13 min read
How to Build a Udemy-Style Online Course Marketplace on WordPress
You can build a Udemy-style online course marketplace on WordPress using two free plugins: Learnomy for course creation, curriculum, quizzes, and instructor payouts, and BuddyNext for the member profiles, activity feed, and community layer that turns a course catalogue into a learning platform people come back to. Together they cover what Udemy and Skillshare actually sell, structured courses plus a community around them, without the 37 - 75% revenue cut a marketplace platform takes from every sale.
This is the deepest guide in this series. It covers course architecture (sections, lessons, drip content, quizzes), the two competing monetisation models (one-time purchase vs. membership/subscription), multi-instructor setup with commission splits, and how the community layer changes completion rates. Every screenshot below is from a live WordPress install running 166 real demo courses and 618 real community member profiles, not a mockup or a theme demo.
Key Takeaways
- Learnomy (free) handles the LMS mechanics: courses, sections, lessons, quizzes, certificates, drip scheduling, and instructor earnings.
- BuddyNext (free) adds the layer Udemy and Skillshare both rely on but most self-hosted LMS builds skip: member profiles, a public activity feed, and a searchable community directory.
- Udemy takes up to 75% of a self-driven sale and 37% of organic-traffic sales. Skillshare pays per-minute-watched from a royalty pool, not a fixed price. A self-hosted marketplace keeps 100% minus payment-processor fees (~2.9%).
- Two monetisation models are supported out of the box: one-time course purchases (Udemy’s model) and membership/subscription access (Skillshare’s model), you can run either or both simultaneously.
- Multi-instructor support with per-instructor earnings and commission rules is built in, so this scales to a marketplace with outside instructors, not just a single-creator course site.
What Is a Course Marketplace, and Why Would You Clone It?
Udemy and Skillshare solved two separate problems and bundled them into one product: a way to structure and sell knowledge (the LMS), and a reason to keep showing up after you finish a course (the community and discovery layer). Most WordPress LMS builds solve only the first problem. They ship a course post type, a quiz builder, and a checkout, and stop there. That produces a course catalogue, not a marketplace, there’s no browsing, no instructor identity, no sense that other people are learning alongside you.
A course marketplace is worth building yourself when you have either the content (a body of expertise worth packaging into courses) or the audience (an existing community you can convert into learners) and don’t want a platform taking a majority cut of every sale, controlling your pricing, or owning the relationship with your students. It’s also the right call when you plan to onboard other instructors, since a single-creator site doesn’t need marketplace mechanics, but a multi-instructor platform does.
Where Self-Built Course Sites Usually Fall Short
Four failure patterns show up repeatedly in DIY LMS builds. First, no curriculum structure, courses are just a single long page or a flat list of videos with no sections, progress tracking, or sense of where a student is in the material. Second, no completion mechanics, no quizzes, no certificates, nothing that gives a learner a reason to finish rather than abandon at lesson three. Third, single-instructor thinking baked into the data model, so adding a second instructor later means rebuilding the earnings and permissions logic from scratch instead of it being there from day one. Fourth, and most common, the LMS has no community layer, so there’s no member directory, no sense of who else is learning, no profile that shows a student’s progress or an instructor’s other courses, which is precisely the retention mechanic that makes Udemy sticky beyond any single course.
The build below avoids all four by using an LMS plugin that ships curriculum structure, quizzes, and multi-instructor commissions natively, paired with a community plugin that shares the same WordPress user account, so a student’s course progress and their public profile are the same identity.
Why Self-Host Instead of Using Udemy or Skillshare
The economics are the whole argument. Udemy’s revenue share depends on how the sale happens: if a student finds your course through Udemy’s own marketing or search, you keep as little as 25%, and even on a sale you drove yourself with a coupon link, Udemy still takes a percentage and controls the price floor through its constant discounting. Skillshare doesn’t sell courses individually at all, it pays instructors from a royalty pool split by minutes watched across the whole platform, so your earnings depend on how many other instructors are in the pool that month, not on what your course is actually worth.
A self-hosted marketplace flips every part of that. You set the price, you keep the sale (minus a standard ~2.9% payment processor fee, not a platform commission), you own the student email list and can market to it directly, and you control what “featured” or “bestseller” means instead of an opaque ranking algorithm deciding your visibility. The tradeoff is real: Udemy brings you buyer traffic you don’t have to generate yourself. Self-hosting is the right call once you have, or can build, your own audience, an existing email list, a content channel, an existing community, not for a cold-start course with zero audience.
What You Need
- WordPress, any standard install, self-hosted or on a host that allows plugin installs.
- Learnomy, a free WordPress LMS plugin, courses, sections, lessons, quizzes, certificates, drip content, and multi-instructor earnings. This is the course engine.
- BuddyNext, the free Community OS for WordPress, member profiles, activity feed, connections, and spaces. This is the retention layer.
- A theme that renders both the course catalogue and the member directory in one visual language. BuddyX Pro is what’s used in the screenshots on this page, its layouts are shared across every BuddyNext-based build in this series.
Everything above is free to install. Paid tiers matter once you need Stripe-based checkout for paid courses and memberships, covered in the monetisation section below.
Step 1: Install Learnomy and Understand the Course Data Model
From your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New, search for Learnomy, install and activate. Learnomy registers its own course post type along with a full curriculum schema underneath it: a course contains sections, each section contains lessons, and lessons can be text, video, or file-based, with an optional quiz attached to any section. This is the same structure Udemy uses (course → section → lecture), which matters because it’s the structure students already know how to navigate.
Learnomy also ships its own WP-CLI command set (wp learnomy), including a seed command that generates realistic demo courses, students, quizzes, enrollments, and reviews in one pass, useful for testing a build before writing real content, and exactly how the demo data on this page was generated.
Step 2: Build Curriculum, Drip Content, and Quizzes
Inside a course, the Course Curriculum panel is where the structure gets built: add sections (“Week 1, Foundations”, “Week 2, Application”), then add lessons under each with an estimated duration, so students see exactly how much time a section takes before starting it. Quizzes attach to any section, and Learnomy tracks pass/fail thresholds, retake limits, and question randomisation.
Drip content is the scheduling layer, lessons can release on a fixed calendar (one section per week, mimicking a cohort) or relative to enrollment date (day 1, day 8, day 15 after a student joins), which is what turns a self-paced dump of videos into something with the pacing and completion pressure of a real course. Learnomy runs drip release through a synchronous cron job, so scheduled lessons unlock without needing a page visit to trigger the check.
Step 3: Set Up Multi-Instructor Accounts and Commission Splits
This is the step that separates a course marketplace from a single-creator course site. Learnomy supports instructor accounts as a distinct role: an instructor can create and manage their own courses, see their own enrollment and earnings dashboard, and get paid on a defined commission split, configured per-instructor or platform-wide as a default rate. This is the same mechanic Udemy runs (instructor keeps a majority share, platform keeps a cut for hosting, payments, and discovery), except here you set the split and you keep the platform share yourself.
The wp learnomy earnings CLI command shows a per-instructor earnings summary, and the built-in Teach flow in the site’s primary nav (see the screenshot above) is what a prospective instructor uses to apply and get onboarded, no separate application system to build.
Step 4: Add the Community Layer (BuddyNext)
Install BuddyNext the same way, Plugins → Add New, search, install, activate. It doesn’t require BuddyPress as a dependency, so there’s no separate community framework underneath it. Once active, it registers a member directory, individual profile pages, and an activity feed on top of the same WordPress user accounts Learnomy already uses for students and instructors.
This is the part most DIY LMS builds skip, and it’s the actual reason Udemy and Skillshare feel like platforms rather than course catalogues: a student can see who else is enrolled, an instructor has a public profile listing every course they teach, and the activity feed surfaces course completions and new enrollments the way LinkedIn surfaces job changes. None of this requires connecting two separate plugin databases, BuddyNext reads the same wp_users table Learnomy writes to.
Step 5: Connect the Two Monetisation Models
Learnomy supports both models the two market leaders each bet on, running independently or together:
- One-time purchase (Udemy’s model): a fixed price per course, the student pays once and owns lifetime access.
- Membership plans (Skillshare’s model): a recurring monthly or annual fee that unlocks every “members only” course on the platform, configured under Membership in the main nav, with billing interval, price, and which courses are gated behind it set per plan.
Running both at once is a legitimate strategy: flagship or evergreen courses as one-time purchases, and a broader catalogue of shorter or supplementary courses bundled into a membership, the same tiering SaaS products use for feature-gating.
Self-Hosted vs. Hosted Marketplace Platforms
| Platform | Revenue Kept | Multi-Instructor | Community Layer | Pricing Control |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Udemy | 25 - 63% (varies by sale source) | Yes | No (course-scoped Q&A only) | No (platform-controlled discounting) |
| Skillshare | Royalty-pool share (variable) | Yes | Limited (project gallery, no profiles) | No (subscription-only, no per-course pricing) |
| Teachable | ~90 - 95% (after monthly platform fee) | Limited (multi-instructor is a paid add-on) | No | Yes |
| Learnomy + BuddyNext | ~97% (payment processor fee only) | Yes, built in | Yes, full member directory and activity feed | Yes, full control |
The gap worth noticing is the same one from the other builds in this series: hosted platforms are strong at bringing buyer traffic you didn’t generate yourself, but weak or absent on community and full pricing control. Teachable gets closest to self-hosting’s revenue economics but treats multi-instructor and community as afterthoughts rather than core features.
Monetising a Course Marketplace
The free tiers above are enough to launch with real courses, real payments, and real instructors. Learnomy Pro adds Stripe/PayPal checkout, coupon codes, advanced certificate designs, and deeper reporting on completion and drop-off rates. BuddyNext Pro adds native paid-membership gating at the community level (separate from Learnomy’s course memberships, useful if you want a general “community access” tier distinct from course access). Combined, this is the same layered pricing model Skool and Circle charge $99 - $500/month for, run on infrastructure you own outright.
Frequently Asked Questions
None. Learnomy is a self-hosted plugin, not a marketplace intermediary, so there’s no platform commission on sales. You pay standard payment-processor fees (Stripe/PayPal, typically around 2.9% + a fixed fee per transaction), the same fees you’d pay on any e-commerce checkout, and keep the rest.
Yes. Learnomy supports both models independently, so you can price flagship courses as one-time purchases while bundling a broader catalogue behind a monthly or annual membership plan, the same tiering strategy Udemy (one-time) and Skillshare (subscription) each committed to separately.
Multi-instructor is built in, not a workaround. Instructors get their own account role, their own course-management and earnings dashboard, and a configurable commission split, either a platform-wide default rate or a custom rate per instructor.
Learnomy tracks progress at the lesson level tied to the student’s enrollment record, so new lessons added to a course appear in an enrolled student’s curriculum automatically and are marked incomplete until they’re viewed. Drip scheduling still applies to newly added lessons the same way it applies to existing ones.
No. BuddyNext and Learnomy share the same underlying WordPress user account, so a student’s enrollment history and an instructor’s course list live on the same profile as their community activity, connections, and feed presence. There’s no second login or separate identity to manage.
It’s better suited to a creator who already has some audience, an email list, a content channel, an existing community, since self-hosting trades Udemy’s built-in buyer traffic for full revenue and pricing control. A cold-start creator with zero audience will generally get more initial sales volume by listing on Udemy first and moving to a self-hosted platform once they have a base to bring with them.
Related
This is the third build in a series on cloning well-known platforms with self-hosted WordPress plugins. See also how to build a LinkedIn-style professional network with BuddyNext and WP Career Board, how to build a Meetup-style events and local groups platform with BuddyNext and Eventonomy, how to build a Reddit-style community forum with Jetonomy, how to build an Instagram-style photo sharing platform with WPMediaVerse, how to build a Yelp-style business directory with Listora, how to build a Fiverr-style service marketplace with WP Sell Services, how to build a Medium-style publishing platform with WB Member Blog, and how to add a Duolingo-style points and streaks system with WB Gamification to reward course completions. The first three share the same BuddyNext profile layer, so a single WordPress install can run them all at once under one member identity. Protecting paid video content? See how to build a Netflix-style protected video platform on WordPress. And for a quick community pulse-check, see how to add Twitter/X-style polls to WordPress.
Get Started
Both plugins are free to install today. Get Learnomy to start building your course catalogue, then add BuddyNext for the community layer. If you want the exact look shown in this guide, BuddyX Pro is the theme used throughout.
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