LearnPress Review: Is It Enough in 2020?

Creating online courses is a booming business nowadays. If you want to build online courses yourself you’ll need an online course platform also called a Learning Management System (LMS).

Thinkific is an online course platform, that is really easy to use and has lot’s of features.

The question is, has Thinkific the features you’ll need and is it the  right online course platform for your online course business?

Let’s find out.

[knop naar Thinkific toevoegen]

What is Thinkific and who is it for?

[homepage screenshot]

No you know what Thinkific is Let’s see who Thinkific is for.

Thinkific is designed for solopreneurs and smaller ventures, usually below 10 employees. Thinkific users create all sort of courses from learning to play guitar, to flying a drone, to enhancing your digital marketing skills!

A big advantage of using Thinkific is that you don’t have to be technical to create your own courses. Thinkific is easy to understand and you can create your first online course in an couple of hours.

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

Now you know who Thinkific is for let’s look at what Thinkific costs.

Thinkific Pricing:

How much does Thinkific cost?

Good question.

In this Thinkific plan comparison, I’ll break down the Thinkific pricing plans for you. I’ll show you which pricing plan is most beneficial for your situation. so you can choose the best Thinkific pricing plan that is the right fit or your business.

Let’s get started

Thinkific has four plans. three paid plans and a free plan:

• Free plan: $0 per month
• Basic plan: $49 per month or $39 when billed annually
• Pro: $99 per month or $79 when billed annually + Growth add-on $0.10/mo per active student
• Business plan: $499 per month or $399 when billed annually

You can change or cancel your Thinkific account at any time. It also offers a 30-day money back garantuee.

[info box] Thinkific has eliminated transaction fees. Thinkific now has 0% transaction fees on all new plans, even for free customers! This means that you keep more of your money that you earn with selling courses. [/info box]

[afbeelding pricing plans]

All Thinkific plans have these core features:

• Instant access to your funds
• Student notifications
• Full e-Commerce
• Upsell offers
• Easy drag and drop Course Builder
• Discussion forums
• Build out your entire website
• Secure cloud hosting
• Multiple instructor profile
• Choose your site language
• Easy, built-in SSL certific
• Email and phone support

Next to these Plans, Thinkific also offers Thinkific Plus. A Learning Management System for larger corporations. Thinkific plus is not built for solopreneurs and small companies I do not include this further in my review.

Let’s dive in the first plan

Free plan

Thinkific has a free plan which you can use to test-drive it’s core features without paying. In the Thinkifics free plan you can use the Thinkifics core features and you can have:

• 3 Courses
• Unlimited students
• Quizzes & surveys
• Content hosting (video, audio and pdf)
• Instant access to your funds

A hugh benefit is that is Thinkific decided to charges no transaction fees on their free plans. This also applies to their free plan. You still pay a fee to your payment provider (just like with other online course platforms). But no extra fee on top of that by Thinkific.

With the free plan you can create your online course with the course drag and drop builder and you can set up your course website with the course builder. But Thinkific’s free plan you’ll miss some features for your courses, like content dripping, randomized quiz content banks and completion certificates

Next to the course creation features the free plan misses is also misses quite some marketing features to properly market you course to your target audience. The free plan has no options to connect to your marketing automation tool like aweber or activecampaign. Coupons and promotions for your online course are not available in this plan.

One other major drawback on Thinkific’s free plan is that you can’t export your data. If you want this you have to upgrade to the basic plan.

When should you choose the free plan?

Thinkific’s free plan is right for you if you wan to test Thinkific if it’s the best online course platform for you, Or if you only have free online courses that you’ll use as a lead magnet to build an e-mail list. You can us the free plan to set up your online course and online course website without paying a monthly fee and upgrade when yu’re ready to launch your first course.

So In my opinion, If you’re ready to start selling your online courses, it’s better to upgrade to Thinkific’s Basic or Pro plan because these plans have more features to successfully market your online course.

Basic plan

Thinkifics Basic plan is the lowest paid plan that Thinkific offers. They chare you $49 per month when billed monthly and $39 per month when billed per year. If you pay annually you’ll save 20%

Extra features

Next to the core features that Thinkific offers you’ll get a lot of extra features with the basic plan. You can have:

• Unlimited courses
• Email iIntegrations Convertkit, Mailchimp, Facebook Pixel, Google analytis
• Zapier integrations
• Scheduled classes (cohort based-set start dates)
• Manual student enrollment & updates
• Affiliate reporting
• Coupons & promotions
• Drip (scheduled) content
• Custom domains

A big pro of the basic plan is that you can set up custom domains for your Thinkific website. With this you can personalize your Thinkific url (mycourse.thinkific.com), or use your own custom domain (learn.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com).

When should you choose the Basic plan?
The basic plan is best for you if you want more then three courses, to drip your course content or want to promote your courses with coupons. If this is the case you must upgrade from a free Thinkific plan to a basic plan.

If you want features like bundles and memberships, Advanced CSS/HTML editing or randomized quiz question banks you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro plan.

Pro plan + additional Growth package

Thinkific says the pro plan is their most popular plan. The price for the pro plan is $99 per month when billed monthly and $79 per month when billed per year. For all Thinkific plans apply that If you pay annually you’ll save 20%.

Extra features
The pro plan has all features that are in the basic plan plus the following features:

• Randomized quiz question bank
• Prerequisite lessons
• Require video completion
• Host Storyline, Captivate & more
• Assignments
• Additional course prices
• Offer payment plans
• Bundles & memberships
• Add-ons
• Advanced CSS/HTML editing
• 1 Community
• Completion certificates
• Create private courses
• Create hidden courses

For all plans Thinkific has Expert customer support. This means you can send mails to Thinkific support or call them on business days between 9 am and 5 pm PST. From the pro plan on Thinkific you’ll get priority support

Growth add-on
With Thinkific’s Pro plan you can have an add-on called Growth with extra features. The Growth package is free for your 100 first students and after that you’ll pay $0,10 per active student. There is a max of $499 per month. This is $400 Growth package fee and $99 Pro plan fee.

Thinkific defines an active student as:

“An active student is a student who has a full enrollment and their enrollment has not yet expired.”

[Info box] Growth package caveats

Please Note that your number of active students can add up real quick with the rules that Thinkific uses:

• If you have students enrolled in Free courses, they also count as active students.
• Students enrolled in Free Trial on a subscription pricing option also count as active.
• A student enrolled in a Free Preview does not count as an active student.
• A student who has reached 100% completion will still count as an active student if their enrollment has not yet expired.

 [/Info box]

Growth features

Now we know what a active user is let’s which features you’ll get with the Growth package.

The growth package has the following features:

• Groups
• Advanced segmentation
• Webhooks
• Infusionsoft and ActiveCampaign integration
• Bulk Import students with xslx or csv
• Bulk emails
• Bulk enroll students
• Remove Thinkific branding
• Public API
• Communities
• Zapier actions
• Brillium exams integration

Calculation pro and growth

Let’s do some math. Let’s say you are on Thinkific’s Pro plan, you have 1000 active students and you want to add the Growth package.

You’ll pay $99 per month as a Pro plan fee and you’ll pay $0,10 for each active student where the first 100 students are free.

You have to pay $99 Pro fee and 900 x $0,10 = $90 this is a monthly total of $189

Thinkific maxed out the price for the Pro plan and the Growth package on $499 per month.

When should you choose thinkific’s pro plan and growth package?

I think The pro plan is Thinkifics best plan for small business owners, bloggers, consultants and trainers. It offers course bundles, membership options and randomized quiz question banks. Check which features you need if you decide between a Basic or a Pro plan.

In my opinion the growth plan is useful if you have lots of students that you want to enroll or import in Thinkific. What you can do is see how many times per month you have to do these kind of tasks and how much time it costs you. If it’s costs you 2 hours to import and enroll students manually and with the growth plan you can do it in 10 minutes than the growth plan is a no-brainer

Premier plan

This plan is Thinkific’s most expensive plan for advanced customers. The Premier plan is  priced at $499 when billed monthly and $399 when billed yearly.

You’ll get all the features in the Pro plan and the Growth package and the following extra features:

• Unlimited courses & students
• 5 Site admin accounts
• 15 Group Analysts
• 50 Course admins/authors
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• Onboarding package
• Unlimited Growth Package

So who should choose the Business plan?

I think the premier plan for businesses who want to deliver online learning at a large scale. You can have an unlimited amount of courses and students and you can have multiple admin accounts. These kind of features are only useful for larger companies.

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 login to Teachable.

[screenshot Dashboard]

Teachable has a clear and simple interface. You can find all 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 setup your School and 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 you school and courses.

If you click on ‘Create a course’ Teachable guides you through the process [onboarding] aanvullen

Teachable user interface conclusion

aanvullen

Thinkific Review: How to create a course in Thinkific

Getting started with Thinkific is really simple. You can start for free by creating an account on Thinkific.com. when you log in for the first time you’ll get a short survey to customize your Thinkific school.

[survey screenshot]

Thinkific onboarding

When you answered the questions,Thinkifc presents 13 steps to teach you how to launch your first course. When you click a step, Thinkifc shows you what you must do and where you can find the feature in Thinkific. If you don’t want help getting started in Thinkific you can skip this experience.

Thinkific User Interface

When uou log in to Thinkific as admin the Admin Dashboard is the first thing you will see. This is the control center for your Thinkific site: it’s where you can access everything to do with your site – Site Builder, the Course Builder, Student progress, Site settings, Orders, Integrations and more!

[screenshot thinkific dashboard and menu]

On the left is the menu with all the features grouped in clear categories. When you click a categorie it collapses and you see the sub menu items.

Now let’s start with creating a course in Thinkific

Getting started creating courses

To start your first course click in Thinkific on ‘Manage learning content’ and ‘courses’. Thinkific already created a first course for you but you can also create an new course by clicking the ‘New Course’ button in the right top of your screen.

Let’s check out the first course

Thinkific Course builder

In your draft course there’s a first Chapter. By clicking the ‘Add lesson’button you can create new lessons in a chapter. Thinkific has the following lesson types:

• Video
• Pdf
• Text
• Audio
• Download
• Presentation (upload your slides and record voice-over)
• Multimedia (embed an external website or upload HTML5 content)

[screenshot course builder]

You can also assess your students with a:

• Quiz
• Survey
• Assignment
• Exam

If you have existing courses you can copy lessons into your new course.

[afbeelding online course template]

In the course builder you can easiliy add new lessons and chapters. If you want to change the lesson or chapter order you can easily drag and drop lessons and chapter in a different order.

Create quizzes in Thinkific

In Thinkifc quizzes are lesson types. You can place a quiz anywhere in you course structure.

In your quiz you can choose from two question types:

• A question where one answer is correct
• A question where multiple answers are correct

Questions, answers and explanation al have wysiwyg editors. This makes it possible to create questions with images as answer options.

It is also very easy to duplicate questions and you can even bulk upload questions to upload an xlsx template.

[info box]From Thinkific’s Pro plan you have the option to randomize questions in a quiz and specifiy a number of questions that will be used in your quiz. For instance when you have 20 questions you can let Thinkific draw 5 random questions. [/info box]

[afbeelding quiz maken]

For each quiz you have the option to set a passing score. If you enter a passing score for a quiz your sudents won’t see question explanations.

Assignments

Thinkific gives you the option to add assignments to your course. With assignments your student must submit a file which requires a review by the instructor. The assignment lesson can’t be completed before it’s approved by a Site Admin or Course Admin. You can set a custom confirmation message per assignment in your course.

Survey

Thinkific has a survey lesson block that you for instance can add at the end of your course to gain insights from your user on how they think about your course. In the survey lesson block you can add five questions types:

• One answer
• One or more answers
• Rating
• Scale
• Free text

All question types have a WYSIWYG editor and you can also select is if a question is mandatory or optional.

Thinkific certificates of completion

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 learnes to fully engage with your course and finish it.

In thinkific completion certificates are available from the Pro plan and on.

You can choose of 7 Thinkific certificate templates

[afbeelding templates toevoegen]

If you use one of the Certificate templates you can customize the background image, copy and colors. You also can add a logo. Thinkifc automatically ads a date when the certificate is issued and a date when the certificate expires, if this applicable.

Your students can download their certificate as a PDF file when the completed your course, or they can view and download it from within their account settings later on.

Drip Course content

You can drip the sections of your online course on 3 different ways to your students.

1. You can release the sections on a specific calendar date
2. You can release content based on when your student first enrolls into your course
3. You can release content based on your student accesses your course for the first time

[afbeelding drip content toevoegen]

Students will only be able to view lessons in your course that are currently available according to your Drip Schedule. If they try to access a lesson that is not released yet, they will see a prompt within the Course Player indicating the date and time the lesson will be available.

You can customize the the pop-up prompt that s student sees when he clicks a lesson that is nog yet available for him.

Design your online courses

Your course design is an important aspect for your students to go trough your online course and finish it. Thinkific offers 3 responsive site builer themes. From the Pro plan and on you have access the the code of your theme and you can make adjustments in your theme.

[info box]Editing theme code

To edit you theme code you must have excellent knowledge of HTML, CSS, SASS and JSON. Thinkific uses Liquid variables to show huge amounts of information in your theme.

[/infobox]

Thinkific Design features

In Thinkific under Design your site > Theme library you’ll find the 3 standard themes:

• Empire
• Vogue
• Vision

Each theme has different styles you can choose from. Standard, the Empire theme is installed in your Thinkific environment, but you can easily install one of the other themes.

[afbeelding design theme]

If you want change the design of the theme that you’ve chosen you can change the look and feel in Thinkifics site builder.

Site builder

If you want to customize the design of your theme, You can do this in the site builder. You can find the site Builder under Design your Site in thinkific.

[afbeelding site builder]

Under theme settings you can select one of the styles that come with the theme. You can also change the colors for the header and footer, text and buttons and background colors. You can select font size for the font in your banner, header, subheader and body text.

[schermafbeelding site builder specifiek]

Thinkific offers a small pre-defined set of fonts which you can choose in your theme. Under theme setting you can also upload a custom favicon for your Thinkific website.

In your theme you can change the following pages:

• Homepage
• Course page
• Bundles page
• Defaulft pages (like sign-in, checkout, all courses, student dashboard and coming soon page)
• Custom pages

You can change the elements on the pages listed above and add extra sections like:

• Additional products
• Call to action
• Countdown timer
• Frequently asked questions
• Text & media
• Video

You can also add custom pages to your Thinkific site. For instance for extra information or an about you page. On a custom page you can change the header, banner and the footer. On custom pages you can also add the extra sections as mentiond above.

Now you know which features Thinkific has to change the look and feel of your Thinkific site to your whishes let’s see which options Thinkific has available to help sell your course.

Sell your online courses

When you created a course, the next step is selling it. Let’s check out the features Thinkific that can help you to generate sales for your online course.

Pre-sell your courses

Thinkific has the option to pre-sell your courses before you create them. With pre-seelling you can measure interest for you course before you start building.

To pre-sell your course in Thinkific you create a course, build a course landing page and set your Course Pre-sell Price. if a student buys your course you can send a welcome email with information about your course.

Checkout pages

In Thinkific you can choose of two checkout page processes

• Two page checkout
• One page checkout

Two page checkout

In the two page checkout option, the first page is for a student to create an account. On this page your student will fill out their first name, last name, email address, password and any custom fields you have created.  On he second page they will input their payment details and any coupon codes if applicable.

One page checkout

The one page checkout option is to streamline your checkout process and convert more visitors directly in students. All the checkout options are on the same checkout page.

If you sell multiple courses , than returning students can complete additional orders with a simplified checkout process.

Once a student purchases one of your courses he will be immediately taken to a default Thank You page where they can click to continue straight into your course content.

A student can only purchase one course at a time. If you want to sell more multiple courses as a course bundle you must be on Thinkific’s Pro plan.

Thinkific Membership site feature

Next to online courses you can also sell memberships from your Thinkific site. Memberships can generate a nice recurring revenue stream for your online business. Thinkific has limited membership options. These options are available from the pro plan and up.

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

Next to your course bundles you can also add private custom pages to your website that are only visible for students who are enrolled in your membership or subscription.

[Afbeelding bundle contents]

Thank you pages with upsells

If you want to earn more from one course sale you can add an After Purchase Flow in Thinkific. With the After Purchase Flow you can add a smart upsell section to a thank you page.

You can sell related products and bundles as upsell. Good upsell ideas are:

• A site wide subscription to all your courses for a monthly price
• Bundle related courses with a discount
• Additional non-course options. Let a student buy your course with an extra hour of consulting time.

Affiliate features in Thinkific

In Thinkific you can give any user within your account the option to promote your courses. Each affiliate has his own set of unique affiliate links that they can use to direct traffic to your Thinkific site.

Thinkific uses a cookie time of 30 days. This means your affiliate will be credited for any purchases that are made by a user they are associated with within 30 days.

The affiliate feature is built for tracking purposes only. You must payout your affiliates outside Thinkific.

Affiliates are a very powerful solution and can boost your online course sales by 30–50% (depending on the price of your product). If you were going to sell 100 courses on your own, by utilizing affiliate marketing you could increase your sales to 150 sales.

[Afbeelding affiliate]

Payment processing options

Thinkific has native integrations with Stripe and Paypal. Both integrations have one time payment options. If you want subscriptions and payment plan you’ll have to choose for Stripe.

A few other differences between Stripe and PayPal for Thinkific are:

• Checkout: With Stripe as payment process your students won’t be directed to an other url. If you have PayPal as payment method you’re users will be directed to the PayPal site to complete the purchase.
• Recurring subscription and payment plans: Are only available when you have Stripe as payment method. PayPal currently supports one time payments.
• Payouts: When a student buys your course with Stripe the revenue will transfer directlty to you bank account. With PayPal it is stored in your PayPal account.

If you prefer another payment gateway than Stripe or PayPal you could check if it’s supported by Zapier.

the Thinkific Shopify App

It is possible to connect your Shopify store to your Thinkific account so you can sell your Thinkific courses on your Shopify store. This is an easy way to add digital products to your physical stuff.

Once you connect Shopify and Thinkific and a student purchase one of your courses, the courses will be automatically fulfilled on the Thinkific account

Not everything in Thinkific is available to be sold via Shopify. At this moment you can only offer 1-time pay online courses. Subscriptions are not yet available.

Thinkific Reporting

As Thinkfic school owner you want to get insights in your students progress and results. Let’s dive in different reporting options for Thinkific.

Thinkfic Monitoring Dashboard

Your admin Dashboard gives you lot’s of information on the performance of your Thinkific school. In the dashboard you can see:

• Total site revenue: and you can zoom in specific periods.
• New accounts: The total number of users created on your site
• Enrollmenrs in your courses: The total number of students enrolled in your courses. If a student is enrolled in 2 courses, it will count for 1 account and 2 enrollments.

Student Progress Reports

In Thinkific you can use the student Progress Reports to gain insights on student activity in your courses and to see completion rates. You can view the progress student reports in Thinkific or export them to .CSV file.

Advanced reporting

IF you want to gain extra insights for your orders, revenue, student enrollments and engagement using Advanced Reporting you can use Advanced Reporting in Thinkific. This feature is available from the Pro + Growth plan and up.

The Advanced Reporting feature gives you deeper insights on your business so you can make better decisions. You can for instance analyze which  of your courses  is bringing in the most revenue, transactions from new students versus existing students, and lessons that have the highest completion rates!

Advanced Reporting includes four extra reports: Revenue, Orders, Enrollments and Student engagement.

Thinkific Integrations

Thinkific integrates with lot’s of 3d party software solutions so you can create your own customized online course system.

Thinkfic has standard integrations with:

• ActiveCampaign
• Aweber
• Brillium
• Constant Contact
• Convertkit
• EarlyParrot
• FaceBook Pixel
• Fomo
• Google Analytics
• Intercom
• Keap
• Mailchimp
• MiniOrange
• MixPanel
• PayPal
• SamCart
• Segment.io
• Stripe
• Stunning
• Sumo
• WordPress
• Zapier

Thinkific and Zapier

If the tools that you work with are not in Thinkifcs integration list you can use Zapier to connect Thinkific to your favorite tool.

There are two levels of integration to connect Thinkific to Zapier.

1. Level 1 – Triggers

These triggers are available on all Thinkific paid plans. You can use triggers to send information from your Thinkific site to another app. For instance Google sheets or HubSpot.

• Level 2 – Triggers and Actions

Triggers and Actions are available from the Pro + Growth plan. With Triggers and Actions you can send information into your Thinkific website and out to another platform.

[info box]Thinkific and Zapier
Zapier has a free plan where you can create 5 zaps and 100 tasks per mont to integrate Thinkfific and Zapier. If you want more complicated multi-step integrations, Zapier has a paid plan that starts at $19,99 per month when billed annully. You’ll get 20 zaps and 750 tasks that you can perform per month.
[/infobox]

Thinkific and WordPress

If you already have a WordPress website you can integrate Thinkific into your WordPress website. You can create online course landing pages in WordPress and link them to your Thinkific website. You can use the powers of WordPress for instance for blogging and layout your website and combine it with Thinkifics online course powers.

Thinkific 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 busininess 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 my solve the problem.

Afbeelding support mail

Thinkific Knowledge base

Thinkific has a very comprehensive help centre. Here you can find a Thinkific demo and lots of articles organized by topic.

If you have a question about Thinkific then chances are good that you’ll find your answers here. And if your answer is not on the support center website you can contact Thinkific support each day within business hours.

Thinkific Review Conclusion

It’s great giving my opinion on the different features and functions of the tool, and how they actually contribute when it comes to finding good keywords – but that’s not what you really want to know.

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

Let’s break it down.

• Intro:
  
  Voordelen
  Powerful quizzing features
• Assignments
• Voice-over Powerpoints
• Pricing no transaction fee

ook een paar nadelen

• Not that intuitive look and feel
• No blogging options on Thinkific
  
  Thinkific zeker een goede tool als jev

Thinkific 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 ThinkBoth 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 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 what is definitely a conversion booster for your online school. With Thinkific you can have customer reviews on your sales pages.

In summary if you compare Teachable vs Thinkific both tools are good platforms to create and sell online courses. It’s hard to choose a clear winner. The best thing if you have time is to create a free account on both platforms and look for yourself which tool you like the most and which of the two tools wins this batte.

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 flexibile online course platform that they can customize.

Also in pricing there are some differences between Teachable and Kajabi:

• Teachable offers a limited free plan, where Kajabi offers only paid plans.
• On all Teachable plans you can create and sell unlimited courses. (even the free plan). Kajabi has limits for how many courses you can create on each plan
• Teachable is primarily a course creation tool. Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that gives you everything you need to create and sell your online courses, marketing and to create your website.

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.

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 an WordPress LMS plugin that changes a WordPress website in a full blown online course plarform. There are lot’s 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 authoringtools 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.