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If you've been researching all-in-one online course platforms, then you've no doubt seen ads about how different platforms compare. There are tons of different online business platforms to choose from, including many that do not tailor to the knowledge commerce �ھ������.����

In this post, we'll take a look at Ontraport and see how 51���� stacks up.

51���� vs. Ontraport Takeaways

Let's start with some takeaways by taking a closer look at what Ontraport is and what it isn't. 

Ontraport markets themselves as a sales and marketing platform for growing businesses. If you look closer, you can see that it is mostly focused on web analytics, sales enablement, and creating webpages.

They offer landing page templates, a CRM, sales representative lead assignment, automations, and high-quality analytics. They certainly provide tools to help you run an online business.

The clearest difference is that 51���� is designed not only to provide a true all-in-one solution, but it’s also built for knowledge commerce entrepreneurs. 51���� provides the tools you need to create, market, and sell online courses, membership communities, and coaching programs.

Now that we know that Ontraport is not actually an all-in-one platform, but instead a sales and marketing platform, let's take a look at how its features compare to 51���� in a head-to-head breakdown.

Head to head comparison 

Course Creation

The biggest difference between 51���� and Ontraport is the course creation process. In 51���� the process is simple, intuitive, and easy to use. 

51���� has a top-notch course builder and digital product generator. With the Product Blueprints, you can build a great-looking online course, mini course, membership platform, group, drip course, or coaching program in just a few clicks. These templates allow you to concentrate on the content of your online course and begin selling sooner.

You can have video trainings, audio courses, worksheets, email-based courses, membership sites, and coaching. To host your content, 51���� includes Wistia video hosting.

Ontraport does not have a course creation tool, but they do have a membership site tool. This means that if you want to host online courses with Ontraport, you would need to go about it with a roundabout way or pay for a course creation tool, like Teachable.

Website Building

Ontraport offers a membership site generator. It allows you to customize it with a logo and selecting a color.

If you wanted to build a website that could sell online courses, you would need to do so with their landing page builder, and string those pages together. Their landing page creation tool walks users through how to craft one.

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With 51����’s website builder, you can pick from a variety of modern, mobile-friendly themes. 51���� even allows you to add features like pop-ups, headers, and videos to your webpage with just a few clicks. And, you can manage it in the same place as your course content.

Customer Relationship Management

Both 51���� and Ontraport include a CRM to keep track of your leads and customers. 51���� supports 100,000 contacts. It includes default segments and  50 custom fields so you can store information that is relevant to your business and use that to segment your marketing.

Ontraport’s top plan allows for 20,000 contacts and requires custom pricing if you exceed that number.  The Ontraport CRM is designed to support a team of sales representatives with multiple lead assignment options. While this is a helpful feature for larger teams with an outbound sales focus, it may not ever be used by knowledge entrepreneurs who often have no sales professionals on the team.

Email Marketing

Both 51���� and Ontraport offer top-of-the-line email marketing services, which allow you to send broadcast messages, use click-through tracking, and set up autoresponders. 

51���� includes email subject line validation to help you craft more compelling subject lines to improve your performance. You can also choose from a selection of templates with lots of content elements included and use the easy, visual editor to add in your copy and customize.

While Ontraport offers more analytics, their system is a lot more complicated. If you’re an experienced email marketer, you may appreciate the robust campaign tools. But 51����’s capabilities are often the right mix of simple and powerful for independent or small business knowledge entrepreneurs. 

Integrations

Ontraport is a supplemental software and is designed to integrate with Wordpress to get the value out of Ontraport’s features. They integrate with other tools like Zapier, Shopify, Zoom, and others like payment gateways and forms.

51���� is designed to provide everything you need in one place.  But still integrates with other tools to provide users with flexibility. Integrations include Zapier, Mailchimp, Segment, ActiveCampaign, and more.

Automations

51���� also includes related to not only sales funnels, but also assessments in your course. These assessments include granting or revoking offers, subscribing or unsubscribing to an email sequence, registering for events, tagging, sending an email, or sending a coupon. 

Ontraport also has automations. These include sales, onboarding, customer lifecycle, and product launch. Their pipelines include a mix of outbound sales and marketing efforts. For example, some of the pipeline automation steps involved missed sales calls, follow-up reminders, and lead scoring. 

Support

51���� offers customer support and technical help 24/7 in addition to a help center and continuing education courses through . 51����’s user Facebook group has nearly triple the members of Ontraport’s. It’s  active with our Heroes collaborating and networking around the clock and around the world. 

Ontraport offers a knowledge center and email + chat support from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m. Monday through Thursday with reduced hours on Fridays and weekends. Ontraport also offers a screen share help option but it appears you have to wait about 48 hours to get an appointment.

Pricing

51���� pricing has three levels ranging from $119 per month to $399, plus an add-on, called Access. 51���� provides more contact storage per level than Ontraport.

Ontraport pricing has four levels: $79, $147, $297, and $497.

Remember, with Ontraport, you’ll need another website and it’s primarily designed to work with Wordpress. The Wordpress plan that enables plugins starts at $33 per month billed monthly, and the Ontraport plan that enables payments is $147 per month, so the minimum investment is $180 to collect payment. 

Summary

Even though Ontraport has jumped into the online course platform market, their service is really analytics-based marketing with a membership site feature thrown on top. If you only want to offer a membership site, it could work for you.

In order to create a course on Ontraport, you would need to do so via a membership site, which may take more time than if you used a service that offers online course framework.

In order to get the same functionality you get on 51���� from Ontraport, you would need to first buy a course creation platform like Thinkific ($49 a month), and Zoom ($19 a month), and Thrive Themes ($19 a month). You may also need to pay for a website hosting service, like Wordpress or Squarespace.

Getting started with 51����

If you want a solution that’s curated for knowledge commerce pros and keeps everything in one platform, 51���� is the way to go. 51���� can help you save lots of time and get your business started quickly. 

In the last 10 years that 51���� has been around, we’ve helped over 60,000 customers earn over $5 billion dollars in gross market value. We’ve helped numerous people take their businesses to 7 figures!

Sign up for a of 51���� today to see how easy it is to run your business from a true all-in-one online course platform.

Still researching? To learn more about the different kinds of online course platforms, check out our other comparisons: 

51���� vs. Teachable
51���� vs. Thinkific
51���� vs. Podia
51���� vs. Clickfunnels
51���� vs. Wordpress