CourseLit
Open-source alternative to Teachable and Thinkific. Self-host your own course selling platform with digital downloads, communities, and email — no per-transaction fees
Quick Start
docker compose up -d Overview
CourseLit is an open-source platform for selling online courses, digital downloads, and community memberships under your own domain. Teachable, Thinkific, and Podia charge per-transaction fees and hold your student data. CourseLit runs on your own server, so both the revenue data and the audience list stay under your control.
The platform covers a full creator stack: courses with video and file content, digital product sales, a no-code website builder, integrated blogging, communities, and email automations. Everything runs from one admin panel, and the self-hosted version is completely free with no per-student or per-transaction fees on top.
It gets mentioned when people search for the best self-hosted LMS, though CourseLit is more accurately a creator commerce platform than a traditional learning management system. It does not include SCORM compliance, advanced assessment engines, or the institutional features of Moodle or Open edX. For a solopreneur or small creator selling access to courses directly, it fits that use case without platform fees.
With 1,200 GitHub stars and active indie development, this is a smaller community than most tools in the LMS space. Vercel added CourseLit to their OSS program in 2025, which provides hosting infrastructure support.
Use Cases
Specific ways to use CourseLit for your workflow.
Deployment Strategy
Recommended ways to host CourseLit in your own environment.