Digital Course Hive

Digital Course Hive is a new, up-and-coming all-in-one course platform and will surprise more than one!

With an attractive pricing, this online course builder holds a lot of promises with a very unique set of features.

But what exactly do you get and how does it compare to other popular platforms?

Again, Digital Course Hive is selling itself as an all-in-one platform for course creators - of the likes of Kajabi, Kartra, New Zenler,etc.

The main promise of an all-in-one platform is that you shouldn’t need to use any third party tool!

This allows creators to have everything under the same umbrella and easily manage everything they need to from a single system.

Let’s see how Digital Course Hive fulfils this promise:

Website/Funnel Builder

The platform offers a very impressive drag & drop visual page builder with global elements (header and footer) to build your site.

A Blog feature is also available, enabling you to make this your one and only platform!

Everything can be easily adjusted, edited and stylized with a few clicks!

And if you don’t have a great eye for design or simply want to save time, you can start from one of their many professionally-designed templates:

This is always such a good surprise and massive bonus point for any platform. You will find similar templates when using the funnel builder.

And the customization of your pages doesn’t stop with the basics but really includes everything you need to make it yours: Section shape divider, animations, custom coding and CSS…

A great range of pre-built widgets are also available:

You can easily copy paste blocks from one page to another! Which can save a ton of time when building your funnel.

I also really appreciated the different templates for funnel, which come with many analytics to assess the performance of your campaigns.

The last great feature to highlight here is the possibility to A/B test all of your pages and funnels to further increase your sales and test different variations of your offer or pages.

All and all, the page and funnel builder Digital Course Hive offers is probably one of the best we have reviewed and compares very well with other more popular platforms!

Email/Automation

As an online course creator, one of your must-have tools is a solid email marketing and automations system.

And Digital Course Hive is definitely delivering on that one!

Just like a dedicated email marketing platform would allow, you can create one-off email broadcasts or Autoresponders.

You can also easily tag your contacts, create segments and manage custom fields to keep track of personal information.

A great feature in Digital Course Hive, which isn’t common to all of the popular online course platforms, is the ability to choose email templates and create your own!

This can save a lot of time when creating your automations or migrating from another system.

The email builder itself is just as great as the page builder: drag & drop your blocks in and quickly edit the content!

Lastly, I really appreciated the visual builder for the automations, which you usually only find in dedicated email marketing systems.

This allows you to really see the contact’s journey and set smart actions and paths depending on their behavior:

Some of these features are still in development (Split paths, target,etc.) but promise to give course creators tools to make the most out of their campaigns and set up some advanced funneling.

Here again, Digital Course Hive delivers an outstanding feature and has nothing to envy to the big names in the industry.

Calendar System/Appointments

A less common feature you’ll also find available in the platform are Appointments.

Put simply, this is everything you need to replace your calendar and booking system! (e.g. Calendly, Acuity, ScheduleOnce,etc.)

This saves money and makes things a LOT easier for course creators offering group coaching or services!

Just like you would with a calendar system, you can create different types of Appointments with different availability, buffer time between calls, booking questions and automatic notifications.

On top of that, you can add different Operators with different schedules and assign them to different services, or just let the platform automatically assign them based on the operator’s busyness!

A true game changer for coaches, who again can also enable group coaching sessions with this feature.

These calendars can then be easily added to a landing page for people to book their session

The only other popular platform in the industry I’ve seen offering this feature is Kartra, which Digital Course Hive should be proud to compare to!

This can easily save most course creators $10+ per month and avoid the headache of connecting tools together.

Checkout & Payments

Digital Course Hive allows to process payment and deliver digital as well as physical products and services.

There is a lot you can customize here such as taxes, shipping options, currency etc.

It’s also good to note a larger range of payment gateways available than most other popular platforms: Stripe, Paypal, Braintree, 2checkout, Afterpay, Authorize.net, Klarna, bank transfer,...

Which is great for customers in countries where some gateways are not available or simply to allow more flexibility with payments and spreading it with credit.

You can then create different types of Product: Physical, Digital, Membership or Service.

Of course this can then lead to different options for delivering on the product and automations with other parts of the platform.

The main thing we’ll be missing right now is the ability to create an affiliate program.

This feature isn’t currently available in Digital Course Hive and may be a deal breaker for some course creators who would have to use an external cart system.

Overall, a very solid feature once again with a lot of flexibility to sell pretty much anything you want online!

This shows that the platform could be a good fit for other businesses than online courses.

Course Building

This is the part that may be a turn off for a lot of course creators.

Digital Course Hive doesn’t really have a course hosting feature per-se:

For one, you will have to use an external video hosting service (such as Vimeo or Wistia)...

Although pictures and other light files can be hosted on the platform, videos aren’t currently supported - which is unfortunately what most course creators use for their products.

This added expense doesn’t have to be a deal breaker but is surely to be taken into account.

Secondly, although as we’ve seen in the checkout feature you can create digital products, there is no content management back-end to help you organize your course’s modules.

Instead you will have to give paying members access to standalone pages that you will have to build and link with each other…

Which, on the one hand, can give you a lot of flexibility for the design and layout of your courses, but also makes for a clunkier user experience:

Unfortunately, the course design feature is often underdeveloped in the online course platforms world and Digital Course Hive isn’t an exception…

This is probably the biggest “cons” for this platform that offers an otherwise great set of features.

Other

We’ve covered the main features of what most online course platform offers, but Digital Course Hive has a lot of extra perks we wanted to highlight here:

• Custom font upload on any plan: if branding is not something you’re ready to compromise on, this can make everything easier.
• File Manager and Folder: create folders for your images so you can easily find them and add them later on.
• Cookies & Privacy: these are legally needed for GDPR compliance and can easily turn on and customize on the platform
• Personalization: you can create global dynamic tags to update later with just 1 click (e.g your phone number).
• Domains: you can add as many custom domains as you want and have different funnels attached to them.

These are mostly small details and probably won’t be massive game changers in your decision but sometimes they can tip the balance a little!

Digital Course Hive is a new platform, which sometimes means that functionality has been given a higher priority than design… but it’s not the case here!

Overall the platform is very satisfying to use and rather to pick up on.

It might take a while for new users to fully use all of the features it offers but still, no corners have been cut to make this user-friendly.

We’ve already seen the only part of the platform that is a little clunkier which is the course creation bit.

There is no menu in the back-end to set this up and you kinda have to figure it out yourself which isn’t the easiest.

Pricing is another one of the biggest selling points Digital Course Hive is marketing on.

For an all-in-one platform, it’s looking very attractive:

Even the starting plan at $39/mo paid annually offers all of the features the platform has to offer.

The 2 main limiting allowances are the monthly emails and total members.

Although you can have as big of a list you want on the platform, you can only send 1,200 emails to 100 people a month (Starter plan), which could be very limiting for some course creators.

A limit that’s not expanding a lot, even by going to the higher tiers…

Along with video hosting, I would say this is the 2nd biggest downside of the platform right now!

That being said, you can still natively integrate a 3rd party email marketing tool with the money you’re saving on things like your calendar system or funnel building.

Digital Course Hive being a relatively new platform is still in the building stage when it comes to its community and support resources.

There is no knowledge bank currently available for users to watch tutorials and learn the platform’s ropes.

The only way to get your questions answered is to submit a contact form to the team.

This can be a little stressful for non-technical people that need to know that they can be taken care of quickly when having an issue.

This is also reflected in the still small number of people in Digital Course Hive community

Again the platform is relatively easy to pick up on but support is an important part of any popular online tool that will need to be improved on!