Teachable Review – Unlimited Course Creation Features

Choosing to learn how to create and sell your own online courses will prove to be valuable in the long run. This is since online learning management systems have grown more and more popular in recent years.

An online course platform is the perfect tool to get started with learning how to create and sell an online course. We recommend that you use Teachable and that you keep reading to find out why.

This Teachable Review will explore why exactly Teachable is a worthy online course platform for you to try out.

What is Teachable?

Put simply, Teachable is an online course platform and learning management system that was founded by Ankur Nagpal. It was originally called Fedora but has since rebranded itself.

Teachable has site building, course creation, and marketing features that will greatly benefit online instructors.

And it’s so much more than just a teaching platform. As mentioned, you can also create your own lessons and then sell them to anyone interested.

Teachable comes with handy marketing tools like email automation and customizable sales pages that you can use to reach a wider audience. It can even host videos that will encourage more interaction and engagement among users.

With Teachable, you won’t have to worry about how you’ll sell online courses that you made. You can immediately market your courses upon creation.

Other features that we love about Teachable are discussed in the next section of this Teachable review.

Features and Benefits of Teachable

Easy-to-Use Interface

Many people who’ve tried out Teachable all seem to notice the same thing. They notice that Teachable has such a clean and easy-to-use interface right off the bat. It makes it quick to navigate and eventually master.

Once you sign in to your account, you’ll be redirected to the Teachable dashboard. From there, you can easily begin setting up your course.

You can upload different files to supplement your lessons and also customize the look of your site. Teachable uses a drag and drop mechanism to add different categories and elements to your course. It’s what makes customization a breeze for most course creators.

You can also drag and drop course resources according to the subject. That way, it’s easier for your students to access the supplemental readings and files they need for their lessons.

And aside from course creation and management, you can also access analytics, payouts, and student progress on your dashboard.

Customizable Themes and Layouts

As mentioned, the Teachable offers settings that you can use to customize the look and feel of your course site. You can choose a personalized color scheme for all your courses to create a standard branding for yourself as an instructor.

To further customize your site, you can upload your own logo, images, and text to make it look more you. And a nice feature that Teachable has is that you can also personalize your domain. And if you opt to get the two more premium paid plans, you can even be rid of the Teachable domain branding altogether.

Plus, Teachable has a Power Editor that you can use to edit the custom CSS and HTML of your page. However, this does require you to have an adequate understanding of CSS and HTML codes since it’s not as easy-to-use as the built-in templates.

Overall, it’s incredibly easy to put up your own site and design it according to your preferences with Teachables custom features.

Convenient Uploading Process

Once you’re done figuring out how you want your course site to look like, you can begin enriching the content of your online courses. This means uploading various resources and supplements for each course.

It’s a good thing that Teachable has a convenient uploading process that won’t eat up too much of your time. Whether you have to upload videos, photos, or PDFs, Teachable has you covered.

The Teachable file uploader has a drag and drop mechanism that lets you input the files in bulk. And once the files are uploaded, they’re instantly stored in a specific folder that you can open anytime online. That way, you won’t have to redo the uploading process if you need another copy of the same file.

And if you’re worried about storage limits, you shouldn’t be. Teachable can be linked to third-party cloud storage applications, Dropbox, and Google Drive.

File Embedding

Teachable also has great file embedding features. When you’ve got the uploading step ticked off of your list, the next thing to think about is how the file will look on your online course platform.

Compared to other course platforms that require you to manually set up how the file will look, Teachable automatically optimizes it for website viewing. For example, you won’t need to add any HTML codes to center or justify your photos. Teachable does it for you.

Videos are also optimized for high-quality viewing on most devices. Students can access them on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone at different qualities to save on bandwidth.

Built-In Sales Features

When your course and resources are all set, you can begin to market them to your audience. Teachable has built-in sales features that help you sell online courses pretty easily.

Teachable offers an efficient payment collection process that allows you to monitor your revenue. You can also send out coupons and subscription discounts to your students to entice them to stay subscribed.

For course creators who’ve already made multiple courses, you can also bundle them all up into one subscription for your students.

And if you’re looking for a little more extra income, you can even run an affiliate program for your online course platform. That way, you can attract more visitors and potential students.

Teachable also has its own blog that you can refer to for extra marketing and sales tips. Many course creators like to use it for checking current trends and strategies that can help grow their business faster.

Analytics Tracker

Upon finishing setting up your course and getting students, you’ll want a tool that will help you keep track of everything going on. This is where Teachable’s analytics comes in.

You can access the progress of each course that you’ve made on the platform. Teachable consolidates all the data into a quick-to-understand chart that you can go through.

You’ll be able to see the number of students subscribed to each course, your total revenue, and overall student progress with Teachable’s analytics tracker. It’s great for determining which of your students might need more guidance and which areas you should focus on.

If you want more detailed results, you can also integrate a third-party app like Google Analytics to see where most of your online course site traffic comes from. You can even use it to check which of your marketing strategies are most effective at converting visitors into subscribers.

Email Marketing Tools

With online course classes, communication with your students is very important. Since lessons aren’t discussed face to face, you have to find a way to make sure that your students understand them well.

That’s why it’s great that Teachable has email marketing tools. You can send out announcements, resources, and other course-related information directly to a student’s email address. That way, they’re up-to-date with course developments.

You no longer have to ask for a student’s name, email, and contact details manually. Teachable automatically does that for you and you can simply send out the emails.

And you can even use the email marketing tools to persuade new students to join your course. You can integrate third-party software like Mail Chimp, ConvertKit, and InfusionSoft to help you market your Teachable course to a new audience.

You should note that with IntusionSoft though, you may have to use Zapier with other email clients. Otherwise, no need to use Zapier.

Efficient Customer Support

Finally, as with all online course platforms, customer support is important to an online course platform’s efficiency. Not only does it help instructors and creators when setting up their Teachable course, but it also guides students on how to navigate the platform.

Teachable’s paid plans offer a live chat wherein students and instructors can seek help with issues they find on the platform.

For common issues and FAQs, Teachable has a Knowledge Base. The Knowledge Base has a number of articles that you can go through on the site.

But if you’re experiencing something that isn’t on there, you can also opt to place a ticket. Teachable’s ticketing system is efficient and responses are sent in less than 24 hours.

How Teachable Works

Now that you know about Teachable’s useful features, you’re ready to begin using it. It’s fairly simple since the interface gives you the ease of use. In just a few steps, you’ll be able to create and sell your online course.

Step 1: Set Up a School

Once you’re signed in to your Teachable account, the platform will ask you to create a school to get started. This school is what will represent your website or your overall brand. Think of it as an actual school wherein all your courses will be stored in.

You can personalize the look of your school by adding a logo or a specific color scheme. This will enrich your branding to make it memorable to your students.

Step 2: Create a Course

The next step is to add a course to your school. For this part, you have to indicate the name of the course, as well as the name of the instructor.

You can upload a thumbnail photo that will appear next to the course name for easier access to your students. There’s even an option to put up a promotional video that you can embed to the sales page.

There are two ways that your potential students can access an online course that you’ve made. They have the option to join your school before choosing an online course or you can also give them access to specific courses for a fee.

Step 3: Create Lectures and Modules

When your online course is set up, you can then add different lectures. These can be labeled according to when you want your students to go through them. For example, you can have lectures named “Introduction”, “Module 1”, “Module 2”, and so on.

Step 4: Upload Resources

One thing we love about Teachable is that you can upload different types of media files to the lectures. You can add video, audio, and PDF files to supplement your modules. And you can also include customized quizzes to assess your students’ progress.

Another thing you can do with Teachable is to embed webinars and live streams to the lectures. Just click on the “Add Code” button and then paste the embed code.

Also, you can choose to “drip” the lectures and content that you give your students. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of “dripping” yet, it’s a simple concept. It means that you send out new content gradually and at regular intervals. This is so that your students don’t get too overwhelmed with information.

Step 5: Publish

Once you’re done setting everything up and adding your resources, you’re ready to publish the course. Just hit publish to see the final product.

Step 6: Sell Your Online Course

The last step is to sell your online course. Teachable lets you create a sales page for your courses so that they’re easier to market.

You can customize your sales page by adding course descriptions, an author bio, and course curriculums. Your sales page will also have a header that you can add a photo or logo to.

And you also have the option to put up a coupon banner to the sales page. This will let your students see any discounts or bundles that you’re currently offering on Teachable.

Pricing is also customizable. Your students can pay for the courses via an installment plan or a one-time purchase.

What Needs Improvement on Teachable

Nothing’s perfect. So even though Teachable has plenty of outstanding features, there are still some areas that we think it can improve on.

When you create and sell online courses, you obviously hope to earn income. That’s the catch with Teachable though. The payout schedule is delayed.

Normally, a course platform would send your payout once per month. But with Teachable, you’ll have to wait twice as long if you’re signed up to the Free plan and Basic plan.

Though your payout will be sent once a month via PayPal, there will still be a 30-day delay. This will pose a problem if you need fast cash and income. The only solution is to upgrade to the Professional or Business plan.

If you’re looking for a cost-efficient online course site, then you might want to think twice about Teachable. While it has great course creation and marketing features, it has higher transaction fees compared to other platforms.

It’s also quite ironic that the transaction fees are higher when you’re subscribed to the Free plan and Basic plan.

Teachable has a 10% transaction fee for the Free plan and a 5% transaction fee for the Basic plan. And though the Professional plan won’t ask for a Teachable transaction fee, there will still be a transaction fee from processing payment via PayPal and Stripe. These payment apps charge a fee of 2.9% plus an additional 20 cents for every transaction you make.

There is an option to forego PayPal and Stripe so that you can just use Teachable’s own payment processor. This will still warrant you a 2% transaction fee though. And many users found that when they choose this option, payment posting gets delayed so it isn’t quite worth the hassle.

Though we mentioned that Teachable is user-friendly and lets you customize your site, the design options are still pretty limited.

There are pre-made templates that you can tweak to suit your preference and get a professional-looking site. But the problem is that that’s as far as it goes.

Though you can choose specific colors, fonts, and photos to add to your site, you can’t create a unique template that will make it stand out. Anyone who visits it will immediately know that they’re on Teachable.com.

Of course, there is the option to just manually alter the CSS and HTML of your site since this is allowed when you’re subscribed to the Professional plan. But then that’ll also mean that you have to hire someone else to do it for you if you aren’t too familiar with the codes.

Either way, if you want a design that can really strengthen your branding, then you’ll most probably have to shell out more expenses.

While Teachable is a user-friendly platform for creating online courses, it doesn’t have extensive quiz features. Course instructors may find this concerning since a variety of quiz types are key to properly gauge how well their students are doing.

Multiple-choice and yes-or-no quizzes that will automatically be graded are quite easy to set up for a course. But if you want a more detailed type of assessment like long essays, sketches, or crosswords, then you may have to integrate an outside software.

Teachable can still add more variation to the assessment types they have on their platform.

Teachable Prices

Teachable has four different plans that you can choose from, depending on your needs and level of expertise with course creation. If you want something more in-depth, check out our review of Teachable Pricing here. Keep reading below for an overview.

Teachable Free

Like any other course platform, Teachable lets you access all its main features for free. The Free plan lasts for a month before you have to decide which among the three paid plans you plan to get.

The marketing and sales features in this plan are very limited though. So we still encourage you to eventually upgrade to a paid plan of your preference once it expires.

Also, you should note that though you won’t be paying a subscription fee to Teachable, they’ll still give you a $1 + 10% transaction fee for any sale you make while using the Free plan. And then there’s the 2.9% + 30 cents fee that payment processors will charge.

So if you do sell something during that time, then the Free plan isn’t actually totally free.

Teachable Basic

The Teachable Basic plan is the most affordable out of the three paid plans. It’s highly recommended for those who aren’t familiar with creating online courses yet because it offers all of Teachable’s main features without the hefty price tag.

The subscription costs $39 per month but if you choose to pay annually, it goes down to $29 per month.

You’ll get to upload unlimited content, automate student sign-ups to your courses, and create custom domains. You can even run an affiliate marketing program already to attract more potential students.

There’s also the option to “drip” the content that you send to your students so that the lessons are sensibly paced out. And you can also share ownership of the online course since up to 2 authors are allowed.

Teachable also charges a 5% transaction fee for any sale that you make, plus a 2.9% + 30 cents fee from payment processors like PayPal and Stripe.

Your payout will be made monthly but, as already mentioned earlier, expect a slight delay of up to another month.

Teachable Professional

Teachable’s Professional plan is the one that’s most commonly subscribed to by users. It’s a good option for those who want more control over the customization and analytics of their course site.

The subscription costs $119 per month but if you choose to pay for it annually, then it’s only $99 per month.

With this Teachable plan, you’ll get all the same features from the Basic plan but with some more add-ons. Up to 5 authors are allowed so you can bring on a team to help you manage your courses.

Advanced quiz features like automatic grading, compiled reports, and course certificates are also easily accessible with this plan. Any customer support queries or requests are also prioritized with access to live chatting.

What people also love about this is that it doesn’t charge a transaction fee for any sale you make. You’ll only have to deal with the 2.9% + 30 cents fee from payment processors.

You won’t have to follow a payout schedule with this paid plan as well. You’ll be able to access and withdraw your funds as soon as you earn them.

We recommend that you upgrade to Professional once you’re online course business receives a stable amount of earnings per month.

Teachable Business Plan

Finally, there’s the Teachable Business plan. This is more recommended for those who plan to create and sell multiple courses.

The subscription costs $299 per month but if you choose to pay annually, then it costs $249 per month.

You get all the same features as the Basic and Professional plans but with extra options. You can have up to 20 authors for one course and you can also enroll students in bulk. It’s perfect for holding large “classes”.

And similar to the Professional plan, you won’t be paying for transaction fees when you sell a course. The only extra cost you’ll incur is the 2.9% + 30 cents fee from PayPal and Stripe.

We recommend that you upgrade to the Business plan when your course creation business is already more established.

Teachable Review/s

Almost every review about Teachable contains praise for how easy the platform is to use. Beginners find no problem setting up their own course and then selling their courses as well.

One user even shared that it helped him triple the number of his students. It’s definitely a good tool for earning extra income as well.

“The best part about Teachable is definitely its ease of use. No special coding knowledge is required, everything is pretty drag and drop. We’re able to upload videos and PDFs and add things like quizzes and text to each lesson.” -Anonymous

“Teachable has amazing tutorials to help you through every step of the process. It’s also so easy to customize, personalize, and frame to your branding and style.” -Anonymous

“With Teachable, you can go from idea to execution fairly quickly, and get your course up and running and (potentially) making sales fast.” -Anonymous

“I like that Teachable provides plenty of resources for every level of entrepreneur to ensure they have the best opportunity to publish their content and share it with their audience.” -Anonymous

“Since I moved them to Teachable, my sign-ups have tripled and my cancellations have gone down to almost nothing. They have an incredibly easy to use system that has everything and that my students love. Plus they offer an affiliate system so I don’t have to worry about anything. ” -Anonymous

Alternatives to Teachable

If Teachable doesn’t seem to satisfy what you need from a course site, then you should check out one of these other options instead:

Kajabi

What we love about Kajabi is that it really does live up to being an all-in-one platform. You don’t need any prior experience with building websites to create your own course site.

Kajabi gives you several pre-made templates that you can choose to customize your website. You can also personalize the themes and colors.

The dashboard is easy to explore and use because it’s grouped into different sections and landing pages. You can easily move on to the next element you’re working on.

And Kajabi is one of the top choices of online course creators when marketing their courses. This is because of the useful marketing and sales tools that the site has.

Kajabi has a Sales Pipeline Builder that helps you make your own online workflow. This ultimately guides you with marketing and selling your courses. It makes every step more organized.

Plus, you can sell different kinds of digital products on Kajabi, as well as create a membership site. The most popular products sold that aren’t online courses are video lessons and eBooks.

And much like Teachable, Kajabi also has email marketing options. It lets you communicate more frequently with your students, as well as send them updates and other resources quicker.

We also love Kajabi’s customer support since they have 24/7 live chat and email responses. You can easily ask for help at any time of the day (or night).

You can also check out our review on Kajabi here. And we also did a more thorough comparison of it against Teachable. Check out our Kajabi vs. Teachable review here.

RELATED: Kajabi Alternatives, Teachable Alternatives

Thinkific

Thinkific always comes up next to both Kajabi and Teachable when you search for a learning platform online. It’s another close and worthy competitor to both.

Its similarity to Teachable is that the interface is straightforward enough to understand. You can access a lot of basic but useful features that will help you create courses and content.

Like Teachable, it also has pre-loaded themes that you can choose from to personalize your site. There’s are options to drip your content and add a sales page as well.

A lot of online course creators and instructors like Thinkific because of its quiz settings. They can easily customize the quiz and assessment types. There’s also the option to conduct webinars and video-hosting to entice the students to learn.

And similar to Teachable, Thinkific also lets you reward your students with certificates of accomplishment. This motivates them to finish each course well.

One thing we don’t like about Thinkific though, is that it doesn’t have email marketing features. You can’t send out automated messages or updates to a student’s email address. This poses a problem because that means you’d have to send out the emails manually.

READ: Thinkific Review – Course Creation Features for Free, Thinkific Pricing, Teachable vs. Thinkific

Final Verdict on Teachable Review

Overall, we find Teachable to be a good platform for creating and selling online courses. It’s fairly easy to understand and use even without a lot of experience with web design.

You can customize the look of your course site and upload a wide variety of file types to enrich your courses. And once you’ve finished creating a course, you can easily sell it through a Teachable sales page.

Another helpful feature is the Analytics option. You can easily track the progress of your students, as well as the state of your earnings. Teachable instantly creates a compiled report for more organized viewing and analysis.

And there is also the email marketing options. You won’t have to ask your students for their name, email, and other contact numbers. The automated email settings on Teachable does all that for you.

You can easily send out course updates, new lessons, and other resources to your students through the automatic emailing system. It’s also helpful for reaching new audiences that can potentially enroll in your other courses.

Finally, we really like that there are a number of plans to choose from. Starting with the Free plan, you can access all of Teachable’s main options without spending on a subscription.

And once your free trial ends, the three paid plans are reasonably priced and equipped with great premium benefits. They’ll surely help you grow your online course business and keep you afloat.

There still are a handful of things to improve on though. The Free and Basic plans have a delayed payout schedule that can turn people who need fast cash away from the site. There are also limited design options apart from the built-in layout themes.

Transaction fees also seem to be higher compared to other rival online course sites. Even with the free trial, you’ll have to give Teachable a percentage of sales.

But setting those aside, our verdict for this Teachable review is that it is a good tool for creating courses and teaching online modules. You’ll surely get your money’s worth with whichever paid plan you opt to subscribe to.

So we highly recommend that you check out Teachable now! Click on the button below to begin your free trial. You can also check out our article on the Best Teachable Website Examples for inspiration when designing your site.

And if you liked this review but still need other options, then you can read through our review of the Best Online Course Platforms.