I've looked closely at 21 providers of professional online continuing education. There's a bit of everything here, from the distance-learning school with courses running for months to the academy with two-day seminars. Every profile shows you which topics a provider covers, how long its courses take and how you learn. The details come from the providers themselves, the ratings from readers like you. Honestly, a raw course count doesn't tell you much. I only list what I've added to Kurslotse here, not a provider's entire programme. Most offer a lot more than what you see, so check out their own website too if something catches your eye.
The providers differ less in price than in format. Four typical starting points and who fits them:
Programmes running several months and ending with a university certificate, alongside your job.
Distance-learning courses over ten to twenty months, with tutoring and the provider's own certificate.
Compact formats from a few hours to three days, mostly on marketing, analytics and AI.
A broad range of topics, open seminars and in-house training tailored to one company.
Each card sums up what a provider stands for. Behind it sits the full profile with features, pricing, our test report and all reviews.
121WATT is a leading provider of digital marketing continuing education with a focus on practical seminars and courses. With over 70 different topics, 121WATT covers all relevant areas of digital marketing and management.
Haufe Akademie offers you comprehensive online continuing education with over 2,500 topics for your professional development. You benefit from flexible learning formats like e-learning, live online seminars, and blended learning.
With over 60 years of experience and more than 71,000 graduates, AKAD University offers over 100 flexible online continuing education programs in areas such as digitalization, business, technology, and health.
The IU Akademie is a leading provider of online continuing education at university level with a focus on flexible and practice-oriented courses.
With over 75 years of experience and more than 900,000 participants, SGD (Studiengemeinschaft Darmstadt) offers over 300 flexible online continuing education courses in areas such as school qualifications, business, technology, computer science, languages, …
OMR Education is a professional continuing education platform focused on online marketing and digital business. It offers flexible, practical e-learning courses, online seminars, and funded continuing education programs developed by over 500 digital experts.
ifmera academy is a continuing education provider based in Berlin that has been offering professional seminars, coaching, and consulting since 1993 — founded as IFM Institut für Managementberatung, and operating under its current name since the 2026 …
INCAS Training und Projekte GmbH & Co. KG has been active as an education partner since 1998 and is based in Krefeld. The company is an authorized DATEV education partner and has been training on DATEV solutions for over 15 years.
WBS TRAINING is a nationwide education provider with over 280 locations and around 30,000 participants per year. The program includes more than 600 certified courses, from IT and AI to nursing and accounting.
The IBB Institut für Berufliche Bildung has been around since 1985, with its headquarters in Buxtehude, Lower Saxony. According to its own information, the provider is accessible via a network of over 1,000 locations.
The TÜV Rheinland Akademie is the continuing education arm of TÜV Rheinland and is based in Berlin. According to its own information, over 15,000 events take place there per year, with approx. 200,000 participants.
The IHK Center for Continuing Education has been the education subsidiary of IHK Heilbronn-Franken since 1993. Over 20 departments range from occupational safety to digitalization to customs and foreign trade.
Kebel Training GmbH is a family business from Dortmund and has been on the market since 1995. Over 1.200 courses run live online, in person, or as in-house training at the client's site.
alfatraining is a training provider from Karlsruhe and has been active in professional continuing education since 2005. Teaching is exclusively live with an instructor, never as pure self-study videos.
The eMBIS Akademie is based in Hallbergmoos near Munich and has been training in online marketing since 2001. Over 200 live online seminars cover SEO, Analytics, Content, Paid Media and artificial intelligence.
Euro-FH is the European Distance Learning University Hamburg and has been around since 2003. It belongs to the Klett Group and is the sister company of ILS.
According to its own information, ILS is Germany's largest distance learning school and is based in Hamburg. Around 80,000 people learn there every year, supervised by over 800 tutors and employees.
The IHK Rhein-Neckar is the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for Mannheim, Heidelberg and the surrounding districts. As a public-law corporation, it is not a private educational company.
The TÜV NORD Akademie has been around for about 40 years and belongs to the TÜV NORD Group. Each year, around 8,500 seminars and webinars take place with about 83,000 participants.
karriere tutor is an education provider for subsidized online continuing education and has been active since 2015. The company is certified according to AZAV, so almost everything runs through the Bildungsgutschein (education voucher).
The Cornelsen Akademie is the continuing education department of Cornelsen Verlag and is aimed at teachers. According to their own information, 50,000 teachers have already been trained here by over 60 trainers.
Topics, formats, duration and funding options come from the providers' own programme pages.
479 individual courses are linked to these providers with price, duration and certificate — comparable in one list instead of spread across 21 websites.
A regular comparison with the provider pages flags price changes, so the course list stays current.
Reviews are written by users themselves, rating usability, recommendation and learning success. Every review is checked before it appears.
Where a link to a provider is part of an affiliate programme, we label it at the place it appears.
Mostly format and duration. 121WATT and OMR Education focus on compact seminars and online courses around marketing, analytics and AI. AKAD University and IU Akademie work with programmes running several months that end in a university certificate, SGD with distance-learning courses over ten to twenty months. Haufe Akademie and ifmera academy cover a broad range of topics and also run their seminars as in-house training.
For the 315 listed courses with a stated price the range runs from €27.99 to €5,630; half of them cost less than €595. Short seminars on a single topic are the cheapest, while programmes running several months with a university certificate form the upper end.
157 of the listed courses record funding via a German education voucher (Bildungsgutschein), and for 259 more some form of funding is possible — through the employer, for example. The course list has a "Funding" filter for exactly this.
The stars come from readers who took a course with that provider. You can rate every provider yourself on its page, separately for usability, recommendation and learning success. A provider without stars simply has no review yet — that is not a verdict on its quality.
The profiles were last revised in September 2026. On top of that we regularly compare the prices of individual courses with the provider pages. What counts in the end is the price the provider quotes at booking.
I am Tim, 26 years old, and I write about online courses and continuing education. My goal is simple: you find the course that really fits you.
Written by Tim Geier. More about the author.
