Before diving deep into the weeds and reviewing each and every single individual feature, let me give a quick summary of the platform review.
Teachable is a great platform for anyone looking to teach online. With Teachable, you can easily create courses, upload videos or audio files as course materials, and sell your course using a simple checkout process.
There are no additional transaction fees in their Pro Plan and above, but you will pay 5% to 10% on transaction fees on their lower-tier plans.
You'll be able to use the platform for free if you want, and pay a low monthly cost if you'd rather use one of their paid plans (Basic, Pro, or Business).
You can create a free Teachable-powered school website, or add Teachable to your existing website.
Whichever option you choose, the Teachable platform makes it easy for you to design your course and customize its look and feel for students.
Teachable also has great features like drag-and-drop functionality that let you customize your course's design without needing any design expertise.
Once you've created your course, Teachable will handle hosting, payments processing, and student communication so that all you need to do is focus on creating your course.
Specs
Free trial: Yes
Free version: No
Starting From: $39.00
Pricing Model: Flat Rate
Pros
- "I like how easy it is to have the lessons structured in a logical manner, and to have different types of resources available to students."
- "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."
- "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 an..."
Cons
- "Their insensitivity to isolated cases where I actually needed them to cancel from their company side, instead if making a fooling me....and I still didn't kno..."
- "Since teachable is a US based company, when you pay in GBP, they convert it into dollars, then in order to pay me, they convert those dollars back to GBP, whi..."
- "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 NOTI..."
What is Teachable?
Teachable is an online course platform that allows instructors to create, market, and sell their courses.
It also offers resources for instructors to learn about the best practices for marketing and selling their courses. Teachable offers free and paid plans for hosting your online courses.
It offers users the ability to create and manage online courses, as well as sell those courses to customers. It also helps you sell your course through a variety of sales tools, including email marketing and promotional codes.
Teachable features a drag-and-drop editor for building courses with videos, text, images, audio files, quizzes, and more. It has numerous features; from marketing tools to sales tools, even email marketing tools.
The platform also features video hosting with unlimited bandwidth. Courses can be sold at a fixed price or as subscriptions with recurring payments.
Additional features include integrations with third-party services like Zapier and Stripe to expand its functionality through automation and email marketing.
Teachable also integrates with Google Analytics to see how much traffic your course pages get. It allows you to add custom CSS code to your course pages, so they look exactly how you want them to look when they launch on the Internet.
If you are looking for an all-in-one teaching solution for your online school, Teachable is a great option. The user interface is intuitive. This makes creating and organizing your content effortless, and offers tons of customization options.
Teachable Company Overview
Teachable has been around since 2014 and is based in New York City. The company’s founder and CEO is Ankur Nagpal. He was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2016—the year he also won the Gold Stevie Award for Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
Its users are based in more than 150 countries around the world, with courses taught in over 80 different languages. You can find courses on topics like business and marketing, health and fitness, photography, technology, and much more.
Since 2014, Teachable has been helping creators turn their passion into a business. To date, they’ve helped creators earn more than $1 billion in sales, and they’re constantly working to improve their offering with new features and integrations.
Teachable makes course creation simple, with a drag and drop editor that allows you to upload material from other sources (like Google Drive). The platform makes it easy for you to create an online course that looks great and feels professional for students.
Teachable also provides a lot of engagement tools, like quizzes and assignments.
The platform offers an interface that is similar to a Word document, which makes it easy for users who aren’t used to HTML to create their own site. There are also many pre-made templates available for users who would rather build their site from an existing structure.
Their dashboard helps instructors keep track of student progress.
In this section we will look at the different sections of the course creation process, so you can check if the platform is a good choice for your needs.
Content Uploading & Structuring
The process to follow to create your course on Teachable is easy! All you need is some basic information, such as the name of your course and a brief description, as well as an introduction video (which may be uploaded or linked from YouTube or Vimeo), a summary, and some other important details.
Creating a course on Teachable requires signing up, creating your school and uploading your content, structuring your course, and engaging with your students.
During the sign-up process, you can choose to upload content from another site or start from scratch. If you choose to upload content from another site, Teachable will ask for the URL of your blog posts or other content. If you choose to start from scratch, Teachable will prompt you to add a course title, description, and lesson title.
Creating a Teachable Course From Scratch
To create a course from the scratch, click on create a product. This takes you to a fresh page where you can choose to either create a course or coaching. From here, you can start creating your first course by clicking the Create Course button in the top-right corner of the screen. This will automatically take you to the course builder tool where you can begin adding content to your course page, such as videos, presentations, or other course materials.
You will have access to many different tools that will help you create the perfect learning experience for your students, including the ability to upload videos or documents, add quizzes, run surveys, set up drip schedules, create lessons with text, images and links, and so much more.
When you click on create course button, you’ll be prompted to name your course, choose a course title, and give your course a title.
Once, you name your course and click on the continue button, your course will be created.
Once your course is created, you can start adding lessons to it by clicking “Add Lesson” from the course page.
After choosing a lesson type (video, audio, text, or file), input the details for that lesson and click “Save.”
From here, you can continue adding lessons to your course until it’s complete. Each lecture is made up of one or more lessons — which can be text, audio, video, or images! We give you the option to upload media files directly to Teachable or embed them from third-party providers like YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox, Google Drive and more. Easily insert code snippets into any lesson by clicking on Add Code Snippet from the lesson editor sidebar
Publish Your Teachable Course
When you’re ready to publish your course, go to Settings > Account & Billing > Course Details, enter any information about your course that hasn’t already been entered (such as a summary of what students will learn), and then Publish Your Course to make it available on your school’s site.
You can build your course from scratch, import content from a CSV file or Dropbox folder, or convert completed lectures into a Teachable course.
Course Creation Features – The Bottom Line
Teachable is a great option for anyone who wants to create and sell an online course. It is also a good choice if you want to build your website from scratch with custom code or an external page builder like for example the Divi page builder for WordPress.
Notice that even though you can embed pages in an external website easily, Teachable itself is not a full blown website builder for creating websites with a fully customized structure.
Let’s now have a look at what features Teachable makes available to us to design and customize our course website.
The Course Builder
Teachable is a simple, yet powerful platform for anyone to create and sell online courses. You can create a course with Teachable in minutes, and it only takes a few more clicks to customize your website and make it look the way you want. Teachable provides users with an exceptional experience.
Some of the course builder features offered include:
Drag and Drop Editor
The drag and drop editor makes it easy to build beautiful online courses from scratch. Simply add sections, lectures, and quizzes to your course outline and customize them using the rich text editor. The editor includes tools to embed videos, images, audio files, and more.
Course Design Templates
Teachable has multiple course design templates which makes it easy for creators to design your courses in a more beautiful way. The platform offers you customizable templates that can be used to design beautiful visually appealing online courses in minutes.
Templates are attractive and easy to use, but they can also be limiting. Themes, on the other hand, can be customized to fit any brand or course topic. A well-designed theme will do more than just change the color scheme and layout of your page—it’s also responsive, meaning it looks great on desktops as well as mobile devices. Furthermore, themes have a range of color schemes that you can choose from, to match your branding as closely as possible.
The themes come in different colors and styles, but they all offer the same basic functionality. You can change the theme at any time by going into “Site Settings” and clicking “Themes” under “Design.”
Overall, Teachable offers lots of templates and themes that make it easy to create a good-looking site quickly, but more advanced users can customize their site for even greater control over its appearance.
Custom Domain
You can host your course on a custom domain, such as mycourse.com, instead of a subdomain like mycourse.teachable.com. This makes it easier for potential students to remember your website name and can enhance trust in your brand.
But you can also create a subdomain, like courses.myschool.com, if you prefer, although I recommend that you always go for a custom domain.
To do that, simply add your custom domain in the School Settings page of your admin area (an SSL certificate is provided automatically).
Once you configure the CNAME records Teachable provides in your DNS settings, your school will be live on your own custom domain.
Customize Each Lesson
Customize the appearance and design of each individual lesson with custom headings, text formatting, background colors, images, and videos. Insert multimedia elements into each lesson such as downloadable PDFs, audio files, videos and more.
You can upload your logo, add custom CSS. HTML, fonts and JavaScript, or create a whole theme from scratch.
Include assignments with each lesson to reinforce learning and track student progress. Assignments can include text instructions, test questions, file uploads and more! Offer unlimited bonus content to students by adding downloadable PDFs, audio files and other files to individual lessons or entire courses at once!
The teachable CSS snippets help you make your site look exactly how you want it to. With Teachable, instructors can easily change the appearance of their school and course pages to match their brand and style.
Teachable’s CSS editor is a powerful tool that allows you to customize the look of your school, your course, the layout of your landing pages, and checkout page. You can go to the Account Settings, Site Appearance tab to find the CSS Snippets section.
You can change colors, fonts, and even the layout of your school using CSS. The custom CSS editor is accessed through the Design tab in your School Admin area and can be used for any Teachable plan.
If you’re on the Basic plan, you’ll find a free set of CSS snippets in the help center that you can use to customize your school. These include changing colors, fonts, button styles, and embedding custom images into your school. You can also access all of these pre-made snippets from the Design page of your admin area.
Website Creation: The Bottom Line
Teachable has all of the tools needed to create and host your website. The platform gives you an easy way to create your website without having to worry about hosting or coding. Their customizable themes are easy to use, and the platform offers a host of additional features that will help you establish yourself as an online educator.
Teachable also integrates great with WordPress. You can build your site using HTML and CSS or use a third-party page builder like Divi.
With Teachable you can easily create your design using its drag-and-drop course builder or by editing the HTML and CSS of your site. You can also publish blog posts directly on your website.
Teachable offers a fully-integrated course player that allows you to create custom courses with videos, audio and text paragraphs. You can also add attachments e.g. PDF downloads for the students to download. Teachable’s course player is intuitive and easy to use. You can see your progress as you move through the course, and you’ll never lose your work since it saves it automatically.
You can also customize how you want your content to be displayed by choosing between the three different display options: Module, List, and Video.
The course player is designed to make it easy for your students to learn, and offer a variety of ways for you to deliver your content.
The Course Player adapts to the screen size of any device, including desktops, tablets, and phones. It also automatically optimizes any video or audio files that you upload to ensure the best experience for your students.
You can customize the font size, color and background of each lesson in your course player to match your brand identity or personal preferences. You can also choose from different themes.
There are three different types of content you can use in the Course Player: text, video, and audio.
You can add text and images using a simple editor, allowing you to create beautiful, engaging content with ease.
Student Management Features
With Teachable, it is easy to manage your students and access the student dashboard.
The student management feature allows you to import your students to a course and manage them with ease. It also allows you to create custom fields for student profiles, which you can then use in other parts of the application.
The editor also provides you with the option to invite an unlimited number of students and group them into classes. You can also create various levels for each class and assign students according to their level.
This way you can easily learn more about your students, communicate with them, and track their course progress and activities. You will be able to see how many students are enrolled in a course, the location of your student, how many lectures each student has completed, how many tests each student has passed, and more.
You can also export your data at any time.
Lecture Comments Section
Teachable has a lecture comments feature which allows you to engage with students and encourage them to share their thoughts.
Lecture comments allow students to ask questions and have conversations with both course creators or other students. These comments can be read by all students, so multiple people can engage in a conversation. Course creators can also make these comments private, so that only the person who posted the comment and the instructor can see what is written.
You will be able to moderate all the conversations happening within the lecture content and replies from instructor will be highlighted on the comment threads. This feature helps instructors to build a sense of community within their course and helps students to learn from each other’s experiences.
Teachable Learning and Engagement Tools
Teachable comes with a number of features that help you engage with your students and teach them through a variety of methods.
Drip Course Content
Teachable has drip course content feature which allows you to deliver course content at specific dates and times instead of releasing it all at once. You can set updates when the next lesson will be available for the student in their dashboard.
Curriculum
The curriculum will be displayed on the landing page of your course. You will have the option to organize your material into chapters, as well as add lessons to each chapter.
Each lesson can include text, video, presentations, projects, handouts and quizzes or surveys to your lessons, as well as discussion forums so you can answer all of your students’ questions in one place.
A typical lecture is divided into two parts: video and notes.
Your notes are displayed on the right side of the screen while students watch your video, making it easy for them to take notes or follow along with written instructions.
You can also upload course files such as eBooks, worksheets, s (PDFs and PowerPoints), text, code snippets, quizzes, assignments and discussion threads to supplement your lessons.
Course visibility (Public or Private):
Your course will be visible to the public by default, but you can change this setting if you prefer private enrollment only. If you want to make your course private, only accessible to those with an invitation link, we recommend giving access to all your students in one place—like through a Facebook group—so that all of them will get in without any trouble.
Community Integration
Teachable allows you to create an online learning community where your students can interact with each other which provides a more engaging experience for them. They’ve recently integrated a new feature called groups which makes it easier for students to find people who share their interests and goals.
With Teachable, you can create discussion threads and groups so that students can connect with each other and have active conversation with fellow students.
Community integration provides a place where they can find answers to frequently asked questions or ask questions of their own.
Basic Quizzes
Teachable offers basic quizzes that help instructors gauge student learning progress through multiple choice questions that are graded automatically by the system, which is a nice feature that saves teachers the trouble of grading them manually.
Graded Quizzes
We offer three question types (multiple choice, true/false and fill-in-the-blanks). You can also add images to questions and define the number of attempts allowed per question.
Course Completion Certificates
You can automatically issue certificates to students who complete your course, allowing them to easily showcase their accomplishment online by downloading a PDF certificate.
You have the ability to customize the certificate with your school logo and the student’s name and grade (if applicable). The certificate can only be accessed by paid customers who have completed the course.
User Roles
Control access to your Teachable school by granting specific privileges to different users. For example, you could allow an assistant to create new courses while restricting their ability to manage other users or change billing settings.
Bulk import students – Add up to 500 students at a time using a CSV file.
The student course experience is pretty clean and straightforward on Teachable.
They have a default course player that has a nice, clean layout which makes it easy to navigate through the course.
There are a few different ways students can access their courses. They can either log-in to your website directly, or they can log in through the Student Dashboard.
If students don’t have an account yet, they will be prompted to create one before they can log in to the course.
They can also use social login if you’ve enabled those options. Once logged in, students will be taken to their dashboard where they will find all the courses they have access to. Students can also click on any course from this screen to get straight into it.
The course player is where everything happens for your students inside Teachable. It is where students will view all course content including lectures, assignments and quizzes. It’s also where students can ask you questions and get support from other classmates in the discussion area.
Teachable course player is mobile-responsive which means you can easily access it on your smartphone or tablet. So, if you want to watch a video while you’re commuting or even cooking dinner, you can simply pull out your phone and watch the video in the app or just open it in your browser.
Within each lecture, they have a navigation window that shows all the lessons in your course, so you can quickly jump to any lesson without going back to the main page of the course.
When watching videos, they have an option to turn off auto-play, so once you finish watching one video, the next one will not start playing automatically. This feature is great for people who prefer not to listen to the audio from their computer or might be watching a tutorial at work and don’t want their colleagues knowing what they’re learning!
Teachable also has an Android and iOS app for mobile viewing. I would love to see them add some more features to this app like being able to stream videos offline (like Udemy) and pop quizzes (like Thinkific)
When your students sign up for Teachable course, they’ll see the course player, which provides a great and easy to navigate experience for them. They’ll be provided with all the lessons on the left-hand side of your screen. From the top left corner, they can access their profile, settings and course dashboard. The top right corner shows how many lessons the student has completed and how many remaining.
When you click on a lesson, it will open up on the right-hand side of your screen where you can watch the video or read content. It also keeps track of where you are in the class so that when you come back, it will show you exactly where you left off. If at any point if you want to revisit a lesson that was particularly interesting, it’s really easy to do so using this feature.
The bottom right corner shows additional information about the class like what students are saying in class discussions, any additional resources and even your progress through each lesson.
Teachable Sales & Marketing Features
Email marketing is an essential part of growing your course. With the right email marketing tool, you can easily segment your email list and send targeted emails to specific people. You can also create automated onboarding email sequences to make sure that your new students get the most out of their purchase.
You can use the integrated email marketing feature to send emails to your students. The course content is hosted on Teachable servers so you don’t have to worry about that and Teachable has an integrated community feature which allows your students and instructors to interact with each other. However, you must upgrade to a paid account to be able to use the emailing feature.
With Teachable, you can also use the integrated email marketing feature by sending automated emails when someone purchases or enrolls in your course.
Teachable offers a built-in email marketing tool that helps paid users capture student emails as they browse through your course. This allows you to easily send custom campaigns to students and create drip content that is automatically delivered to students at the right time.
With the Teachable email marketing tools, you can segment students by course, tag them based on their interests and actions, and automate emails so they’re sent at the right time.
Email Marketing and third-party integrations
From communicating with your students directly to growing your audience with engaging email campaigns, Teachable’s powerful email marketing tools will help you connect more deeply with your students while also growing your audience.
When it comes to email marketing, you have plenty of options for sending emails and marketing your courses. However most of these are only accessible to paid members.
With a few clicks you can turn your students into an audience that you can market your new offerings to on autopilot (Teachable’s email marketing integrations include MailChimp, ConvertKit, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Drip).
Teachable also offers course creators the ability to send out emails directly from their dashboard.
With MailChimp, you can set up automated emails that go out when someone signs up for your course, or when someone buys a product from your school.
However, if you are using MailChimp or another third-party app to send emails through Teachable, there are some limitations:
You cannot access data about student enrollment in specific courses (e.g., the number of students who have enrolled in your course)
You cannot automatically include student information (e.g., name and email address) in emails sent through MailChimp.
That is why it’s so convenient to be able to send bulk emails straight from Teachable, without relying on external email tools.
Zapier Integration
Zapier allows you to connect Teachable with over 1000 other apps, like Google Docs, Slack, and MailChimp, so that you can automate tasks like adding students to an email marketing list or sending a text message when someone purchases your course.
Different types of email you can send through Teachable
Teachable has a lot of excellent email marketing tools that you can use to engage your existing students, promote your online course and generate more sales – even when you’re busy doing other things.
Let’s take a closer look at the different types of emails you can send using the Teachable platform and how they can help you increase your sales.
Course Launch Email
If you’re rolling out a new course on your school, you’ll want to let people know about it! Send a Course Launch Email to inform your students of the updates. You can also use this email to highlight upgraded features.
To create an email marketing campaign around the launch of your course (among other uses), you can send an email broadcast from inside your Teachable school. This will feel familiar if you’ve ever used MailChimp or another marketing platform before.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned cart emails are sent to a customer who adds a product to their shopping cart, but leaves your site without completing the purchase. This is an extremely effective way to recover sales you would otherwise lose.
Abandoned cart emails represent about 25% of total email-driven revenue, and can be highly personalized based on the visitor’s actions. For example, if you know what page(s) they visited before leaving your site, you can tailor the content of the email to include specific recommendations or other relevant information.
These emails are intended to remind the user of the items they’ve added to their cart, and hopefully convince them to finish check out.
Abandoned cart emails generally have high open rates because they target people who have already expressed interest in buying your product, but haven’t yet followed through with the purchase.
They are one of the most effective marketing techniques in ecommerce and they can help you recover a significant amount of lost revenue.
For instance, if a user signs up for a free trial plan of your course, but doesn’t end up purchasing a plan before the trial expires, you’ll use the abandoned cart email to remind them in an email that they should upgrade.
It’s easy to set up: just go to Settings > Email Notifications in your dashboard and write a message for customers who abandon their carts. Teachable even provides a placeholder for the order link so that it’s quick and easy for customers to finish their purchase.
Let’s take a closer look at the different types of emails you can send using the Teachable platform and how they can help you increase your sales.
Receipt and Confirmation Emails
When someone buys one of your courses, it’s important to communicate to them that their transaction has gone through.
Automatically sent to all of your customers, these emails give students a record of their purchase through a receipt and confirmation email.
Receipts also include access links for course content, so your students always have easy access to your course material.
Order Confirmation Emails
The Order Confirmation Email is automatically sent to anyone who purchases your course. You can customize this email from your school dashboard by editing the “Order Confirmation” content block under General Settings > Email Templates.
Teachable has integrated payment processing which helps you to accept student payments. This feature allows you to collect one-time or recurring payments from your students and you don’t need any third party payment processor.
You can also use PayPal as a payment option while creating your online course. In addition, it also has a course selling feature that allows you to sell your online course on other platforms such as Facebook, blog, forums and more. As an instructor, you can create many free courses and sell paid courses too.
Upsells
Sell related courses to the ones that the student has already purchased to increase your revenue, even after a student purchases their first course.
Offer an upgrade at checkout with one-click upsells that are automatically added on to a student’s purchase without having to enter their payment details again.
Integrated shopping cart
Quickly convert customers with a seamless checkout process that allows customers to purchase multiple courses in one transaction. Offer discounts or give away courses for free to encourage sales of other courses. You can even set up different payment plans (i.e., monthly vs yearly) or offer coupons through the integrated shopping cart so you can test different pricing strategies without hassle.
Course price (paid or free)
You can set any amount for your course price, so you can choose to be nice and give it away for free or make some sweet cash instead,
Discount coupons
Teachable has coupon codes feature which enables you to create coupons for your courses and set a fixed price or discount for each coupon code you generate.
You can create discount or free coupon codes for your students, so that they can get access to your course at a lower price (or for free!).
Coupon codes are a great way to promote your courses through affiliates or exclusive discounts. After creating a coupon code, you can see how many have been redeemed, as well as when they expire.
One of the biggest perks Teachable offers is the fact that it does not charge any transaction or payment gateway fees when you sell courses on its platform when you’re on pro and business plans.
If you decide to use a self-hosted elearning solution, such as WordPress and a membership plugin, you will typically have to pay an additional fee for every course sale. With these fees included in most other elearning platforms, this can make them much more expensive than Teachable overall.
Course promotion through affiliates
You can also choose whether you’d like to have affiliates promote your course through their own platforms by setting up an affiliate program.
This allows people to promote your course for you and get a cut when someone uses their link to sign up.
Sales & Marketing Features: The Bottom Line
The ability to easily customize your sales pages and opt-in forms sets Teachable apart from its competitors. You won’t find a better option for setting up free trials or enticing prospects with a coupon code on their checkout page.
However, there are some limitations when it comes to differentiating between clients who buy different products and/or pricing tiers.
What’s most important is that you’re able to share your courses with the people who want them. Teachable succeeds in that respect, earning solid marks for its marketing, sales, and distribution options.
These are the areas where Teachable shines.
Teachable has a built-in marketing tool that allows you to sell your course directly on your website with a buy button. The buy button can be customized and linked to a specific sales page or checkout page. If you are using WordPress, you could use plugins like LearnDash or WP Courseware instead of the built-in marketing tool; however, if you do this, your learners would need to log in separately. Also, if you are using any other platform (not WordPress), then these plugins will not be available to you.
Teachable offers extensive customization options and third-party integrations that make it easy to get started with e-learning right away. Plus, their global community of course creators offers advice and support to each other so you’re never alone as you start growing your online education business.
If you don’t need a fancy website, Teachable offers an easy, affordable way to start selling online courses quickly and easily.
Customer support is available via live chat and email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Teachable has a very strong support system. If you need help, you can contact their support via email or live chat. However, live support is only available to pro and business users. They also have a large knowledge base and an active community of users that you can benefit from.
If this still doesn’t work for you, there is always the option to hire someone to either help you set up your website or complete tasks for you (like building your course).
Overall, Teachable offers extensive online resources for self-help and 24/7 email support with a one-business-day response time.
Course compliance, security and privacy controls
You can use Teachable’s compliance features to ensure that you are in compliance with international, national, and state laws governing education.
If you’re planning to sell or distribute your course in a country that requires disclosure of certain information, you can use the Compliance feature to add pop-up disclaimers to your sales pages.
Advanced Reports
See how your students are progressing through your courses so you can tailor your material and increase engagement. This feature is only available to paid users.
Teachable Pricing Plans and Features
Teachable offers 4 pricing options, from free to $249 per month. The Teachable three paid pricing tiers, range from $29 per month to $249 per month. The pricing varies depending on the features you need, but all plans let you create a customizable school with your branding and own the content you produce. Each tier gives you access to a variety of course building and marketing tools so you can have the best course out there.
The Basic plan is perfect for beginners who just want to get started selling courses online. It includes everything from creating custom pages, hosting your site on Teachable’s domain and adding up to 10 team members. This plan is ideal if you’re looking for flexibility and customization at a low price point.
The Pro plan gets even better with a free Teachable subdomain, unlimited students, custom certificates and quizzes, along with more advanced analytics about your sales. If you’re looking for more features to grow your business this is the plan for you.
Finally, the Business plan takes things even farther with all of the above plus bulk student enrollment, marketing automation integrations and custom contracts that allow you to set up affiliates or resellers to sell your course on your behalf.
Free plan
Teachable’s free option lets you upload unlimited courses, unlimited video bandwidth and unlimited coaching sessions. You can also create an unlimited number of students, use the platform’s video hosting, offer quizzes and surveys, as well as access basic reporting tools.
Keep in mind that you have access to only one admin, and the platform charges a 10% transaction fee each time a student purchases a course.
You can create a Teachable school for free, but if you want to charge for your courses, I suggest you pick a paid plan.
The free plan has limited features and offerings:
The Basic Plan
A Basic, $29/month plan gives you access to all the basic features of Teachable. It allows you to upload unlimited courses with unlimited students. Additionally, Basic plan users pay no transaction fees and have access to two admins.
You can create your own custom course pages, set up a checkout system for students to buy courses from your school, and get detailed reports about how your students are engaging with your content. Basic plan charges 5% interest on sales in addition to monthly subscription charge.
The Pro Plan
A Pro $99/month plan gives you everything that the Basic plan does, plus advanced student analytics, third-party advanced integrations such as Zapier and marketing automation software like Drip or MailChimp. Pro plan users also get priority support from Teachable’s customer service team, three admins for their accounts, unlimited video hosting and the ability to add a custom domain and SSL security certificate to your school.
It unlocks unlimited courses and students. It also lets you sell memberships to paid content sites with recurring billing. You can also add an affiliate marketing program to your school using the Pro plan.
Charging only for specific content inside of a course (rather than charging for an entire course upfront) Setting up private courses so that you can only share them with specific people Creating coupons and special discounts to incentivize enrollment in your school Selling merchandise related to your school or courses in our store feature
The Business Plan
The Business plan is $249 a month. In addition to everything in the previous two plans, it includes bulk student enrollment so you can invite multiple students at once into a course or membership site. It also includes course compliance for extra security if you’re selling content that requires certifications for continuing education credits (for example). A Business plan has two options: $249/mo and $499/mo. The former allows you to offer coupons on your courses while the latter lets you host multiple schools in one account.
The 4 plans and Feature Usage
The four plans offer users Unlimited courses, unlimited coaching, unlimited students, and unlimited video bandwidth.
Support
Email support is available for all members both free and paid members, but the live chat support is only available to users with the Pro and business plans.
Features
Free users only have 1 admin-level user, the basic plan has 2 admin-level users, the pro plan has 5 admin-level users while the business plan users can have up to 20 admin users.
All the payment plans can use the integrated payment processing feature, student management feature, and course design templates. They are equally entitled to lecture comments, basic quizzes, and CSS snippets. However, while the free users are not entitled to a custom domain, all the other members are free to use a custom domain.
Also, the three paid plans can use coupon codes, drip course content, use integrated email marketing features, and community integration. These features, however, aren’t available for free users.
Also, the pro and the business plans all have access to Zapier actions, Graded Quizzes, Course completion certificates, Course compliance, upsells, advanced reports, unbranded website, and advanced developer customization, whereas these features are unavailable for users with the free and basic plans.
The custom user roles and bulk import students are only available for users with business plans. They are not available for free, basic, and pro members.
Additional benefits available for business users include the members-only community, the course creator training, and the group coaching calls. The pro members are equally entitled to all three additional benefits. The basic member only has the members-only community and the course creator training feature. The free members don’t have access to any of these additional benefits.
Teachable is one of the easiest platforms to use. It is built with beginners in mind and contains step-by-step instructions to guide users through the process of setting up their courses.
If you have any experience building websites, you can probably navigate through Teachable without the need for a tutorial. Teachable has a very intuitive interface that makes it easy for beginners to get started, but more advanced users will appreciate the ability to customize their site’s branding and appearance.
They offer a wide range of features, including:
Multiple instructor accounts – Allow additional teachers or assistants access to your account so they can help manage your school and its content.
Security – All payments are encrypted and secure. Teachable also meets all PCI compliance standards for credit card data security.
Hosted course pages – Your online school will have its own subdomain automatically created on the teachable platform (e.g., myschool.teachable.com). You can also use your own domain name instead (e.g., myschool.com).
Unlimited video streaming – Upload as much video content as you want without worrying about costs increasing due to bandwidth usage
Unlimited courses – You can create and sell as many courses as you want.
Student management – Organize your students into groups, view their course progress, and export their information for your records.
Teachable-powered website – Create a single-page website for your school in minutes. Customize the URL to match your brand and choose from a selection of beautiful themes that automatically adapt to all devices. (You can also integrate using our API.)
Course creation & management – Choose from a variety of multimedia lesson types, including video, audio, text, presentations, and downloads; organize lessons into sections and add them to a course; publish your courses immediately or save them as drafts.
Live classes – Use an online whiteboard to teach live classes over video conferencing and share presentations with students. (Available on Professional plans only)
Student analytics – View individual student progress through your course(s), including time spent on lessons and quizzes completed. (Available on Professional plans only)
Teachable Review (In-Depth): Final Verdict
Teachable is a standalone online course platform that makes it easy to create and sell online courses. It’s a great option for entrepreneurs who want to create their first online course or move existing courses from other platforms to Teachable.
You can create a custom domain for your courses, but only if you’re on their Professional plan or above.
Teachable is an easy way to teach and sell online courses, allowing you to sell unlimited video, audio, PDF and ZIP file downloads, as well as live video streams.
You can also make your online course available on mobile devices with Teachable’s free iOS app.
With Teachable, you can also add multiple instructors to your school and set different pricing for each instructor’s course.
But that doesn’t mean that Teachable is perfect for everyone. For example, if you want to sell physical products as well as digital courses, then you’ll be better off with a platform like Podia or Kajabi.
There is also the question of price. The plan that you really want to is the Pro plan, which includes course certificates and email marketing. These are essential features for any course creator, and all the other plans below it are just a way to get you to the Pro plan.
But the Pro plan if you choose monthly will cost you $119 per month, or $1188 if you commit for one year upfront. That’s a bit on the expensive side for most course creators just starting out.
Other than that, Teachable is a very good online course platform, and it has all the tools that you need.
