Heights Platform vs Stan Store: The Best Alternative to Stan Store

Main Overview of Heights vs Stan Store

Heights Platform and Stan Store both help creators sell digital products online, but they are built with very different goals in mind.

Stan Store is mainly a storefront builder. It allows creators to quickly set up a simple page where they can list products, such as a course, a digital download, or access to a community and collect payments.

It’s straightforward and easy to use, but its simplicity also means that features are limited. Branding options are minimal, and from the customer’s perspective, it’s clear that the program is hosted on Stan rather than on the creator’s own brand as Stan Store does not support custom domains/white-label.

Heights Platform, on the other hand, is a complete course and community platform designed for creators who want more than just a payment link. With Heights, you can build engaging online courses, host a community, sell digital products, run challenges, stream live events, and even design your entire website, all under your own brand.

Unlike Stan Store, Heights gives you full control over branding: your logo, your colors, and your own domain name, so your customers experience your business, not a third-party platform.

Another key difference is that Heights includes built-in AI to support every step of your business journey. From creating entire courses in minutes to generating sales pages, community posts, and marketing emails, Heights AI is designed to help creators save time and grow their businesses.

Stan Store has its own AI assistant, but its role is limited to answering questions about the platform rather than helping you create and scale your business.

In short: if you’re looking for a quick and simple storefront to sell a few digital products, Stan Store can do the job and it is easy to use. But if you want to build a scalable knowledge business with a branded experience, community, and AI-powered growth tools, Heights Platform is the better choice.

Pricing: Heights vs Stan Store

Stan Store offers two pricing tiers: $29/month for the basic Creator plan and $99/month for the Creator Pro plan (charged monthly).

Both have 0% transaction fees, but the feature sets diverge: Heights adds creator tools Stan doesn’t list (custom domains, SEO-indexable public community posts), while Stan emphasizes link-in-bio storefronts and Instagram AutoDM.

Plans in Heights Platform also begin at $29/month (charged monthly), and the full-featured Pro plan is $119/month, which includes everything you need to run a scalable knowledge business: unlimited courses, community channels, digital products, advanced payment options, affiliate programs, AI tools, live streaming and a website builder (and more!).

Online Course Creation in Stan Store vs Heights Platform

Both Heights Platform and Stan Store allow creators to sell courses. Stan Store has a straightforward course builder, where you can upload video lessons and deliver content, but the learning experience is limited compared to Heights Platform.

There’s little flexibility in how courses are structured, and features like assignments, quizzes, or gamification are not available. For many creators, this means having to rely on outside tools if they want to provide an engaging and structured learning journey.

Heights Platform was built from the ground up as a course creation platform. You can create unlimited courses with unlimited lessons and modules, upload unlimited videos, and add interactive elements such as projects, quizzes, assignments, and gamification features that keep learners engaged.

Heights also supports advanced release options, like drip schedules or fixed start-and-end date challenges, where students progress together as a cohort.

Another major difference between the platforms is how offers are structured. With Heights, you can bundle multiple courses together, combine them with digital products or community access, and sell them as one package.

You can set one-time payments, subscriptions, installment plans, or even pay-what-you-want pricing. In Stan, every course or tier has to be sold as a separate product, with no native way to bundle or create flexible pricing options.

On top of that, Heights AI can generate entire courses and offers for you in minutes—complete with a title, lesson outline, and cover image—so you never start from a blank page. Stan’s Stanley helps with platform Q&A and content writing, but there’s no feature to auto-build courses/sites.

In short, Stan lets you host and sell simple courses, but Heights Platform equips you to create a professional, engaging learning experience with all the tools you need to actually help students succeed.

Selling Digital Products: Heights vs Stan Store

Both Heights Platform and Stan Store allow creators to sell digital products of all kinds. Deliver ebooks, templates, spreadsheets, schedule coaching calls, live webinars, you name it.

Stan Store’s core strength is acting as a storefront. Creators can quickly add digital products like eBooks, templates, or access to a program and start selling. It’s a good fit for creators who only need a simple checkout page.

Stan offers straightforward product setup and link-in-bio style storefronts. Heights' offer creation may feel a bit more complex, but it provides the flexibility to easily bundle products together, create pricing tiers within the same product, or offer flexible payment plan options. If you want to sell a course plus coaching calls plus community access in one package, you’ll need to create multiple separate products on Stan and manage them individually.

Heights Platform gives creators far more control over how they package and sell digital products. Inside Heights, you can create a single offer that combines courses, memberships, digital downloads, coaching, and community channels - all under one checkout.

You can also sell products using one-time payments, subscriptions, installment plans, or even pay-what-you-want pricing. On top of that, Heights includes features like upsells, order bumps, and coupon codes, so you can maximize sales and average order value without extra software.

Finally, Heights AI makes creating digital products even easier. Simply describe your idea and Heights AI can generate a full product offer for you—complete with courses, digital downloads, or community access—all set up in your account and ready to sell. Stan doesn’t provide AI tools to help you design or launch your products.

If your goal is to sell a handful of downloads, Stan Store might be enough. But if you want to create valuable offers, bundle products, and keep more of your revenue, Heights Platform gives you the tools to scale.

Community Building: Heights vs Stan Store

Both Heights Platform and Stan Store allow creators to build and sell access to a community space.

In both platforms, you can create unlimited community channels and welcome unlimited members.

As with other features, communities in Stan Store simply lack the flexibility that Heights offers.

In Stan, creators cannot build multiple private channels, segment groups, or set unique access rules for different tiers of members.

Stan’s community also lacks public visibility, meaning your community is private and only visible to its members. While on Heights that is also the case if you set a channel to paid, there is also the option to make posts in free channels discoverable on Google, so your Heights community can act as a lead generation tool!

On Heights, you can create unlimited community channels, each with its own rules, topics, and even pricing. For example, you might have a free public community to attract new members (which can be indexed by Google for organic traffic) alongside private, paid channels for premium students.

Heights even lets you bundle community access with courses or digital products, giving you full flexibility in how you monetize and structure your program.

AI also plays a role in helping creators build thriving communities on Heights. Heights AI can suggest new post ideas, draft weekly round-up emails, and even assist with moderation, keeping discussions lively and safe.

In short, Stan offers a simple, single community space with set rules, while Heights Platform empowers you to create a dynamic, scalable community that can both generate leads and drive long-term engagement.

AI Tools: Heights vs Stan Store

Both Heights and Stan include AI, but they serve very different purposes.

Stan Store offers an AI chatbot called Stanley, which helps creators answer questions about how to use the platform.

Inside Heights Platform, Heights AI is a full suite of tools designed specifically to help creators build, launch, and scale their online business.

With Heights AI, you can:

• Instantly generate an entire offer with a courses, digital products, webpages, and content according to your specifications.
• Rely on the AI Coach for personalized weekly business guidance and marketing tasks.
• Create entire website pages in minutes, as well as generate emails, community posts, and even quizzes tailored to your content.
• Ask Heights AI to act as your assistant, editing products on your behalf with simple text commands.

Unlike a generic chatbot, Heights AI has been trained on years of creator insights and best practices, making it more than just a help desk. It’s like having an integrated business coach, content creator, and marketing assistant all inside your account.

In short, Stan’s AI is there to help you use the software, while Heights AI is built to help you actually build your business.

Webinars & Live Streaming: Heights vs Stan Store

Stan Store lets you sell access to webinars, but it doesn’t include a built-in live streaming tool. To actually host the webinar, you’ll need to connect to an outside platform such as Zoom, Google Meet, or another video service. This adds extra steps for both you and your customers, since the experience isn’t fully integrated.

Heights Platform is offers live streaming directly into the platform! You can run webinars, live lessons, or group calls with community members right inside your Heights account - no expensive third-party software needed.

These live events can be sold as standalone products, bundled with courses or communities, or used as ongoing member perks.

In short, Stan requires outside tools to deliver a webinar, while Heights Platform is an all-in-one solution where you can sell, host, and engage your audience live, without ever leaving your program.

Branding & Website: Heights vs Stan Store

One of the biggest differences between Heights and Stan is how much control you have over your brand.

Stan Store is primarily designed for creators who interact with their audience on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Its pages are optimized for mobile viewing, which means your content is displayed in a simple list of buttons and call-outs. While this works well on a phone screen, you don’t have control over how your storefront appears on desktop, so the experience may feel less polished to visitors browsing from a computer.

What you get with Stan is essentially a single link-in-bio page and straightforward checkout pages for each product. Product titles and subtitles have character limits, and the checkout pages let you add basic elements like text, bullet points, videos, images, or links.

However, if you want to go beyond that—like building an “about” page, a detailed services page, longer sales pages, or a blog—you’ll need to connect outside tools, often at an extra cost.

With Stan Store, customization is minimal. You can adjust colors and a few visual elements, but the storefront clearly looks like a Stan Store to your customers. You can’t fully white-label the experience, and advanced branding features like custom domains, full website pages, or a blog are not included.

For many creators, this means that while selling is easy, the customer journey doesn’t feel unique or fully professional.

Heights Platform gives you full ownership of your brand. You can upload your own logo, connect a custom domain, adjust fonts, colors, and even build an entire website with unlimited pages.

Heights includes a drag-and-drop web page builder, blog publishing, SEO optimization, and AI tools that can instantly generate high-converting sales pages for your offers.

The result is a seamless, fully branded experience where customers engage with your business—not a third-party platform.

Heights Platform is The Best Alternative to Stan Store

Stan Store is a quick and easy platform to set up a storefront and start selling digital products, but it comes with limitations. Its simplicity makes it appealing for beginners who only need a basic checkout page, but the lack of flexibility, customization, and advanced features can hold back creators who want to scale.

Heights Platform, on the other hand, is built for both beginners, both creators looking for long-term growth. It combines online courses, digital products, communities, challenges, live events, and websites into one all-in-one platform, powered by AI to save time and help you grow.

You own the branding, you keep all of your revenue, and you get the tools to create a truly professional learning experience.

If your goal is simply to sell a few downloads, Stan Store can work. But for a similar price, you could get a platform that allows you to build a thriving knowledge business.

Try Heights Platform and see it for yourself, by creating your free account (no credit card required!)

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