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Squarespace Courses vs Teachable
Are you looking for a secure and intuitive course hosting and marketing platform? You’re in the right place!
Read on, as we compare how two popular platforms – Squarespace Courses and Teachable, stack up against each other. We review both these offerings on a wide range of parameters from landing page creation to course control.
Before we get in, it is important to note that both platforms offer a 14-day free trial. However, you will have to upgrade if you want to go live with the site.
Table of Contents
Squarespace Courses vs Teachable Summary
Teachable is a no-code course creation platform for creators who want to share their expertise with the world. It’s a robust online course creation platform designed to empower educators, entrepreneurs, and experts to easily build, customize, and sell their courses. With its user-friendly interface, it offers a comprehensive suite of tools for uploading course content, engaging with students, and handling payment processing, making it an ideal choice for anyone looking to create and monetize high-quality online learning experiences. See our Teachable review for a more in-depth look at the platform.
On the other hand, Squarespace Courses is a more comprehensive platform for creating online courses and selling digital and physical products. It comes with extensive eCommerce, blogging, and SEO tools that support the selling process.
Where is Squarespace Courses Better Than Teachable?
Squarespace is a better platform than Teachable in the following scenarios.
- Great option for existing Squarespace users who want to create an online course.
- Offers excellent design templates to quickly customize and create websites to promote your courses and online business, just the way you want.
- Supports eCommerce businesses that operate purely online or in an offline-online mode.
- Makes it easy to analyze abandoned cart recovery to increase sales.
Where is Teachable Better Than Squarespace?
In the below situations. Teachable is a better choice when compared to Squarespace.
- Exclusively built for creating, hosting, and selling online courses.
- Comes with an intuitive editor to drag and drop your content, so you can create the best courses quickly.
- Supports student engagement and monitoring their performance for a personalized experience.
- Guarantees an uptime of 99.99%, along with industry-leading security features like fraud protection, encryption, and more.
With this summary, let’s delve into a head-to-head comparison across different aspects.
Online Course Building
Let’s start off our side-by-side comparison of Squarespace Courses vs Teachable by looking at the most important area — how they fare as online course building platforms. Both tools make it easy to create online courses, but there are some differences between the two.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace Courses is a brand new feature that was recently added to the Squarespace platform. Now, Squarespace users have the ability to create and sell online courses with a Business or Commerce plan. And of course, because Squarespace is a renowned website builder, you can easily launch a website to promote and host your course.
As with its website builder, Squarespace Courses features a diverse collection of customizable templates that can help you get your online course up and running in no time at all. There are templates for just about any kind of course you want to create.
Using Squarespace Courses, you can seamlessly upload and host videos, send emails, handle customer management, monitor analytics, and process payments, all within a single platform.
Some other features of Squarespace’s course builder include:
- Multiple pricing options for your courses: Free, one-time, or subscription
- Tons of helpful analytics and customer insights
- No Squarespace ads or branding
- 24/7 customer support
- Easily offer discounts or run promotions for your course
- Enroll students in cohorts
- Create lessons and chapters to organize your course the way you like
- Accept customer payments with PayPal or credit card
Teachable
Teachable is a versatile and user-friendly course builder platform designed to empower educators, experts, and entrepreneurs to create and sell online courses with ease. It provides a comprehensive set of tools and features to help you build and customize your course content, making it engaging and interactive.
With Teachable, you can effortlessly upload video lectures, written materials, quizzes, and assignments. The platform offers flexibility in branding, allowing you to create a unique and cohesive online learning environment that matches your personal or business identity.
Additionally, Teachable takes care of the technical aspects, such as hosting, security, and payment processing, leaving you free to focus on creating exceptional educational content.
Its intuitive interface and analytics tools also enable you to track your students’ progress, gather insights, and refine your teaching strategy, ultimately helping you achieve your goals as an online educator.
Whether you’re a seasoned instructor or just starting your online teaching journey, Teachable provides the tools and support to bring your courses to life and reach a global audience.
Verdict
When it comes to course building, both Teachable and Squarespace Courses are both fantastic options.
Teachable excels in its specialization for online education, offering a robust set of features tailored for course creators. It provides comprehensive tools for course content creation, customization, and management, making it a top choice for educators and entrepreneurs looking to create immersive learning experiences.
On the other hand, Squarespace Courses, while primarily known for website building, seamlessly integrates course creation into its platform, making it an attractive option for those who value a unified online presence. It allows users to host videos, send emails, and handle payments alongside their courses, providing a streamlined approach for those who want a well-rounded online ecosystem.
The choice between Teachable and Squarespace Courses ultimately depends on your specific needs and the extent to which you want your course to be integrated with other online elements.
Brand Customization and Consistency
Branding is an essential part of marketing, as it helps you to subtly help visitors remember your offering. A good branding strategy must use consistent colors, fonts, logos, and other visual elements across all your web pages. Let’s see how Teachable and Squarespace compare on this front.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace uses something called sections, which is a little different from other website builders like Wix. Though this takes a little bit of time to get used to, it eventually helps to create cleaner and sleeker websites. The highlight is that you can replicate these sections across all pages, so you save effort and time while ensuring branding and consistency.
Teachable
Teachable also comes with a website builder that you can use to create beautiful websites and sales pages. The drag-and-drop editor is intuitive to use, and this means, you don’t have to hire a designer to create websites for you.
So, which of the two is better?
Verdict
When you compare the two, Squarespace is the hands-down winner because website building is one of the central functionalities of this platform. It comes with many visual elements that you can quickly move with its drag-and-drop editor. Also, the menu options are uncluttered, and editing the elements is a breeze. Also, you can easily upload videos, design lessons, and other materials to offer students the best learning experience. While Teachable also helps create websites, the options are highly limited.
Website Templates
Design templates are a great starting point for building stunning websites, landing pages, and checkout areas quickly. Most professional website-building platforms offer hundreds of templates that you can simply take and customize to meet your needs. Let’s see how Teachable and Squarespace stack up against each other.
Squarespace Courses
Design templates are a great starting point for building stunning websites, landing pages, and checkout areas quickly. Most professional website-building platforms offer hundreds of templates that you can simply take and customize to meet your needs. Let’s see how Teachable and Squarespace stack up against each other.
Teachable
Teachable, on the other hand, is highly limited when it comes to design templates. At the time of writing this piece, only three templates are available, namely, Classic, Colossal, and Simple. All these three templates work well on both mobile and web and are designed to lead you to create and sell courses.
Verdict
Squarespace is the clear winner in this space too, simply because it comes with stunning templates to ease the process of website page creation for users. Teachable, on the other hand, offers only limited options for website design. But if you want to create stunning web pages for your courses, Squarespace is your choice here.
Membership Sites
A membership site, as the name suggests, is a functionality or content that can be accessed through a membership only. Often, this is one of the ways to make money as members have to sign up and pay a certain amount to enjoy content. Depending on your business, you can provide steady drip content at regular intervals to your members or just one-time access to special content. This additional content can be a great addition to your courses and can complement them while earning you some extra income. Regardless of how you choose to create and manage membership sites, let’s see if you must choose Teachable or Squarespace.
Squarespace Courses
The membership site of Squarespace is called Member Area, and it is easy to create and share content exclusively with your members. However, there are some limitations too. You will have to publish the pages and personalization options manually are highly limited as well.
Teachable
Teachable is much better suited for membership sites as you can preset scheduled dates on which content will be made available to users. You can even offer previews through automated email campaigns to attract more members. Also, you can decide if a particular content must be available to all membership levels or some plans only. Similarly, you can charge different prices for different levels.
Now comes the question of which platform is a good choice for membership sites.
Verdict
A quick comparison of Squarespace vs Teachable shows that Teachable is more conducive for membership sites than Squarespace. Despite being a new entrant, Squarespace is rapidly scaling up its Member Area functionalities. However, it could take some time for Squarespace to compete with the more established Teachable in this space.
Blogging
Blogging has become an important tool for asserting your topical authority and educating your audiences with the right words and visuals. It is also an important channel to move your audiences through the marketing funnel. Given this strategic role of blogs, how do both platforms support it?
Squarespace
Squarespace is well suited for blogging as it comes with many supportive tools and features. In particular, Squarespace is most conducive for hosting visual images along with blogs, which is a convenient feature to have. Also, this platform can support multiple contributors to the same blog. Readers can sync and share the content on social media with the click of a button. Furthermore, the many blogging templates make it easy to get started quickly and with minimal effort.
Teachable
Teachable is not designed for blogging. It does not natively support the creation of blogs, but you can integrate a third-party plugin like DropInBlog to create blogs. Simply embed the code of DropInBlog into Teachable to connect the two platforms, so you can seamlessly write and manage content on Teachable.
Verdict
Even a glance at the features clearly shows that Squarespace is the winner in this category. Not only does it have native support for blogging, but it also comes with blogging templates that you can customize to match your organization’s branding.
Customer Support
Customer support is an important consideration, as you’d want to reach out and get your fix problems at the earliest. Here’s how the support varies between the two platforms.
Squarespace
Squarespace is well-known for its top-quality support. You can reach out to them through many channels like live chat from Monday to Friday and 24×7 support on social media and through emails. Moreover, it comes with video tutorials and a vibrant community that provides answers to known issues.
Teachable
You can contact Teachable through its social media handles on X, Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. For live chat support, visit the Help Center or open the Help widget. You can also raise a ticket through the system.
Verdict
As you can see, both platforms have good customer support that has been answering the questions and concerns of its millions of users.
Pricing
The pricing of online platforms must be simple and affordable to attract the maximum number of people. Plus, studies show that platforms that ease the creation of an uncluttered checkout page are more appealing to potential students. Also, such well-designed checkout pages offer the flexibility to upsell and cross-sell your courses.
Squarespace Courses
Squarespace Courses pricing includes the following options:
- Squarespace Business Plan & Above: Basic Courses plan included at no extra cost with Squarespace Business ($23/month), Commerce ($27/month), and Commerce Advanced ($49/month) plans. Includes a 9% transaction fee for digital products sales and 30 minutes of video storage.
- Squarespace Courses Starter (+$9/month): For an additional $9 a month, this plan includes a 7% transaction fee for digital products sales, 10 hours of video storage, and unlimited courses and memberships.
- Squarespace Courses Core (+$34/month): For an additional $34/month on top of your base plan, this package includes a 3% transaction fee for digital products sales, 50 hours of video storage, and unlimited courses and memberships.
- Squarespace Courses Professional (+$119/month): For an additional $119/month on top of your base plan, this plan includes no transaction fees, unlimited hours of video storage, and unlimited courses and memberships.
Teachable
Teachable pricing includes four plans:
- Free: No subscription, but a 10% transaction fee for every payment.
- Basic: $39 per month plus a 5% transaction fee.
- Pro: $119/month and 0% transaction fee. Supports many features like affiliate marketing, live chat support, upsells, and more.
- Pro+: $199 per month and 0% transaction fee. Offers 200 coaching products, digital downloads, product bundles, and more.
Which Is Better?
All in all, both plans are priced pretty evenly. Both companies offer lower-priced plans that include transaction fees on sales and then higher priced, premium plans that eliminate those fees.
Conclusion
Now, comes the big question – which of the two platforms is better?
The answer is it depends.
If you’re someone who’s looking to build a well-rounded online presence with a great website, blog, and more, Squarespace is the winner here because it offers well-designed templates that can be a great addition to your course content.
But if you’re someone who’s just looking to launch an online course and you don’t care about the bigger picture of brand building, Teachable is a fine choice as well.
In the end, it comes down to your specific needs and preferences.