Updated: April 24th, 2017
Many people ask us, “Is Teachable any good? Can I teach an engaging, successful online course using Teachable?”
You should take our opinion with a healthy pinch of salt, since we develop a competing online course platform.
That said, we’ll try to be as fair as we can. We’ve written an in-depth Teachable review here — it includes a complete Teachable feature comparison and decision guide.
Why use Teachable?
Teachable has powerful features for selling your course.
For example, you can create discount codes and set up affiliate tracking.
This can be helpful if you’re setting up a complex launch sequence and bringing in affiliate partners to promote your course.
Teachable also offers solid video hosting capabilities and nicely-designed landing pages for your courses.
Possible concerns about using Teachable
Teachable’s biggest limitation is that it only supports “self study” courses, in which all the content and activities are available as soon as a student registers.
There’s no way to run, say, a scheduled 4-week program for a group of people to learn together on the same pace.
By itself, Teachable also has no support for discussion and online community. This can make it challenging to run a scheduled course with an active, engaged community.
Teachable does not offer any conferencing or webinar features for running teleclasses or webinar classes within your course. You would need to research, purchase, and manage a separate conferencing tool.
Teachable also charges substantial transaction fees on its base plan, which can result in it being a relatively expensive solution in the solopreneur/small business space. For example, suppose you plan to run several courses which together will generate $25,000 in revenue over the next 12 months. Teachable would charge $468 ($39/month * 12 months) in hosting fees, plus $1,250 ($25,000 * 5%) in transaction fees, for a total of $1,1718 in fees. Comparable platforms offer plans starting at $74/month.
For further details about each of these concerns, please check out our in-depth Teachable review here. The article includes an extensive Teachable feature comparison and decision guide.
Alternatives to Teachable
Here are some alternatives to Teachable you could consider:
- Ruzuku (read the complete Ruzuku review as compared to Teachable)
- Pathwright (read the complete Pathwright review and comparison)
- Wishlist Member (read the complete Wishlist Member review and comparison)
- Jigsawbox (read the complete JigsawBox review and comparison)
- Kajabi (read the complete Kajabi review and comparison)
Thanks for comparison – saved me precious time as a solopreneur wearing all the hats.
You were good to point out the shortcomings of Teachable, which seem considerable. It’s likely I would want to teach a “Live” course with a community. That Teachable does neither is a revelation.
My review of yoiur review would not be compete, however, if I didn’t point out that the online course sites you compare at the end don’t include some of Teachable’s closest, most comparable competitors, including Udemy.