CourseLit

CourseLit is a batteries-included learning management system for running a teaching business on your own domain. It is an open source alternative to Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, Teachery and LearnDash, and it arrives with the pieces those platforms charge a monthly fee for already assembled.

The project is a monorepo managed with pnpm workspaces, storing data in MongoDB. Media assets go through MediaLit, a paid service by default, though you can point the app at your own MediaLit instance with a single environment variable. Database migrations are standalone scripts kept in a dated directory and run against your connection string.

Everything needed to publish, sell and administer a course is included.

• Course authoring: build the course structure and content in the admin.
• Student management: enrollments and learners are handled from the same dashboard.
• Payment processing: Stripe is wired in for taking money.
• Website builder: a full site with custom sales pages, so the marketing page and the course live together.
• Analytics: reporting is included, though the project describes it as very limited for now.
• Custom widgets: extra functionality can be added by writing your own widgets.

Getting started locally means cloning the repo, filling in the environment file under the web app, then pnpm install, build and dev. Self-hosting has an official guide and a one-click Vercel deployment, and the cloud version offers a fourteen day trial with no credit card.