We Ranked Every Online Yoga Teacher Training by 1.6 Million Student Reviews. Here's What We Learned.

We just finished indexing every online yoga teacher training program in the world that is registered with either Yoga Alliance or the International Association of Yoga Therapists. The total came to 2,389 schools, and together they hold 1,596,325 verified student reviews.

Then we built a filterable database around the data, ranked every school by a Bayesian-weighted student rating, and made it free to use: The Online YTT Database.

This is the first time, as far as we can tell, that anyone has actually compiled the full global picture of online yoga teacher training. Most "best online YTT" listicles compare 10 to 20 schools. A few bigger sites list 40 or 50. We have 2,389. And we can't find anybody who's read all 1.6 million reviews — no human can — so we let the math do the ranking.

Here is what the data says.

The short version

• 2,389 online programs across 50+ countries — 2,319 Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga Schools plus 70 IAYT-accredited yoga therapy programs
• 1,596,325 verified student reviews, average rating 4.85★
• 1,617 schools earn our "Top Rated 2026" badge (4.5★+ with 10+ reviews)
• The highest-rated program in the world is in Indonesia, not the United States or India
• ~53% of all online YTT is based in the United States — but the top 3 Bayesian-ranked schools span Indonesia, Thailand, and the US
• Rishikesh has 61 online programs (yes, really — online), tied for the densest yoga city in the index
• Only ~21% of schools publish their pricing, which is the single biggest information gap in the industry

How we built the database

Yoga Alliance operates a searchable public directory of every Registered Yoga School (RYS) in the world. It's the closest thing the industry has to a canonical list, but the interface is slow, hard to filter, and doesn't let you sort by rating or compare programs side by side. So we wrote a scraper that pulled every online-capable RYS, then enriched each record with the school's biography, trainer roster, training format, languages taught, upcoming cohort dates (where schools had published them), and the first two sample student reviews.

We then pulled the full IAYT accredited programs directory — 70 yoga therapy schools worldwide — and merged them in as a distinct credential tier with a purple "IAYT Accredited" badge.

Every entry links to the school's own Yoga Alliance listing, and every entry has a "Report an issue" link so schools can correct errors or opt out. We're not affiliated with either Yoga Alliance or IAYT. We don't take sponsored placements, we don't sell ranking, and we don't insert affiliate-commission schools into the top results. Schools appear in our ranking based entirely on the Bayesian-weighted rating calculation, which we'll walk through below.

The top 10 online yoga teacher trainings in the world

Here is the current leaderboard, ranked by Bayesian-weighted student rating. Bayesian weighting just means we penalize schools with very small review counts so a school with three perfect reviews can't leapfrog a school with three hundred near-perfect reviews. A 5.0 from 3 students is noise. A 4.97 from 352 students is a signal.

A few things stand out immediately. The #1 Bayesian-ranked online yoga teacher training in the world is not in India or the United States — it's in Jakarta, Indonesia, at a small studio called LearnYoga@GG that has quietly accumulated 780 near-perfect reviews over a decade. #2 is in Bangkok. #4 is in Delhi. Five of the top ten are American, but the two at the very top are Southeast Asian. The "Rishikesh is the yoga capital of the world" story, as true as it may be for destination retreats, doesn't hold up for online training.

You can see the full list of all 1,617 Top Rated 2026 schools, ranked, in the database.

Where the schools actually are

The geographic distribution of online yoga teacher training is surprisingly concentrated. Here are the top ten countries:

More than half of every Yoga Alliance-registered online yoga teacher training in the world is run by a school based in the United States. This is partly because Yoga Alliance is an American organization and has always had deeper US penetration than in Europe or Asia, where regional credentialing bodies like the British Wheel of Yoga, Yoga Australia, and Sivananda-aligned lineages run parallel systems. Our database is missing those non-Yoga-Alliance programs for now, and we're working to add them via an open submission form.

Within specific destinations, the density is striking. Rishikesh, the self-described yoga capital of the world, hosts 61 separate schools offering online training — more than the entire country of Germany. Bali has 30. Costa Rica has 12. Among US states, California alone has 230 schools — more than any single country outside the US.

What the ratings actually look like

The average rating across all schools with reviews is 4.85★. That's absurdly high — and it's the single data point we get asked about most by new users of the database. Is it real?

Mostly, yes, with one caveat. Yoga Alliance's review system is only available to students who have actually completed training with a given school. It's not an open-to-the-public review system like Yelp or Google Maps, where anyone can leave a one-star rating for any reason. So the people leaving reviews have self-selected into the experience and committed hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to it. You would expect that population to be far more positive on average than a random yoga class reviewer. And they are.

But the 4.85 average hides real variation. Look at the review count distribution across our 2,319 Yoga Alliance schools:

Nine percent of listed schools have never received a single review from a student. Another 20% have fewer than ten. This is the long tail — small schools, new schools, schools in languages other than English, schools whose students simply haven't used the Yoga Alliance review system. We include them in the database anyway, because excluding them would mean pretending they don't exist, but they sort below the reviewed schools in our default ranking. If you want to avoid the tail entirely, the Top Rated 2026 filter restricts the view to the 1,617 schools with at least 10 reviews averaging 4.5 stars or higher.

The IAYT layer: yoga therapy is a different world

We separate the 70 IAYT-accredited yoga therapy programs into their own tier because they aren't directly comparable to general teacher training. IAYT accreditation is a significantly more rigorous credential than Yoga Alliance registration. Where a Yoga Alliance RYS 200 requires 200 contact hours of teacher training, IAYT requires an 800-hour yoga therapy certification program with clinical components, client case studies, anatomy and physiology coursework at a paramedical depth, and supervised practicums with real clients presenting real health conditions. C-IAYT graduates work alongside healthcare practitioners. They are the clinical tier of the yoga world.

The distribution is stark: 45 of the 70 IAYT-accredited programs are in the United States. 8 are in Canada. Only 3 are in India — which is interesting given that India is the source lineage for most yoga therapy tradition. The credentialing gap reflects the geographic distribution of the healthcare systems that hire yoga therapists, not the depth of the practice. If you're looking to become a clinical yoga therapist, the IAYT tier is the one to study.

The biggest missing information: pricing

Here is the single biggest gap in our database, and it's a gap that the entire online yoga teacher training industry shares: most schools do not publish their prices publicly. You have to email them, wait for a response, schedule a call, and often sit through a sales pitch before anyone tells you what a 200-hour program costs. We have verified pricing for only about 21% of the database — and that's after weeks of work.

The prices we do have span an enormous range. At the entry end, legitimate self-paced RYS 200-hour online programs start around $200 — yes, two hundred dollars, for a real Yoga Alliance-registered credential. At the top end, IAYT-accredited clinical yoga therapy programs routinely run $10,000 to $12,000+, with the flagship trauma-sensitive yoga certifications developed inside US academic medical centers sitting at the ceiling. That's a 60x spread between two programs that both grant legitimate credentials the yoga industry recognizes. Among the schools we have verified pricing for, the distribution looks like this:

Two identical Yoga Alliance RYS 200 credentials — same 200 hours, same Yoga Alliance registration, same final certificate — can be priced 15x apart depending on the school's business model. The cheap end is usually a self-paced video library with optional live check-ins. The expensive end is usually a live cohort with a small student-to-teacher ratio, in-person intensives, mentorship, and active career placement. Both are legitimate. Neither is objectively better. But if you don't know the range exists, you can easily overpay by thousands of dollars for a credential that a cheaper program delivers just as well.

We're working on a full pricing pass for the database in our next refresh. Until then, when you click through to a school and "Contact for pricing" is all you see, you now know roughly where that school is likely to sit.

How we rank schools (the methodology)

We use a Bayesian-weighted rating score, which is the same approach IMDB uses for its Top 250 movies and the same approach Goodreads uses for best-book lists. The formula penalizes schools with small review counts so that a handful of glowing reviews from friends can't push a school to the top. The weighting is transparent, and we don't adjust it by hand.

On top of the score, we apply three hard filters to determine whether a school earns our "Top Rated 2026" badge:

• At least 4.5 stars average
• At least 10 reviews (the point where review sample size starts to be statistically meaningful)
• Currently listed on Yoga Alliance (we drop schools that have deregistered)

1,617 schools earn the badge. Everything else is ranked below the badge tier, but still fully searchable and filterable. We don't hide schools. We don't remove schools. If a school wants to correct information about itself or be delisted entirely, we honor the request within 48 hours — the database includes a "Report an issue" link on every school profile.

What we didn't include (and why)

Three deliberate exclusions are worth naming, because they shape what the database does and doesn't tell you.

No in-person-only programs. Everything in the database offers at least some online delivery. We did this on purpose: if we included every RYS, the database would be 7,000+ schools instead of 2,389, and the filters would be unusable. There are other directories for in-person-only training.

No programs run by schools that have deregistered from Yoga Alliance. YA membership is voluntary, and some well-respected schools (Sivananda, Kripalu's Healing Arts Council, and post-KRI Kundalini programs) have stepped away from Yoga Alliance over governance disputes. These schools run legitimate and rigorous training, but they're not in this iteration of the database because the data source is Yoga Alliance itself. We're building a submission form to add them individually.

No personal judgment on lineage or philosophy. We rank by student rating, not by whether a program is "authentically traditional" or "sufficiently secular" or "appropriately clinical." Those are conversations worth having, but they are not this database. If you want a specific lineage, our Lineage / Style filter narrows the view to schools in the Vinyasa, Ashtanga, Yin, Kundalini, or Hatha traditions based on how they describe themselves in their own bios.

Who this is for

If you are about to spend $2,000 to $4,000 on a 200-hour yoga teacher training — which is what a typical online RYS 200 costs — and you have narrowed your choices to three or four schools, the database is here for you. You can compare them side by side. You can see the real student review counts. You can see whether they accept the GI Bill (144 schools do) or offer scholarships (1,034 schools do) or run work-exchange programs (236 schools do). You can filter by your home country, your preferred language, your preferred style, and your preferred format. And you can read our short editorial take on each school's credential mix before you click through to their own site.

If you're not sure where to start yet, we built a Match Me quiz that asks seven questions about your goals, budget, and timing, then returns three schools matched to your answers with a short reason for each match.

None of this costs anything. We don't have a paid tier. We don't have affiliate links to the schools (yet), we don't take sponsored placements, and we don't run ads against the database. When we do add a revenue model later this year, it will take the form of paid verification for schools that want a "claimed profile" with photos and expanded descriptions — not manipulation of rankings. The data is the product, and rigging the data would destroy the product.

What's next

This is version one of the database. The next refresh, planned for mid-year, will:

• Add the 50+ IAYT programs we missed (some accredited under transitional status)
• Add Sivananda, Kripalu's post-Yoga Alliance offerings, and post-KRI Kundalini programs via submission
• Close the pricing gap with verified tuition data from at least 1,000 more schools
• Add full student review text for schools with published reviews, not just the first two samples
• Add a discount code tracker for schools that publish them

If you run a school and you'd like to claim your profile, correct your information, or submit an IAYT / BWY / lineage-based program that isn't listed yet, there's a submission form for that. If you're a student trying to find the right training, the database is here and the Match Me quiz takes ninety seconds.

We will keep updating this post as the numbers change. If you want to know when the next refresh ships, you can follow Online Yoga Planet on Instagram or subscribe to the newsletter from any page on the site.

Published April 2026 · Online Yoga Planet · Data sourced from the public Yoga Alliance and IAYT directories. Not affiliated with either organization.