What’s in this Guide:
- Intro to Teachable
- Intro to Ruzuku
- Feature breakdown
- Step-by-step decision guide
- Detailed visual checklist
Ruzuku and Teachable are two options for coaches, authors, bloggers, speakers and other independent experts who are creating online courses.
Teachable is a marketing and content delivery platform that is hosted for you at teachable.com. Teachable was founded in 2013 by Ankur Nagpal.
Ruzuku is a course platform that is hosted for you at ruzuku.com. Ruzuku was designed by user experience consultants Rick Cecil and Abe Crystal, Ph.D., and launched in 2011.
Let’s take a look at the similarities and differences between the two platforms.
Last updated: December 20, 2017
Who is Teachable for? Who uses it?
Teachable is designed to help information marketers sell online content and courses. According to the Teachable website, “Your knowledge is unique and valuable. With Teachable, you can host courses on your website and control your branding, student data, and pricing all from one place.”
You can use Teachable as part of your online marketing. For example, you can use it to run affiliate marketing campaigns for courses.
Teachable also allows you to structure and post the content of your online program (such as videos, audio recordings, articles, and downloadable files.)
Teachable is commonly used by experts who specialize in internet marketing and technical programming specialities, among other areas.
Who is Ruzuku for? Who uses it?
Ruzuku is designed to support online courses or group programs in which many people go through a structured, step-by-step program together.
For example, a blogger who has written popular posts about using LinkedIn to find new career opportunities might create a 6-week course on “Using LinkedIn to Take Your Career to the Next Level.”
Here’s an example of an online course hosted on Ruzuku: 5 Steps to Your Online Course
[This self-study course is free, and you can register to see a live example of how the ruzuku platform can be used in practice].
Ruzuku is commonly used by experts and companies who offer courses in the areas of art & design, crafts, health, creative business, personal development, and professional skills, among other areas.
Course platform capabilities
When considering any online course platform, you’ll want to examine several factors:
- Ease of setup and ease of use
- Registration and Payment
- Scheduling and Content Delivery
- Audio and Video: Hosting & Streaming Content
- Learning Community and Discussion Forum
- Progress Tracking
- Live Calls or Webinars with Recording
We’ll go over each of these areas in more detail.
Ease of Initial Setup & Use
A key factor in moving forward with your online course is ease of use — how easy it is to set up and manage your online program?
Teachable emphasizes ease of use for people who want to “turn content into a product.” Their website states, “With just a few clicks, you’ll get a fully functioning school with learning management, payment gateways, and sales & marketing tools.”
Ruzuku focuses on ease of use for structured online courses. You set up your first course by registering for a trial account on ruzuku.com, then clicking the “Create a new course” button.
Registration and Payment
Both Ruzuku and Teachable enable you to set a price for your online program and charge for access.
Ruzuku focuses on registering people into a course. For example, a career coach might create a 6-week course for $499. The course would combine videos, worksheets, and group coaching calls. She might run this course several times throughout the year. Ruzuku would handle registration and payment for people signing up for sessions of this course.
Ruzuku can also be used with ongoing membership or continuity programs by setting up a recurring subscription payment option for a course.
Ruzuku supports payment processors and shopping carts, such as:
- Stripe
- PayPal
Teachable offers the option to process payments directly on their own website. In exchange for this service, they charge a percentage of course revenue, which can be as high as 7.9% on the “Basic” plan.
As part of its integrated payment processing, Teachable also holds student payments for 30+ days before transferring money to you. This means that you will not generate cash flow until 1 – 2 months after you launch your course and begin receiving signups.
Scheduling and Content Delivery
Teachable offers only “immediately available” or “drip fed” course content. Participants either get access to all lessons in a course as soon as they sign up, or receive lessons a specified number of days after signup.
While these models work well for some self-study courses, it can be very challenging to run a scheduled course — one based on defined dates, with a group of people going through the program together — using Teachable.
Ruzuku is designed to host both “scheduled” and evergreen courses.
A scheduled course starts on a specific date and allows a cohort of participants to go through the course together, on the same schedule. This model facilitates peer-to-peer learning and community for “live” courses and group coaching programs.
Ruzuku’s visual outline tool makes it straightforward to plan out your course, and choose the dates on which lessons are released.
The same visual outline can also be used to structure evergreen courses, as well.
Audio and Video: Hosting & Streaming Content
Both Teachable and Ruzuku includes professional audio and video hosting service as part of the course delivery platform, at no additional cost.
You can upload unlimited audio and video files directly to either platform. You also have the option to embed videos from 3rd-party services.
All of Ruzuku’s plans include a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), to support students around the world.
Learning Community and Discussion Forum
Ruzuku is designed around the importance of community and peer-to-peer support in online courses.
Participants have profiles with their name, a short biography, and a photo. As they participate in the course, a “learning journal” of all their work is automatically created:
The Ruzuku online course platform provides integrated discussion forums for each lesson, as well as optional discussion prompts for specific activities. You can pose questions — and give students a space to reflect and share as they move through the course.
Participants can respond with both text comments, as well as documents, images, or even videos. For example, in an art course, a participant could upload a photo of one of her artworks to share with the community:
The “Notifications” stream makes it easy to see what others are posting and contributing in the course:
In addition, automatic email notifications keep participants engaged. For example, if Alice posts a comment and then Bob replies to her, Alice will receive an email notification.
Finally, Ruzuku can send daily and weekly emails to participants with summaries of the most recent posts and comments in the course. These emails help remind people to return and contribute to the course discussion, making for a more vibrant online discussion and community.
Teachable does not support course discussions directly, except as an experimental “labs” feature. Course creators have the option to embed a 3rd-party commenting tool, such as Disqus, into their courses. Using Disqus, participants can leave “comments” underneath a specific piece of content, such as a video in the course.
Limitations of this model include:
- inability to share documents, images, or videos in the discussion
- lack of a “recent activity” page or “news feed” to see what’s new in the community
- inability to track and view how active different participants are in the community
Progress Tracking
Ruzuku’s “Course Progress” feature gives instructors insight into how students are progressing and interacting in the course.
You can view analytics for the course as a whole, or drill down and view data for a specific step in your course. You can use information found in Course Progress to help determine who is staying on track, and who might need a little more encouragement.
You can also download a spreadsheet of video viewing activity in a course, including which participants have viewed specific videos and what percentage of the video they have viewed.
Teachable provides an overall summary of behavior in a course. The goal of this summary is to allow you to “understand your average lecture completion rates by student account type.”
Live Calls or Webinars with Recording
Live calls or webinars are a critical component for many online courses.
This is especially true with group coaching programs. The ability to meet in a “live” setting and share progress is what keeps your participants on track and motivated.
Ruzuku offers two forms of live events and interaction:
- teleconferences with slide presentations and group chat
- video webinars with slide presentations and group chat
You can easily create an event and run these live events directly through Ruzuku without having to purchase or learn an external service:
When someone includes a question mark with their comment, their chat will be highlighted automatically:
Teleconferences and webinars can be recorded automatically for later access.
Teachable does not currently offer any conferencing or webinar features.
Pricing
Teachable offers plans ranging from $39/month to $1,299/month. Complete Teachable pricing can be found here: Teachable pricing »
In addition to the monthly subscription cost, Teachable assesses a transaction fee — a percentage of your course sales.
For example, on the “Basic” plan Teachable charges a 5% transaction fee.
This means that if you were to earn $50,000 in course revenue in a year on this plan, Teachable would charge you $2,500 in transaction fees.
Ruzuku’s plans with video hosting and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) start at $74/month (if pre-paid annually). View Ruzuku’s pricing here: Ruzuku Pricing »
Ruzuku does not charge a transaction fee on course revenue. This means that if you were to earn $50,000 in course revenue in a year, Ruzuku would charge you $0 in transaction fees.
Both Ruzuku and Teachable allow unlimited courses or programs with a paid subscription. However, Teachable assesses additional fees for video hosting depending on course volume. Their website states, “If we detect that you’re going over the limit, we’ll [ask] you to upgrade. We’ll never charge you for bandwidth overages without your express consent.”
Ruzuku allows unlimited participants and courses with any paid subscription.
How to choose the right platform for you
Use our visual decision guide (below) to help you choose the right platform for your needs. Here are some considerations to take into account…
First, review what types of online courses/programs you plan to offer.
Are you intending to offer “live,” scheduled courses? For example, a 6-week course that starts on a specific date, with a group of people all going through the course together.
Do you also want to offer “On Demand” courses that are always available for registration?
Ruzuku supports both models.
Next, review what types of live events and interaction you’d like to have within your programs.
Do you want to offer group conference calls or video webinars as part of a course? Ruzuku integrates these types of live events directly into your courses. With Teachable, you would research and purchase a separate conferencing and/or webinar system.
Finally, test out each platform by participating in a sample program and creating a test program of your own.
Ruzuku provides free, sample courses you can join:
… as well as a 14-day free trial (no credit card required for sign up).
Teachable also offers a limited free plan to evaluate the platform.
Your Next Step: Start a Free Trial
We hope this comparison guide has been helpful to you so far!
Now it’s your turn.
To sign up for your free, zero-risk trial (no credit card required), just click here.
Start your 14 day unlimited-use free trial of Ruzuku
Give Ruzuku a spin. And let us know what questions you have – we love to help!
| Ruzuku vs. Teachable: Complete Feature Comparison | |||
| Category / Feature | Teachable | Ruzuku | |
| Platform category | Managed (cloud) service, hosted on Teachable.com. | Managed (cloud) service, hosted on ruzuku.com. | |
| Technical knowledge required | No specific technical knowledge is assumed. | No specific technical knowledge is assumed. | |
| Registration & Payment | |||
| Charge for course access (single payment) |  | | |
| Charge for subscriptions to course access (recurring/continuous payments) | | | |
| Create free ($0) courses | | | |
| Invite or remove participants from courses | | | |
| Coupon codes/discounts | | | |
| Supported payment processors | Direct integration: Stripe. Other processors supported via link/redirect. | Direct integration: PayPal, Stripe. Other processors supported via link/redirect. | |
| Supported email marketing providers | MailChimp, InfusionSoft, 1ShoppingCart, and others. | MailChimp | |
| Scheduling and Content Delivery | |||
| Live (scheduled calendar-based) courses with automatic email notifications | | | |
| Copy a previous course and run it again on a new schedule | | | |
| Self-study courses | | | |
| Self-study courses with drip content | | | |
| Audio and Video: Hosting & Streaming Content | |||
| Host and stream video | | | |
| Host and stream audio | | | |
| Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) for fast audio & video delivery | | | |
| Word documents | (as a link/attachment) | (can be displayed directly in the web browser for students to view easily) | |
| PDF documents | (as a link/attachment) | (can be displayed directly in the web browser for students to view easily) | |
| PowerPoint slides | (as a link/attachment) | (can be displayed directly in the web browser for students to view easily) | |
| Learning Community and Discussion Forum | |||
| Students have social profiles, bios, and photos in the course community | ✘ | | |
| Discussion questions/prompts for specific activities/content | ✘ | | |
| Students can post images, PDFs, and videos in their responses | ✘ | | |
| General course-wide Q&A and forum | | | |
| Receive email notifications when a student posts a question | | | |
| Send email announcements to all participants in course | | | |
| Participants receive daily/weekly email updates to keep them engaged | ✘ | | |
| Progress Tracking | |||
| Students can mark each activity as complete, and track their own progress | | | |
| Course Progress feature shows students’ activity completion and comment rates, with data for the whole course or by lesson | ✘ | | |
| Live Calls or Webinars with Recording | |||
| Host teleconferences with slides, group chat, and automatic recording | ✘ | | |
| Host video broadcasts with slides, group chat, and automatic recording | ✘ | | |
| Customer Service & Support | |||
| Instructor support (supporting you as you create and run your courses) | |||
| Phone/Skype | ✘ | | |
| | ||
| Private Facebook group | | | |
| Searchable FAQ/knowledge base | | | |
| “101” online training course | | | |
| Tutorial videos | | | |
| Student/participant support (supporting your participants as they register, pay, and access your courses) | |||
| Phone/Skype | ✘ | | |
| ✘ | | ||
| Searchable FAQ/knowledge base | ✘ | | |
| Tutorial videos | ✘ | | |
| Pricing | |||
| Free trial (no credit card required to sign up & try the platform) | 14 days free | 14 days free | |
| Initial setup fee | free | free | |
| Ongoing hosting/support fee | $39 – $1299/month | Starts at $74/month (pre-paid annually) | |
Ready to try Ruzuku?
We hope this comparison guide was useful to you.
Now it’s your turn.
To sign up for your free, no-risk trial (no credit card required), just click here.
Start your 14 day unlimited-use free trial of Ruzuku
Give Ruzuku a spin. And let us know what questions you have – we love to help!
