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New Zenler is an affordable all-in-one platform with powerful course creation tools. Additionally, it offers features for site creation, blogging, course selling, marketing funnels, and email marketing.
However, its marketing tools are quite basic and require substantial enhancements for them to compete with specialized solutions. Nonetheless, the platform pricing is quite competitive, making it a good all-in-one option for course creators on a budget.
New Zenler is a relatively new online course platform that lets you create and sell online courses on your website.
At first glance, the platform seems quite promising—but is it actually good? What features does it offer, and how do they perform? Where does it stand among the plethora of course hosting platforms?
To answer these questions, we created this in-depth New Zenler review. We thoroughly tested every bit of the platform to understand its features and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses.
Below, we’ll break down everything you need to know about New Zenler and help you decide whether or not you should use it.
New Zenler is an all-in-one course builder for creating, marketing, and selling online courses and memberships. The idea is to run your entire education business from a single platform without needing third-party apps.
It offers a range of course creation and engagement features, including a drag-and-drop course builder, live lessons, quizzes and assignments, certificates, and community.
Moreover, you get a powerful site builder, blogging features, flexible pricing options, a 1-step checkout process, a sales funnel builder, email marketing tools, and affiliate marketing features.
So, it’s different from course builders like Thinkific, which primarily focus on course creation and only offer essential website building and selling tools.
However, many of these all-in-one features, such as the funnel builder, need significant improvement, which we’ll cover later in this review.
Also, remember that the platform is still relatively new, and it needs refinement here and there. Otherwise, in our testing, we found the platform to be robust and didn’t encounter any significant issues.
With this in mind, let’s dive deep into this New Zenler review and examine the platform closely.
New Zenler and its tools are easy to use, so it won’t take long to get used to it and start building. And you won’t need to learn coding or other technical skills to build your website.
Talking about the user interface, it’s intuitive. Everything is organized into sections and listed in the top menu. When you click a section, it brings up a set of related features and options displayed on the left-hand side, making them easy to find and use.
Plus, the individual tools—course builder, page editor, and funnel builder—are intuitive and easy to use.
A quick walkthrough of New Zenler’s user interface
Having said that, there are a couple of issues that we want to highlight.
The aesthetic elements, such as font sizes and colors, aren’t properly selected. So, it can be difficult to review the information in different areas of your account, such as the dashboard. For instance, the help option is so tiny that it’s hardly visible.
Another thing that they need to improve is the placement of features.
For instance, while there’s a dedicated section for sales funnels, course and webinar funnels must be accessed from different sections. It would be better to manage all funnels in one place.
Overall, you can learn and use New Zenler easily, but there will be some hindrances due to aesthetic issues and improper placement of specific tools.
The primary job of an online course platform is to let creators build their knowledge products and deliver a great learning experience to students. We’ll see how New Zenler performs when it comes to course creation and learner engagement.
New Zenler has a drag-and-drop curriculum builder that makes it easy to upload your content and structure your course. The curriculum builder has a clean interface and is pretty intuitive to use.
To start with, you can upload and add various content formats, including video, audio, PowerPoint, PDF, text, quiz, and custom code. You can even upload SCORM/HTML files from popular authoring tools like iSpring Suite and get them to play inside your course lessons.
The easiest way to upload content to New Zenler is with its bulk upload feature. You can select all your files and add them to your course at once; it will automatically turn each file into a lesson. You can also import files directly from cloud drives like Google Drive and DropBox.
When you click on a lesson, it opens the lesson editor, where you can modify existing content or add new ones. You can also adjust various lesson settings.
What we like the most about the course builder is that it gives you a lot of flexibility to add multiple content types to the same lesson.
For example, you can add text, multiple videos, quizzes, PDF downloads, etc., in the same lesson and show them in any order.
We also like that New Zenler has a video library, which allows easy access to all uploaded videos. This means you can use existing videos in different lessons or courses without reuploading them.
The only thing we don’t like about New Zenler’s course builder is the lack of bulk actions for managing your lessons. For example, you can’t set multiple lessons as drafts or delete them in one go; rather, you’ll have to do that one by one.
Otherwise, the course builder strikes a perfect balance between ease of use and flexibility, making it super easy to create a course in New Zenler.
New Zenler recognizes the importance of learning and engagement tools to build a successful online education business. Therefore, you’ll get some great features in this regard.
In this section, we’ll check each tool individually, starting with quizzes.
New Zenler quizzes support a few question types, including multiple-choice, multiple-answer, true/false, match the following, and order the items.
You can also add images/videos to both questions and answers and apply formatting.
You can add a passing grade to the quiz and also require students to pass the quiz to continue in the course.
It also supports important quizzing features, such as randomizing questions, creating timed exams, retake limits, and importing questions in bulk.
On top of that, you have a bunch of other quiz options to improve the end-user experience:
Another important learning tool that you get is Assignments. This feature allows students to submit homework by providing text input or uploading a file.
Assignments can be added to any course lesson, and upon submission, you’ll receive a notification, and you can then evaluate it. Additionally, instructors and students can communicate privately through the comments section below the assignment lesson.
We love New Zenler’s assessment tools and the flexibility it offers for creating quizzes and exams.
The platform also allows you to create and send certificates to your students natively.
To create a certificate, you have six pre-designed templates that include the student name, course name, and date of completion. Alternatively, you can import a certificate template and use it as well.
Once you have your template ready, you just need to enable the certificate for a course. That’s it, and New Zenler will take care of the rest.
There is one more New Zenler tool we should mention here—Surveys, which allows you to collect feedback from your students easily.
New Zenler supports content dripping that allows you to create a drip schedule for your course sections. You can also set the schedule based on student enrollment or a specific date.
Moreover, you can send notification emails automatically to your students when new content becomes available.
Another course delivery feature that you get is Compulsory Lessons. With this feature, you can mark a lesson (or a quiz) in your course as compulsory, and unless a student completes it, they won’t be able to progress further in the course.
This is a useful feature for ensuring course compliance and can be handy if you offer corporate training or sell courses with credits.
New Zenler has a feature called Communities, which allows you to create a site-wide or a course-specific community.
Both you and your members can create community posts with text, images, videos, and file uploads. Other members can like posts, leave comments, and post emoticons in their replies.
Your members will receive email notifications when you or another member replies to a thread they started or participated in. As the community owner, you can also send custom email notifications.
The communities are also accessible through the Zenler mobile app, with support for push notifications to keep members engaged.
However, New Zenler’s community tool is basic. It lacks super essential features like spaces, events, direct messaging, member directory, and notification management.
Moreover, the community design doesn’t look polished, and there’s no option to customize it.
So, while the community feature is good for simple course support groups, it needs major upgrades to become a real alternative to specialized community platforms.
New Zenler’s live class feature lets you deliver interactive online classes with the platform’s native Zoom integration, making the platform a good option for cohort courses.
Here, you can schedule a live lesson, set session duration, restrict who can access the session, and send reminder emails. You can also make the live classes recurring with daily, weekly, and monthly periods.
We like the fact that you don’t need a separate Zoom subscription. It’s included in your New Zenler membership and will save you money.
Apart from live classes, the platform also supports one-on-one live sessions through its Zoom integration. You can specify the available slots and let the students pick the one that suits them best. You can charge for standalone sessions (useful for selling coaching) or assign them to paid course plans.
As an online course creator, it’s important to deliver your content professionally.
When students click on an enrolled course in Zenler, they are taken to the curriculum page. Here, they can view their progress and resume where they left off.
The actual content is delivered through New Zenler’s course player.
The course player is pretty straightforward, so students can watch your course content and participate in discussions in the main area on the right. It also has a full-screen option for better, distraction-free learning.
They can move to the next lesson using the Next Lesson button. They can also navigate between different lessons and sections from the sidebar on the course player.
Overall, we like what New Zenler offers for their course player. However, a couple of things can be improved:
A quick walkthrough of New Zenler’s course player
Talking about the mobile experience, New Zenler has a free mobile app for end-users, and the course player works perfectly in the app. So your students can watch your courses without any issues on their mobile devices
Overall, New Zenler does a good job when it comes to course creation and learner engagement. It has an easy-to-use course builder with all the necessary features. The course player is user-friendly, even though the design isn’t polished.
New Zenler also offers all the important learning and engagement tools like quizzes, certificates, live classes, content locking, and mobile apps. It also includes a community builder, but the feature needs more improvements.
This section will discuss New Zenler’s features for building your course website and sales pages. Here are the essential features the platform offers:
Now, let’s discuss the actual site-building features.
New Zenler doesn’t have any real themes feature; it just has one default template. Because of this, you’ll need to make more effort in creating a unique website.
It has a branding section at the site level where you can upload your logo, select the font, and customize the colors of your website’s various elements (buttons, text, etc.). You can also set your color preferences for your course player and community area here.
However, you can’t decide things like page layout, page width, and style of various elements at the site level, which will be a challenge if you have a website with many pages.
New Zenler’s powerful visual page builder compensates for the site themes to a great extent. The page builder has an intuitive user interface and is straightforward to use.
By default, it creates pages like the homepage and course pages, and you can further customize them. Plus, you can always create a new page from scratch.
When you build a new page, you can add Blocks to it. A block is like a section on your page, and New Zenler has dozens of prebuilt ones for page headers, course listings, galleries, FAQs, testimonials, etc.
On top of that, there are dozens of pre-designed templates for these blocks, making page building much faster and easier.
Pre-defined page Blocks
New Zenler also allows you to add popups on pages. Again, you have prebuilt popup templates that you can work with and customize extensively. If you want to create a lead-capture popup that shows when someone tries to leave your website, you can do that easily.
Now, a block is made up of what they call Elements, and the most important element here is Rows, as it allows you to create flexible layouts for your page section.
For example, you can add rows to page sections, make them single-column or multi-column, and set the width for these columns.
Plus, you can add different elements like text, headings, forms, buttons, images, videos, and countdown timers to these rows as you want.
Modifying and updating blocks and elements on your page is also easy. You just need to click on the element you want to edit, and it will highlight it along with its editing options. Apart from this, you can add animations, delays, or intervals in your page elements.
You can also save a page block as a template and use it on other pages.
New Zenler pages are fully mobile responsive. Additionally, if you want to change settings for different devices, the platform lets you do that.
New Zenler even maintains a version history for your pages. So if you don’t like any modifications, you can easily revert to the older version.
Overall, New Zenler’s page builder gives you a lot of firepower for building and customizing pages without compromising ease of use.
And if you’re interested in seeing what you can create with this platform, you can check out this ultimate list of New Zenler examples.
New Zenler also lets you create a blog on your website. This feature includes setting up your blog page, adding blog posts, categorizing them, and doing basic SEO settings.
Adding content to your blog posts is easy as well. You get a user-friendly text editor to add your text and media and do all the basic formatting. You can also set visibility for each blog post: for everyone, logged-in users only, and users enrolled in certain courses.
Having said that, New Zenler’s blogging tool doesn’t provide enough customization options for design or SEO, and it can’t still replace a blogging platform like WordPress
Overall, New Zenler does a good job regarding site-building. It gives you free hosting, free SSL, and the ability to use a custom domain for your website.
While it doesn’t offer any website themes, it has a powerful page builder, making it possible to create any custom design. Also, you can build a blog on your Zenler website.
New Zenler promises to be an all-in-one platform for selling online courses, so it comes with a range of sales and marketing tools, which we’ll explore in this section.
This also distinguishes New Zenler from other online course platforms, as most limit themselves to certain essential tools required to process payments and sell your courses.
With New Zenler, you can sell individual courses and also bundle multiple courses. In addition, you can keep your product free, charge a one-time fee, a recurring subscription, or even a payment plan.
Moreover, you can have multiple pricing plans for your products (courses and bundles) and choose what your customers get as part of each plan.
If you’re selling a course, you can select what sections/lessons a student will have access to as part of a plan. Similarly, if you’re selling a bundle, you can choose what courses to include in a plan.
Regarding recurring subscriptions, you can charge your customers monthly, yearly, quarterly, half-yearly, or custom time period basis. You can also charge a one-time setup fee and offer a free trial.
On top of these, New Zenler has a couple of useful options for making things even more flexible:
Finally, you can use the coupon feature to offer discounts. With coupons, you can offer a percentage discount or a fixed discount. Plus, you can apply the coupon to all products or specific ones.
New Zenler supports three payment processors—Stripe, PayPal, and Razorpay. All of these are available for one-time and recurring payments.
The checkout process is well-optimized from a conversion point of view. It’s a one-step process where your users need to create an account only after completing their payment.
The default checkout page template is well structured with product details, pricing details, contact information, payment form, and testimonials. You can customize the checkout page further using the page builder and add elements like videos and countdown timers.
On top of that, you can add order bumps and 1-click upsells to your checkout process, which is great for increasing the lifetime value of your customers.
Finally, New Zenler supports global tax handling, so you can charge taxes directly from your students, irrespective of their location. And if you charge EU VAT, the platform will even remit the taxes on your behalf.
New Zenler lets you create marketing funnels, even if you have little marketing experience or technical knowledge.
When you create a funnel in New Zenler, it first asks you to select the type of funnel (workflow). Currently, it supports only two funnel types: Lead Magnet and Video Series.
Once you select a funnel type, it will ask you to enter basic details like what lead magnet you want to deliver or what videos you want to include in your video series.
Then, you can choose from one of the several themes available for the funnel type. These themes influence the design of your funnel pages.
Once you go through these steps, New Zenler will automatically create all the pages in your funnel.
For example, suppose you select the Video Series Funnel. In that case, the funnel builder will create the opt-in page and the individual video pages, and you can then customize them using the page builder.
You can also add new pages to your funnel or change their order.
While the funnel builder is fairly simple to use, and the concept behind it excellent, certain issues make it less useful:
However, New Zenler’s marketing funnel builder is still valuable for creating marketing campaigns inside the platform.
New Zenler has built-in tools for email marketing and automation.
It has a feature called Email Broadcasts which lets you send one-off emails to your audience. You can use the text editor for editing email content.
You can easily create a user segment using user tags, roles, purchase history, course enrollment, and other advanced filter options. Subsequently, you can send the email immediately or schedule it for a future date.
Apart from email broadcasts, New Zenler has another feature called Automations. With this feature, you can create email sequences and send them automatically based on user actions.
The automation builder works on when/then rules where you can define a trigger and the actions that follow. You can also specify a delay between various actions.
For example, when someone subscribes to one of your funnels, you can automatically trigger a series of emails to go out to them.
In terms of actions, you can send an email, add a tag, remove a tag, send a webhook, or notify an admin. Plus, you can create a conditional filter rule for these actions and apply it only to certain people and not all subscribers.
For example, if you want to send certain emails (e.g., sales emails) in your campaign only to those who haven’t bought a course, you can easily do that by creating a filter inside your email action.
Having said that, New Zenler’s automation feature does come with significant limitations:
So, New Zenler has only the basic email marketing and automation features. It doesn’t have a fully-fledged email marketing tool, and you’ll be better off using a solution like ConvertKit for email marketing.
New Zenler has all the essential features to set up and manage an affiliate program for your online course business.
First, you can manually add new affiliates from your admin dashboard. Currently, you don’t get a public sign-up page for your affiliates.
The affiliate suite is straightforward, where you can set affiliate cookie duration, add affiliates, set a commission % for them, and select the courses you want them to promote.
Plus, your affiliates can access a private dashboard to see the program details, grab their affiliate links, track their sales and commissions, and set their payout details.
However, a few things about New Zenler’s affiliate tool need improvement. For example, you can’t set separate commission % for different products even though you can set separate % for affiliates.
Overall, New Zenler has decent sales and marketing capabilities. It has all the important selling tools for pricing your product, processing payments, handling checkouts, managing sales taxes, and affiliate marketing.
It also has some handy marketing features—marketing funnel builder and automations. However, both these features are quite basic and require substantial enhancements before they can replace the need for specialized solutions.
An important aspect of growing your online course business is the ability to track the performance of your products and campaigns and manage your courses, students, and other aspects. This is what we’ll cover in this section.
New Zenler has a separate Reports section in the admin dashboard to track your course completion data, quiz scores, video analytics, sales performance, and affiliate sales.
All reports are designed to give you a high-level overview as well as deeper insights.
So, if you want to see your students’ progress, you can use the Course Progress report. Here, you can get a quick overview of the number of people who have enrolled in a course, started, and completed it.
Then, there’s a detailed report to see individual students’ progress in a specific course. Moreover, you can click on an individual student and see their progress lesson-wise.
Similarly, if you want to analyze your sales performance, you can look at the Sales report, which gives you an overview of the sales you’ve made in specific periods and for specific courses.
Plus, if you want to pull out detailed transaction reports and see how many sales you generated from a coupon or by an affiliate, you can also do that.
Additionally, there are reports for tracking quiz performance, video engagement, and affiliate sales.
So, New Zenler’s reporting tools are pretty handy. However, a couple of things can be improved:
New Zenler makes adding new students to your site or managing existing enrollments easy. You can add users either one by one or bulk import them into your site. Then, you can assign the correct role to them.
To manage your existing audience, you can segment them using various filters. For example, you can filter the students based on course enrollment, course completion, user tags, custom field values, and coupons they’ve used.
Moreover, you can select a single user and track their entire lifecycle on your school. Here, you can see what courses they’re enrolled in, their course progress, their purchase history, which communities they have joined, their lesson discussion, what funnels they’re subscribed to, etc.
You can also add them to a new course, remove their course access, manage their subscription, issue a refund, and unsubscribe them from a funnel.
New Zenler allows you to add your team members to your site. Here are the roles supported:
These admin roles are in addition to the three other roles supported by New Zenler—leads, students, and affiliates.
They give great flexibility in managing your team on the platform. Plus, the instructor role is beneficial when building an online school and adding multiple instructors.
New Zenler allows you to enhance your website functionality by integrating with other tools.
To start with, you can add third-party scripts to your website. So, you can easily integrate New Zenler with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. It also enables you to integrate lead generation tools like ConvertBox and tracking tools like Deadline Funnel.
For email sending and tracking, you can use Zenler Mail as your SMTP provider or a custom SMTP solution like Sendgrid or Mandrill.
Otherwise, New Zenler has direct integrations with MailChimp, ConvertKit, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, and Moosend if you prefer using a third-party email service provider.
Plus, you can integrate New Zenler with Zapier, which allows you to integrate hundreds of other tools like SamCart, Hubspot, etc., which don’t directly integrate with the platform.
New Zenler also has a public API that allows you to build custom integrations and functionalities for your website.
Finally, New Zenler offers SSO functionality to enable a seamless login process between your New Zenler website and another third-party platform, such as Circle.so for communities.
New Zenler has a dedicated customer service team, so if you’re facing any issues or are stuck somewhere, you can simply reach out to them.
To contact customer support, you can drop a message via the chat widget. Remember that this isn’t live chat support, and you won’t get an immediate response.
However, the team is pretty responsive, and you’ll generally get a response via email within a day during weekdays.
In addition, they have a self-help section with how-to articles and step-by-step videos that show how to create a course on the platform, build your website, set up your marketing, and other aspects of New Zenler.
While the articles are helpful, the knowledge base needs to be more comprehensive, as certain aspects of the New Zenler platform aren’t covered in any articles.
Finally, New Zenler has a private Facebook group where creators can sign up to get notified about updates, participate in discussions, and ask questions.
Now that we’ve covered different aspects of the platform in this New Zenler review, let’s talk about pricing.
The platform offers a generous free plan, making it one of the best free online course platforms. However, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to use all the features.
New Zenler currently has two paid plans—the Pro plan, which costs $67/month, and the Premium plan, which costs $197/month. You can also subscribe to their yearly plans to get an additional discount.
What’s great about New Zenler pricing is that you can create unlimited courses and students on both plans with no transaction fee. Plus, both plans include almost all the platform’s features.
The only two features not available on the Pro plan are custom user roles and single sign-on. Both are advanced features, and most creators won’t need them.
Otherwise, the two plans differ only in the number of leads, funnels, emails, and sites.
The Pro plan ($67/month) should be sufficient for most creators, making the platform pricing unbeatable. This is one big reason New Zenler has attracted so much attention from course creators.
Before concluding, let’s compare New Zenler with the top course builders and see where it stands.
New Zenler is often compared to Kajabi, another all-in-one online course platform.
Based on features, Kajabi does a much better job. It has course player themes, a powerful community builder, coaching programs, and branded mobile apps. Besides that, there are website themes, podcast tools, a powerful funnel builder, and robust email marketing.
However, note that Kajabi is expensive, with its Basic plan costing $149/month. Read this Kajabi vs New Zenler guide to see a detailed comparison of the two platforms.
Another popular New Zenler competitor is Thinkific. Again, Thinkific is a more established platform, it’s easier to use, has more robust course creation tools, and has a dedicated app store.
However, it doesn’t include any funnels or email automation tools and is recommended over New Zenler if you primarily want course creation and engagement tools.
In this New Zenler review, we discussed all its important features, and undoubtedly, it’s a feature-rich platform.
It has a range of course creation tools, including a flexible course builder, powerful assessment tools, certificates, content dripping/locking, and live classes. On top of that, you get a website builder, blogging tools, eCommerce features, and a marketing funnel builder.
However, certain sections, such as the funnel builder and email marketing tools, require significant improvements before New Zenler can become a truly all-in-one platform.
Still, the platform pricing is super affordable, making it an ideal option for those getting started or those on a tight budget.
New Zenler is invite-only, and if you’d like to try it, click the button below to get a special invite to sign up for the platform.
We hope you found this New Zenler review useful. If you have any questions about the platform, please comment below.
New Zenler is an all-in-one online course platform for creating courses and membership sites. You can also use it for marketing and selling your products.
New Zenler was created by Rakesh Vallil. He has created several course-authoring tools and learning management systems in the past.
New Zenler offers features for course creation, website building, and sales and marketing. While course creation and website building features perform up to the mark, the platform needs improvements in sales and marketing aspects.
Yes, New Zenler offers an iOS/Android mobile app, allowing your students to watch courses and participate in communities while on the go.
Yes, you can create landing pages using New Zenler’s page builder and as part of the marketing funnels. However, there is no standalone landing page feature.
New Zenler has an invite-only free beta plan, but you can only use limited features here. You’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to get access to all the features.
New Zenler’s lower-tier costs $67/month, and higher-tier costs $197/month. There are no hidden charges or transaction fees involved.
Hey there! I'm Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I'm here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
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Hey there! I’m Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I’m here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
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