Teachable Review 2024: Features, Pros and Cons

If you’re a professional looking to monetize your expertise by offering online courses, an online course platform can be your best ally. 

These platforms assist with hosting, creating online portals, designing websites, and setting up payment systems to streamline the process for your students.

Teachable stands out as one of the best online course platform, boasting over 100,000 creators who have collectively earned over a billion dollars. 

Users appreciate Teachable for its user-friendly interface, design flexibility, robust analytics, seamless integrations, and suitability for memberships, courses, and coaching.

In this review, we’ll explore Teachable’s features, course creation process, pros, cons, and pricing.

Let’s get started.

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What is Teachable?

Teachable is a user-friendly online course platform designed to help you create and sell online courses, memberships, and coaching services. 

It offers an intuitive admin interface, making course creation straightforward and manageable.

With Teachable, you have full control over your branding and the management of your online school. 

The platform allows you to design a professional-looking website with various pages, such as sales pages, course pages, and checkout pages. 

Thanks to its drag-and-drop editor, you don’t need any technical skills to organize your course content and page elements.

Teachable also provides a sub-domain for your site where users can easily log in and access their courses. If you prefer, you can connect your own custom domain as well.

For course creation, Teachable offers unlimited hosting for videos and other content formats with high bandwidth. 

You can upload course materials from third-party tools, add quizzes, set up content dripping, and issue certifications.

Additionally, Teachable includes numerous features for adjusting pricing models, marketing your courses, and integrating with third-party tools. 

We’ll explore these features in detail below.

Who is Teachable Best For?

Before we dive into its features, let’s first understand who Teachable online course platform is best suited for.

Teachable is ideal for beginner course creators seeking an affordable starting point with unlimited content hosting. 

Its free plan is particularly attractive to those just starting out, as it allows you to host and sell unlimited courses without a significant upfront investment.

While Teachable’s basic plans may lack some advanced features, they provide a solid foundation for hosting and selling your courses. 

As your student base grows and your earnings increase, you can easily upgrade to higher-tier plans that offer more advanced features.

Additionally, Teachable supports the creation of coaching services. If you plan to offer one-on-one coaching to your clients, Teachable is a great choice.

One of Teachable’s standout features is its sleek design. The platform offers attractive page templates and elements that enhance the overall user experience on your Teachable website.

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Teachable Features

Let’s take a closer look at some of the standout features of Teachable.

1. Free Plan

Teachable’s free plan is a significant draw for new users, offering a comprehensive online teaching platform without many of the limitations found in other tools. 

With the free plan, you can create unlimited courses and host unlimited videos, setting your own pricing and enrolling unlimited students. 

Additional features include email support, PayPal and Stripe payment integration, design templates, basic quizzes, and student management. 

Teachable charges a 10% fee on each transaction, which is a reasonable trade-off for the extensive features offered.

2. User-friendly Interface

Teachable boasts a straightforward admin area, making navigation and course management intuitive. 

The neatly organized menu allows you to easily create and publish courses, design landing pages, manage teachers and students, set pricing and refunds, and analyze performance. 

Quick links on the dashboard facilitate important tasks such as course creation, page design, and domain setup. 

The course creator interface simplifies the process, guiding you from adding a course title and sections to uploading content, setting prices, and publishing.

3. Unlimited Videos and Course Hosting

Teachable excels in hosting high-quality, lengthy videos, even on the free plan, with no limit on storage space. However, individual files should be under 2 GB. 

Supported video formats include .mp4, .mov, and .avi, with recommended resolutions of 4k or 1080p and frame rates of 24 to 30 fps. 

In addition to videos, you can host various content types like audio, text, PDFs, quizzes, and images, allowing for diverse course materials. Teachable also supports webinars and live streams via Zapier integration.

4. Course Pricing Flexibility

Teachable offers flexible pricing models for courses and coaching services:

• Free: Offer courses or coaching services at no cost, with optional limited access duration.
• One-time Purchase: Charge a single payment for access.
• Subscription: Charge recurring payments, with an option to offer a free trial.
• Payment Plans: Set up monthly payments over a specified period.

You can also offer multiple payment plans for each course.

5. Design and Customization

Teachable provides extensive design and customization options to establish your brand identity. You can set themes, upload logos, and choose global fonts and colors for various site elements. 

The platform offers pre-made content blocks such as banners, videos, images, course curriculum, and custom HTML, which can be added to pages using a drag-and-drop editor. Additionally, you can create multiple sub-domains for your site and connect a custom domain (available on paid plans) for a more professional look.

6. Integration

Teachable supports integrations with various third-party tools to enhance functionality. 

Available integrations include:

• Circle.so
• Google Analytics
• Facebook Pixel
• Mailchimp
• ConvertKit
• Sumo
• Segment
• Zapier

Teachable also allows for additional integrations via Webhooks.

7. In-depth Analytics

Teachable’s comprehensive dashboard provides detailed analytics, helping you track potential customers, enrolled students, student progress, and revenue. 

Integration with Google Analytics offers insights into visitor demographics, behavior, and site engagement. 

Teachable’s advanced tracking and reporting features allow you to monitor student engagement, course completion rates, and quiz/assignment performance. Pro and Business plan users can also set up and track affiliate programs.

8. Coaching Services

Teachable enables you to offer and manage coaching services, allowing for scheduled meetings, messages, and video calls with clients. 

You can enroll clients directly, through an intake form, or with your approval after reviewing their forms. 

Pricing for coaching services can be set as a one-time fee, subscription, or payment plan, and you can offer free trials or services if desired. 

The coaching product includes “Milestones” to schedule various client interactions effectively.

By combining robust features, user-friendly design, and flexible pricing, Teachable provides an excellent platform for creating, managing, and monetizing online courses and coaching services.

Teachable Pricing

Teachable offers a range of pricing plans from $0 to $249 per month on an annual plan, catering to both beginners and advanced users. 

As a freemium tool, Teachable provides a free version with substantial features, including unlimited courses, unlimited video hosting, quizzes, and design templates. However, the free plan incurs a transaction fee of 10% + $1 for each course sold.

To avoid transaction fees and access more advanced features, you can choose from Teachable’s paid plans. 

Each successive plan offers enhanced functionality to better support your online school’s growth and needs. Here’s a brief overview of the Teachable paid plans:

• Free: $0 | $1 + 10% transaction fee | 1 admin
• Basic: $29/month | 5% transaction fee | 2 admins
• Pro: $99/month | No transaction fee | 5 admins#
• Business: $249/month | No transaction fee | 20 admins

Each plan progressively unlocks more features and reduces transaction costs, allowing you to scale your online teaching business effectively.

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Teachable Pros and Cons

Let’s examine the pros and cons of using Teachable.

Pros

• Feature-rich free plan: The free plan includes robust features like unlimited courses and video hosting.
• Unlimited free courses: Create and host as many courses as you want without additional costs.
• Clean user interface: Easy-to-navigate and user-friendly admin area.
• Drag-and-drop editor: Simplifies the process of designing and organizing your course content.
• Affiliate tracking and payouts: Built-in tools for managing affiliates and automating payouts.
• In-depth analytics: Comprehensive analytics with integrated tools and Google Analytics support.
• Advanced integrations: Supports APIs, integrations, and webhooks for enhanced functionality.

Cons

• Higher transaction fees: Up to 10% + $1 per transaction on the free plan.
• Limited mobile app: Available only for iOS devices.
• Limited multi-lingual support: Not ideal for courses in multiple languages.
• Fewer email marketing integrations: Limited options for integrating with email marketing software.
• Student experience: The user experience for students can be improved for better engagement.

How to Create an Online Course with Teachable

Now that you have a good understanding of Teachable’s capabilities, let’s walk through the steps to create an example course. 

This guide will focus on using the free version, so there’s no need to spend any money upfront. Teachable makes it easy to build an entire website without any coding or technical knowledge. 

Let’s get started.

Sign Up for Teachable

Visit Teachable’s Website:

Go to the Teachable homepage and click on “Pricing” to view the available plans.

Select the Free Plan:

Scroll down to the available packages and select the free plan by clicking on the “Select Plan” button.

Create Your Account:

Enter your name, email, and create a password. Agree to the terms and conditions, then click “Create Account.”

Set Up Your School:

Enter the name of your school, which will also serve as your sub-domain.

Provide some information about your experience and business. This step is necessary before accessing the admin dashboard.

Access Your Dashboard:

Your dashboard will appear, featuring various menu options on the left sidebar for creating courses, designing landing pages, setting up marketing, and more. The center panel shows your website’s domain and a shortcut to create a product.

Create a Course

Start Creating:

• Click on the shortcut in the dashboard’s center or on “Courses” in the left sidebar.
• If using the sidebar, click on the “New Course” button on the next screen.

Enter Course Information:

• Fill in the course title, subtitle, and select the author (note that adding team members requires a paid plan).
• Click “Create Course” to proceed.

Add Sections and Lectures:

Courses on Teachable are divided into sections (main topics) and lectures (sub-topics).

• Edit the default section and lecture or add new ones by clicking on “New Section” and “Add New Lecture” respectively.
• Use the drag-and-drop feature to rearrange sections and lectures as needed.

Add Course Content:

• Click on a lecture’s name to add content such as videos, text, quizzes, and files.
• Upload files from your local device, Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. You can also drag and drop files directly.
• Add thumbnails, subtitles, and additional content types as needed.
• Preview or publish the content using the respective buttons.

Use Lecture Options:

• Utilize options like duplicating lectures, making them downloadable, enabling free previews, and publishing/unpublishing lectures.

Add Pricing:

• Click “Add a Price” at the bottom of the course builder.
• Choose a pricing model (free, one-time purchase, payment plan, or subscription) and fill in the required details.
• Add additional pricing plans for the same course if needed.

Publish the Course:

• Go to “Information” from the course builder menu.
• Upload a course image and review the course details.
• Click the “Publish Course” button to make it live.
• Customize and Optimize

After publishing, you can further customize the appearance of your course player by adjusting the layout, colors, and fonts.

Explore the dashboard to enhance your online course portal. Customize your domain name, upload branding images, change colors and typography, and create landing pages.

These steps provide a basic guide to creating and publishing a course on Teachable. With this foundation, you can explore Teachable’s extensive features to create a polished and professional online learning experience.

Teachable Alternatives

While Teachable is a great solution for creating online courses, it’s not the only option available. 

There are several other platforms that enable you to establish online schools, membership portals, and teaching hubs. 

These alternatives may offer different features, ease of use, pricing, and support compared to Teachable.

Let’s explore some popular competitors of Teachable:

1. LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds is an advanced platform designed for creating, marketing, and selling online courses. 

It offers a robust set of features aimed at providing an engaging and interactive learning experience. 

This includes customizable course players, interactive videos, assessments, and eBooks.

• Rich Interactivity: LearnWorlds stands out with its focus on creating interactive and engaging content, including interactive videos and customizable course player themes.
• Comprehensive Analytics: It provides detailed analytics and reporting tools to track learner progress and course performance.
• Flexible Pricing: LearnWorlds offers multiple pricing plans with different levels of features and support, starting with a free trial and scaling up to more advanced packages.

2. Thinkific

Thinkific is a user-friendly LMS platform designed for creating, publishing, and selling online courses seamlessly. 

It offers a wide range of features including drip content, quizzes, coupons, promotions, affiliates, user and team management, various payment methods, and third-party tool integrations.

• Free Plan: Thinkific offers a free plan, though it is limited to one course.
• No Transaction Fees: Unlike Teachable, Thinkific does not charge transaction fees on any plan.

3. Kajabi

Kajabi is a comprehensive tool for creating a full-fledged online portal that includes not only online courses but also coaching, memberships, podcasts, and communities. 

It offers an all-in-one solution for building a digital product platform, complete with websites, landing pages, marketing pipelines, analytics, email automation, upsells, and more.

• No Free Plan: Kajabi does not offer a free plan, but provides a 14-day free trial, with an extended 30-day trial available through certain links.
• Higher Pricing: Kajabi’s plans are more expensive than Teachable, but it offers a plethora of advanced features.

4. Podia

Podia focuses on creating a digital store to sell courses, webinars, digital downloads, and community access. 

It includes features like a custom domain, email marketing, live chat widget, affiliate programs, bundles, Zapier integration, branding options, and custom coding capabilities.

• No Free Plan: Podia does not have a free plan but offers a 14-day trial period.
• Affordable Pricing: Podia’s starting plan is quite affordable compared to some other platforms.

Each of these platforms has its own strengths and weaknesses, making it important to evaluate your specific needs and preferences when choosing the right one for your online teaching business.

Final Thoughts

In summary, Teachable is an excellent choice for absolute beginners who want to create and launch their first online courses with minimal expenditure. 

The platform offers a user-friendly interface and a comprehensive set of built-in features for uploading courses, creating landing pages, email marketing, affiliation, handling payments, and refunds, all within an intuitive dashboard that eliminates technical hassles.

Teachable’s standout features include its clean interface, ease of use, free plan, unlimited video hosting, unlimited products, and seamless integrations. 

These elements make it a compelling option for newcomers to the online course creation space.

If you’re considering other options, LearnWorlds is another platform worth exploring. It provides advanced features focused on creating interactive and engaging content, making it a strong contender for those seeking a more dynamic and customizable learning experience.

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