AceableAgent vs Colibri 2026: Coverage, Price Per Required Hour and Refund Terms

Every comparison of two online real estate schools that I have read opens with price. That is the wrong opening, and at E-Commerce Paradise I would rather be useful than conventional. The first question in a state regulated category is not which school is cheaper. It is which school can legally sell you a course where you live. AceableAgent sells pre-licensing in 17 states. Colibri lists pre-licensing across 40 states plus the District of Columbia. For roughly two thirds of American readers this comparison is over in the first section.

For the other third, the ones living in a state where both compete, the interesting fight starts. I priced both this session, entry tier against entry tier, on the same required hours, in five states where they overlap. I also read the guarantees, which is where the real difference lives, and where Colibri has a caveat that quietly voids its best feature in two of those five states.

One housekeeping note that saves a lot of confusion. Real Estate Express is not a separate competitor any more. Visit realestateexpress.com and you land on colibrirealestate.com. Same company, one brand. If you find an old comparison ranking them as two different schools, it is out of date.

State coverage: the only comparison that matters first

AceableAgent’s course listing index names 16 states with starting prices and the company runs a seventeenth course page for Utah. Those states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington.

Colibri’s pre-licensing navigation lists 40 states plus the District of Columbia. I counted that menu myself this session, because the line “Colibri covers all 50 states” is repeated all over this category, it was in my own working notes, and for pre-licensing it is simply not true. Absent from the Colibri pre-licensing menu are Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota and West Virginia.

The confusion has an obvious source, and it is worth understanding rather than just correcting. Colibri’s exam prep menu genuinely does cover all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Exam prep and pre-licensing are different products, and only one of them satisfies your state’s required education hours, so a nationwide exam prep list is not evidence that the coursework is available where you live.

The coverage advantage still runs heavily Colibri’s way. If you are in Alabama, Nevada, Missouri, New Jersey, Wisconsin or any of the other states AceableAgent skips and Colibri serves, this comparison resolves itself immediately and Colibri is the one that can actually sell you the hours.

But if you live in one of those ten gaps, neither school on this page can help you, and that is worth knowing before you spend an hour comparing them. The CE Shop lists pre-licensing in 49 states plus the District of Columbia, with only Wyoming absent, which means it covers all ten of the states Colibri does not.

There is one wrinkle on the Colibri side worth knowing before you assume total coverage means uniform product. In Ohio, Colibri does not deliver its own course. Its Ohio page states that Colibri has partnered with Hondros College to offer state approved Ohio pre-licensing, and it publishes no package price on that page. You are buying a Hondros product through a Colibri front door. That is not a criticism, and given Ohio’s rules it is arguably the sensible arrangement, but you should know what you are buying.

Price in the states where both compete

Below is the entry tier from each school, priced this session, with the required hours from the schools’ own state pages and the cost per required hour worked out. AceableAgent’s entry tier is called Basic. Colibri’s entry tier is called The Basics, described on its own pages as the required pre-license coursework without additional exam prep.

Colibri was running a promotional code at the time I checked, so I have given both the list price and the promotional price and labelled which is which. List price is the durable number. Promotional pricing comes and goes and I am not going to build a recommendation on a coupon.

At list price, AceableAgent wins the entry tier in all five states where I could price both. The margin ranges from 11 percent in Texas to 60 percent in Virginia. When Colibri’s promotional code is applied, the ordering flips in all five, Texas included, where the promotional price of $299 sits $150 below the AceableAgent list of $449.

That flip is the honest complication in this comparison, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If a discount code is live when you buy, Colibri is frequently cheaper. If it is not, AceableAgent is cheaper at the entry tier. Neither of those is a permanent state of the world and you should check both on the day you are buying rather than trusting a table, including mine.

The worked calculation: Virginia at both schools

Take Virginia, where the gap is widest, and run it properly.

Virginia requires a 60 hour Principles of Real Estate course. The Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation states that salespersons must complete that 60 hour course and pass the state and national portions of the salesperson examination. So both schools are selling the identical regulatory obligation.

AceableAgent Basic is $149. Divide by 60 and you get $2.48 per required hour. Colibri The Basics lists at $239. Divide by 60 and you get $3.98 per required hour. The difference is $1.50 per required hour, or $90 across the whole course, for coursework that has to satisfy the same board approval either way.

Now go up the ladder and the picture inverts. AceableAgent Premium in Virginia lists at $349. Colibri’s top tier, Ultimate Learning, lists at $519 in Virginia. AceableAgent is still cheaper. But in Texas, AceableAgent Premium lists at $1,119 while Colibri Ultimate Learning lists at $748.34, and Colibri is meaningfully cheaper at the top of the range. Whichever school you prefer, the answer changes by tier and by state, which is exactly why single number comparisons are useless here.

What you actually get in each package

The two schools structure their ladders differently, which is the main reason naive price comparisons go wrong. AceableAgent runs three tiers. Colibri runs four in most states.

The meaningful format difference is live instruction. Colibri’s top tier includes live instructor sessions and a series of six focused one hour Exam Cram webinars. AceableAgent’s Premium tier includes live webinars and one on one tutoring. Both are moving toward the same place, but Colibri also offers a printed textbook option at the third tier, which matters more than people expect for anyone who does not retain material off a screen.

The other real difference is scale of operation. Colibri markets 1.5 million alumni and states it is trusted by over 1.5 million real estate students nationwide. AceableAgent markets over 800,000 satisfied students. Neither number tells you anything about whether you will pass, but they do tell you both are established rather than experimental.

Pass guarantees and refund terms, where the real difference is

This is the section that should move your decision, and it is the one comparison articles handle worst.

Colibri markets a guarantee it calls Pass or Don’t Pay. The wording on its site is that if you don’t pass on your first attempt, they will reimburse the cost of your pre-licensing package. That is a strong offer. It also carries a restriction stated plainly on the same page: due to state law, the guarantee is not available in Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and Tennessee.

Read that against my price table. Florida and Michigan are two of the five states where I priced both schools. In both of those states, the feature that makes Colibri compelling does not apply. If Pass or Don’t Pay is the reason you were leaning toward Colibri and you live in Florida, Michigan, New Jersey or Tennessee, you are not getting the thing you were choosing for.

There is a second condition worth reading. On the Texas page the guarantee is described as reimbursing the original cost of either your pre-licensing package or the exclusive exam prep, if a student does not pass the Texas real estate license exam within 30 days of completing the exam prep course. That is a time window and it is tied to the exam prep course, and the same page indicates the guarantee applies to select packages rather than all of them.

AceableAgent’s structure is different. Every tier carries a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, described on the state pages as a 30 day course trial with your money back. The Deluxe and Premium tiers additionally carry the line “Pass the test or your money back!” The entry level Basic tier does not carry that pass line in the package grid, so the cheapest option is also the one without the pass promise.

My honest read is that both guarantees are narrower than the marketing implies, which is normal in this category and not a reason to distrust either company. It is a reason to read the terms yourself before you let a guarantee decide a purchase.

Ohio, where neither answer is clean

Ohio deserves its own section because it breaks the comparison.

Ohio requires 100 hours of qualifying education, made up of 40 hours of Real Estate Principles and Practices, 40 hours of Ohio Real Estate Law, 10 hours of Real Estate Appraisal and 10 hours of Real Estate Finance, and Ohio Revised Code section 4735.09 requires that education be completed at an institution of higher education. That phrase is defined more loosely than it sounds. Section 4735.01(D) extends it to state institutions, nonprofit institutions holding a certificate of authorization, exempt private institutions, and career colleges registered with the state board of career colleges and schools that are approved to offer degree or certificate programs. No degree is required of the student and none has to be awarded by the provider. What the rule does is narrow delivery to registered institutions, which is why AceableAgent’s Ohio page carries the badge “Approved by OH SBCCS” and the line “SBCCS-Approved Registration #2359” rather than a plain provider approval, and it is why Ohio pricing looks nothing like the rest of the country.

AceableAgent sells Ohio pre-licensing at $949 for the Basic tier, which is $9.49 per required hour, the most expensive figure anywhere on my tables. Colibri does not sell an Ohio course of its own and hands Ohio students to Hondros College with no package price published on that page. A third provider, The CE Shop, prices Ohio salesperson pre-licensing from $1,099 to $1,799 for the same 100 hours.

The Colibri Ohio page does carry one number worth reporting precisely because of how carefully it is qualified. It states that 94 percent of Hondros students who follow the recommended study plan pass the Ohio real estate licensing exam on their first attempt, and the footnote defines that as Hondros College students who followed the recommended study plan and sat for the Ohio exam between January and September 2025. That is a conditional figure on a self selected group, which the footnote says openly, and it is a far more transparent claim than most schools make.

If you are in Ohio, get quotes from all three and read the Ohio Division of Real Estate and Professional Licensing requirements yourself before you commit. This is the one state where the cheapest headline is probably not the right decision.

The one place a regulator scores both schools

Texas publishes something almost no other state does. The Texas Real Estate Commission reports first time sales agent exam pass rates broken out by education provider, with a machine readable data file behind the page, covering exams taken between 12/1/2023 and 11/30/2025. That is regulator data rather than school marketing, and it is the strongest evidence anywhere in this comparison.

Across the whole field, 29,980 Texas sales agent exams were taken in that window and 16,824 were passed, a first time rate of 56.12 percent. TREC separately publishes a minimum performance rate benchmark of 44.94 percent, which is a compliance floor rather than an average, and the distinction between those two numbers matters more than it looks.

AceableAgent leads Colibri by about nine percentage points on this measure, on a Texas sample roughly sixteen times larger. Colibri’s 534 exams clear TREC’s reporting threshold but are a thin base to reason from, while AceableAgent’s 8,516 is the second largest sample in the entire dataset, behind only Champions School of Real Estate.

Two hard limits on how far this travels. It is Texas only. TREC publishes it because Texas requires TREC to publish it, and there is no equivalent dataset for the other sixteen states AceableAgent operates in, so nothing here tells you how either school performs in Virginia or Arizona.

And it does not retire the criticism I make of AceableAgent elsewhere in this cluster. The company still publishes no pass rate of its own anywhere on its site, and the 74 percent figure it does market is a score on a readiness assessment administered by its own exam prep brand rather than an exam outcome. The honest summary is that the Texas regulator’s data supports AceableAgent considerably better than AceableAgent’s own marketing does.

Which one I would actually pick

If your state is not in AceableAgent’s seventeen, Colibri, because availability beats every other criterion.

If you are in California, Virginia, Texas or Florida, want a self paced mobile first course, and no promotional code is live, AceableAgent at the entry tier is the better value on list price and the per hour arithmetic supports it. In Texas the regulator’s own pass rate data supports it as well.

If you want live instructor sessions, a printed textbook, or a pass reimbursement guarantee and you do not live in Florida, Michigan, New Jersey or Tennessee, Colibri’s upper tiers are the stronger product and in Texas they are cheaper than AceableAgent’s top tier by a wide margin.

If you are in Ohio, treat both as starting points rather than answers, and read my full pricing breakdown before you spend anything.

Running the business behind the licence

Whichever school you pick, the course is the cheap part of building an income. The expensive part is client acquisition, and the agents who solve it fastest are the ones who already think like operators.

If you are building something commercial alongside the licence, market selection comes first. My guide to profitable high ticket niches lays out the screen I actually use.

After that, the economics. Read how the high ticket model works so the margins make sense before any money moves.

Supply is the bottleneck for most people. My complete supplier sourcing guide is the step by step version.

And commission income normally wants a proper entity behind it, which my walkthrough of business formation covers without the legalese.

My own stack is short. Storefronts run on Shopify. Entity filings and registered agent service go through Bizee.

Liability cover comes from Hiscox, which becomes materially more relevant the moment you hold a professional licence. Bookkeeping runs on QuickBooks, which is how course fees and commission income stay separable at tax time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AceableAgent or Colibri cheaper?

At list price on the entry tier, AceableAgent was cheaper in all five overlapping states I priced, from an 11 percent gap in Texas to 60 percent in Virginia. When Colibri’s promotional code was applied, Colibri became cheaper in all five, Texas included. Check both on the day you buy, because promotional pricing changes and list price does not.

Which one covers more states?

Colibri, by a clear margin, though not by as much as it usually gets credited with. Its pre-licensing navigation lists 40 states plus the District of Columbia, not all 50, and Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota and West Virginia are absent. Colibri’s exam prep menu does cover all 50 plus DC, which is almost certainly where the “all 50 states” claim originates. AceableAgent covers 17. In Ohio, Colibri delivers through a partnership with Hondros College rather than its own course.

Is Real Estate Express the same as Colibri?

Yes. realestateexpress.com now redirects to colibrirealestate.com. They are one company under the Colibri brand, so any comparison treating them as two separate schools is out of date.

Does Colibri’s Pass or Don’t Pay guarantee apply everywhere?

No. Colibri’s own site states that due to state law the guarantee is not available in Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and Tennessee. On the Texas page it is further conditioned on not passing within 30 days of completing the exam prep course and applies to select packages. Read the current terms before treating it as a safety net.

Which school is better for exam prep?

Colibri builds exam prep into its second tier and up, with simulated exams, flashcards and a Readiness Tracker, plus live instructor sessions and Exam Cram webinars at the top. AceableAgent bundles exam prep into Deluxe and Premium through PrepAgent, which covers all 50 states and the national exam portion. Both are credible; the choice is really live sessions against self paced drilling.

Do either of them guarantee I will get licensed?

No, and neither claims to. Course completion is one requirement among several, which typically also include a passing exam score, an application, fingerprinting, a background check and in many states a sponsoring broker. Confirm the full requirement list with your own state real estate commission, because it changes and it is the only version that binds.

Bottom Line

Coverage decides this comparison for most readers. Colibri sells pre-licensing in 40 states plus the District of Columbia, not the 50 it is usually credited with, and AceableAgent sells in seventeen. If you are outside those seventeen and inside Colibri’s 40, there is no decision to make.

And in Texas specifically, an outside authority has scored both schools. TREC’s provider data puts AceableAgent at a 65.81 percent first time sales agent pass rate against Colibri’s 56.74 percent over the same window, on a far larger sample. That is a Texas result and it does not generalise to the other sixteen states, but it is the only regulator verified head to head either school has.

Inside them, AceableAgent’s entry tier is cheaper at list price in every state I could price, and the per hour arithmetic backs that up rather than just the sticker. Colibri answers with four tiers instead of three, a printed textbook option, live instructor sessions and a pass reimbursement guarantee that is genuinely strong wherever state law lets it operate, which is not Florida, Michigan, New Jersey or Tennessee. In Texas, Colibri’s top tier undercuts AceableAgent’s top tier substantially.

Pick on availability first, then on format, then on price, and read the guarantee terms before you let a guarantee sway you. And whichever you choose, verify your current hour requirement, fee schedule and approved provider list with your own state real estate commission. Finishing a course is not the same as holding a licence, and no school controls the part that comes after.

If the business you are building alongside the licence is an online store rather than a brokerage, my team runs a complete done for you high ticket dropshipping business build and launch service covering the storefront, supplier relationships and launch systems.

Related Articles

AceableAgent Review: The 17 State Gate and What You Actually Get

AceableAgent Pricing: Every State and the Real Cost of Licensure

AceableAgent vs The CE Shop: Published Pass Rates Compared

Best Online Drivers Ed: Comparing State Approved Courses

Is Online Drivers Ed Legit? How to Check State Approval

Trevor Fenner

Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.

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