Online Real Estate Schools Compared: The 5 Big Providers (2026)

Five online schools show up on almost every shortlist: 360training’s Agent Campus, AceableAgent, Colibri Real Estate, Kaplan Real Estate Education and The CE Shop. They are not interchangeable. One of them sells in eleven states and another in every state but one. One publishes its students’ exam pass rates and the other four do not. One gives you thirty days to change your mind and another gives you seventy-two hours. This page puts those differences side by side, using only figures taken from each school’s own pages on 5 September 2026, and says plainly where a school publishes nothing.

The Five Schools Compared

Listed alphabetically. There is no ranking here because there is no published figure that would justify one. Read the price column with the footnote underneath it: none of these schools sells a single national price, so a range is a range across states, not across packages.

Self-Paced Or Live Online

Every one of these five sells a self-paced online course as its main product. The question is whether you can get a scheduled human in front of you, and only one of them treats that as a real alternative rather than an add-on.

• Kaplan is the only one of the five that lists four separate delivery formats: self-paced online, pre-recorded OnDemand video, daily live instruction through what it calls the Live Online Learning Hub, and in-person classes. In-person was confirmed in Florida, where a sales associate in-person class with exam prep is sold at $459. The Texas, California and Michigan pages showed online and video packages only, so availability is state by state.
• Colibri offers instructor-led livestream alongside self-paced, but calls it “livestream courses in many states” and never publishes which states. The Florida page offers livestream classes led by Florida instructors; the Texas page offers a choice between self-paced and instructor-led livestream. If livestream is what you want, check your own state page before you buy. No in-person option appears anywhere on its site.
• The CE Shop is self-paced only as a delivery method. Instructor-led webinars appear as a package feature in some states, described as two evening sessions most weeks with the schedule provided inside the course. They were in all four Missouri packages and the three paid Texas packages, and absent from the package matrices of the other nine states checked.
• AceableAgent is self-paced only. Live instruction exists inside the upper tiers, for example Texas Deluxe listing five live webinars a week plus an hour of private tutoring, but there is no cohort you can enroll in on its own.
• 360training is self-paced only, with no live or in-person option anywhere on the site. Its own copy sells that as the point: courses “delivered entirely online, no commuting to a classroom”. Note that the course final exam is proctored in most states, which is a scheduled, supervised event even though the instruction is not.

Exam Prep: Included Or Not

At all five schools the cheapest option is the state-required coursework and nothing else. Exam prep is the upsell above it: at Colibri in Florida that is the difference between a $99 package and a $149 one. This is the most consistent pattern across the five, and it is worth knowing before you compare headline prices, because the headline price is almost never the package that includes exam prep.

Two things follow from that table. First, if you already own exam prep, or you intend to buy PrepAgent or CompuCram separately, the cheapest tier at any of these schools is the honest comparison, and the gaps between schools narrow sharply. Second, at AceableAgent the bundled exam prep is a time-limited licence rather than something you keep, so a long gap between finishing the course and sitting the exam can leave you paying for it twice.

Refund Policies And Pass Guarantees

These are two different promises and the schools blur them constantly. A refund policy is your money back because you changed your mind. A pass guarantee is a conditional promise tied to failing the state exam, and every one of them has conditions that most buyers will never read.

The refund policy is the one that matters

• 360training has the strictest refund policy of the five by a wide margin. Its published policy requires the request within 72 hours of purchase, and that you have not attempted any portion of a test, quiz or exam, have not completed 50% or more of the course, have not been issued a certificate, and have not had materials shipped. The request must go by email with proof of purchase. In practice that means one evening of coursework can end your eligibility.
• The CE Shop gives 30 days from purchase, before the course expires, with the course under 50% complete. Its exam prep product is refundable within 30 days only if you have not taken the initial assessment.
• Colibri gives 30 days from the date of purchase on self-paced courses, but a completed course does not qualify, and completing any single for-credit course inside a package ends the refund for the whole package. Livestream is different: 24 hours after the first class, and if you do not attend the first scheduled class you do not qualify at all. New Jersey livestream students get seven days. Physical textbooks and shipping are non-refundable and $50 is withheld from refunds on packages that include a textbook.
• Kaplan gives 30 days from purchase for web-based asynchronous courses, only if the course has not been completed, and less applicable fees including a $20 registration fee. Shipping is non-refundable. Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio and Oregon run on different state-specific timeframes.
• AceableAgent advertises a 30-day course trial with a full refund if you are not satisfied.

The pass guarantees, and what they actually require

• Colibri, “Pass or Don’t Pay”. You must buy a package containing exam prep, score 80% or higher on at least three simulated exams, sit the state exam within 30 days of finishing the exam prep curriculum, and if you fail on the first try, email the result within 30 days of the failure to be reimbursed the cost of the package. Colibri’s own site is inconsistent about which states are excluded: its guarantee page lists Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and Tennessee, and its refund policy page lists Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey and Tennessee. It describes these as state-law prohibitions. Treat the longer list as the safer assumption.
• AceableAgent states its pass guarantee two different ways on its own site. The dedicated guarantee page says you get your money back if you do not pass on the first try, conditioned on completing all the course hours before the exam, sitting the exam within 90 days of finishing the course, and having bought direct rather than through a third party, and it warns that redeeming the guarantee ends your access to the courses. The state-page FAQs on Texas, Ohio and Virginia instead say you are refunded if you do not pass after three attempts. Both versions are on the live site. It is scoped to the Deluxe and Premium tiers, so Basic buyers get the 30-day trial and nothing else.
• The CE Shop attaches a Pass Guarantee, listed at a $64 value, to the paid tiers in most states. It is not money back on the course. It reimburses the cost of the initial licensing exam if a retake is needed. That row was absent from the Florida, Georgia and Missouri package matrices.
• Kaplan’s “Kaplan Commitment” is not a money-back guarantee at all, and it is the clearest-written of the five for that reason. If you sit the state exam within 30 days of completing your program and do not pass, Kaplan continues to support your studies for the same exam at no cost, for up to 18 months. The conditions are specific: complete the Kaplan Commitment video course within 14 days of enrolling, submit the form within 7 days of failing, meet the instructor as scheduled, and re-sit within 30 days of that first one-to-one meeting.
• 360training’s is the one to be careful with. A “money-back guarantee” is advertised on its Basic package pages in at least six states as a reason to upgrade to Premium, but the terms are published nowhere: not on the Premium package pages, not on the exam prep page, and the refund policy page never uses the phrase. The only published refund promise on that site is the 72-hour policy above, which would exclude anyone who had already attempted a quiz. Do not buy on the strength of it without asking them in writing what it means.

Mobile Access

This matters more than it sounds. A 180-hour Texas course is six weeks of evenings, and the people who finish are usually the ones who chip away at it in twenty-minute gaps. There is one real difference here and four schools that are the same as each other.

• AceableAgent is the only one of the five with a native app. It lists mobile app access in its cheapest tier, and its app page confirms free downloads on both the Apple App Store and Google Play with progress carrying across devices.
• Colibri works in any browser on any device, and says so explicitly, but tells you to take unit quizzes and course final exams on a PC or laptop, and recommends a computer over an iPad for the general experience. iPad users are told to use Chrome on iOS 11 or newer. No app.
• The CE Shop says yes to phone and tablet, with the same exception: you must use a PC for proctoring if your state requires a proctored final. No app is advertised anywhere on its site.
• 360training carries “100% online courses available 24/7 on any device” on its course pages and tells Florida students they can finish from their phone. No app, and no stated offline access.
• Kaplan does not publish anything about mobile access at all. Not on its course index, not on its student experience page, and not on the Texas, California, Florida or Michigan licensing pages. Its courses are described only as online and flexible. That is not the same as saying they do not work on a phone; it means the school has not said.

Which Schools Cover Your State

Coverage is the first filter, and it eliminates schools faster than price does. Two of these five sell pre-licensing almost nationwide and one of them sells it in eleven states.

What None Of Them Publish, And What One Does

Pass rate is the figure every buyer wants and almost nobody supplies. This is the honest state of it as of 5 September 2026.

• The CE Shop is the only one of the five that publishes pass rates. Its figures, described as first-time attempts from verified data sources: combined exam 65% against a 57% state average, national portion 67% against 50%, state portion 58% against 50%. It also breaks the data out by state where it has at least 25 tests in a quarter, and those rows are more useful than the national ones because they are the honest comparison. Texas salesperson, for example, is 56% against a 56% state average, which is to say identical, on 1,077 exams taken between 1 December 2023 and 30 November 2025. Colorado broker is 79% against 68% on the national portion. Missouri salesperson is 35% against a 35% state average. A school publishing a number that shows it level with the state average is doing something the other four are not doing at all.
• Colibri publishes no pass rate. Not on its homepage, its state pages, its FAQ or its guarantee page. Its nearest claim is a volume figure, over 1.5 million students. Any Colibri percentage you see quoted elsewhere came from a third party, not from Colibri.
• AceableAgent claims “industry-leading pass rates” with no figure attached. Its Texas page has a pass-rate chart, but the chart is an image with its text converted to vector paths, so the percentage in it cannot be read, quoted or checked. Its own footnote points readers to the official TREC Provider Exam Pass Rates list, which is the right place to get a Texas number and is published by the regulator rather than the school. The one numeric claim it does publish as text is not a pass rate: it says PrepAgent’s own readiness assessment scored its students at an average of 74% against 64% for students of other providers. That is a vendor’s internal quiz, not a state exam result.
• Kaplan publishes no national pass rate. The only figure anywhere on its site is on the Texas page: that Kaplan “consistently exceeds Texas’s required minimum pass rate by 6.89%”. That is a margin over a regulatory floor, not a pass rate, and it cannot be compared with anyone else’s number.
• 360training publishes no pass rate in any form. Every percentage on its site is a discount, a required passing score for a course final, or a refund threshold. It also carries two contradictory versions of the same boast, “25+ years” and “15+ years” as the number one trusted training provider, on different pages of the same site, which is a reason to discount both.

Your State Sets The Hours, The Fees And The Exam

None of the numbers on this page are hour counts, and that is deliberate. The school does not choose how long your course is. Your state does, and the spread is enormous: 40 hours in Michigan, 63 in Florida, 180 in Texas. The same is true of exam format, the passing score, the application fee and the commission that issues the licence. That is why the price ranges above look so wild. A $99 Florida package and a $299 Texas package from the same school are not two prices for the same thing; they are 63 hours and 180 hours.

For the hours, fees, exam format and approved-provider rules where you live, start with your state:

• California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas

If you want all eleven side by side rather than one at a time, our real estate license requirements by state guide puts the hours, exam format, passing score, fees and licensing body in one table.

The Decision That Costs More Than The School

Worth saying plainly, because most people comparing schools do not know it yet: the course is the cheapest decision in this whole process, and it is the only one you make once. A passed exam is not a working licence in any state. It becomes one when a sponsoring broker activates it, and that brokerage takes a cut of every commission you earn for as long as you stay. A $200 difference between two schools is real money today. A ten-point difference in commission split is that same $200 every deal, forever.

You do not have to decide now, and you should not. But it is worth knowing what you are walking into while you still have three to six months of coursework ahead of you, rather than being introduced to it by the first brokerage that recruits you out of your exam results.

• Run your own numbers on our brokerage cost worksheet. It is a fill-in sheet for your split, your cap, your monthly fees and your transaction fees, not a sales page, and the point is that the answer is different for someone doing four deals a year and someone doing forty.
• Compare the models before you meet a recruiter, in our brokerage comparisons: splits, caps, fees, technology and training, side by side.
• When you are ready to talk about where to hang your licence, here is what joining our team at eXp looks like, including the training and the support you get in the first ninety days.

Where These Figures Come From

Every figure on this page was read from the school’s own live pages on 5 September 2026. Nothing here is taken from another comparison site, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on this page. Where a school does not publish something, this page says so rather than filling the gap.

• 360training / Agent Campus – pre-licensing index, the eleven state pages and 23 package pages beneath it, the exam prep page and the refund policy.
• AceableAgent – the state course index, the Texas, Virginia and Ohio state pages, the guarantee page, the exam prep page and the app page.
• Colibri Real Estate – the homepage pre-licence menu, the Texas and Florida licence pages, the Pass or Don’t Pay page, the refund policy and the FAQ.
• Kaplan Real Estate Education – the course index and sitemap, the Texas, California, Florida and Michigan licensing pages, the Kaplan Commitment page and the terms and conditions.
• The CE Shop – the pre-licensing hub, the pricing pages for all eleven states covered here, the pass rates page, the FAQ and the legal page.

Figures not published by a school are listed as not published above rather than estimated. Course hour counts, exam formats and state fees are set by state regulators, not by these schools, and are covered on the state guides linked above rather than here.

Next step: pick your state first, because it sets the hours and the fees the school is only selling you. Start at our real estate school guides by state, or read the whole path from zero to licensed in our guide to becoming a real estate agent.