Teachable Reviews: Make Unlimited Courses for Unlimited Students with Teachable

Making money with hobbies like writing, gardening, fitness, and art are often not in the cards. Teachable helps you put together a professional online course to teach people all about it. This Teachable review outlines one of the more impressive options for developing a beautiful website for presenting your courses, from video courses to PDF training.

We’ve taken a look Teachable’s main competitors: Udemy and Uscreen. Both of those mentioned have their pros and cons, but now it’s time to outline Teachable, another interesting company. Teachable has clean website interfaces, great customization tools, marketing options and analytics.

Teachable’s online course creation module provides hosting and security, along with all the learning tools you need, from quizzes to discussion forums and blogs to video courses. So keep reading to check out our detailed Teachable review and see if it’s the right online course builder for you.

Btw, I’ve done a video version of this Teachable review for you in case you want to hear my voice ?

Teachable Review: Table of Contents

What is Teachable

Let’s start simple, shall we?

Teachable is an online course platform for delivering learning or educational experiences. The idea is that the platform provides everything you need to teach other people your skills.

With a tool like teachable, course creators from various backgrounds can build an unlimited number of engaging courses, capturing the minds of students worldwide.

As an online course platform, Teachable is very simple to use. It comes with a back-end learning management system, the option to take payments from a range of tools, like PayPal, and more. Additionally, Teachable can even integrate with your existing website, or allow you to build your own website from scratch.

Who would love Teachable? Teachable is a fantastic service for professionals eager to sell their knowledge and experiences to other people in the marketplace. It could also suit businesses that want to train their employees, or entrepreneurs looking for an additional source of income.

Teachable Pros and Cons

Every online learning platform or course platform solution comes with it’s own benefits and negatives to consider. Making the decision of which tool you should use means thinking about the kind of features that are most essential to you.

Teachable Pros ?

• Easy to use interface that’s fantastic for beginners
• Customizable sales, thank you, and checkout pages
• Range of payment options (over 130) including Stripe and Paypal
• Multiple currency options
• Easy to use software
• Excellent and affordable pricing. There’s even a free plan
• Zapier allows you to create integrations with Teachable.com
• You can control your own pricing, with bundles and coupons
• Various pricing plans to choose from
• Option to host your own affiliate program
• Total control over enrollment

Teachable Cons ?

• Lacking some of the gamification and engagement features found elsewhere
• Limited community component for engaging with students
• Not much in the way of custom integrations
• Lack of support for importing various courses
• No multi-tenancy options for educational companies
• No way to record or document the education credits given to students
• Limited support for multilingual teaching
• Not ideal for selling memberships
• Limited support for digital products

Which Teachable Features Stand Out?

Taking a look at the current user designs, it’s clear that Teachable is doing something right in terms of its website builder. In addition to that, the pricing looks pretty solid. So what are some of the main features you can look forward to?

Upload All Sorts of Files

Teachable supports the majority of files you need for a respectable online course. This includes video, image, audio, text, and PDFs. On Teachable, you can pull your content from a wide variety of sources like Google Drive or Dropbox, syncing up your storage spots with the website.

Teachable’s Drag and Drop Builder

Drag and drop builders are getting better and better, and if you look at the user designs from Teachable it’s clear they’ve done a good job in that area. Not every Teachable user has tons of knowledge in web development, and that’s kind of the point.

You can move around courses, organize pricing packages, drop text and imagery on the homepage, and quickly develop sales pages (which we’ll talk about below).

Along with uploading from cloud services, you have the option to upload media and lecture files (like audio and PDFs) directly from your computer.

What’s also interesting is that you can work with your existing website to add the course pages on there. Or, you can start a completely new website with a unique domain name by starting from scratch on Teachable.

Advanced edits

One of the advantages of Teachable is that you don’t need to be a coder or developer to make and sell courses online. It allows you to start with a template, upload your content, and start making money as long as your courses are good enough.

However, it makes sense that some individuals and organizations may want to customization the Teachable interface even further. This would allow you to move around more advanced elements like button placement, image size, and the overall branding of your website.

Teachable has something called a Power Editor, which gives more advanced users the opportunity to tap into the code and make those customizations if needed.

Teachable Review: Responsiveness for Viewing on All Devices

This ties into the design aspect of Teachable. In short, Google wants to make sure that your website is visible and user-friendly for all devices, from desktop computers to smaller smartphones and tablets. Therefore, you want to ensure that the text and media are viewable on these devices without any problems.

Luckily, your Teachable content all snaps into place based on the device detected. So, if your student is viewing your lectures on a phone, they can see everything in the right dimensions. The same can be said for computers and tablets.

Sales Pages

Landing pages are often crucial for selling courses. You design the sales pages, then buy some ads linking to them on Facebook and Google. Customers are more likely to buy from sales pages, and you don’t confuse people by sending them to the standard homepage.

In Teachable, sales pages are provided for you. All of the templates are tested to improve your conversions, so all you have to do is go in there and customize the template to fit your own brand and courses.

What’s also cool is that these sales pages (and all of the pages on your site) can be converted into a wide variety of languages. This way, international customers have the chance to look at your courses and potentially sign up. It’s not a guarantee that these folks will be able to understand your videos, but the text-based translations would allow you to open up your business to people all over the world.

Learning and Community Tools Like Forums, Blogs, and Quizzes

The quizzes are there to provide more content for your users. I haven’t ever taken a course online where I haven’t been excited to test my knowledge at the end. Teachable also offers a forum and blog for your website, turning it into more of a community than anything. If you nurture this community you’re more likely to get some VIP customers who recommend you to other people.

Finally, some of the Teachable plans provide course completion certificates. This contributes to the feeling of community and gives students a sense of achievement when they finish one of your courses. You can do this for all of your courses or just a few of them. It allows you to customize each of the certificates and add your own personal flair to each one.

Impressive Marketing Features from Teachable

You don’t always see marketing features with online course creation platforms. However, Teachable has coupons, promotions, affiliate programs, email marketing and much more.

You can also play around with advanced pricing options, with alternatives like payment plans, bundled courses, and subscriptions.

Teachable Reviews: Student Management

One of the trickier parts of running an online course is managing students, making sure they take the courses, and giving them the support they need.

One way to do this is with the student feedback module in Teachable. Basically, it lets you create items like surveys, Google Forms, and other feedback tools to get information from the students and see what they dislike or what they’d like to see in the future.

Teachable‘s support integrations help out with student management as well. Through Zapier you can link to tools like Zendesk and Olark, bringing you all sorts of options for collecting customer information and remembering past conversations that you have had with certain students.

Finally, student list segmentation is provided to improve on your marketing and student-relationships. In short, the segmentation module has options for sending out targeted emails based on certain criteria. For instance, you may send out a welcome email when a student enrolls in your course. Or, you might think about having a code redemption for those students who haven’t purchased one of your courses in a long time.

Teachable Review: Pricing

One of the coolest parts of Teachable is that you don’t have to go out to find and pay for your own hosting. It’s all included in the pricing package, which is nice for keeping your site up at all times and fast for users.

However, the best part is the number of students and courses supported by Teachable. It seems like more often than not I stumble upon similar services that have maximums for students and courses until you pay more money. That’s NOT the case with Teachable–since you can have unlimited students and courses for all plans.

As for the pricing, here’s what Teachable offers:

• Free – $0 for unlimited courses and limited to 10 students. That said, you have to pay a $1 + 10% transaction fee for all of your paid courses.
• Basic – $29 per month paid anually ($39 per month paid monthly) for all base features, 5% transaction fees, instant payouts, two admin users, product support, course creator training, custom domain support, coupon codes, drip course content, integrated affiliate marketing, integrated email marketing, and third-party integrations.
• Professional – $99 per month paid anually ($119 per month paid monthly) for everything in the Basic plan, instant payouts, five admin users, priority product support, graded quizzes, advanced theme customization, advanced reports, Teachable branding removed, and course completion certificates.
• Business – $249 per month paid anually ($299 per month paid monthly) for everything in the previous two plans, no transaction fees, instant payouts, 100 admin users, priority product support, manual student importing, bulk student enrollments, custom user roles.

The reason I like this pricing plan set up so much is because it allows you to test out your courses with the Basic Plan. The 5% transaction fees aren’t ideal, but you still get 95% of whatever comes in for the courses.

Recently, instant payouts have been added to all of the plans, so you get your money upfront without having to wait for a few weeks or a month.

Basic features:

We mentioned that all base features are included in the Basic plan, so it makes sense to outline what some of those features are:

• • No fees when you give away courses for free.
  • Basic quizzes to test your students.
  • Discussion forums for building a community around your courses on Teachable.
  • Student management tools.

• An integrated payment processing system to collect all payments securely.
• Teachable offers nlimited hosting, students, courses, and video.

A few final notes on pricing:

During my Teachable review, I noticed that Teachable doesn’t charge any setup fees or cancellation fees. This means that the only thing you have to pay for is the monthly plan and whatever transaction fees you might be incurring. You should also remember that there are always going to additional transaction fees for payment processing, and this all depends on which option you go with.

There isn’t a free trial, but you can configure an account and play around with the Teachable backend for as long as you want. In my eyes, this is much better than a free trial, since it allows you to build your course website and understand how it’s going to function before launching. Teachable then starts charging your credit card once you launch the site.

Finally, the pricing plans listed above are based on annual payments. So, you must pay for a year in advance to get that special pricing. Paying month-to-month for Teachable means that your monthly pricing will increase. For instance, the Basic plan goes up to $39 per month if you don’t pay for a year in advance.

Teachable Review: Customer Support

As you may have noticed in the pricing plan area, each plan has product support. The Professional and High Volume Plans offer priority product support, so I’m assuming you get bumped to the front of the line when contacting the company.

As for the means of contact, Teachable offers a live chat on the website along with a ticketing system for you to submit your questions. However, they route you through the knowledge base before you send them a message.

Teachable also has a wonderful blog with tips and tricks, weekly live workshops for even more learning and an online academy filled with tutorials and courses similar to the ones you’re trying to make and sell!

Overall, Teachable‘s support options look great. It’d be nice to see some phone support, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards right now.

Teachable Review: Payment Options

One particularly positive feature of Teachable, is that it allows you to control a lot of your own payment solutions. That means that you’re free to decide how you’re going to accept the cash for your courses, as well as what currency it comes in.

You can choose from a range of currencies for your courses, and accept payments from more than 130 payment solutions too. Additionally, one particularly beneficial aspect of Teachable is that you can create discount codes and coupons for students. There are even affiliate codes so that you can work with other people to promote your system for online education.

Aside from basic digital options like Stripe and PayPal, Teachable also supports advanced options like Visa and Mastercard. You can also set up subscriptions, payment plans, one one-time payments, depending on how you want to provide your services.

If you use the Free or Basic plan for Teachable, however, you will need to wait to access the money you earn on a once monthly basis. This can be problematic for people who are trying to survive in a competitive market and need access to money straight away.

Teachable Review: Integrations

Teachable is great in its own right. However, just like WordPress, there’s always a chance that you might want to add extra functionality to your course creation solution. That’s where integrations come in. The platform comes with a range of integration options to help you out.

As mentioned above, you can create your own custom integrations using a tool like Zapier. That’s a great option for a lot of people who want to design very specific connections with their favorite tools. You can even access marketing tools and link to alternative membership sites. There’s also the option to access Vizia with Teachable, so you can add various forms of engagement to your courses.

For instance, Vizia will help you to implement things like quizzes, calls to action in your videos, polls, and so much more. On top of that, there’s also support for webhooks, and more significant third-party integrations with tools like:

• Mailchimp
• Convertkit
• Sumo
• Gmail
• Salesforce

Teachable Review: Reporting

The only way to make sure that you’re getting the best return on investment from your online course, is to measure some metrics. Just like with an eCommerce site, accessing reporting tools will tell you whether your sales strategies are actually delivering results.

The course reporting tools for Teachable come with much of the same ease of use that you would expect to see elsewhere on the platform. However, you can only access reporting if you’re using the Professional plan and up. There’s no access to reporting on the free or basic plan options.

If you’re on the right plan, you can find reports on everything from your course sales to memberships and video stats on the View all part of the admin side-bar. You can click Reports to go through to reports for Quiz scores, video engagement, leaderboards, and so much more.

There’s also a lecture completion report that allows you to see how much progress your students are making with your course business.

What are the Best Teachable Alternatives?

Teachable has a lot of value to offer, providing state-of-the-art features in an easy to use platform. You can integrate with your email service, create your own plugins with Zapier, and more. However, Teachable is also lacking in some areas too. You can’t always import a new course from another environment, and the community aspects are limited. Because of this, you might decide that you prefer an alternative.

If Teachable isn’t right for you, then you can find some nice features on some of the following alternatives.

Thinkific

Thinkific is a fantastic service with a high level of popularity in the current market. Using Thinkific allows you to join more than 6000 other business leaders running their own online courses. A great thing about Thinkific is how easy it is to showcase your unique brand and connect with your target audience thanks to advanced tools.

Thinkific helps to handle all stages of the customer journey for you, from the initial point where your customer arrives on a landing page in your subdomain, to the upsells and cross-sells for further course content. On top of that, with Thinkific, you get access to the money that you earn immediately, so there’s no waiting around for cash to land in your bank account.

Pros

• Handles all stages of the customer journey
• Excellent customer support
• Incredibly easy to use
• Flat-rate monthly subscription fee
• Instant access to payments
• Lots of support for customization to suit your brand
• Various payment processing options
• Free plan available

Cons

• Can only upload videos of a certain size and file type
• Not all students will have access to courses in their own currency
• Built-in discussion forum isn’t the best to use
• Course developers can’t copy and paste quizzes
• Reporting isn’t ideal

Udemy

Udemy is a very popular way to sell courses online if you don’t want to mess around with things like CSS and HTML. This platform takes a unique approach to selling online courses, giving you access to everything that you might need to grow, including a host of fantastic tools for marketing your course on a wide platform.

The great thing about Udemy is that you’re instantly publishing your course in an environment that’s full of people interested in what you have to say. On the downside, you won’t have anywhere near as much control over things like customization and branding. You don’t create your own website or subdomain with Udemy. Instead, you just place your course on their marketplace. Additionally, if customers arrive on your course thanks to Udemy’s marketing, then you only get 50% of the profits.

Pros

• Instant access to a vast community of students to sell your courses too
• SEO-friendly course building solution
• Easy to use with practically no background knowledge need
• Pretty good customer support
• FAQ section for self-learning
• Easy to offer both offline and mobile access to courses

Cons

• Can be very difficult to make a significant income
• No control over your course prices
• No subdomain or website
• Difficult to add your own branding to anything

Podia

Podia is another fantastic platform for course creators that are keen to share their work online and educate the masses. With Podia, you can sell online memberships, digital downloads, and courses as much as you like. What’s more, there are plenty of customization options to help you create the perfect storefront.

If you’re looking for a service that has everything you need to build and publish a sensational online education environment, then Podia is a good choice. You can even integrate with social media, send email marketing campaigns, and process payments securely too. Additionally, if you’re already using another platform to host your online course and you decide that you want to switch to Podia, the company will manage the migration for you.

Podia comes with a range of different pricing packages to choose from, so you’re sure to find something that’s suitable for your budget. However, you might find that Podia is lacking when it comes to things like reporting.

Pros

• Great customer support
• Very easy to set up and use
• New features are constantly being added
• No restrictions on your content
• Invoicing and VAT support
• You can make your own URL
• Live webinars to help you get started
• You own your data and customer list
• You can access your earnings on a daily basis

Cons

• Not always easy to personalize email marketing strategies
• Only able to accept payments via Stripe
• No built-in analytics support
• Editor is pretty basic

Academy of Mine

Finally, Academy of Mine is another fantastic online education solution that can be mentioned in Teachable reviews. If you’re looking for something that provides a powerful LMS, complete with a range of back-end tools to manage your courses, this could be it. Academy of Mine makes life easy by providing all the tools you need to edit and promote your content.

With this service, you can manage all of your solutions with ease, organizing quizzes and assignments to suit your students, so that everyone can stay connected. There’s also the option to access payments from a range of platforms too. You can use ecommerce tools like PayPal, or just accept credit cards instead. Academy of Mine even benefits from being SEO friendly, so you can work on ranking higher in the search results.

Pros

• Easy to insert custom components within your courses
• Straightforward to manage your course on the back-end.
• Easy to navigate your student community
• eCommerce functionality built-in
• Packaging options for those who want to bundle courses
• Coupons available to encourage sales
• Plenty of great support
• Access to certificates to reward students
• Transparent paid subscription prices

Cons

• Limited knowledgebase
• Can take a while to get to grips with the interface
• Not as many marketing options as other tools

FAQ

Is Teachable suitable for beginners?

Teachable is definitely a worthwhile consideration for beginners. It can host a wide range of course types to suit your needs. Additionally, the interface is very simple to get accustomed to. Once you’ve spent an hour or two on the back-end, you’ll feel totally comfortable. What’s more, because Teachable offers excellent support, if you do have any issues with using the tools, then you can always reach out to the team.

Can I use Teachable for free?

There is a free plan available for Teachable. The freebie is one of the more generous options on the market provided by an online course platform. This free plan comes with unlimited hosting, online courses, videos and access to student information. However, there are downsides to the free account too. You don’t get access to any reporting features, which means that you can’t optimize your online course. Additionally, the transaction fees are quite high, measuring in at 10% and $1 for every course you sell.

Is Thinkific better than Teachable?

Both Thinkific and Teachable are very popular choices for online learning platforms. However, it’s difficult to say for certain whether one is better than the other, as each has benefits in its own right. Thinkific has better tools for customization if you want to show off your brand. Additionally, Thinkific excels when it comes to designing your site and making it stand out. Alternatively, Teachable provides a slightly better alternative to Thinkific if you’re looking for sales and marketing features.

Can I create my own website using Teachable?

It is possible to create your own website using Teachable. However, you might not be able to create the same kind of fully-featured website that you would create with something like WordPress. You can’t sell things like digital downloads and memberships without using workaround integrations, for instance.

Who Should Consider Teachable as a Way to Make Money Online?

Teachable is great for YouTubers, bloggers, publishers, niche experts, authors, and much more. My Teachable review revealed that as long as you have some sort of skill you can sell courses teaching that skill on Teachable.

You can test out Teachable without punching in any payment information, so that’s cool for people who are planning on making courses. However, there’s no reason to pay for a Teachable plan until you have some of your courses made.

Once you make a course, the sky’s the limit. I’d recommend trying to get out of Teachable’s Basic Plan as soon as possible since you can take advantage of the zero transaction fees.

Any type of course can go on Teachable. For example, Teachable supports everything from YouTubers to authors and artists to web designers.

If you have any questions about this Teachable review, let us know in the comments below.

These are the top 3 online course sites:

And, there’s a LIVE webinar called 7 steps to launch your own profitable online course that will explain lots more, I would definitely sign up on this one!

Teachable

Rating:

5.0

– Review by

Joe Warnimont.