Teachable Review: Best Platform to Sell Online Courses?

Teachable is a platform that promotes “sharing what you know,” allowing you to share your knowledge with others while earning money. It is an all-in-one platform that allows you to create courses and coaching services while also providing a platform for you to earn money by selling courses.

Teachable can handle absolutely everything for you. This includes both web hosting and payment processing. If you want to share your knowledge then it is the right kind of website for you. You can work from home, sell courses, and earn money automatically. Go through this Teachable Review and check all the details you require.

What is Teachable?

Teachable is an online platform through which you can sell online courses and earn money. It is a leading platform and is pretty much high in demand. Teachable aims to provide the world with a new possibility, where online course creation and gaining knowledge are easy and available for all. With Teachable you can build a video that includes audio as well as text-based courses. These will help you to monetize your knowledge and not only this but you can build on-demand products that will earn you good money. You can convert your know-how into a business that is profitable as well as easy to manage.

How does Teachable work?

After getting started you will see a page like this. In this, you will have to fill up all the details that you want Teachable to know. Tell about whether you are a business owner, or a non-profit organization is just an explorer. Choose the topic of your content or courses which you will be selling. Tell teachable about the category that will best describe your business stage and whether you are teaching an online course already. You will even get to choose the size of your audience in Teachable. From beginning to email list, social media followers, subscribers, and whatnot. With this information, Teachable will organize and customize your dashboard accordingly.

After providing the information, you will see a dashboard on the left side of your screen. Here you will be able to check your sales from various courses, users that have to subscribe, emails, settings, and a lot more! Underneath the dashboard, the products heading includes bundle, coaching, and courses provided by you to edit and add. If you want to move onto a new plan or upgrade the old plan the dashboard includes that too.

You can create a product and also edit your product’s sales page. It can help you to create high-quality content and process amazing courses for your sales. The pricing plans will appear with the courses and will be shown to you as well. From editing your homepage, and site theme and also set up your domain name. After setting up your tools for reaching out to your audience and then you are set to launch your school!

Features and Products of Teachable

Teachable is easy to use and offers good reliability. You can grow your business with full security as well as surety of growth. Spreading knowledge is one the best to build a business, where you can provide the young generation with online courses and guidance and also provide them with coaching services. These features to support and help you grow are as follows:

Course creation

Uploading

Teachable supports bulk uploading and bulk actions, which can save you a lot of time. It also supports cloud upload to help you save storage space. It also allows you to add multiple content types within the same lecture (which Thinkific does not support) as well as custom content.

First, you need to add Your Course Name

Teachable allows you to sell courses, bundles, and coaching products. Teachable does not have any course templates. Everything must be created from scratch. Teachable’s course curriculum is divided into sections (all modules) and lectures. If you want to create a course then you must have to cross these four sections i.e “Add information” “Add curriculum” “Add a price” and “Publish course“.

Teachable supports the following format types:

• Text
• Video
• Files
• Quizzes
• Examples of code
• HTML/CSS/Javascript custom codes
• Upsells

Teachable does not support SCORM, Adobe Captivate, or Articulate Storyline files (as Teachable is not made for institutions it is not a big deal). If you require these features, LearnWorlds is an option (review). Alternatively, when comparing Teachable and Thinkific in this regard, Thinkific supports Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline files but is not SCORM compliant.

If you want to include different types of content within the same lecture, such as Teachable allows you to incorporate text, video, and quizzes into the same lecture. This also assists you in adding more value to your content. Including quizzes in each lecture allows you to gauge how well your students are learning.

Teachable’s best feature is that it allows for bulk uploading of PDFs, videos, images, and other files but this feature is only available on paid plans. Individual lectures will be created from the bulk uploaded files. Again, there is no need to rearrange them into separate lectures.

Teachable allows for bulk operations on lectures. You can make the lecturers in bulk –

• Free preview (can be used as a lead magnet)
• Edit Lecture name
• Publish in bulk
• Delete the lectures in bulk

Teachable also supports cloud uploading from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and other services to reduce file storage requirements. Thinkific does not have this feature.

Enrollments

Teachable makes your work easier by allowing you to perform bulk actions such as bulk enroll/bulk unenroll.

When a student completes the checkout process in Teachable, they are automatically enrolled in the courses. You can manually enroll new or existing students in a specific course if you wish. A student can also be manually unenrolled or removed from a course. If you have a business plan, you can use bulk import features to enroll or unenroll students manually.

Providing content (to the students)

Teachable lets you drip-schedule content based on a specific date or the student’s enrollment date. When the drip content becomes available, Teachable automatically sends email notifications to students. Only the sections, not the lectures, can be drip scheduled.

Teachable allows for comments in each lecture. It is located beneath the content area, making it easier for students to come and leave comments. Teachable allows for multi-level comment threading. This allows students to easily participate in conversions without having to constantly fiddle with chats. You can also enable comment moderation and comment attachments as a school owner.

Take a look at how the course page appears on the front for students. Teachable provides two templates for creating the page structure of your course.

Teachable displays course progress, instructor information, student profiles, and so on. The course player includes a video speed controller, automatic playback, a quality controller, and the ability to add subtitles, among other features. Subtitles make it easier for students to understand the content. You must first upload subtitles in the backend for them to appear. Teachable’s note-taking feature encourages active learning. Students can take notes on key points within the course player and refer to them at any time. You should utilize the power editor to add custom CSS to the course player. Teachable is infuriating if you are not a coder.

Add Pricing Plan

Teachable offers four pricing options.

• Free
• Purchase made only once
• Payment plans
• Subscriptions

For subscriptions, you can provide a free trial period of your choosing. Offering free trials assists you in attracting customers and increasing sales. If you are from another country, you may charge VAT to your students. This is a big plus because Teachable includes VAT calculation.

Course compliance

The features of teachable course compliance are excellent. They assist you in ensuring that students complete your course. You can include graded quizzes in each lecture to ensure that students are learning effectively.

When it comes to course compliance, Teachable reigns supreme among the various course creation platforms available today. You can do the following to ensure that students complete their courses.

You can connect your domain to the domain of Teachable, this will give you easy linking and connectivity. Customization is easy as with Teachable you can also use its tools like power editor. This will help you to create engaging content, videos, coaching sessions, and also multimedia lectures. Teachable has an endless list of partners, you can think of any integrations and Teachable is here to support them. Moreover, you also get to know what is the response to your lectures through student insight in the comprehensive dashboard. The best part about the Teachable customization feature is that you can bring your team members. You can customize their roles and permissions, Teachable pays them for you. The flexible page editor generates incredible sales!

Themes

Teachable does not provide any site or course themes; it only has one theme that you can customize. Within the tool, you have the option to:

• Personalize the logo and branding.
• Include a site logo, a favicon image, and a thumbnail of the school.
• Change the fonts. (Custom fonts are supported).
• Change the color of the theme/background, navigation bars, footer, header, buttons, links, and so on.

You will have access to the power editor if you have purchased a business plan. This allows you to tailor the theme to your specific requirements. As said before Teachable, does not provide any themes to help you design your site. The tool only has basic customization options. If you require more features, you can use the power editor and custom code.

Page Builder

Teachable has a good website builder. It includes enough blocks to construct your site pages, landing pages, thank you pages, and any custom pages. You can even use CSS/HTML to add custom content. Its FAQs, upsells, and testimonials all help to boost conversions.

Teachable provides several page design building blocks. In addition to single blocks, there are a few different block layouts to choose from. Rearranging, duplicating, hiding, and deleting blocks are some of them.

• Banner
• Image with text
• Text with image grid
• Featured products
• Pricing
• Upsell
• Email leads form

You can customize these things in each block. You can also customize the pages with custom CSS/HTML.

• Background
• Images
• Colors
• Padding
• Etc.

Domains

In Teachable, you can add a custom domain and subdomain to sell courses and coaching under your own brand. However, the checkout page and some others still have “teachable” in the domain name, indicating that it is not completely white-labeled. Teachable’s paid plans all support custom domains and subdomains. Your school will be assigned to the Teachable subdomain by default. When you set up your custom domain, you will not be able to cancel your paid subscription until you delete it.

Learning Tools

With learning tools, you get unlimited courses and coaching services to sell and generate income. Moreover, you also get unlimited students on all paid plans from Teachable! You can run one on sessions and give live lectures to your students. It has easy-build milestones, task features as well as call hosting. It is easy to handle new as well as old clients with Teachable. Starting from Booking to intake scheduling and also learning, all can be done with the native integrations of Teachable with Calendly.

Giving lectures may be solely boring for students, but with Teachable you can engage them in quizzes, and course completion certification. Teachers also ensure course compliance controls that require course completion to move on. With surveys and forms, you can get student feedback after course completion. It gives you Easy integration with Zapier that will take the support service of Teachable to another level with Zendesk, Olark, Intercom, and a lot more!

Monetization

You get flexible payment modes with Teachable. It includes coupons and various advanced payment modes. These include subscriptions, one-time payments, bundles as well as memberships. You can even grow your business by letting others know about it. The affiliated market tools provided by Teachable will help you to do so. Incentivizing previous students to refer your course to others can be a good way to promote your business.

Earning discounts for students will be encouraging and will lead you to more sales. All can be handled by Teachable starting from Pixel support, affiliate payouts, last-touch attributions, and also authors. The best part is you can go worldwide, and accept payments while selling your courses in 130+ currencies. Moreover, Teachable offers PayPal and Mobile Pay for your online coaching service.

Certification 

Teachable, like Thinkific and Podia, includes built-in course completion certificates. There are three templates available for customization via HTML/liquid templating. You can also create custom certificates from scratch. In addition, when a student completes a course, Teachable sends them an email with a link to download the certificate. Alternatively, you can manually issue the certificates by reviewing the student’s course progress. In this case, you have the option of issuing certificates in bulk by selecting all students who have completed the courses completely. Teachable provides a limited number of certification templates but allows you to create your own using custom coding. You can also choose to send emails with a download link automatically.

Affiliate marketing

Teachable does not have a dedicated affiliate program; you must create affiliates using users. But the best part is that it handles all affiliate payouts. Teachable lets you have affiliates for your product and pay them a commission for their efforts. To add an affiliate, you must first create a user and change their role to an affiliate. The commission you specify will apply to all products. You can restrict affiliates from promoting any product if you don’t want them to. You can set your own custom cookie period as a school owner.

Affiliate invoices:

If you use Teachable’s payment gateways (Teachable Payments or Monthly Payment Gateway) and enable the BackOffice service, your affiliates will be paid automatically to their PayPal account. Every month on the first of the month, affiliates will be paid. You must handle all payouts on your own if you use a third-party payment gateway.

Hosting and Security

The hosting and security of Teachable will give your data 100% protection. Moreover, your sold course is yours, Teachable is just a medium to convey. It provides you with 24*7 monitoring. It has instant upgrades, so you do not have to wait for new features. Moreover, about payment security, it is fully secure. The payments accepted are only from PCI level one compliant, so Teachable is secure for the session provider and the students.

Teachable Payment processing

When it comes to payment processing, Teachable excels. Teachable has its own payment gateways in addition to Stripe and PayPal. It handles all complex transactions, including EU/VAT calculations and affiliate payouts. It allows students to easily pay with credit/debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Teachable Payments and the Monthly Payment Gateway are their own payment gateways. Teachable Payments handles EU/VAT calculations, and affiliate payouts, and has a service called “Back office” that handles all complex payments. If you want Stripe/PayPal, you must be on a professional plan or higher. Credit/debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google PayTM are all options for students. You can choose daily, weekly, or monthly payouts as a product owner.

• Daily payouts will be made within two business days.
• Every Thursday, weekly payouts will be cleared.

Every 30 days, on the first of the month, a monthly payout is distributed. To issue refunds to students, you must use third-party services such as PayPal, check, wire transfer, and so on.

Pros of Teachable

• It includes course completion certificates. This, combined with course compliance, makes it suitable for hosting academic courses.
• The Teachable course player includes a note-taking and subtitles feature. Note-taking aids in proactive learning and sub-titles assist students in clearly understanding the content.
• You can embed HTML/CSS scripts in the lectures, allowing you to easily embed any type of content inside the lectures, which opens up a wide range of possibilities.
• You don’t have to worry about getting tools like Vimeo or Wistia because they provide unlimited bandwidth for video hosting.
• Teachable supports bulk media file uploading to save time and cloud uploading to streamline your workflow.
• When it comes to comments, it encourages multi-threading of responses to keep conversations organized rather than chaotic.
• It has the ability to handle EU/VAT, which very few online platforms have. This makes your life easier if your students are from Europe.
• It includes native payment gateways (Teachable Payments and the Monthly Payment Gateway) as well as a “Back Office” service that handles all affiliate payouts and complex payments.
• Teachable offers detailed student reports and video analytics to help you understand how students are engaging with your content. It has heat maps and video retention graphs.

Cons of Teachable

• Teachable does not take the risk of refunds. You must handle this on your own through the use of third-party services.
• Along with a 10% transaction fee on their limited free plan, they also charge a 5% fee on their basic plan.
• There are no built-in options for customizing the course player in Teachable. Custom coding is required if desired.
• Unlike Thinkific, it lacks community features. You must integrate communities with Circle if you want to create them. So, with a surcharge.
• There isn’t a drag-and-drop builder. As a result, you may end up using quite geeky features such as custom CSS and power editors (only available in the professional plan).

Alternatives for Teachable

Thikific

Thinkific is a great alternative to Teachable. It provides you with a platform to not only create but also market and sell your online courses. Even the membership sites can be sold on Thinkific. It looks out to what is the need of a new online learner and an individual who wants to earn by selling or more specifically teaching. It is similar to Teachable as it is an all-in-one platform built for both audience and course creators. Unlike Teachable, it includes built-in community features, eliminating the need to integrate with community platforms such as Circle. so. Thinkific also offers native integrations with over 80 apps available in its app store.

Thinkific offers some distinctive features such as randomized question banks, live lessons, true white-labeling, groups, Brillium exam integration, and much more. Thinkific is the way to go if you require a lot of community for your courses.

Kajabi

• identifies your audience.
• Drive them to your site.
• Entice them with a solution to their problems.
• Nurture the relationship.
• Persuade them to invest their time and money.
• Get repeat sales.

With Kajabi you can identify your audience and drive them to your site. You can provide them with a single solution to all their issues. It will create a relationship between teacher and student even online. This will increase your sales and help you to target more audiences. Kajabi is a good alternative to Teachable and works well. These platforms’ target audiences are very different. Teachable is designed for course creators/teachers who are just getting started and require features such as course compliance, certificates, and quizzes to assess students’ progress. Kajabi is designed for advanced marketers with a marketing audience who do not require course compliance or certificates.

Podia

Although Podia is cheaper when compared to Teachable, it does not offer a lot like Teachable. It has limited courses to create. Podia is an easier site to navigate and provides full intuitive content to its users. It is friendly and less complex. It offers a simple monthly fee for all courses and has a much more simple pricing plan. It provides you with automated notifications and automatically triggers emails. It provides you with badges and certification after the completion of courses. You can easily discuss forums, course points, leaderboards, and various assignments.

Udemy

Udemy is a good alternative but Teachable wins against it. It provides absolutely complete customization options to its users on Udemy. It has a wide variety of templates to choose from. Udemy is a legitimate company that provides you will various courses at simple pricing. However, it does not offer discounts or host sales but the instructors offer coupons in order to increase sales.

Plans and Pricing

Starting as free, Teachable provides its users with four different plans and features included in it. It is up to you, what you require. Grow and subscribe to the plan with the increment in your growth.

Teachable FAQs

How many students can you have on Teachable?

You will have access to a limited number of features while on the Free plan, including There are an infinite number of students. There is no limit to the number of students who can register for your course. Teachable allows you to have an unlimited number of students in your course. This figure is based on the number of users who have purchased a course rather than the total number of students currently enrolled in any courses.

Do I own my content on Teachable?

Yes, you are the sole owner of all of your Teachable content. As a creator, Teachable gives you complete control over how it is used and distributed. The content You upload to the Platform is and will remain Your property. Teachable makes no claim to intellectual property rights over materials You upload to the Teachable Platform as a result of using Teachable Services.

Does Teachable have discussion boards?

Teachable does, indeed, have discussion boards! You can enable comments on Teachable for any specific lecture in your school course. Comments on course lectures assist school administrators in encouraging student engagement and interacting directly with students. They are an excellent way to ask questions and receive feedback from other course participants. You can also ask your own question or respond to other people’s comments.

What is a Teachable account?

Teachable Accounts – Accounts that can be taught A centralized account that allows you to log in to your associated school accounts using the Teachable Accounts login page. Please keep in mind that Teachable schools have the option to opt out of offering Teachable Accounts to log in to their school.

Over to you with my Teachable Review

Here at the end of my Teachable Review, I have tried to give you a detailed explanation of features that will benefit you to start your coaching services online with Teachable. It is doubtlessly an amazing platform however if you are low at investing and yet want your business to start selling courses you may think again.

However, if you are serious, and have a robust plan and content for your course then It will help you to gain students and will increase your sales and business. All you require is knowledge and passion to teach, the rest is taken care of by Teachable. If you are not new to Teachable Let us know about your experience, sales growth, and views in the comment section.