Teachable Review 2023 — Is It Worth Your Time & Money?

Teachable is one of the leading platforms for online courses and coaching. The platform is packed with some great customization features where you can create online courses, distribute completion certificates, and also handle payments and taxes.  

However, the platform lacks some important features which we will discuss further in this review. 

Overall Ratings (Out of 5)

• Features – 4.3★
• Pricing – 4.8★
• Customer Support – 4.6★
• User Interface – 4.5★

In this article, I will cover everything you need to know about Teachable. We will also discuss its price, customization options, and other key features. Keep on reading to find out whether teachable offers good value for money or if you should look elsewhere. 

Let’s begin!

Teachable: What’s Good About It?

👍 Course Compliance Features – The platform provides extraordinary course compliance features to ensure the students complete every part of the given course. You can enforce videos and lectures to deliver the information in the best possible manner. Furthermore, you can make students take quizzes in the end of the course to assess their performance and also ensure that they have taken the entire course. 

👍 Unlimited Courses – Apart from the free plan, you can create and host any amount of courses. This is where Teachable outperforms Kajabi where there is a restriction on the number of courses you can host. 

👍 CSS/HTML Support – The platform supports CSS and HTML meaning you can insert any customized CSS or HTML into your course to give it a professional look. So if you have programming skills, you can create different headers using HTML and JAVA.

👍 Video Hosting – You can host unlimited videos without third-party integration as teachable provides you with unlimited bandwidth for video hosting. 

👍 Payment Options – Teachable is a good option to sell courses and subscription-based services. It has its own payment gateway that students can use to make payments for the courses. You can also add your stripe or PayPal account for faster payments at a smaller transaction fee. 

👍 Student Reports – With Teachable, you can access multiple data points and reports regarding any student. This is a good way to find out the overall performance as well as the engagement level of the students. The platform highlights the analytics reports through various heatmaps, graphs, and tables. 

👍 Subtitles & Notes – Teachable offers a multi-function course player where students can take notes while studying. This helps students to learn faster. Also, the built-in subtitles help them understand the material better. 

And, What We Don’t Like…

👎 No Community Features – Unlike many other course-hosting platforms, teachable doesn’t have in-built community features. However, you can integrate your Teachable to Circle app and create communities. 

👎 Difficult to Customize – One of the biggest drawbacks of Teachable is the lack of customization options. There are no drag-drop tools meaning you solely rely on your programming skills to design the course. If you are on a Professional plan, you can use power editor and custom CSS. 

👎 Refunds – Teachable is not responsible for your refunds. You need to install a third-party refund management application to manage the refunding process. 

👎 High Transaction Fee – Apart from the Pro and Business plan, teachable charges a heavy transaction fee, varying between 1% to 10%. Pro and Business plans have zero transaction fees, but basic and free accounts charge you up to 10% of transaction charges. 

Teachable: The Overview (2023)

FEATURE	DESCRIPTION
Starting Price	$0, $29, $99, and $245 per month
Number of Courses you can create	Unlimited courses (except free plan)
Mobile Application	iOS only
Transaction Charges	0-10%
Third-party Integrations	Over 10 third-party apps
Affiliate Marketing	✔
Course Player Customization	✖ (Requires custom CSS)
In-Built Survey	✖
SCORM Files	✖

Teachable first came into existence as Fedora – An online platform to sell educational courses. The founder Ankur Nagpal who is also the chief designer of the platform wasn’t happy about the program he was using to host his own courses. 

Soon he came up with an idea of an LMS website with more customization and payment facilities. Soon enough, the founders assembled a team of 15 people including programmers, accounting experts, and on. As of  2020, the platform has more than 200k registered educators selling courses on marketing, coding, handcrafts, cooking, and much more. 

The platform provides you with a course creator tool where you can prepare your courses, training programs, and seminars, for your students. Furthermore, if you are planning to sell subscriptions, there is an option for that too. Teachable also provides multiple payment options including a native payment gateway, Stripe, and PayPal.

Let’s discuss the features in detail.  

The User Interface

Teachable has a user-friendly interface, however, sometimes the response time is low. Nearly all the features can directly be accessed from the dashboard with a single click. We would love to see a search bar to find the required feature but the interface is smooth and fairly easy to navigate. 

You can personalize your website using the logo, background images, and different color themes. Some advanced tools are missing but teachable has done enough so that even beginners will be able to create a stunning and professional-looking page to sell their courses. 

If you are committed to long-term investment, you can get one of the higher plans and get your website a custom domain name to have a unique identity. Teachable also allows you to create blogs within the website which is a good idea to advertise your courses on the internet. 

Getting started with teachable just takes a few steps. 

• Go to the Teachable Homepage.
  
• Click on Start for free on the right of the page.
  
• Complete the sign-up process by giving your name, email, and password.
  
• You will be asked a few questions regarding your work experience, intent, and business ideas. Click on Next after you have provided all the answers. 

On the next screen, you will see your page, with several customization options such as Rename, customize domain, account upgradation, landing page creator, course creator, and payments. 

How Does Teachable Work?

To start with Teachable, you must set up an account on it first. Creating an account on Teachable is as easy as you’re creating a social media account. All you need to do is fill up your basic information and get started with the free plan immediately. After creating an account, you can start using its course creation tools to create your course from scratch. You will need to set up a school for your course first.

With every Teachable plan, you can create only one school, create as many courses as you want, and take as many students as you can to your school; there is no restriction. They also guide you through the course creation process, so you won’t have any issues creating your first course. You can also connect your school’s website to a custom domain, but you will need a paid Teachable plan for that. After creating your course, you can use its marketing & selling features to promote and sell your course.

Student’s Corner

Here are the features you will get as a student on Teachable.

Completion Certificates

Teachable allows you to award the completion certificates to the student who has completed the entire course. Certificates are the best proofs to market your skills during a job hunt and nearly all e-learning websites offer some sort of certification program these days. 

However, you will have to purchase a professional plan in order to use this feature. There are a few pre-designed certificate templates available to choose from, but If you are well-versed in coding, you can design your own templates using CSS, or HTML. 

Course Features: Compliance & Assessment 

In my opinion, no other hosting platform comes close when it comes to compliance characteristics. These features allow you to ensure that your material is being studied by the students and they are engaging properly with the content. 

At the end of the lesson/course, you can put an exam to make sure that students have studied and paid attention to your content. You can set the number of attempts a student can take, minimum passing marks, etc to create a professional test for your students. These exams encourage students to go through your course seriously and spend more time on it. 

Engaging With Students

For any e-learning website, it’s important to stay in touch with the students regularly. Such engagement highlights your brand in a good light and increases your value. 

Although Teachable doesn’t come with in-built community features where you can connect to the students directly, you can download a third-party application such as Circle which is one of the leading community-creating platforms these days for learning websites, gaming platforms, etc. 

Teachable has good third-party community integration but it’s not the same as having the native community options as we see in other platforms such as THinkific. 

Checkout, Discounts, and Course Sales

With teachable, you can sell your courses for free, one-time payments, or recurring payments. Although the platform doesn’t support membership features, through the course bundling feature, you can easily set up monthly subscriptions for students. 

Teachable supports multiple payment processors and gateways including Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, and PayPal. If you want your students to pay through Stripe or PayPal, you will need to purchase the professional plan. 

Also, you can offer numerous discounts and coupons to students during the festive seasons. You can set the coupon rules for each product, and associate them with a particular plan, product type, etc. You can directly place the Buy links with the coupons applied already. This will increase the chances of the sale. 

Reports & Analysis

With professional or higher plans, you get access to various student reports. Here you can monitor all the students’ activities, their overall engagement with the courses, and much more. You can also use filters to analyze a particular group of students. 

You can also track your course’s performance in terms of completion rate. This data helps you make necessary improvements to create more engaging and beneficial study content for your students. 

Moreover, you can analyze students’ data where can check several reports related to quiz scores, video heatmaps, individual progress of each student, and much more. 

Who Should Use Teachable?

Teachable is an amazing platform for anyone who wants to share their knowledge with the world through coaching and courses. Over 100K entrepreneurs, small business owners, and creators have sold more than $1 billion in coaching and courses with Teachable. It is also a great platform for companies to create training videos & courses to train their employees. Here are some of the best use cases of Teachable:

• Online entrepreneurs can get to their clients worldwide through their Teachable courses.
• Individuals who don’t have a lot of knowledge of technical stuff to create a course can easily create their course on Teachable.
• Large companies are using Teachable to give basic or skill training to their employees.
• Educational institutes can create a fully functional school website on Teachable.

Anyone can create a course with Teachable, and the best part is that you can get started for free. 

Teachable Pricing Details

Teachable offers 3 plans, apart from the free one – Basic, Professional, and Business. 

Basic

Basic plan comes at $39/month and Gives you all the basic features required to create a website and sell your courses online. Here are some key features included in the Basic plan:

• 5% transaction fee
• Create unlimited courses
• Teachable Payments
• Unlimited Video hosting
• Student Management and reports
• Third-party integrations
• No limit on the number of students
• VAT calculations (EU region)
• Custom domain name
• Website builder tools
• Quiz and comments.

Professional 

A Professional plan will cost you $119/month. Apart from all the features of the Basic plan, it offers

• 0% transaction fee
• Independent website without Teachable brand information
• 5-user license
• Affiliate program, payments, etc
• Priority customer support
• Group training calls
• Native certificates
• Quizzes with a grading system
• Advanced reports and analysis
• Course compliance features

Business

The Business plan offers you all the features of the Teachable platform. You will have to pay $299/month to get this plan. Apart from the features of Basic and Professional plans, it offers

• 0% transaction fee
• Bulk student reports and management
• Advanced customization options
• 20 user license
• Custom Roles. 

If you go for the annual subscription, the plans will cost you $29, $99, and $249 respectively. 

Features	Basic$29/month	Professional$99/month	Business$249/month
Transaction Fee	5%	Nil	Nil
Author Accounts	Single	5	20
Customization	Basic	Basic	Advanced
Affiliate Program	✖	✔	✔
Advanced Reports	✖	✔	✔
VAT Estimation	✔	✔	✔
Unlimited Courses	✔	✔	✔
Custom Domain	✔	✔	✔
Video Hosting	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Compliance	✖	✔	✔
Group Calls	✖	✔	✔
Certificates	✖	✔	✔
Graded Quiz	✖	✔	✔
Integrations	✔	✔	✔

There is also a free Teachable plan with some really basic features. 

• Up to 10 lecture videos
• Order bumps
• Basic quiz
• 1 course at a time
• Email support only
• CSS/HTML snippets
• 1 User license
• Basic templates

Teachable Alternatives

Here are some best Teachable alternative lists here.

Thinkific

If there is a platform that can come close to teachable in terms of features, it’s Thinkific. Unlike Teachable, it has a built-in community feature so you don’t have to rely on third-party applications for that. 

Also, it offers more third-party integration (nearly 90) than teachable, which means you get more customization fasciitis and tools to increase the overall functionality of your e-school. 

Apart from this, there are some unique features such as live sessions with students, free course previews, Brillium integration for exams, assignments, and much more. Thinkific has a lifetime free plan with basic course features and a website builder. 

• Basic – $49/month ($39 for yearly subscribers)
• Pro – $99/month ($79 for yearly subscribers)
• Premier – $499/month ($399 for yearly membership)

Podia

Podia is more like a platform to sell digital goods rather than a dedicated course-hosting platform. It comes with all the necessary website-building tools where you can create a professional-looking site in less than 15 minutes. 

You can sell online courses, digital notes, e-books, webinars, audio/video files, spreadsheets, and much more. 

There are some great features including built-in community support, a drag-and-drop website builder tool, multimedia conversations, and round-the-clock 365 days customer support. 

• Free – No charge
• Mover – $39/month ($33 if billed annually)
• Shaker – $89/month ($75 in billed annually)
• Earthquaker – $199/month ($166 if billed annually)

Kajabi

Kajabi can be a great alternative to Teachable if you are willing to make a long-term commitment to the course-hosting business. With a starting plan of a whopping $149/month, it’s one of the most expensive LMS platforms in the market. 

Kajabi is more suitable for businesses and training institutions whose users are professionals rather than just students or amateurs. There is no certification and course compliance facility at Kajabi, but there are some advanced marketing features such as funnels, exclusive membership programs, a built-in community, product blueprints, and so on. You also get excellent designing tools to build your website which is more refined than Teachable. 

• Basic – $149/month ($199 for the annual plan)
• Growth – $199/month ($159 for the annual plan)
• Pro – $399/month ($319 for the annual plan)

The Bottom Line: Teachable Review (2023)

This is all for this Teachable review. If you have skills and want to share them with the world, there is no harm in doing so professionally and getting paid. If you are new to the e-learning world, Teachable will help you create a professional page for your brand and share your knowledge with others. 

The platform has an extremely friendly interface which makes it a viable option for beginners with little to no programming experience. Even for amateurs, it’s very easy to build a website, thanks to pre-designed templates and design features.

Although the platform missed some key features such as in-built community support, a basic drag-drop website builder, etc but the company has done enough through third-party integrations, making it a good beginner’s platform to sell online courses.

FAQs On Teachable