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Last verified August 2026 · India

Live teaching platforms in India

Every tool here can put your face on a screen. The differences that actually matter are narrower: does the platform know who attended, is your live time metered, and can you sell the seatin the same place you teach it. This guide compares on those — and starts by telling you when you don’t need a platform at all.

Run a live class freeSee how attendance flows into the record

First: you might not need one

We sell one of the platforms below, so treat this section as the one we had the least incentive to write. If any of these describe you, a plain video call and a calendar invite genuinely covers it — save your money.

  • You run one weekly session for a group you already know, and nobody pays you through a link.
  • You teach 1:1 and invoice by hand — a calendar invite and a video call genuinely covers it.
  • Your students are inside one school or company that already licenses Teams or Workspace.

A platform starts earning its keep when you’re selling seats, running more than one cohort, or losing students quietly between sessions and only finding out at renewal.

The options, compared

“Attendance on the student record” means the platform links who turned up to who paid, without you reconciling a spreadsheet.

ProlaudOur pick

Teachers whose product IS the live class

The live room, the storefront and the student record are one product. Schedule and host the class, run a multiplayer whiteboard, take polls and raised hands, and the attendance writes straight onto the record that took the payment — where it weights the student's score and surfaces who is slipping.

Attendance on the record
yes
Live time
Unmetered — no hourly cap, no room-size ceiling, no per-attendee add-on
India
Your own Razorpay for UPI, cards, NetBanking and EMI with GST invoices; Stripe in $ for international students.
See how it works

Zoom

Running the meeting itself, at any scale

The most reliable video call there is, and genuinely hard to beat as a pure meeting tool. Breakout rooms, recording and a basic whiteboard all work well.

The catch: It has no idea who bought anything. Attendance lives in a CSV you download and reconcile by hand, and nothing connects a no-show to a paying student.

Attendance on the record
no
Live time
Per-host seat; free tier caps group calls at 40 minutes
India
INR pricing available; no storefront, no student record.

Google Meet

Schools and anyone already inside Google Workspace

Free with a Google account, zero setup, and fine quality. If your institution already runs on Workspace it is the path of least resistance.

The catch: No teaching surface beyond a shared screen, no way to sell a seat, and attendance reports only on higher Workspace tiers.

Attendance on the record
no
Live time
Free tier caps group calls at 60 minutes
India
Free/Workspace pricing; no commerce layer at all.

Microsoft Teams

Institutions standardised on Microsoft 365

Strong for structured institutions — assignments, class teams and calendar all in one place, with education tenants often already licensed.

The catch: Built for organisations, not for selling to the public. There is no storefront, and setting it up for an independent teacher is heavy.

Attendance on the record
partial
Live time
Licensed per user
India
Education licensing; no public storefront or UPI checkout.

Circle

Communities with occasional live events

The best-designed community product in this comparison, with courses, events, a website builder and a custom domain.

The catch: Live is metered. The entry plan includes 10 live hours a month, caps an interactive room at 15 participants, and sells extra hours as an add-on. Two 90-minute classes a week exceeds the allowance before the month ends.

Attendance on the record
partial
Live time
10 live hrs/mo and a 15-person room on the entry plan; extra hours cost extra
India
USD-first; no UPI, no GST invoicing, and a percentage of paywall sales.

Skool

Paid communities where the group is the product

Native live calls that scale to a large audience, plus a gamified feed that genuinely keeps people coming back. Very little to configure.

The catch: Skool processes your payments and keeps a slice of every sale on every plan, with no way to connect your own gateway — which also rules out UPI and GST invoices.

Attendance on the record
partial
Live time
Live calls unmetered
India
USD-first; payments run through Skool, not your bank.

Classplus / Teachmint

Coaching institutes wanting a branded app

India-built and genuinely good at institute workflows — batches, attendance, fee collection and a branded Android/iOS app for students.

The catch: Your students live inside their app rather than on a web storefront you own, so there is no Google-discoverable page for someone searching for your class.

Attendance on the record
yes
Live time
Plan-dependent
India
India-built with UPI; app-first rather than open web.

Jitsi / BigBlueButton

Teams who want to self-host and control everything

Open-source meeting servers. BigBlueButton in particular is built for teaching — shared whiteboard, breakout rooms and polls out of the box.

The catch: You own the servers, the scaling and the 2am outage. There is no commerce layer, so selling a seat is a separate system you also run.

Attendance on the record
partial
Live time
Unmetered — bounded by the hardware you pay for
India
Self-hosted; UPI and GST are entirely your problem.

Keep reading

How the live room works

Whiteboard, polls, raised hands, auto-chaptered recordings.

The teaching loop

One student from checkout to verified certificate, on one record.

Online teaching platforms in India

The wider build-and-sell comparison.

Circle alternative

Why metered live hours bite a teaching schedule.

Live teaching, answered

What is a live teaching platform?
Software for running a class in real time — video, a shared teaching surface, and some way to know who attended. It differs from a plain meeting tool like Zoom or Google Meet in that it also knows who your students are: who paid, who enrolled, who showed up, and what they scored. A meeting tool hosts the call and forgets it happened.
Do I actually need a live teaching platform, or is Zoom enough?
For a lot of people Zoom genuinely is enough, and we would rather say so. If you run one weekly session for a group you already know, nobody pays you through a link, and you are happy tracking attendance in a spreadsheet, a video call plus a calendar invite covers it. A platform starts paying for itself when you are selling seats, running more than one cohort, or losing students quietly between sessions and finding out at renewal.
What is a live cohort?
A group of students who move through a course together on a fixed schedule, rather than each working alone whenever they like. Everyone starts the same week, attends the same live sessions and finishes together. Cohorts finish at far higher rates than self-paced courses because the schedule and the group create accountability — which is also why they cost more to run.
Which live teaching platforms work with UPI in India?
Very few. Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams have no commerce layer at all, so payment is something you arrange separately. Circle and Skool are USD-first and process payments themselves, which rules out UPI, GST-compliant invoices and rupee settlement. India-built options — Prolaud, Classplus, Teachmint — handle UPI natively. Prolaud connects your own Razorpay so money settles from your gateway straight to your bank at 0% commission.
Why do some platforms limit live hours?
Because live video is genuinely expensive to serve — the cost scales with how many people are watching, not with how many are teaching. Platforms that bundle live into a flat subscription either cap it or price it in. Circle, for example, includes 10 live hours a month on its entry plan and caps an interactive room at 15 participants, selling more as an add-on. It is worth checking the meter before you commit, because a teaching schedule burns through an allowance built for occasional events.
What should I look for beyond the video quality?
Three things, in this order. Does attendance land on the same record as the payment, or do you reconcile a CSV by hand? Is the live time metered by hours, attendees or room size? And can you sell a seat on your own domain, or does the platform own the checkout? Video quality is broadly a solved problem — these three are where the real differences are.
Can I run live classes and sell them in the same place?
That is the specific gap this page exists to describe. Course platforms sell well and send you elsewhere to teach. Meeting tools teach well and know nothing about your students. Community tools do both but meter the live time or take a cut of every sale. Prolaud runs the room and the checkout against one student record, unmetered, at 0% commission — which is the whole reason it is on this list.
Is there a free way to run live classes for students?
Yes. Google Meet is free with a Google account (60-minute cap on group calls), and Jitsi is free and open-source if you are willing to self-host. Prolaud has a free Starter tier that includes the live room, so you can run a class and take your first payment without a card. What you will not find free is the combination of unmetered live time and a storefront — someone has to pay for the bandwidth.

Teach the class where you sell it.

Free to start, no card. Unmetered live hours, your own domain, your own Razorpay or Stripe, 0% commission.

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