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Teachable Review 2023: The Best Online Course Platform?
Teachable is one of the leading learning management platforms that makes it easy to create and sell courses. Everything from hosting to analytics is handled for you. It helps you to build a knowledge business and share it with potential students without worrying much about the technical aspects of hosting, design, or coding.
Are you thinking about creating and selling your own online course? Wondering if Teachable is the right platform for your needs?
Teachable is one of the most popular online course platforms out there today, offering users everything they need to create, market, and sell their courses.
But is Teachable legit? Or are you better off using a different platform for building and selling online courses?
Over the past several years, we’ve extensively tested and reviewed dozens of online course platforms. We understand what each does well and where each falls short.
In our Teachable review, we’ll take an in-depth look at what the platform has to offer, as well as some of the pros and cons of using the platform. We’ll also tell you why we think it’s a great online course platform for those new to the industry.
Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about the Teachable platform!
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Business
$299
PER MONTH
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The one key difference at the Teachable Business Plan tier is the admin users allowed. Instead of 5 with Professional, you can have 100 admin level users.
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Try Teachable Free Trial → |
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Professional
$119
PER MONTH
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In addition to charging no transaction fees at the Professional tier, you also get the expected upgrades of a higher software subscription tier.
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Try Teachable Free Trial → |
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Basic
$39
PER MONTH
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The Basic Plan gives you the tools to get your first online course up and running. Unlimited students, courses and access to the full range of Teachable’s third party integrations.
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Try Teachable Free Trial → |
Key Teachable Features
What does Teachable do? How does it make it so easy to create and sell online courses? What makes it unique? Is it one of the best online course platforms?
Let’s explore the answers to such questions and take an in-depth look at its key features.
Course Creation and Engagement
One of the biggest advantages of using a learning management platform like Teachable is you don’t need any design or coding knowledge. Its drag and drop builder makes it easy to drag and drop different elements to create stunning landing pages. All that it needs is imagination and the editor can turn it into reality.
This makes Teachable a great option for beginners who are just getting into creating online courses.
If you know to code and want to make extensive customizations to your page or content, Teachable has something called a Power Editor that gives you access to the underlying code.
What’s interesting is that you can add course pages to an existing website or you can create one from scratch through Teachable.
Teachable supports different file types such as videos, text documents, PDFs, audio, image, and more, so you have the flexibility to create engaging and informative online courses based on your target audience.
You also have the option to pull content directly from a cloud storage service such as Google Drive or Dropbox.
Further, it comes with many tools to engage your students and keep them interested in your offering. You can, for example, create surveys and Google forms to get inputs about your course from students and make changes to meet their preferences.
Likewise, you can use student segmentation lists to boost your relationship with students and to send them relevant and personalized offers.
Due to these features, Teachable is undoubtedly a convenient platform for course creation, management, and student engagement.
Test/Quiz Creation
Tests and quizzes are exciting as it helps students to assess their learning.
Teachable allows you to have videos, documents, comments, quizzes, and more in the same lecture and in any order. As a content provider, this gives you a world of flexibility to make your content more engaging to your customers.
The quizzes can be designed to have both single and multiple answers and the author can specify whether it will be graded or not. If it is gradable, the score will be displayed in the reports. This feature is available in all the plans.
But you can’t store questions in a question bank or randomize questions on Teachable, which means, you’ll have to enter questions one-by-one to create a test or quiz.
In the Pro and Business plans, you can also offer completion courses that can be created natively on this platform.
Checkout Process
Teachable has a streamlined checkout process where users can enter their personal information and make payments on the same page. Since the entire process is short and user-friendly, the conversion rate tends to be high.
Also, you can customize elements on your checkout page such as testimonials and money-back guarantees that are sure to add to the conversion rate as well.
From an author’s perspective, you have complete control over the payment solutions, which means, you can decide how you’re going to accept money and in what currency.
Teachable supports more than 130 payment solutions and the most popular currencies. Further, you can set up payment plans, subscriptions, one-time payments, and more to cater to different audiences.
It helps to know that besides digital payment solutions such as PayPal or Stripe, Teachable also allows payments through Visa and Mastercard to give more flexibility to your users. Also, it supports Apple Pay and Google Pay natively.
You can offer discount codes and coupons through this platform to bring in more users, Affiliate codes are also available for those who want to promote your courses and earn revenue from it.
Overall, its checkout process is simple and user-friendly and the platform supports many payment methods, all of which can bring in more students for you.
Website Creation
Landing pages are the pages that a potential customer sees first, so it should be stunning, appealing, and informative to boost the buying chances.
The good news with Teachable is that it comes with a host of well-designed landing page templates to choose from. All that you have to do is choose the sales page template, customize it with your name and logo, upload your content, and start selling it.
These pages can also be translated into many languages for your international audience.
You can also choose to create your webpages from scratch if that works better.
Teachable provides free hosting and an SSL certificate with every subscription and it handles things like security, updates, backup, and 100% availability, so those things are off your hands.
Further, it gives a free subdomain with every account and you can create a custom domain too in some plans.
In all, website creation is a breeze in Teachable and it gives you the freedom to focus on your content instead of worrying about the nuts and bolts of hosting and maintenance. Its templates add to the ease of creation as well.
Integrations
Teachable integrates well with third-party tools like Salesforce, Segment, and Vizia to give additional capabilities.
You can also create custom integrations through Zapier, that in turn, connects with thousands of apps.
Teachable integrates directly with two well-known email marketing platforms, namely, MailChimp and ConvertKit for email marketing. If you want to use other tools, you can always do it through Zapier.
That said, it merits to know that Zapier is a paid service and more integrations could cost you more.
Course Reporting and Analytics
Teachable offers advanced analytics and reports to help you stay on top of your students’ activities and performance. You can even see their completion rate of videos, quizzes, and other elements, so you can improvise your content offering to better suit your audience.
The dashboard has a separate section called reports that provides comprehensive information needed to evaluate your course and its popularity among your customers.
There are many built-in reports such as the Leaderboard report that shows the course completion rates for individual students while the Lecture Completion report shows the average course completion rates of different lectures/courses. Video Stats report is another popular built-in report that shows the engagement and play rate of all your videos.
Besides these built-in reports and a comprehensive dashboard. Teachable also integrates with Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and Segment to give you information about the number of visitors, their behavior, amount of time spent on each page, and more.
Combining both these sets of information, you can create powerful marketing strategies to widen your customer base and increase the conversion rate.
Ease of Use
Teachable is an easy-to-use platform that requires little experience and training to get started. Also, you don’t need deep technical knowledge to create Teachable courses as this platform handles much of the background work for you.
This is why you can focus on creating courses and selling them without worrying about the overheads associated with it.
You can easily add different types of materials to engage your students and to give the skills and knowledge they’re looking for.
From a student’s perspective too, this platform is simple to use. The highlight is its one-step checkout process that removes a lot of complexity when signing up and paying for a course.
Its well-designed reports and dashboard make it easy to access information about your revenue, students’ performance, engagement rate, and more. Its interface is uncluttered and the navigation is fairly intuitive as well.
Customer Support
Customer support is available in all the pricing plans, though the more expensive ones have priority support.
You can reach out to the customer service representatives in many ways. You can create tickets in the system, but you’ll be redirected to the knowledge base before you can submit questions.
Besides, Teachable also has an extensive blog that provides answers to most questions, gives tips and tricks, and has an online academy and live workshops to give users a better hang of the platform.
They also have live chat on the website, but no phone support.
Pricing
Besides the free plan, Teachable pricing offers three tiers and they are:
- Basic ($39/month) – This plan is ideal for those who want to try Teachable’s advanced features to create and sell online courses.
- Pro ($119/month) – This is for the serious content creators who want to make a career out of teaching and sharing their knowledge with students around the world.
- Business ($299/month) – This plan is mostly for small businesses that have more than 25 courses by different authors and want to track and manage the performance of each
Conclusion
To conclude, Teachable is a content creation platform that comes with a host of features to help you create different courses, engage your students, understand their needs, provide custom offerings, market your courses, up-sell them, track analytics, and more.
That said, Teachable also comes with its shortcomings and may not be ideal for everyone.
In general, choose Teachable if you,
- Are new to this field and want to test waters before making a substantial investment
- Want to focus on creating content with some basic marketing activities
- Need a flexible and user-friendly course builder
- Think your course platform should have an iOS app
- Require a simple and one-step checkout process
- Want to provide completion certificates to your students natively, without integrating with third-party platforms.
You should probably look at other options if you,
- Want a platform with advanced marketing and automation tools
- Need a vibrant student community
- Require extensive customer support
In all, Teachable is a comprehensive platform that focuses on providing the right tools needed to create excellent courses and sell them to interested students. Its easy checkout process, handling of EU Digital Goods VAT tax, support for Apple and Google Pay natively, live chat, and advanced analytics make Teachable a good choice for every content creator who wants to share his/her expertise to the world.