Tarjih Academy runs on Open edX, which we host and support for 4,000+ learners. Marafiq runs on a custom Laravel platform; 2 developers built it in about 3.5 months. Both platforms work, and they are built in very different ways.
If you run a training company, an academy or a certification body, you face the same choice. You can rent a hosted course platform such as Teachable or Thinkific, run an open-source LMS such as Moodle or Open edX, or pay for a platform built around how you sell and teach. Often the right answer is not a custom build.
Start with how you sell
Feature checklists will not separate these options. Your business model will.
Ask yourself these questions before you look at any demo:
- Who pays: individual learners with a card, employers buying seats, or a government or corporate client on invoice.
- How they pay: one-off purchase, subscription, bundles, coupons, or installments.
- How you teach: recorded lessons only, live cohorts on a schedule, or both.
- What the certificate must prove: a nice PDF, or a document an employer can verify online by serial number.
- Language: English only, or Arabic first with right-to-left layout.
- Who runs it day to day: one course creator, or a team of admins, instructors and support staff with different permissions.
The more of your answers sit on the simple side, the stronger the case for buying.
Hosted course platforms: Teachable and Thinkific
A hosted platform is the fastest and cheapest way to start selling courses. You sign up, upload lessons, connect payments and launch the same week. Hosting, security updates and uptime are the vendor's job.
The price is a monthly plan, sometimes plus a cut of each sale. On Teachable's pricing page in October 2026, the Starter plan is $39 a month billed monthly, allows 5 products and takes a 7.5% transaction fee. The higher plans drop that fee to 0% when you use Teachable Payments, though standard payment processing fees still apply. Thinkific's Start plan is listed at $109 a month billed monthly on its pricing page, with cheaper rates for annual billing.
This is the right choice when one person or a small team sells recorded courses to individuals, in English, by card. For many course creators it stays the right choice for years. Spending from $15k on a custom platform to sell 5 courses is a bad trade.
The limits show up when your process does not match the vendor's. You get the checkout, the certificate layout, the roles and the reports they ship. If you need a payment method they do not offer, a seat-based deal for an employer, or a verification page for certificates, you either work around it by hand or wait for the vendor to add it. Test those exact flows before you commit, including Arabic if you need it.
Open-source LMS: Moodle and Open edX
Moodle and Open edX are free to download and have no license fees. Moodle core is released under the GNU GPL, version 3 or later (per Moodle's developer documentation). The Open edX platform is released under the GNU AGPL, version 3 (per the license file in its GitHub repository), and openedx.org states there are no license fees to use it.
Free software is not a free platform. Someone has to run the servers, apply security updates, install new releases, back up the data and fix what breaks. For Open edX, Tutor, which its documentation calls "the official Docker-based Open edX distribution", is meant to make deploying and upgrading easier. It still needs an engineer who knows the system. You either hire that skill, or pay a hosting provider or an agency to do it.
Moodle suits schools, universities and corporate training teams whose work is teaching and grading inside courses.
Open edX suits course catalogs that look like a university program or a MOOC: structured courses with graded units, open to a large number of learners. Tarjih Academy runs on it, with 4,000+ learners, and we host and support it on a subscription. Running Open edX well is its own topic, and we will cover hosting and upgrades in a separate post.
The trade-off with both is customization. Changing a theme or adding a plugin is routine. Changing how checkout, pricing or the learner dashboard work means writing code against a large codebase, and that code has to survive every upgrade. A heavily modified Moodle or Open edX can end up costing more to keep current than a custom platform.
Custom build: when the platform is the business
A custom platform makes sense when the way you sell and run courses is your edge, and no product does it without daily workarounds. You pay more up front, and you own the code, the data and the roadmap.
Marafiq is the example we know best. It trains facilities-management professionals for the FMP, CFM and CAMA exams, on a platform we built with Laravel, React and Filament. It needed:
- Arabic first, with English: right-to-left layouts on every screen. We wrote about what that takes in building Arabic and English platforms.
- Two ways to pay: card checkout through Stripe and buy-now-pay-later through Tamara, with a cart and coupons.
- Live and recorded teaching: Zoom cohorts and Vimeo lessons in the same course.
- Exam practice: timed, auto-graded quizzes.
- Certificates employers can check: PDF certificates with a serial number, a QR code and a public verification page.
Two developers built it in about 3.5 months, with about 940 automated tests. It now serves 1,700+ learner accounts across 25 published courses, with 300+ active enrollments. The Marafiq case study shows the platform.
Custom also fits when learning is only part of the product. Meraki, a language school for children, needed lessons and voice exercises with AI pronunciation scoring, parent and teacher accounts, subscriptions with dues and discounts, and a front-desk desktop app. No LMS covers that mix. It serves 2,600+ students today (Meraki case study).
Custom does not always mean starting over. EGulf Innovation, a training academy, came to us with a legacy PHP platform. We redesigned and upgraded it instead of replacing it, and we have maintained it for years. It sells recorded and live courses, bundles and paid assessments, and reaches 5,000+ learners a month.
The costs are real. Our platform builds start from $15k, and a custom LMS needs upkeep after launch: hosting, security updates, framework upgrades and support. We covered what that involves in what happens after software launches. If you are not sure yet which features matter, build a smaller first version; MVP or full product explains how to draw that line.
The three options side by side
| Hosted (Teachable, Thinkific) | Open source (Moodle, Open edX) | Custom build | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | Days | Weeks, longer with custom themes and plugins | Months (Marafiq: about 3.5) |
| Upfront cost | Low: a monthly plan | Setup and hosting; no license fee | From $15k |
| Running cost | Plan fee, plus transaction fees on some plans | Servers plus an engineer or a hosting provider | Hosting plus a support plan |
| Checkout and payment methods | The vendor's | Plugins, or custom code to maintain | Yours (Marafiq: Stripe and Tamara) |
| Arabic and right-to-left | Test before you commit | Test it with your theme | Designed in from the start |
| Who owns the code and data | The vendor's platform; you export what it allows | You, if you host it | You |
| Upgrades | The vendor's job | Yours, every release | Yours, on your schedule |
| Best fit | Solo creators and small teams selling recorded courses | Schools and academies with structured, university-style courses | Training businesses whose sales or teaching model is the edge |
Signs you have outgrown off-the-shelf
Most training companies should start on a product and move only when the product starts costing them sales or staff time. These are the usual signals:
- Manual work around checkout: staff enrolling learners by hand after an installment or invoice payment.
- Spreadsheets next to the LMS: cohorts, attendance or employer seats tracked outside the platform.
- Certificate requests by email: employers asking you to confirm a certificate is real.
- Plugin stacks: five plugins to do one job, and fear of the next upgrade.
- A fee line that keeps growing: per-sale or per-learner fees that now cost more each year than running your own platform.
- Arabic that half works: a translated interface with a layout still built for left-to-right.
One or two of these can usually be fixed inside the product you have. Several at once is when a custom platform, or a well-run Open edX instance, starts paying for itself.
Moving off an existing LMS
If you already have learners, migration is part of the decision. Accounts, course progress, past certificates and payment history have to come across, and old certificate links should still verify. Plan for it in the scope from day one, and ask any vendor or agency exactly what they will migrate. Sometimes the better move is the one EGulf made: keep the platform, and redesign and upgrade it.
How we help you decide
We do not push custom by default. If a hosted platform fits, we will say so, and we offer Open edX because for some catalogs it is the better tool. When the choice is not clear, a discovery sprint (from $1.5k, credited in full if the build starts within 60 days) maps your courses, payments and roles, and ends with a fixed scope, architecture and estimate.
If you are weighing a platform change, book an intro call and bring your current setup. We will tell you which of the three options fits, and why.