Teachable review [2020]: The Best Online Course Platform?

If you want to start creating online courses and looking for a platform to host your course content, Teachable might help you.

Teachable is an all-in-one online course platform, that takes care of all the technical stuff for you, so you can focus on creating the best course there is about your subject.

The question is, is Teachable the online course platform that deserves a place in your online course building toolkit?

Let’s find out in this Teachable review.

What is Teachable?

Teachable is an online course platform or Learning Management System (LMS), where you can create and sell your own online courses. Teachable, previously known as Fedora, is one of the most popular online course platforms around since 2013. Teachable has more than 10 million students across 125,000 courses, with 12,000 paying customers on its platform.

Who is Teachable for?

Let’s start to see who is Teachable for.

Teachable is built for bloggers, creators, niche experts, authors, and entrepreneurs who want to package their acquired knowledge in an online course. The beauty of Teachable is that you don’t have to be that techie to create your own online course and start selling it.

You don’t need to worry about hosting or payment processing of your courses because Teachable organizes this for you so you can entirely focus on creating and launching your own profitable online courses.

Who is using Teachable?

I think that Teachable is best suited for people who are starting their online course creating career. You don’t need much technical knowledge to build your own online course in Teachable.

Let’s look at some examples for inspiration of people who also use teachable:

• Self Publishing Formula by Mark Dawson. Mark Dawson is a USA Today bestselling thriller author. Besides writing his own books he also learns other writers how they can self publish and market their books. Mark has al his courses on the Teachable platform.
• Online Business Courses by Pat Flynn. The reason Pat uses Teachable is that it’s really easy to create courses with integrated videos, text and downloadable pdf files. It saves a lot of time that Teachable takes care of Technical stuff.

Now you know what Teachable is, and who it’s for. let’s look at what Teachable costs.

Teachable Pricing: How Much Does Teachable Cost?

What does Teachable cost?

Good question

And as for me as a dutch guy the most important question. Just kidding of course😊

In this section, I’ll break down Teachables pricing plans for you. And show you which pricing plan is most beneficial, so you can choose the best Teachable pricing plan that fits your situation at this moment.

So let’s get started

Teachable has three paid plans and a free plan:

• Free plan: The free plan is limited to 10 student enrollments
• Basic plan: $39 per month or $29 when billed annually
• Professional plan: $119 per month or $99 when billed annually
• Business plan: $299 per month or $249 when billed annually

You can switch between plans at any time. Teachable also offers a 30-day refund policy for all paid plans, so if you’re unhappy with Teachable for whatever reason, you can request a refund and cancellation of your paid plan.

Here is a list of features that are available in all paid plans:

• Unlimited video
• Unlimited courses
• Unlimited hosting
• Integrated payment processing
• Student management
• Lecture comments
• Basic quizzes
• No fees on free courses
• VAT (value-added tax) for EU

Teachable transaction fees

There are some downsides to Teachable’s pricing plans. The biggest downside is that Teachable charges a transaction fee on their Basic plan. They charge you 5% of your course price as a transaction fee.

In the table below, you’ll see a breakdown of the transaction fees that Teachable charges for each course that you sell.

read more about Teachable pricing.

How does Teachable work?

The first step that you need to take to start creating courses on Teachable is to sign up for an account and create a school. When you finished with the setup of your school you can create courses.

You can create an unlimited amount of courses under one school. For instance, if you’re into woodcarving, you can have a woodcarving 101 course in your school, and a course about carving flower rosettes. For each sub-topic of your expertise, you can create a separate course.

When you’ve set up your School, the next step is to create your first course. The next step is to create the actual content for your course. You can divide the content into sections. And each section can have multiple lectures under it. You can use sections to focus on a specific theme or concept.

For our woodcarving example, this means you can have a section about tools, techniques and materials. You can split up the technique section into different lectures. In each lecture, you cover a different technique.

First Impressions Of The User Interface

Now that you have a bit of an idea of Teachables structure, let’s start up the browser and log in to Teachable.

Teachable has a clear and simple interface. You can find all the important features in the left sidebar. If you click an item a sub-menu appears with more specific choices.

Teachables user interface makes it really easy for you to set up your School and the first course in a couple of minutes. You don’t need any technical knowledge to build engaging online courses on your expertise in Teachable.

Teachable onboarding

When you’re logged in one of the first times in, Teachable shows you some tasks that you must do before you can successfully launch your school and courses.

If you click on ‘Create a course’ Teachable guides you through the process to set up your online school. Teachable show you which tasks you must complete.

Teachable Features

Teachable has a lot of features on board that help you to build your own online course. Let’s break down the most important features in different categories one by one to see how you can use them to create online courses.

Create online courses

Teachable is an all-in-one platform that helps you create online courses and takes care of all the technical hassle for you.

let’s take a look at which Teachable features support you in your online course building journey.

Teachable Course builder

When you registered your school, the next step is to create your first course. Teachable guides you through the whole process to set up your course. You can choose from three different course templates. If you choose mini-course or standard course, Teachable generates a pre-defined course structure for you. Do you want to build your own course structure? You can choose the Blank template option.

In Teachables course builder you can easily add new sections and lectures, and change the order of lectures or whole sections by dragging them in the right order.

In a lecture you can add different content blocks like:

• Files
• Text
• a Quiz
• Code Examples
• Custom Code
• Upsell

A lecture can contain multiple content blocks that are placed under each other. If you want to change the order you can easily drag them in a different order.

Create quizzes in Teachable

Creating quizzes in Teachable is really easy but the quiz options are very limited.

You can only create plain text-based questions (Teachables quiz tool has no WYSIWYG editor) with one or more correct answer options. Your Answer options can’t contain images. There’s no room for feedback per question why an answer is correct or incorrect.

There is no option to bulk import quiz questions, randomize answer options or draw x question from a question bank. This is really a missed opportunity for Teachable.

Quizzes in Teachables Basic plan are not graded. From the Pro plan, you can choose if you want to create graded or non-graded quizzes.

Teachable also doesn’t have the option that users can send in assignments up to now.

Completion certificates

Your students want to be recognized for the online course that they followed. A completion certificate for your online course is a prove of required knowledge and motivates learners to fully engage with your course and finish it.

Teachable has certificates in their Professional plan and up. Teachable has 3 certificate templates and 1 custom template.

If you use one of the Certificate templates you can customize copy and colours. You can add a logo specifically to your course and a signature. Teachable automatically adds a serial number for authenticity.

Your students can download their certificate as a PDF file when they completed your course.

Drip Course content

You can drip the sections of your online course in two different ways to your students.

1. You can release the sections on a specific date
2. You can release a section xx days after a student enrolled to your course.

You can also set up specific email announcements for each Lecture Section that you want to drip. This way your students know when new content in your online course is available.

Design your online courses

A great design is important for your students to go through your online course and finish it. Teachable has different features to design a good looking online course website.

Let’s check out the design options. the page editor and the power editor feature.

Teachable Design features

In Teachable under Site > Theme you can add your own custom logo, Homepage background and a favicon to your school.

You can choose one of the 11 pre-defined fonts to use throughout your school and customize your school’s colours by choosing a pre-defined colour palette or choosing a custom colour for the navigation bar, footer, buttons and links and more.

Under Site > Code snippets you can add custom CSS on all your school’s pages and add javascript codes inside the head tag on all pages.

If you’re not satisfied with the result of the design options Teachable offers the options to change the design of your site with their power editor. The power editor is available from the Professional plan and up.

Power editor

If you want to fully customize the design of your Teachable school, Teachable offers you the Power Editor. With the Power Editor, you can customize every bit of your school’s design.

The Power Editor works with Liquid code. This is an open-source templating language developed by Shopify. When You open the Power Editor you can select the different templates that you can adjust. You can change:

• Pages
• Lectures
• Author bios
• Layouts
• Courses
• Blogs

When you select one of the templates, you can choose from different blocks that you can adjust. As an example: Under Pages, you can adjust the block of the featured course and change the layout of this block to your own wishes.

Page editor

Your Teachable school doesn’t only has course pages. Your school can have different other pages like a sales page, home page or a thank you page. With the page editor, you can design the layout of these pages and add blocks with content to your pages. The blocks are built-in building blocks that you can use.

You can add the following basic blocks:

• Image
• Text
• Button
• Video
• Custom HTML

You can add these layouts:

• Image with Text
• Banner
• Text with Image Grid
• Featured Courses

When you added the blocks you can simply adjust their order by dragging them in a different position.

Sell your online courses

When you created a course in Teachable, the next step is selling the online course. Teachable has different features that can help you to generate more sales for your online course.

Blog

Teachable has a feature to add a blog to your Teachable school. You can restrict the blog to students of your school or make it available for everyone.

Adding a blog to your school can bring in customers for you. According to statistics on Optinmonster.com, 57% of the questioned marketers say they’ve gained customers specifically through blogging.

On the new blog post page, you can add a title and a URL. You can’t add a meta description. The blog post editor is a rich text editor with basic features. There is no option to add a heading in your blog. If you know a little HTML you can do this with a workaround and add the <h> tags yourself in the HTML view of the rich text editor.

Sales pages

Per course that you create in Teachable, Teachable prepares a sales page for you that you can fill with content. You can add multiple sales pages per course in Teachable. This way you can create different sales pages for each subset of your target audience. You can create up to 10 sales pages per Teachable course.

Check out Teachable.com/blog/sales-page-examples for some sales pages that are created in Teachable.

Checkout pages

Teachable offers single-page checkouts on all courses. Single page checkout can be a huge conversion booster for your online course sales.

You can also add testimonials and bullet points where you can reassert your value proposition can also contribute to more online course sales

Students are not forced to create an account before buying your online course. Entering account information is only necessary after you have sold your online course. Teachables checkout page removes as many barriers as possible to ensure your online course will be sold.

Teachable Memberships

Next to online courses you can also sell memberships from your Teachable school. Memberships can generate a nice recurring revenue stream for your online business.

In Teachable you can create course bundles that you can sell as a recurring membership. You can charge a monthly or yearly fee to your students to access all your course content.

In Teachable under Courses > Bundle contents, you can create a master course and select which courses you want to add to your Course Bundle.

Thank you pages with upsells

To earn more from one-course sale Teachable offers you the option to add upsell to your thank-you page. This is the page students will be redirected to when they bought your online course.

You can add:

• A video: In this video you can give students your upsell pitch to your other product.
• An upsell offer: With the upsell offer you can offer students a on-click upsell offer to one of your other courses.

Teachables Upsell offer is another great way to increase engagement and conversion rates on your online school.

Affiliate options for you as a school owner

Teachable gives you the option to use affiliates to sell your online courses. You can let students promote your online courses for a commission rate that you can set.

Teachable offers the following features for your affiliates:

• Permissions for affiliates on course level: You can select which courses your affiliates can promote.
• Generate External links for affiliates: You can create links for affiliates outside of Teachable.
• Custom cookie length setting: Set how long an affiliate’s cookie remains active after a user clicks their affiliate link. You can set the cookie length between 1 and 364 days.
• Basic analytics for owners & affiliates: You can generate an analytics dashboard for affiliates and for yourself as school owner.
• New FAQs page: You can keep your affiliates informed by adding Frequently Asked Questions.

Payment options

If you live in the US or Canada you use Teachable payments. Teachable payments are handled with Stripe Express. It makes it possible that you can receive your online course payouts, daily, weekly or monthly to your Stripe Express account.

If you’re a teachable school owner and you live outside the US or Canada you must process payments using Teachables Monthly Payment Gateway. As the name says it, with the Monthly Payment Gateway you will be paid every 30 days via Paypal.

Your students have the following payment options when they want to buy your course:

• Credit/debit cards
• PayPal
• Apple Pay®
• Google Pay™

Subscription reminders

Teachable offers an email template for billing reminders of students that are enrolled in annual subscriptions. This gives you less hassle if you sell memberships next to your online courses. Your students get a payment reminder.

This way your students know there will be an upcoming payment in seven days. Under Emails > Template Editor you can change the contents of the mail to your own likings.

Teachable Integrations

Teachable has integrations with:

• Google Analytics (available on the Free plan)
• SumoMe (available on the Free plan)
• Facebook Pixel
• Zapier
• Mailchimp
• Segment
• ConvertKit

Teachable and Zapier
If you’re using other tools and you want to connect Teachable and Activecampaign or Teachable and Shopify you can use Zapier for that. You don’t have to write any line of code for that. You can send data to the tool that you want to integrate with Teachable on different triggers such as:

• New course enrollment
• Course completed
• Lecture completed
• New Graded Quiz Result
• Profile Updated
• New Transaction
• New User
• Subscription Cancelled
• Student Unsubscribes From Marketing Emails

Webhooks

Next to integration with Zapier, you can use Teachables webhooks if you have programming knowledge to send information from Teachable to another app. Teachable has 13 events that you can use with webhooks.

Teachable Facebook Pixel

Teachable has a native integration to embed Facebook pixels on your school checkout, site and course pages for all paid plans. The Facebook Pixel is very easy to add.

You don’t have to work with code snippets. In Teachable you go to Settings > Integrations, check the Facebook Pixel checkbox and insert your Facebook Pixel id. Easy as that.

Teachable Support

Teachable offers e-mail support on all plans. From the professional plan and up you can live chat with Teachable’s support team between business hours.

When I used Teachable to set up my own online course I had an issue with the content blocks in the Lecture builder. I mailed support and I received a clear and descriptive email back the same working day with a video in it to help me solve the problem.

It’s a pity that you cannot live chat with support if you have a Basic plan. But when you send an email to Teachable’s support team my experience is that you get a good and fast response that helps you solve your problem or answers your question.

Teachable alternatives to consider

Not really convinced after reading my Teachable review or do you want to shop around a bit? Below I listed some alternatives to Teachable and a short comparison.

Teachable vs Thinkific

Teachable and Thinkific both are great tools to create and sell online courses. Both are cloud-based online course platforms. This means that you don’t have to worry about hosting courses on your own website.

Teachable and Thinkific have a lot of overlap in features and on some points, one tool is better than another. I think Teachables Course Builder is more intuitive. Thinkific on the other hand has more assessment features to test your students.

Teachable has a one-page checkout option which is definitely a conversion booster for your online school. With Thinkific you can have customer reviews on your sales pages.

Let’s review the differences between Teachable and Thinkific in detail:

Interested in learning more about Thinkific? Read my extended Thinkific review here.

Teachable vs Kajabi

Teachable and Kajabi are both large names in the online course field. They both have a different target audience.

Kajabi is a real all-in-one solution to online courses and to market them. Teachable has limited marketing features and is more focused on creating and selling courses.

Both are absolutely good tools. Which tool is best for you depends In which phase of the course building process you are.

For not such experienced online course creators Teachable is a better fit. Kajabi on the other hand is a better fit for more experienced online course creators who want a flexible online course platform that they can customize.

Let’s review them in detail:

Want to know more about Kajabi? Read my Kajabi review here.

Teachable vs Podia

Podia vs Teachable which of the two online course programs is most suited to host your online courses?

Teachable is an online course platform focused on creating and selling courses. Podia is just like Kajabi an all-in-one online course platform. Podia has more membership functionalities and email marketing functionalities over Teachable.

I think Podia and Teachable are both suited for different target groups. Podia is for the experienced online course creator who has created a ouple of courses, has already established an email list and is ready for the next step in his online course business.

Teachable is perfectly suited for online course creators who are planning on building their first online course.

Both tools have their pros and cons. Podia has chat support all days of the week. Teachable has only chat support form their Professional plan and up. the other plans have email suppport. Teachable has a free plan and Podia only a 14 day trail.

In summary Teachable is a great online course platform to create your first profitable online course. If you already have more experience it is possible that you will encounter some limitations with Teachable.

Let’s review them in detail:

Interested in Podia and want to know more? Read my extended Podia review here.

Teachable vs LearnDash

If you want more features than Teachable can offer. Or you have a specific vision on how you’re online course should work and you have some decent technical HTML and PHP programming knowledge LearnDash can be a good Teachable alternative for you.

LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin that changes a WordPress website in a full-blown online course platform. There are lots of WordPress plugins on the market that add extra functionality to your WordPress LMS. Such as SCORM and xAPI integration so it’s possible for you to embed e-learning courses that are created with authoring tools like Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate in your online course.

A LearnDash license costs $199 for a license with one year support and updates. On top of LearnDash price you also have costs for hosting, extra plugins and hours for technical maintenance on your online course platform.

All together is Teachable a less expensive option which gives you less to worry about, but which gives you less freedom in features.

Learn more on LearnDash in my LearnDash review.

Teachable Frequently Asked Questions

Teachable Review Conclusion

It’s great giving my opinion on the different features and functions in this Teachable review and how they actually contribute when it comes to creating and selling online courses – but that’s not what you really want to know.

What you really want to know is, should you actually buy Teachable or is it a waste of your time and money?

Let’s break it down.

Teachable, is one of the most popular online course platforms. With Teachable you can createa engaging online courses, sell subscriptions & membership programs, and market these courses.

If you are a beginner online course creator and want basic features Teachable is a good online course platform to get started with.

If you already have multiple courses and want more automation and enhanced marketing (landing pages, sales pages, funnels,etc. ) — you should look at Katra or Kajabi.

Do you want an online course platform that is SCORM compliant? LearnWorlds and LearnDash (With a 3rd party plugin) both have the option to embed SCORM modules.