Teachable

Pros

Teachable makes it easy to put your online course(s) up for sale without having to worry about separate video hosting or payment processing. You also don't have to worry about managing customer logins to your own website for security since all that happens on Teachable's system. It's easy to upload content and create your curriculum, and it's nice that you can start with a pre-made template for sales pages and checkout pages, rather than having to create all that from scratch.

Cons

If you're not making many sales, it can be hard to justify the ongoing monthly expense. The login system is surprisingly frustrating and confusing, especially if students have enrolled in previous courses or if you yourself have enrolled in other Teachable-hosted courses. At one point I had 10+ logins, but I've slowly been able to consolidate those under one master account.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

I bought it at the beginning of the pandemic in spring of 2020. At the time it was best in class.

Cons

The aesthetics, after so many years, for there to be no improvement here, I find unforgivable.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

Nice looking and quite simple to use for the basic stuff

Cons

Customer Support wasn't able to help most of the times I contacted them

Pros

It was affordable and has adequate features to train people.

Cons

They have horrible customer support. i have never been able to get into a music course that I purchased from them. I am currently unable to access another course I have purchased and a week and no response. I am disgusted by them.

Pros

Teachable has user-friendly interface and intuitive course creation process. This allows me to easily organize and structure my content, add multimedia elements like videos and quizzes, and customize my course's branding and design. This ease-of-use can be particularly beneficial for individuals who may not have technical expertise or experience with online course creation.Another aspect that I appreciate is Teachable's marketing and sales features. With tools like coupon codes, affiliate programs, and upselling options, I can promote and sell my courses directly through the Teachable platform. Additionally, the platform integrates with email marketing services like Mailchimp, making it easier for course creators to communicate with their students and potential customers.

Cons

Teachable is expensive for me, and it will be especially expensive for users with large student bases or multiple courses. While Teachable offers a free plan with limited features, users need to upgrade to a paid plan to access more advanced features such as graded quizzes, custom domain names, and more detailed analytics.Another issue that I have is that Teachable's built-in website builder can be somewhat limited in terms of design customization. While I can add my branding and customize some elements of my course website, I unable to make more extensive design changes without the assistance of a developer.

Pros

Seemed easy to set up and discount. Many competitors were more expensive. in 2020 there weren't many similar platforms.

Cons

Raising cost and removal of features from plans. Customer support became rare. AfterI downgraded from Pro to Basic, I lost access to the "Founders" community which was the best part of Teachable, as you feel very supported by other founders.

Pros

Our team started using this tool as our primary learning management platform during Covid. We work across multiple school sites, the csv learner upload worked well for us in making the quick transition to fully remote. The platform is relatively straightforward to build within but leaves much to be desired for customization and accessibility.

Cons

The lack of customization and the limits within the account types constrained our team and ultimately led us and several of our partners to switch to Articulate 360 and Searchie.

Pros

It is easy to set up online courses. the templates and editing platform are easy to use.

Cons

Although Teachable is a no-payment platform, they make their money when you sell a course. The payment can take weeks to reach my bank account.

Pros

The user interface and ability to track students on ever level.

Cons

How much the charge for enrolled students, per month - even if the students aren't actively taking a course.

Pros

Ease-of functionality at first...it appeared to address our marketing plan

Cons

Were not able to save work-in-progress...then, the surprise! Lost hours of work.

Pros

I love that they allowed me a free account while I created course content.

Cons

I only left to move to a platform with both CMS and LMS. BIG mistake.

Pros

Teachable has been an absolute life-saver for me. As a business coach, I needed a platform that could help me create and sell online courses quickly and easily. Teachable has done just that! It's incredibly simple to use and has allowed me to make money teaching my skills in no time. Teachable is the ultimate platform for creating and selling online courses - highly recommended!

Cons

I am unable to identify any negative aspects at this time.

Pros

For starters, it is great that you can creaet a course and put it on Teachable for free to test drive the platform and see if it will be a good fit for you and your students. I like that the platform is easy to use, customizable, NOT CLUNKY, and is professional looking.

Cons

The pricing might be a bit much if you're just starting out as a course creator and aren't sure if you're course is going to sell out the way you want it to. Other than that, there really isn't anything bad I can say about Teachable. They've done a great job creating a platform that makes it easy for anyone to sell a course they've created.

Pros

You can change the colour scheme to for your brand.
There is a white label option to ensure all branding is yours and only yours.
You can use your own domain.
Video hosting is done directly on Teachable, so no need to figure out embedding etc from other sites.
You can add quizzes and tests to your online courses.
You can add resources and PDFs for your students.
It's possible to add add-ons for additional income on courses, and also bundle courses together.
They offer many free courses and resources to help the budding online teacher.

Cons

There is no middle ground between the starter plan and next plan - it's expensive for the starter plan compared to other course platform options with hardly any of the perks the others offer.
The promise of being able to fully customise your school is negated by the very real fact that you HAVE to be able to 'code' to do so, taking away from the ease of use.
The quizzes available are restricted to multiple choice or true and false - students aren't able to upload assignments and there is also no room for free flow questions.

Pros

Easy to set up, very reasonably priced and great tutorials and advice for marketing your courses. If you have online curriculum you'd like to share with the world, this is a very seamless process.

Cons

Unable to add HTML features within the curriculum itself. They do not do any marketing (like Udemy), whereas they would market globally and the school owner would get a smaller percentage of the sales. I think this is good for reaching a larger audience.

Pros

- Great UI and UX.
- Unlike WordPress, you don't have to plug-in several puzzles together to get the system working. Works fine out of the box.
- For those looking for more, they have provided ways to integrate with 3rd party applications.
- Teachable does all the heavy lifting by itself allowing you to focus on creating your course.

Cons

Pricing. They may want to look into an alternative pricing structure for teachers interested in few courses with limited no of students. As of now, someone with 100 courses and 10,000 students will pay the same fees as with some one with 5 courses and 500 students.

Pros

Teachable is good both for the schools (authors) and students. The platforms has everytyng you need to run your online video course. Very cheap, all content is protected, multiple integrations and options allow easely scale the school.

Cons

Visual editor for creating the pages could have more blocks for sophisticated designs. Payout options may a problem for subscribers from outside the USA.

Pros

Easy to use. A simple framework to set up a complete curriculum. Fine sales pages and features to give students access by drip function. So they have to work their way through before accessing the whole course.

One can also make a great Curriculum framework and reuse for the next and the next. By the function og duplicating a whole course.

Cons

The inflexibility to make the page look and design in a way that fit the needs for ones own creativity is limited. Also the integrations with other software, landingpages, Eventbrite, Facebook is quite lowkey and can need an upgrade soon.
There is very few options for making the page look great in the GUI. But one can use own html to code if so desired.

Pros

Have a couple of trainings hosted on Teachable and have found it to be great software. Easy to set up and pretty flexible. I like that it's hosted, meaning I don't have the pressure of worrying with the security and uptime of using my own host.

Cons

Wish the first level had more features, like being able to integrate with Zapier in the way that I need it to, which is automatically adding people who buy via my shopping cart.

Pros

Good structure to course, nice layout. Good analytics. We have not launched our course yet but have been using it to set up for the past month.

Cons

Video uploads take forever. Like 10 times what it take to upload to Youtube. One video of 150 MB can take 1.5-2 hours to upload on extremely high speed internet. (17mb per sec download speed).

We have talked to support and they say if our videos are over 500MB then it can take a long time. And if your computer falls asleep it will stop...or it can just stop anyways and you have to start to whole process over again. The bulk uploader is a joke. If you want to upload 10 video plan on staying on your computer for 15 hours.

The only reason we have stuck with it is that once you invest 100 hours you hate to throw it away. Also, thinkific doesn't have great analytics, so we feel there is no better option at the moment. If only Google would create good platform.

Pros

It has a free plan and you can test most of significant features of the application

Cons

So important some of features are closed in free plan

Pros

Teachable has so much functionality I expect from my Learning Management System. And the support/team behind it empowers me to provide beautiful courses to my users. Its coupon functionality, homepage design, and course builder are intuitive and powerful. Just recently they have made it possible to give students a certificate for completing the course, which has long been a request of our users.

Cons

I wish there was more API functionality through Teachable. There are useful webhooks, but manipulating data within the platform is limited.

Pros

Very easy to set up courses, videos load fast and uptime is high

Cons

All additional features added within the past 2 years have made the software less user friendly on the backend. Difficult dealing with customer support on lower tier plans.

Pros

Teachable provides sufficient course creation, marketing and analytics tools even in its free pricing plan. It also allows for full branding of the online course pages by utilizing custom HTML/CSS.

Cons

Since this is a hosted service, it is good to know that Teachable is managing everything for the creator but at the same time there is not much transparency as to which and how many resources (server CPU power, memory, network bandwidth, CDN) are being utilized. In my opinion, if this information was included in each pricing plan, the creators would be able to better match their course creation requirements with actual hardware resource levels.

Pros

I love that Teachable handles all of the online payments, accepts all major credit cards, and handles any taxes necessary. I also love that they not only offer a platform to host your sites, but also include sales pages, check out pages, and thank you pages.

Cons

I wish some of the reporting was easier to find and understand. It can be pretty difficult to break down income streams within the program. It can also be difficult to maneuver the backend of the site in general. I always struggle to find how to change preset text, as well as find more information about my students (like who completed the course and when, etc).

Pros

Overall, my experience has been great. I started using with Free plan, it's is super easy to use for non techy. This is the best for course creators who have >=5 course. Resources are really helpful.

Cons

Sometime getting system errors (slow), expensive but anyone can start with Free or Basic plan.

Alternatives Considered

Switched From

Pros

Easy to use, easy to upload product and host course

Cons

There is no way to reach someone by phone. The only way is email. After submitting an email, a week will go by and no one will answer. You will submit another email requesting an answer and they will reply with an emailing asking for information they had already requested in order to submit the initial help email, or what they refer to as a “support ticket”. You reply with those details a second time, and a week goes by and there is still no answer. You email them again begging for an answer and still no answer a week later. It has been a month, no answer and no way to contact anyone. Most their “help” button lead you to a broken link. Their online chat support is never turned on When trying the ethics link, to report this bad customer service, they put the entire page in another language so you do not know how to report anything. The only way to contact someone is if you want to sign up with teachable and pay an outrageous amount a month to have them host your course, keep a large amount of your sales, and keep a portion of each sale for 60 days. This is possibly the worst company you could ever sign up with to host your course. Never choose them!!!!

Pros

- easy to students to use - no cost on the student side

Cons

In the past, accessing courses was difficult (this looks to be fixed now)

Pros

This software is easy to get started - on a Pro account you have everything you need, the free tier these days has very little. It's a great drag and drop course content & sales pages - handles all the sales and taxes if you like. Provide training to help you get started with not just the course creation but the sales side as well - I definitely found this helpful in the beginning.

Cons

There is very little in terms of tracking student progress - the mail capability is lacking - I use separate softwares for emailing, customer management and even certification (zapier & mailerlite). So those features though provided by Teachable don't have much functionality. I can see individual students log ins and progress on individual courses - but overall unable to see for instance, a list of students that havent' logged in for a certain time period - I have to look at each student individually. So it's very difficult to track the students progress overall in the school. Plus they've just put the prices up and it's very expensive now.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

It's easy to build, customer service/support is excellent, students love it.

Cons

When students sign up it does not parse out first and last name, making integration with other platforms challenging.

Alternatives Considered

Switched From

Pros

Teachable really sold me with their marketing about how easy the platform was to use and with their webinars that really walk you through the course creation process. I really appreciated the education that they give you at the beginning of the on boarding process and that was really valuable even if the tools themselves ended up being very limited for my needs.

Cons

Between the time that I signed up and I decided to leave this platform the price more than doubled for hosting the courses that I was hosting. In addition to this, when you compare Teachable to the other platforms that are available out there; specifically, learnworlds, which is a platform I decided to go with, there's so many limits to their functionality that it's really difficult to run a course that is training students and in a process that needs to be evaluated. I think if I was just teaching for fun this might be a good platform for me but my students are moving through a process that needs to result in demonstrated mastery and the ability for me to present the information to them in an interactive way and the ability for them to complete evaluations and assessments with in the actual platform is really limited.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Teachable

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

There wasn't much about Teachable I liked. I migrated away from Teachable because it wasn't working.

Cons

Integrations often broke which resulted in people not receiving the courses they paid for. This was a huge problem.

Pros

Easy and works out of the box and has its own search for all courses.

Cons

It’s a bit too basic for my level. But for most works well.

Pros

Teachable is very user friendly. I am not a very technically inclined person and this program gave me the ease I needed to set our digital classroom. AT the time we began using the company could not afford more than $100 a month and Teachable was very affordable for out small nonprofit.

Cons

I would say that my least favorite aspect of Teachable is or was the design templates, although they recently upgraded this feature and you can do a few more fancy things to your store and landing page.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Teachable

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

Teachable is easy to use and does everything I need it to - and mostly very well. I also like that the company behaves ethically.

The user experience for my students is excellent and the all-in one package makes it very easy for me.

Cons

There are a few little niggles. Not a great mobile solution (but perfectly adequate) and the text editor in the course builder is low on capabilities for formatting beyond the basics (Tables? Not so much). And the placement of toolbars and save buttons is frustrating.

Pros

The course building platform itself is great. Support is decent for the most part, although they don't really engage well with feature requests.

Cons

Teachable seems to look at sales as an incidental part of course creation and teaching. Here are a few examples:

1) They don't have a drag-and-drop landing page builder. The templates are really generic and it's hard to get a sleek-looking landing page.
2) No email automation. You can send one-off emails to your students, but that's it.
3) You can't add a lead magnet to collect email addresses. You'll have to pay for Convertkit (which is another $25/month) or another email list provider.
4) There are limited options to customize the checkout. You can't custom code (like Analytics), or so on because the checkout is hosted on sso.teachable.com. And there's no option for a two-step checkout - say goodbye to abandoned cart emails (unless you want to create a complicated integration).
5) Their "one-click-upsell" mechanics are super limited. They previously had this feature, but got rid of it when they upgraded their page builder. They now have an upsell, but the mechanics are clunky. Again - sales and marketing are not at the top of this company's mind.

On top of that, the pricing was expensive. $99/month (the lowest-priced annual plan with no transaction fee) is super high pricing for what you get. You're better off with Kartra (which costs the same as Teachable, but does way more) or Systeme.io (which has crazy-affordable pricing and really engages with users to improve the product)

Pros

I've been a Teachable user for a few years (I was a user when the name was Fedora). Since then, Teachable has been one of the most mentioned names for online course creators. One of the things I like best about Teachable is how easy it is to use the platform. In a matter of time, you can create an online course, including curriculum and media. This is super convenient for both the novice online course creator and the more experienced ones. It's a time saver!

Cons

Since 2019, the blog feature of being able to auto-schedule posting has not worked. I've placed support tickets to address the issue, but as of this writing (Feb 2020), the feature still isn't working. I write blog content well in advance and was able to schedule blog posts with ease. Now I have to set a reminder to go into my Teachable account to manually post the blog. This is not ideal.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Teachable

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

* Customer Service
* Ease of use
* Pretty nice admin interface
* Although there is not much you can do to theme your school without getting into code, what they have out of the box is pretty tasteful in terms of typography and layout

Cons

* No built-in contact form capabilities, and I don't know that you could code your own (if you're tech savvy enough), so that leaves you with a cheesy free embed form that will have someone else's branding on it, or paying at least $10 a month for a white-labeled contact form. I mean, what sort of paid online school doesn't have a "Contact Us" page with a form (as opposed to just an email address)?
* Hefty fees if you want to have payments automatically sent out to other authors automatically (wish I knew this before I signed up!).
* No ability to sell gift certificates without going through a very manual convoluted process

Pros

The overall coverage of all features a course creator needs. They even provide a payment gateway, which alone saves you plenty in commisions and monthly fees.

Cons

Just need an Android app. Not having an Android app forces most of my students to watch the courses on their browsers.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

My favourite thing about Teachable is it 'just works' out of the box. Most of its functionality is intuitive and it doesn't try to add a million features that most people won't use. It's a software tool that knows what it is and who it's for. It makes it very easy to make a good looking site and get a course up for sale. Anyone can get started and be able to do most of what they need to be able to do to create a profitable online course business easily.

Cons

The drawback is in that final 5%. It's easy to make a good looking site, but not easy to make an amazing looking site. I have in the past had some issues with their affiliate system and with their support staff, but to be fair this was in late 2016 and they have made big improvements since then. I would like to see them roll out new features more consistently so that their users are on the cutting edge of online course technology rather than just slightly behind. Teachable is also best for people that don't want to integrate multiple tools. This is also a good thing as it stays focused, but I think it's worth noting here as a potential user should consider that what they get with Teachable is what they get. Don't start using it expecting to link it with a forum later if you don't love how their commenting system works (for example).

Pros

The teaching platform (curriculum videos, PDFs, etc.) is good and uploads are easy. I found that building a sales page was not difficult and sending people to the sales page with discount coupons was a smooth process. Payments were collected and paid out promptly at the end of the month (for my plan). Support is by email only (no chat) and took a couple days but the answers were helpful. The plans are reasonably priced for individual teachers and consultant.

Cons

I have experienced serious problems with their built-in email application. Since this is the primary way teachers communicate with students, it should be a priority for them. There were days when it wasn't working when I needed to send links to live classes and webinars. It's difficult to customize "Welcome" emails and there's no way to schedule sends or save drafts. They recently announced that all emails would come from a strange looking email address that belongs to them (and has been labeled "spam" by my email hosting service). I've drawn their attention to these problems several times. The response is polite but there has been no move to improve the service. It's a very amateurish response. I would recommend looking at other services first OR be prepared to use a third party email service every time you want to reach your students, including new sign-ups.

Pros

Well, when I started I liked the idea of drip content for my students weekly lessons - BUT, it doesn't work properly so I can't say I liked anything about the Teachable software.

Cons

Constant Problems
The software constantly has glitches and major problems. My students have problems getting in, links do not work and have to be sent several times. My classes receive emails from other classes/courses that don't apply to their course at all.
Don't get me started on Customer Service. UGH! They replay in a decent amount of time - with a bunch of work for YOU the person paying to use their platform to read through, problem solve and basically try to figure out why THIER platform is not working properly.
For most of us we pay for a platform like this to cut down on the workload we have! Not create EXTRA work! I have spent so much time doing Teachables job that I rather create a damn Facebook group page for free and post the video learning and tutorials there. Or build it into my own website.
I can't even use their merchant services as they have asked for my tax info literally 30+ times. I sent it to them the first 10 times and just said forget it and have my student pay through our business system.
Wast of money and a HUGE waste of time.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

I like that Teachable always deploys new features, listens to tutors and I also like the community they've been developing among the teachers. So, they both try to improve their product and their users at the same time.

Cons

Sometimes it's hard to bundle your courses as you like. You have to tweak this and that to get something close to what you want.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Teachable is easy to use and I was able to set up my courses quickly in a format that was conducive to the content.

Cons

Assessments are an important part of my curriculum, but the available quiz templates were too basic for my needs. Also, when I had questions or needed help, it took days to get a response for customer service.

Pros

It's probably one of the better choices when it comes to making courses online. First of all, you get a lot of options to integrate with 3rd party software which is great since you don't have to start from scratch in some aspects. Second, it's really easy to start teaching your audience online with Teachable.

You can easily add new courses, record some lessons and launch!

You get great payment options to choose from to give your customers some variety, also, it's easy to setup your page to make your "classroom" look even better.

Cons

It does take time to setup everything if you're planning to work on many courses and uploading a lot of material.

While you can get most of it done by the time your free trial is over, it's always great to upgrade from the start to be able to take advantage of the premium features Teachable offers.

One more thing is that, it's a bit pricey compared to other choices however, if you want great quality, it will cost you.

Pros

The payment gateway and ease of setting up courses. It is easy to get started and the onboarding example courses and content was very helpful.

Cons

This is a new con for me. Teachable no longer has unlimited video file size! They used to market unlimited, but that changed to under 4GB if I remember correctly and now they have a hard limit of 2GB. They made this change with NO NOTIFICATION to customers. My customers pay a lot for the content and we deliver 30min+ HD lectures, now we have to leave the platform. If you are thinking "Just use Vimeo to host" that is an extra $600/year to Vimeo to do that.

My second issue is navigating the payment end is complicated when you have customers that forgot to add a coupon (especially for a subscription) or if a customer misses a payment there is very little you can do.

Third, my customer based has grown significantly in EU. Our coaching or live lecture courses aren't required to collect VAT. Teachable collects it anyways and it's up to the customer to get their money back vs not charging them in the first place.

Pros

I really liked about teachable is that it allows you to setup and integrate your coaching calendar within Teachable to allow for bundles. I also really liked how easy it was to integrate the quizzes as well. The tracking module was also really good.

Cons

It was really difficult to set up the sales page. There are no marketing tools integrated with this. It is very expensive in comparison to other options as well. I did not typically have the best response with customer service - it wasn't bad though, it just wasn't good.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

I was excited to find a product that was stremlined and user friendly. I even like that I can register students without registering for their monthly plan. Of course the fees are a little higher with that version but I like the 'try-before-you-buy aspect'. I like the look of it and that you will be able to creat certificates and allow students to track their progress. One of my favorite features is being able to create discount/ special codes when you want.

Cons

I don't like that i have to post a youtube URL if my videos are a little larger. This adds a little complication seeing as I'm not a techie, but it's not insurmountable.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Pros

The user interface is intuitive but not that easy to use, pages take time to load.

They keep adding new features regularly, I like the recently added limited period access so I can expire my free courses which is really helpful to make my student take action complete the course on time and upgrade to my higher offers if they desire.

I love that Teachble provides unlimited students and courses/coaching plans even on the basic plan.

Has teachable university to help with setting up the courses and coaching bundles, which is beneficial for beginners setting up their e-learning platform.

If you do not want a lot of designing customization to your landing page using html etc, I have found the page builder via block elements easy to implement.

Cons

The web app crashes a lot when bulk uploading videos.
Cannot upload videos of size greater than 1.5 GB.
Have to pay heavy transction fee of 5% to teachable for each sale on the basic plan.

Pros

Teachable is very user friendly and they offer an intuitive user interface. They have features like drag and drop or duplicate that make creating training courses a breeze. I've used other course creation software and I find that Teachable is easier to understand. They also have a lot of documentation and offer support. Also, check out their facebook group...there's lots of valuable info exchanged there about course creation.

Cons

I'm on the basic plan and I think it's a little pricey, but I get it; they're in business to make money. I wish they had a plan between the free plan and the basic plan with less features than the basic as this would probably be a better fit for me.