AccessAlly vs. New Zenler: a comparison

New Zenler is an online course platform.

You log in to the platform to set up your school. A school may include online courses and content within each lesson.

They control the structure of the site. You cannot customize the structure or flow of your online course.

You’re just setting up shop on their online course platform. The infrastructure is already set up.

Your online course will look very similar to another that is set up on the same course platform.

You may have heard of Kajabi or Podia, who also work this way.

You’ll find AccessAlly and New Zenler to be very different here.

New Zenler is an all-in-one online course platform that’s built around sales and marketing.

They strive to replace as many tools as possible.

While this may be great advertising it gets complicated when one platform tries to do it all.

A jack of all trades is a master of none.

AccessAlly is the most flexible plugin for online courses and membership sites.

We believe that your ideas can change the world, and catapult you to the top of your industry.

AccessAlly was built to help leaders and educators make their ideas a reality.

New Zenler is… new.

There have been other variations called Zenler. New Zenler is in the Beta version.

There may still be bugs and feature issues as you work through your setup.

Part of the sign-up process with New Zenler is agreeing to the fact that you’re using a Beta version. And it may not be smooth sailing.

Because it’s so new, issues may not be documented. 

And it’s frankly hard to find a lot of in-depth information from the company.

Not only about its platform but about who they are as a business.

No matter which you choose, it’s important to understand the full scope of pricing.

As a course creator, think about what you’re offering now, and what you want to offer in the future.

As a membership site owner, think about the tiers you have now, future tiers, and different packaging ideas you may want in the future.

Think about how many members you have now, and will have.

Map out your full scope of pricing with each payment plan option plus all the integrations you’ll need.

Remember to factor in any fees from Stripe or PayPal as well.

First off, you may be wondering what a CRM even is, and if you need one?

A CRM is a system you use to house, manage, and email your contacts. There are a variety of them on the market, all with different features and capabilities.

If you choose an online course platform that offers sales and marketing features, you don’t necessarily need a CRM.

You’ll find the built-in email marketing features on this platform limiting, especially if you’re used to something like ActiveCampaign or Keap.

With AccessAlly, you need a CRM. AccessAlly offers built-in integrations with ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Ontraport, and Keap.

While AccessAlly does offer email sending capabilities, it’s not something you would want to use for your email marketing campaigns. We’ve left that the existing CRMs for now.

The integration between your CRM of choice and AccessAlly is top-notch.

It’s a two-way integration, which means that the two systems can communicate seamlessly back and forth.

Imagine you have an Account Profile page on your members’ site.

Here, your members can update their name, address, email address, phone number, etc.

With AccessAlly’s two-way integration, when your member updates their info on their profile page, AccessAlly will automatically update your CRM as well.

While New Zenler does offer basic email marketing functionality, they also offer integration with some popular CRM tools like MailChimp, ConvertKit, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, and Moosend.

All these integrations are one-way integration, which means that the platform pushes information to the CRM, but it’s not a two-way integration.

This means if someone purchases from your online course website, you can send a notification to your CRM, that could trigger an email or apply a tag.

If someone updates their information on the course platform though, it wouldn’t be passed to the CRM.

While a one-way integration is handy and technically gets the job done, it doesn’t have the ability to enhance your members’ experience.

Two-way integration allows everything to appear seamless (because it is).

Your members won’t think twice when they see an email from your CRM with their updated name from their member profile (which is what you want!).

With a one-way, they’ll see an email with their old name and think, “Hey, I thought I changed that already?”.

They notice when it’s wrong.

Both New Zenler and AccessAlly integrate with Stripe and PayPal.

With AccessAlly, you can accept both accept one-time payments and subscriptions through both Stripe and PayPal.

However, with New Zenler, you can only accept subscriptions through Stripe, not PayPal.

This can be a deal-breaker for businesses that need to accept subscription and/or payment plan payments through PayPal.

Simply put, a learning management system (LMS) is a fancy way to talk about course features.

When you think of learning management system features, think of anything that enhances the learning experience for your members.

Things like course completion certificates, progress tracking, quizzes, video bookmarking, and course objectives are all learning management system (LMS) features.

And with online learning gaining traction rapidly, members have come to expect a certain level of accountability and enhanced learning from their online course.

Using these powerful features is yet another way to show your member that you’ve made an investment in their learning.

It shows them your online course is worth it, and top of the line.

The fact is, you can charge more for well designed courses, memberships, and other online content.

With New Zenler, you can use multiple choice questions, true/false questions, or questions with images.

The quiz can be graded or not. And you can also set it to required completion before moving on to the next lesson.

So, while it’s appealing they offer quizzes as a learning management feature, it’s not fully built out and is missing key functionality.

With AccessAlly you have ultimate flexibility with your quizzes. You’ll have the same options as New Zenler, plus even more.

For example, you can create opt-in quizzes to lead prospects to a specific product or offer.

You can set up a personality test with dependent answers that lead to a specific solution on the quiz.

For graded quizzes, you can add resources if they don’t pass so they know where to go back and learn.

There’s no limit to how many or what kinds of quizzes you create with AccessAlly.

And because of the deep, two-way CRM integration, you can tag based on quiz results and trigger specific actions in your CRM.

New Zenler has a great course certificate feature that allows certificates to be sent after a course is completed.

They have a simple checkbox to enable certificates for a specific course. You can choose from its defaults, or upload your own SVG file.

The drawback here is the lack of detailed progress tracking.

When a course certificate is enabled, it’s unclear when the certificate is sent. And with basic progress tracking, there’s no way to know if the members really completed the course.

Ideally, when you send out certificates you have detailed progress tracking that requires them to watch videos and complete objectives in each lesson, module, or class.

AccessAlly offers all the same features as New Zenler here, plus more.

You’ll have access to features like detailed progress tracking. That way when the certificate goes out, you know for certain they’ve completed the course.

This can be a game-changer if you offer an official course that fulfills continuing education credits, qualifies them to teach or lead, or any other kind of official qualification.

As the course creator, it’s your responsibility to make sure the course certificates you’re sending out are accurate.

Both AccessAlly and New Zenler offer affiliate programs, but they are quite different in functionality.

With New Zenler, there’s no affiliate sign-up through the site. You have to manually add each affiliate and assign them to an affiliate group.

You can trigger a reset password email for each new affiliate or manually handle sending login credentials to them. This comes from a basic no-reply address.

Once you’ve manually added your affiliates, they will be able to log in and see their affiliate links.

Picture this: a beautiful affiliate dashboard for your affiliates where they can find important stats, like commission rates and payouts. Plus a beautiful section where they can find your copy, images, and important dates.

That’s not possible with New Zenler.

They do have an affiliate dashboard where your affiliates can find their affiliate links and see commission rates and payouts. However, there’s no way to share your copy, important dates, and/or images with them through this dashboard.

All those important details must be sent through emails.

New Zenler doesn’t offer member directory features.

AccessAlly does.

You can create public or private facing member directories.

You have the ability to add custom fields to the directory listing, images, and more.

We’ve seen these used for all kinds of purposes, from managing large teams, to Chamber of Commerce websites, or for online education. The options are truly limitless.

New Zenler has a built-in online community feature.

The feature itself is the most basic and is similar to WordPress comments if you’re familiar with that.

There’s no way to classify discussions with topics, events, member directories, quizzes, or polls. There’s no mobile app or access for the community, which decreases engagement since so many users use their phones.

The main goal of this community feature is to simply comment on lesson content.

On paper, this community feature is very attractive. It will need major upgrades before it could replace something like Mighty Networks, or even a Facebook Group.

AccessAlly now offers CommunityAlly, which puts you in charge of how you want to set up your communities. You can have one global community that everyone can access, course or cohort-level communities, or dedicated discussion areas so that people know exactly where to get the support they need. This, in combination with the built-in member directories, quizzes, polls, and private notes create an unsurpassed engagement community.

• • You want a plug-and-play platform with few design choices
  • You want a basic structure and flow for your courses and will conform to New Zenler’s limitations
  • You’re okay using a brand new platform that doesn’t have a large user base or the experience of a long-time running
  • You’re willing to bypass or pay for a third-party tool for features like bulk course enrollment, affiliate program management, or member directories.
  • You’re okay with a basic commenting feature for your community engagement
  • You’re willing to migrate when you outgrow the platform

• • You’re looking to make a long-term decision with little chance of migration in the future
  • You want a customizable members area
  • You want valuable features like bulk course enrollment, affiliate program management, and member directories without paying extra or integrating
  • You already use (or are willing to use) one of the 5 CRMs (Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Ontraport, or Keap)