This is an almost perfect platform with one downside.
This is an almost perfect platform. I've used Heartbeat for the last 2-3 years to host a community. The "course" element is excellent, much better than similar tools like Teachable or Thrivecart's course add-on. It's easy to publish courses, get homework/assignments from students, etc. If you just need a place to host courses and review student work, Heartbeat is excellent. The BIG downside to Heartbeat is the forum/community UI/UX ... no subjects/titles on posts, one LONG scroll to find new posts, and no sorting by date. It's basically set up like a chatroom with one single thread (or appears that way to the user), not a true bulletin board or discussion area like Circle or phpBB, with different posts you can pull up in different tabs by clicking on the post subject. If they could fix this, it would be perfect. The team behind Heartbeat is great. They have a monthly update presentation that's open to users and the development of the platform has been continuous from what I've seen. There's a good community of people using the platform, so you'll likely be able to get any questions you have answered via their forum if you can work with its limitations (see above). Overall, I think it's excellent for people selling courses. If you have a heavy community and want a lot of interaction via forum, I would look at other options before committing.
By David H.