How to find influencers for your course launch: 8 tools compared

Online course creators can find influencers to promote a launch using influencer discovery platforms, AI-powered creator search, and social media databases. Tools like Modash, Heepsy, HypeAuditor, Upfluence, and Influencity help discover creators by content topics, keywords, and audience characteristics. Collabstr lets you browse influencers offering paid collaborations, while SocLeads and CRMChat help research public contacts and Telegram communities.

For online courses, searching by the subject being taught is often more useful than looking for “education influencers” in general. A creator who regularly publishes tutorials about a specific skill may be relevant even if their profile doesn't mention education. AI search, content filters, and lookalike discovery make it possible to find these niche creators without checking hundreds of profiles manually.

In this guide, we'll compare eight tools for finding influencers to promote an online course launch, explain how each discovery method works, and help you choose the right one for your search.

8 tools to find influencers for an online course launch

The best place to start depends on what you already know. If you're looking for creators from scratch, use a discovery database to search by content and audience. If you want to work with creators already offering paid collaborations, start with a marketplace. Contact-research tools are more useful once you've identified relevant accounts or communities. The comparison below shows what each option gives you access to and how much the research may cost.

1. Modash: find creators through their published content

Modash searches more than 380 million Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube creator profiles. Its AI search accepts natural-language descriptions, while content filters let you find creators through the topics they publish about.

For a course on a specialized subject, this can uncover relevant creators whose profiles fall under a broader category like technology. You can then narrow the search using audience filters. This helps you find creators who cover the right topic and reach your target market, although you'll still need to check whether their content suits the level of your course.

Once you've found a relevant creator, lookalike search can expand the list. Content lookalikes find accounts publishing similar material, while audience lookalikes identify creators reaching comparable followers. Modash also supports image search and lookalikes based on multiple reference creators.

The Essentials plan starts at approximately €177 per month with annual billing, including 300 opened profiles and 150 public email unlocks per month. These limits apply to detailed access, separately from the initial search results.

2. Heepsy: start with free discovery and expand through lookalikes

Heepsy combines AI search, text matching, lookalike recommendations, and more than 30 filters across supported social networks.

You can search creator bios and published content for relevant keywords or describe the type of account you're looking for. The results can then be narrowed by account size, location, language, and audience characteristics.

When a search produces a promising creator, Heepsy's lookalike feature can find similar accounts. That profile gives the search another starting point when creators use different terminology for the same skill. You can save the results in projects and keep candidates from several searches together.

Its Free plan includes 500 search results but only 10 advanced profiles per month. For a first course launch, that can be enough to check whether Heepsy covers your niche before paying, although detailed research quickly reaches the profile limit.

The Starter plan raises those allowances to 5,000 results and 100 advanced profiles for approximately €62 per month with annual billing. It also includes 300 outreach emails per month. Exporting contact data and using additional audience-quality filters require the higher Plus plan, which starts at approximately €133 per month with annual billing.

3. Collabstr: browse creators who already offer paid collaborations

Collabstr is a marketplace where creators list their services, content examples, and package prices. You can browse by social network, category, location, and follower range, then see what each creator offers.

For an online course launch, check where the content will be published. A sponsored video on the creator's own account can reach their followers, whereas a user-generated content (UGC) package may only include a video for you to publish on your website or social channels. Both are available through creator marketplaces, but only the first necessarily includes distribution through the creator's audience.

Marketplace browsing is free, with a 10% hiring fee on purchases through the Free plan. The Pro plan starts at approximately €222 per month with annual billing and includes one campaign listing per month, up to 15 creator invitations, and 20 audience reports. Campaign listings provide another way to find creators, bringing interested applicants directly to your brief. The 10% hiring fee also applies on Pro.

4. HypeAuditor: narrow searches with detailed audience criteria

HypeAuditor searches more than 226 million profiles across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, and Twitch. Its discovery features include keyword search, lookalikes, and more than 35 creator and audience filters.

Those filters can narrow a broad topic search to creators reaching a particular audience. For example, someone publishing relevant tutorials from one country may have most of their followers in another. HypeAuditor lets you distinguish the creator's location from their audience's location, alongside other available audience characteristics.

AI Scout offers another way to begin: provide a campaign brief in chat, upload a PDF or text file, or use a previous campaign. It generates a shortlist of up to 50 creators with explanations of why each one matches. This suits users who want to review suggested candidates from a detailed brief before investigating individual profiles.

HypeAuditor's full discovery pricing is customized. AI Scout uses credits included with the subscription, with additional credits available for purchase. Refining the brief in chat is free; credits are deducted when the influencer search begins. Detailed-profile access also depends on the plan.

5. SocLeads: collect public contacts from relevant social sources

SocLeads collects publicly available contact information through social keyword and hashtag searches, follower research, Facebook groups, X searches, and other supported sources.

Once you've identified a relevant account, hashtag, or community, SocLeads can gather associated contact records and export them. This reduces the work of collecting publicly listed contact details from individual accounts.

The results still need to be connected to actual creators. A hashtag about a course subject might lead to independent educators, businesses, students, and people who follow the topic without publishing anything themselves. Unlike an influencer database, SocLeads doesn't turn those records into a ready-made list of creator profiles with audience information.

The Free Trial plan includes 100 contacts per month. The Basic plan costs approximately €18 per month with annual billing or €26 with monthly billing, with 2,000 contacts per month. Any personal information collected must be handled according to applicable privacy laws and platform rules.

6. CRMChat: research Telegram communities and potential creators

CRMChat provides Telegram CRM and research tools, including Group Finder and Group Parser.

Group Finder locates public Telegram groups using keywords. Once you've found a community discussing a relevant subject, Group Parser can collect available participant information, including usernames and display names.

You can then investigate whether any of those participants publish through their own public channels. This takes additional manual research, since group membership alone doesn't establish that someone has an audience you can reach through a collaboration.

CRMChat offers a free Starter plan with 50 CRM leads. The Personal plan costs $20 per month with annual billing, includes unlimited CRM leads, and offers a one-week trial. Team costs $34 per seat per month with annual billing. The platform's credit-based group parsing service charges 500 research credits per group, with credit pricing and plan availability requiring confirmation. CRMChat also offers a separate Group Parser Chrome extension.

7. Upfluence: discover creators through AI or existing relationships

Upfluence combines a searchable influencer database with AI-assisted discovery, lookalike recommendations, and creator application workflows.

Its AI assistant, Jaice, can search for creators from a natural-language description of the content and audience you're interested in. This provides a starting point when you know the subject but haven't identified specific accounts.

Upfluence can also search through existing business relationships. With supported integrations, it can identify customers who are content creators. That gives an established course business another potential source of profiles, although a first-time creator without customer data would usually begin with the general database.

Creator application pages provide a third way to find potential partners: interested creators submit their profiles in response to a business's invitation.

Upfluence uses custom, modular pricing with a minimum 12-month commitment. Businesses considering it primarily for discovery should confirm which database, AI, and contact features are included, since the platform also offers wider program-management capabilities.

8. Influencity: refine searches with AI-assisted filters

Influencity provides creator discovery across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube through its Discover interface.

You can search using creator characteristics such as follower count, growth, interactions, and location, then narrow the results through audience, bio, and hashtag filters. The platform also supports lookalike searches and saved profiles.

Its AI Assistant turns a natural-language request into visible search filters. You can inspect the generated criteria, change them, and then run the search. For example, if a request for programming educators produces filters that are too broad, you can refine the subject, platform, and audience requirements directly.

This makes Influencity's AI workflow different from HypeAuditor's AI Scout. AI Scout presents a shortlist selected from a brief; Influencity lets you control the criteria used to generate the search results. The distinction is about how you work with the tool, not a proven difference in the relevance of the creators it finds.

Influencity offers a seven-day trial. Its Discover plan costs €135 per month with annual billing (€1,620 per year) and includes 5,000 influencer discovery results and 30 creator insights tokens per month. The discovery allowance is used as you view new results, while detailed creator analyses draw on a separate token allowance. Trial access has lower limits than the paid plan.

How to test an influencer discovery tool before subscribing

The size of a creator database tells you little about how many relevant matches it will produce for your course. If a platform offers a free plan, trial, or demo, use it to run a real search before committing to a subscription.

Start with the same brief in each tool: your course subject, target audience, preferred social network, and creator size. Then compare three things:

• How many results are actually relevant? Count creators who regularly publish about your subject and match your audience requirements. The total number of profiles returned can be misleading: a tool with fewer results may still give you a better shortlist. For a beginner course, check whether the creators' content speaks to beginners or to experienced practitioners.

• How current is the information? Check when audience demographics and other profile data were last updated. Some platforms charge credits for refreshing an analysis, so a profile you found previously may cost more to investigate again.

• How much will it cost to research enough candidates? Search results, detailed profiles, and contact unlocks can have separate allowances. Estimate how many creators you need to examine and calculate whether the included limits will cover that work.

Prepare your course videos with Kinescope

Finding potential creators is one part of an online course launch. The course website may also need video previews, sample lessons, and other material that visitors can watch before enrolling.

At Kinescope, we provide video hosting and a customizable player for publishing that content. You can upload recordings and embed them into websites or learning platforms, while we handle video processing and delivery.