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codelitdev/courselit
Create/Sell courses and digital downloads and publish blogs on your own branded website. An open source alternative to Teachable, Thinkific, Podia and the likes.
CourseLit is a self-hosted LMS for selling courses, digital downloads, and memberships — a direct swap for Teachable/Podia. It's a full-stack Next.js + MongoDB monorepo with a page builder, Stripe payments, built-in email marketing, and community features. Aimed at solo creators and small teams who want to own their platform instead of paying platform fees.
Active development with recent commits and a clear roadmap on Notion. The feature set is genuinely broad for one project: course authoring, digital downloads, drip content, SCORM support, completion certificates, email sequences, and a visual page/theme builder. MongoDB-backed with a migration system that's at least versioned and named chronologically. The widget extension system gives you escape hatches without forking the core.
Media storage depends on MediaLit, a paid external service with no free tier — self-hosting is incomplete without either paying for MediaLit or running your own instance, and the docs don't make this obvious upfront. The DB migration story is rough: migrations are raw Node scripts you run manually, not something a migration runner handles automatically on deploy. Analytics are acknowledged as 'very limited' in the README itself. 1,172 stars and 244 forks after what appears to be several years of development signals limited adoption, which means the community, third-party widget ecosystem, and battle-tested production stories are all thin.