Heights Platform Review, Pricing & Features

What is Heights Platform?

Heights Platform is a course creation software solution that many creators use to build online courses and sell digital products. Its features include a course and site builder, course bundles, badges, student discussions, a sales tracker. Heights Platform also has integrations with popular software tools like Intercom, Shopify, and Zapier.

Table of Contents

• What is Heights Platform?
• Heights Platform Review Summary
• Heights Platform Pricing & Cost
• Heights Platform Features
  • Course Builder
  • Course Delivery
  • Marketing
  • Payments
  • Legal & Security
• Heights Platform Integrations & Website Compatibilities
• Heights Platform Customer Support
• Heights Platform vs. Competitors
• Is Heights Platform Right for You?

Heights Platform Review Summary

Heights Platform was founded in 2018 by Bryan McAnulty. The founder is particularly focused on student learning. Today, the company has around 10 employees and is based in Austin, Texas.

Heights Platform is a basic course creation solution that helps its customers create and sell their courses and digital products online. The platform includes a course & site builder, drip scheduling, student discussions, a sales tracker, and key integrations with platforms like Intercom, Shopify, and Zapier. We found Heights Platform’s strongest feature to be the student discussion tool. Overall, the tools in Heights Platform are less complete than what’s found in competitors.

Heights Platform’s most popular plan costs $99 a month. In terms of pricing, Heights Platform is competitive with Thinkific and Teachable. However, Thinkific and Teachable offer more features at this price point.

Overall, Heights Platform is best for those who need a simpler course creation solution. It’s a newer platform, which means there are many features that are still in development. As an early customer, you have the ability to influence the product roadmap, but must be patient as features are rolled out.

We recommend comparing Heights Platform alongside other course creation tools:

Heights Platform Pricing & Cost

Heights Platform’s pricing ranges from $49 to $499 a month. Customers can save ~20% by purchasing an annual plan. The company offers a 30-day free trial for all plans.

Heights Platform Features

Below, we will discuss the key features of Heights Platform. We will also include screenshots of the product to give you an idea of its design and architecture.

Course Builder

The course builder is the most important feature in course creation platforms. Overall, Heights Platform’s course builder is sufficient for building standard courses, and intuitive once you’re familiar with the platform.

In Heights Platform, courses are made of separate lessons. For each lesson, you can upload different forms of multimedia to include in courses – images, videos, downloadable files, audio, and code. You can also add one assignment per lesson. Unlike competitor solutions, Heights Platform lets you assign points to lessons. Students can be rewarded these points as they complete each lesson, which encourages them to continue taking your courses.

As seen above, Heights Platform offers limited customizing capabilities how each lesson appears for students. Lesson elements are automatically centered and ordered from top to bottom. Heights Platform also only lets you align text to the left, center, or right of each slide

Assignments

Heights Platform offers an in-platform assignments feature that we found to be very limiting and inefficient. Assignments indicate how well your students are progressing with your course material. They also give you an opportunity to give individual feedback.

As you can see above, an assignment in Heights Platform is a single question that only accepts a text response. It does not let students attach files like images, documents or videos, or allow you to edit the alignment and size of your text.

Gamification

Heights Platform offers gamification, which makes online learning interactive and increases learner engagement. One of the most common gamification mechanics is rewards – Heights Platform uses badges. These provide students a sense of accomplishment and motivate them to study your course material.

Heights Platform is set up to automatically award some badges. This includes badges for completing courses and being a member of your school. Heights Platform also lets you create custom badges. You can use these to reward accomplishments that specifically relate to your courses and school.

Additional Course Editing Features

Heights Platform lets you add custom branding to your website, and translate it into 18 languages besides English.

Heights Platform’s custom branding capabilities are basic – you can upload a logo, a favicon, and create a custom color scheme. Some of the languages Heights Platform lets you translate your website and courses into include:

Course Delivery

The next step after creating your course is delivering it to your students. Heights Platform includes features that help schedule your course content, and support student interactions.

Drip Schedule

Drip schedules are used by instructors to publish specific sections of course material at certain times. Drip schedules ensure that your students are not rushing through your content just to complete it.

Heights Platform lets you choose a specific date for releasing your courses. For lessons, Heights Platform lets you choose the number of days after a student’s enrollment to release the content.

Student Discussions

Heights Platform offers an in-platform student discussion feature, which increases student engagement and helps build a community. Heights Platform’s students discussion feature is the platform’s strongest feature, and superior to similar features offered by alternative solutions.

Heights Platform lets you create message boards, message board groups, and send private messages between you and your members. These message boards include many nice-to-have features that streamline communication, such as the ability to quote and reference previous comments. Heights Platform also lets you moderate whether certain posts get posted and choose what you will be notified about.

Marketing

Once you’ve made your courses, you need to find the best method to market them. Heights Platform offers a site builder, and additional marketing tools like coupons, course bundles, and a sales tracker. It does not support affiliate marketing, which is found in most other alternatives.

Site Builder

Heights Platform includes a site builder that lets you create your site from scratch and host it on a custom domain. Heights Platform’s website builder is very limited when it comes to customizations and designing your landing pages.

Heights Platform offers templates for four pages – a home landing page, a student checkout page, an internal support page, and a terms and policies page. The ability to edit templates is limited – you can only edit the text in certain sections of the page. For example, on the checkout page, Heights Platform only lets you write out a billing and refund policy.

The templates are also limiting from a design perspective. For example, Heights Platform does not let you alter how elements align on a page. The most you can do is align text to the left or right, or center of the page. A positive is that Heights Platform does let you add testimonials and link your Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Coupons

Heights Platform lets you create coupons that can be applied to your courses. Coupons help promote your courses and increase your sales. When creating a coupon, Heights Platform lets you:

One disadvantage of Heights Platform’s coupon feature is that coupons do not offer a discounted dollar amount or percentage off any item. Instead, coupons act as the new price for a course. The biggest issue with this approach is that you have to create a unique coupon for every course that you want to offer at a discount. This system is very inefficient and would require you to create many unnecessary coupons.

Course Bundles

Heights Platform lets you sell your courses in bundles at discounted prices. Course bundles entice your customers to purchase and increase your average order amount. With Heights Platform you can charge bundles as a one time payment or on a subscription basis.

Some of the bundles customizations Heights Platform includes are:

Sales Tracker

Heights Platform lets you keep track of your sales and the revenue made from your courses and other products. This information helps you monitor the performance of your courses and make the improvements needed to increase your sales. Heights Platform’s sales tracker is limited in terms of the data points it offers, as seen below.

Heights Platform’s sales tracker shows who purchased a product, the amount they owe, whether or not they have paid, and the date the product was purchased. It does not provide graphical information of your sales or indicate which sales had coupons applied or were from affiliate recommendations.

Digital Products

Along with courses, Heights Platform lets you sell digital products. Having digital products can expand your brand, increase your profits, and be used to support core course material. Popular digital products include ebooks, software, videos, graphics or digital art, and documents.

Heights Platform lets you sell these within its platform. This makes it easier for your students to purchase your products because they won’t have to go to another site or tab. When selling your products, Heights Platform lets you:

Email Templates

Heights Platform offers an email feature that comes with email templates. This includes templates for enrollment, payment failure, and private message emails. This feature is great for keeping in touch with your students and encouraging them to return back to your platform. However, we recommend using a third-party integration for managing your emailing list.

As seen above, Heights Platform lets you customize the subject and body of an email using HTML and liquid tags. You can also adjust the base color of your email branding.

Payments

Heights Platform does not process payments through its own platform. However, it does integrate with Paypal and Stripe. Integrating through Stripe gives you the ability to charge your courses on a subscription basis. All plans also come with no additional transaction fees.

Legal & Security

Course creation software can require sensitive information like login and payment credentials. Therefore, it is important that your software complies with certain legal and security standards to protect your sensitive information.

Heights Platform Customer Support

Efficient customer support is very important in guaranteeing a satisfactory customer experience. Overall, we found Heights Platform’s customer service to be slightly above average. Their support team’s response time is very quick and responsive. However, the company’s chatbot is only able to lead you to an article or provide the company’s contact information.

We also found Heights Platform’s help articles to be text-dense, and therefore hard to read. They are also inconsistent when it comes to text size and images. Only a portion of articles have images and product screenshots, which make them easier to follow. None of their articles include GIFs or videos to help visualize processes.

Heights Platform Integrations & Website Compatibilities

Heights Platform offers key integrations and website compatibilities that allow you maximize your course and site efforts. These include integrations that support the creation, marketing, selling and delivering of your online courses. These integrations include:

Heights Platform is also compatible with various website builders through Zapier. These include:

Heights Platform vs. Competitors

The top Heights Platform competitors are listed below. Heights Platform competes most directly with Podia and Teachable. The best option for you will depend on the features you need and your budget.

Is Heights Platform Right for You?

Heights Platform is a new, up-and-coming course creation platform with a focus on driving successful student outcomes.

Overall, Heights Platform is best for those who need a simpler, more basic course creation solution. It’s a newer platform, which means there are many features still in development. As an early customer, you have the ability to influence the product roadmap, but must be patient as features are rolled out.

We recommend comparing Heights Platform alongside other course creation tools:

To learn more about Heights Platform, try it for free today.