no transaction fees.
Verdict
A quick comparison shows that Squarespace offers better value for your money. Even the highest plan of Squarespace is only $49 with no transaction fees. In comparison, the lowest plan of LearnWorlds with no transaction fees is $79 Also, the digital add-on plan of Squarespace works out cheaply, especially if you go for the Core plan. Due to these reasons, Squarespace is the winner when it comes to pricing.
Conclusion
In this comparison between Squarespace Courses and LearnWorlds, Squarespace is the winner on all the fronts. Its beautiful templates, a wide range of choices, and ease of customization enable you to build attractive landing pages for your courses within minutes.
Likewise, you can design courses to include rich multimedia content for enhanced user experience.
When it comes to marketing, the wide array of tools such as SEO helper, blog, and email marketing give you complete control and visibility. Lastly, the analytics are in-depth and provide all the information you need for informed decision-making.
Though LearnWorlds also makes it easy to create courses, track student progress, and bundle your courses with attractive pricing, Squarespace is a lot more flexible and scalable. The fact that you can create additional revenue streams adds to Squarespace’s appeal.
Due to all these reasons, Squarespace Courses is the better of the two for most aspiring course creators.