Teachable Online Course Creation Platform Review
With a rapid rise in the popularity of online courses, there are a lot of people who make selling their knowledge or skills online their main or additional source of income.
The hardest part is to create your course and structure the content. But along the way from creating a concept of your course to selling it, there are tons of choices to make. One of them is to decide which platform to use for building hosing your course.
One of the possible answers is Teachable and let’s dive into its review.
What Is Teachable?
This is a platform for creating online courses and coaching services with having over 100K of active users. It offers all-in-one solutions from building a course to selling it. It includes the full circle of operations needed: domain hosting, templates for creating an online course website and the content itself, connecting payment options, marketing your course and tracking its performance.
The company was launched in 2015 by Ankur Nagpal, its current CEO, and is located in New York.
How to Create an Online Course with Teachable
Let’s see how to use Teachable, step by step.
Signing up
After you sign up, you need to choose what you want to create, a course or coaching. You choose the course option and add the title of your course.
Course content
Your course content you can add in the “Curriculum” section. You need to click on the
First Lecture and there, you can add different types of content. Here you can add files like videos, audios, and PDF, add text, build a quiz, and add code examples (if you are building a coding course).
Adding more classes is available on the “Curriculum” page – click on the ‘Add new lecture” button.
Design
You can choose how your course pages will look in the Design Templates sections. Teachable has 3 design templates in its library.
Course Pricing
Next, you need to choose your online course pricing model, and here you can see the available options.
Landing pages
In the section “Pages”, you can build Sales, Checkout, and Thank You pages. From the page “Pages” Homepage you can also access your website main pages like Homepage, Terms & Privacy Policy pages – and create new ones.
Additional features for your online course
Next, you can have some additional useful options like The Drip Feature. It allows you to publish lectures over a period of time based on the number of days after your students enroll. However, this one is not available on their free plan – only on the Basic plan and upwards.
Marketing and sales of your online course on Teachable
Moreover, you can use additional features to improve your sales. Among them are Order Bumps option (allows adding an additional product on the checkout page), Bundle Contents (allows grouping multiple courses together into a single bundle that you can sell at once), and Add Coupons option (available only within paid subscription).
Teachable Pricing
The company has 4 pricing plans with a free one:
1. Free. It allows creating unlimited online courses or coaching services and providing access for unlimited students. The free plan also includes course design templates and the ability to create basic quizzes. However, you need to pay 10% per transaction which is the main drawback.
2. Basic for $39 per month or $350 if billed annually. Here you get all the features from the free plan but you pay less per transaction (5%). Also with this plan, you can connect a custom domain, have drip course content and integrated email marketing as well as create private members’ communities.
3.Pro for $119 or $1188 annually. The main benefits are no transaction fee, graded quizzes, and certificates upon completion.
4.Business for $299 monthly or $2988 annually. This subscription also has zero transaction fee and offers some advanced options like the ability to bulk student enrollments, advanced theme customization, or custom user roles.
For all paid plans it is more profitable to pay for a year as the monthly payment is reduced this way.
FAQ
The platform is used for creating online courses by adding lesson by lesson and then selling the course right on the platform.
Teachable is useful for creating online courses and it’s very beginner-friendly.
Yes, the main way to make money on Teachable is by creating and then selling your online course on this platform. Teachable claims that a good baseline price for a course is $100.
Depending on the plan, it can take a transaction commission of 5-10% per sale. In more expensive plans you have no commission.
You need to set up your payment method. Teachable has two payment options: PayPal and Stripe Express. Withdrawal takes up to 30 days.
Teachable Alternatives
Among the main Teachable alternatives are Udemy, Thinkific, and Kajabi. Thus, let’s see how they differ and what similarities they have.
Teachable vs Udemy
| Teachable | Udemy |
| Plans from USD $ 39 / month | It does not charge for the use of the platform plans. |
| You decide the price of your courses | Udemy sets the price of your courses |
| If you start with the most basic plan Teachable charges you a 5% commission on the sale of your courses, in all other teachable plans the commission is 0% | |
| Unlimited storage space | Unlimited storage space |
| Integrated with Paypal | Own payment integration. |
| Possibility to customize your own school of online courses | No possibility to customize your own school, and you must follow a standard format for the publication of your courses. |
| You must be in charge of the sales of your courses | The database of people who buy your courses does not belong to you. |
| The database of the people who buy your courses belongs to you | Udemy handles the sale of your courses, but does not guarantee anything. |
| You keep the copyright on your online courses | You lose the copyright on your online courses. |
| Possibility to generate discount coupons | You can generate coupons for promotions and discounts |
| You can do webinars | You can do webinars |
To know which platform to choose you have to first define your goals, what you are looking for, since the business model of these platforms is very different.
Udemy can be a good platform for people who are looking to generate passive income and do not want to complicate their life, on the one hand they do not charge you any commission for uploading your courses to their platform and on the other hand they take care of the sales, it is almost like a dream for those who want to monetize their knowledge, you should just be aware that on the one hand you will not have an extraordinary income unless your course is the milk, on the other hand, you do not have control of anything when you upload your course and you do not set the price and you lose the copyright on your courses.
Teachable on the other hand has an initial cost, so you need to invest to get started and nothing is guaranteed, it is the other extreme of Udemy that may seem like a dream of someone who wants to monetize their knowledge, but only at the beginning. With Teachable you will have to struggle at the beginning and nothing is guaranteed, but if you manage to succeed and generate a digital community you can have a much higher passive income than Udemy.
Thinkific vs Teachable
Thinkific is a direct competitor of Teachable and has many good options to offer. It has more course design options, features for creating content – like advanced quizzes, and also its advantage is no transaction fee.
Meanwhile, Teachable is easier to use, it has more documentation for each feature, and also they have good user community management. Moreover, Teachable has better analytics and reporting tools.
| Teachable | Thinkific |
| Plans starting at USD $ 39 / month + 5% of course sales | Plans starting at USD $ 49 / month without commission on the sale of courses |
| Unlimited Courses | Unlimited Courses |
| Unlimited users on all plans | Unlimited users on all plans |
| Unlimited storage space | Unlimited storage space |
| Support via Ticket, in its most basic plans | Support via Ticket, in its most basic plans |
| Integration with Paypal | Integration with Paypal / Stripe |
| Integrated with e-mail Marketing | Integrated with e-mail Marketing |
| Administrator / Student / Tutor / Affiliate / Student roles | |
| Possibility to generate promotional coupons | |
| Customizable portal – Market Place | Customizable portal – Market Place |
| Personalized domain | Personalized domain |
| Integration with Mailchimp | Integration with Infusoft |
| Basic Evaluations only in the Basic plan, the other plans have more complete evaluation options. | |
| Integration with Google Analytics | Integration with Google Analytics |
| Webinars | Webinars |
As we can see in the comparison table, both platforms present almost the same functionalities and the same business model of plans, perhaps some important aspects that differentiate these platforms is the fact that Teachable is only integrated with Paypal, while Thinkific is integrated with Paypal and Stripe. This is a Thinkific benefit, since Stripe has cheaper commissions than Paypal and also allows tracking transactions more accurately than Paypal.
Perhaps the most differentiating aspect between Teachable and Thinkific is the customization. While Techable has standard customization features, Thinkific widens the range a little more and offers themes with different customization.
Teachable’s benefit is the price as its plans are USD $39 per month Thinkific offers plans with a minimum of USD $49 per month.
Kajabi vs Teachable
Kajabi is also Teachable’s competitor worth mentioning. It has many customization options and more advanced website functionality. Moreover, it offers tools for marketing automation.
However, Kajabi is higher priced compared to Teachable and its disadvantage is no native option for course completion certificates and poor analytics and reporting tools.
