Teachable is a popular platform among educators and teachers who want to utilize the Internet to teach, showcase their hobbies, and monetize the courses they sell. The free version is already generous and offers unlimited hosting, however the platform’s paid tiers lets you access SEO features, and live-group coaching sessions, and give you a custom domain. Teachable has integrations with Facebook, Pixel, Circle.so, and ConvertKit. It also offers a partner scheme that lets users earn up to 30% commission with every Teachable referral.
Capabilities |
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
Very pretty and simple aesthetic for students, ability to see everything they're signing up for.
Basic functions all in English even if you switch language to something else.
Needed to create courses.
With Teachable, you can go from idea to execution fairly quickly, and get your course up and running and (potentially) making sales fast.
There are some things which are frustrating and limiting, but you learn to work around them.
I used to host my courses on my own site, but on Wordpress there were always issues with updates and security and plugins, and on Squarespace there really isn't a decent membership solution. Once I moved my courses to Teachable, most of the admin side was no longer an issue or a headache.
Easy to use and input information into the system. I like how user friendly it is.
I am not 100% sure how it will look/feel when complete.
Online leaning - reaching people we cannot normally reach
I like the price the best. Their competitor kana i is waayyy expensive
I wish it had a little more capabilities and flexibility
It’s difficult to brand it to your own business.
- It's partially white labeled, although not fully. So you do get the branding of the specific provider which is nice - Having all your courses from a specific provider in a centralised environment is nice. Otherwise some courses may get lost. - The possibility is there to combine accounts if ever needed (which was the case for me) - When you login to your Teachable account, you get an overview of all your providers and thus all your courses when you click on them.
- It would be way, way, way too expensive for my personal taste to use for my own businesses. I always look for lifetime deal software and if that's not possible, I would definitely find something with a much lower monthly cost. In my case, I'd use WordPress with some plugin(s) to achieve the same type of functionality. - The process of signing up for a course after buying from a provider who uses Teachable can be hard/confusing sometimes. I ended up with 3 accounts and due to my own fault I even lost access to a few courses. Luckily that provider gave me back that access after my request, but it was a hastle anyway. Again, this was partially my own doing (including creating the multiple accounts), but it can be confusing is what I found.
Basically, as mentioned above, I do like it when I purchase a course from someone and they use Teachable. Because by now, I know what Teachable is so it's very easy for me to go to my account and find my new course there. So as a "buyer of online courses", my experience has been positive. Though again, I would not use the software for my own businesses. I'd personally use something different.
Ease of setting up a course and getting started. The example courses and content to improve your course were very helpful.
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.
I need a simple but clean UX to deliver on demand courses and live coaching.