Disclosure
How Affiliate Links Work
Some links on this site — in reviews, comparisons, and best-of lists — are affiliate links. If you click through and sign up for a platform or purchase a course, we may earn a commission from that platform at no extra cost to you. This is one of the ways Ed Tech Ranking funds the testing and writing that goes into every review, and we believe being upfront about it is the minimum standard for a site that asks you to trust its recommendations.
Why This Doesn't Affect Our Scores
Every platform on this site is scored using the exact same Methodology — course catalog depth, teaching quality, platform UX, and price & certificates — regardless of whether an affiliate relationship exists. A platform that offers a higher commission does not receive a higher score, a better position in a ranking, or more favorable language in its review. We test platforms first and establish or maintain affiliate relationships separately; the commercial relationship never comes before the testing, and it never influences the outcome of that testing.
How We Choose What to Recommend
Our recommendations always start from testing, not from which affiliate programs exist. When we decide to publish a review or add a platform to a Best Online Courses list, that decision is made by evaluating the platform against our criteria first. Only afterward do we check whether an affiliate program is available for that platform, and if one isn't, we cover the platform anyway with the same depth and the same standards. You will find platforms on this site with no affiliate relationship at all, scored and reviewed identically to ones that do have one.
Editorial Independence in Practice
Our writers and testers don't have visibility into which affiliate deals generate the most revenue for the site, and compensation for reviews is never tied to commission performance. This separation exists specifically so that no one writing or scoring a review has a personal financial incentive to inflate a particular platform's ranking. If an affiliate partnership were ever incompatible with an honest review — for example, if a platform's actual quality declined sharply after a partnership began — we would update the score and the review to reflect that, even if it meant losing the partnership.
What We Never Do
We never accept payment in exchange for a guaranteed positive review, a specific score, or a placement in a ranked list. We never allow a platform to review or approve review copy before publication. We never hide or bury negative findings about a platform simply because it's an affiliate partner, and negative sections of a review — cons, limitations, poor support experiences — are written with the same detail as positive ones. If you ever find language on this site that reads like it was written by the platform itself rather than by an independent tester, that's a bug, not a feature, and we'd want to know about it.
How Sponsored Content Would Be Handled
As of today, this site does not run sponsored posts or paid placements of any kind — every review, comparison, and list is created on our own initiative based on our testing priorities. If that ever changes in the future, any sponsored content would be clearly and prominently labeled as such, separate from our independently tested reviews, and it would never be inserted into or mixed with our scored rating system.
Updates to This Policy
We'll update this page any time our affiliate practices or editorial process meaningfully change, so it always reflects how the site actually operates rather than a policy we wrote once and forgot about. The version you're reading now is current as of the platform's latest content update.
Questions About This Policy
If anything here is unclear, or if you've spotted something on the site that seems inconsistent with what's described on this page, our Contact page is the right place to raise it. We take disclosure seriously enough that we'd genuinely rather hear about an inconsistency and fix it than have it go unnoticed.