Teachable Reviews

Pros

Teachable is easy to use and does everything I need it to - and mostly very well. I also like that the company behaves ethically.

The user experience for my students is excellent and the all-in one package makes it very easy for me.

Cons

There are a few little niggles. Not a great mobile solution (but perfectly adequate) and the text editor in the course builder is low on capabilities for formatting beyond the basics (Tables? Not so much). And the placement of toolbars and save buttons is frustrating.

Pros

I've been a Teachable user for a few years (I was a user when the name was Fedora). Since then, Teachable has been one of the most mentioned names for online course creators. One of the things I like best about Teachable is how easy it is to use the platform. In a matter of time, you can create an online course, including curriculum and media. This is super convenient for both the novice online course creator and the more experienced ones. It's a time saver!

Cons

Since 2019, the blog feature of being able to auto-schedule posting has not worked. I've placed support tickets to address the issue, but as of this writing (Feb 2020), the feature still isn't working. I write blog content well in advance and was able to schedule blog posts with ease. Now I have to set a reminder to go into my Teachable account to manually post the blog. This is not ideal.

Alternatives Considered

Thinkific

Reasons for Choosing Teachable

SchoolKeep was changing its charging platform to a per-student model that didn't have a place in my business.

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

I liked the interface Teachable had (Fedora) vs. Thinkific.

Pros

The course building platform itself is great. Support is decent for the most part, although they don't really engage well with feature requests.

Cons

Teachable seems to look at sales as an incidental part of course creation and teaching. Here are a few examples:

1) They don't have a drag-and-drop landing page builder. The templates are really generic and it's hard to get a sleek-looking landing page.
2) No email automation. You can send one-off emails to your students, but that's it.
3) You can't add a lead magnet to collect email addresses. You'll have to pay for Convertkit (which is another $25/month) or another email list provider.
4) There are limited options to customize the checkout. You can't custom code (like Analytics), or so on because the checkout is hosted on sso.teachable.com. And there's no option for a two-step checkout - say goodbye to abandoned cart emails (unless you want to create a complicated integration).
5) Their "one-click-upsell" mechanics are super limited. They previously had this feature, but got rid of it when they upgraded their page builder. They now have an upsell, but the mechanics are clunky. Again - sales and marketing are not at the top of this company's mind.

On top of that, the pricing was expensive. $99/month (the lowest-priced annual plan with no transaction fee) is super high pricing for what you get. You're better off with Kartra (which costs the same as Teachable, but does way more) or Systeme.io (which has crazy-affordable pricing and really engages with users to improve the product)

Pros

A unique platform where you can create courses and sell them. The free plan offers a number of features. We can create our website and host it with Teachable. It is the best way to get students from all over the world.

Cons

The Pro plan has good features but it is quite expensive for a newbie.

Pros

I was excited to find a product that was stremlined and user friendly. I even like that I can register students without registering for their monthly plan. Of course the fees are a little higher with that version but I like the 'try-before-you-buy aspect'. I like the look of it and that you will be able to creat certificates and allow students to track their progress. One of my favorite features is being able to create discount/ special codes when you want.

Cons

I don't like that i have to post a youtube URL if my videos are a little larger. This adds a little complication seeing as I'm not a techie, but it's not insurmountable.

Alternatives Considered

Thinkific

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

I was a student on the other platform and didn't love the experience. I thought Teachable would be better for me as a creator and for the student side as well.

Pros

The overall coverage of all features a course creator needs. They even provide a payment gateway, which alone saves you plenty in commisions and monthly fees.

Cons

Just need an Android app. Not having an Android app forces most of my students to watch the courses on their browsers.

Alternatives Considered

Thinkific

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

The first is that Teachable has an awesome reputation. Easy to use, and above all, affordable.

Pros

The platform looks super professional, it's very easy to create professional and high-quality video courses for online clients.

Cons

I would add an option to create a video course you don't really want to sell, just to send to registered customers. Also, the navigation on the website is pretty difficult.

Pros

My favourite thing about Teachable is it 'just works' out of the box. Most of its functionality is intuitive and it doesn't try to add a million features that most people won't use. It's a software tool that knows what it is and who it's for. It makes it very easy to make a good looking site and get a course up for sale. Anyone can get started and be able to do most of what they need to be able to do to create a profitable online course business easily.

Cons

The drawback is in that final 5%. It's easy to make a good looking site, but not easy to make an amazing looking site. I have in the past had some issues with their affiliate system and with their support staff, but to be fair this was in late 2016 and they have made big improvements since then. I would like to see them roll out new features more consistently so that their users are on the cutting edge of online course technology rather than just slightly behind. Teachable is also best for people that don't want to integrate multiple tools. This is also a good thing as it stays focused, but I think it's worth noting here as a potential user should consider that what they get with Teachable is what they get. Don't start using it expecting to link it with a forum later if you don't love how their commenting system works (for example).

Pros

Easy to use. A simple framework to set up a complete curriculum. Fine sales pages and features to give students access by drip function. So they have to work their way through before accessing the whole course.

One can also make a great Curriculum framework and reuse for the next and the next. By the function og duplicating a whole course.

Cons

The inflexibility to make the page look and design in a way that fit the needs for ones own creativity is limited. Also the integrations with other software, landingpages, Eventbrite, Facebook is quite lowkey and can need an upgrade soon.
There is very few options for making the page look great in the GUI. But one can use own html to code if so desired.

Pros

It has several important features but among the most outstanding is very easy to use since the platform is very intuitive and does not correspond a great challenge to use it, besides having a large number of tools from which I can attend the student as for example the power create blogs and finally their different forms of payment gateways can affiliate with different accounts being an excellent option.

Cons

It is an excellent platform because it is simple for both the teacher and the student, adapting to the preferences of the author of the course giving a great capacity for organization over the various contents.

Pros

* Customer Service
* Ease of use
* Pretty nice admin interface
* Although there is not much you can do to theme your school without getting into code, what they have out of the box is pretty tasteful in terms of typography and layout

Cons

* No built-in contact form capabilities, and I don't know that you could code your own (if you're tech savvy enough), so that leaves you with a cheesy free embed form that will have someone else's branding on it, or paying at least $10 a month for a white-labeled contact form. I mean, what sort of paid online school doesn't have a "Contact Us" page with a form (as opposed to just an email address)?
* Hefty fees if you want to have payments automatically sent out to other authors automatically (wish I knew this before I signed up!).
* No ability to sell gift certificates without going through a very manual convoluted process

Pros

Software is OK. Company is untrustworthy.

Cons

No file security on downloads
Unlimited Plan is NOT Unlimited
[SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] unwilling to honor promises of Unlimited Plan
We were forcibly evicted along with our 8,200+ customers!

Pros

I like that you can track where you are in the course and easily download resources. 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.

Cons

When I see a course that I want to sign up for that is housed on Teachable, I groan.

I know it is going to take me several minutes to be able to actually start consuming the course, because even though I already have a student account, it is going to ask me to verify my sign-in. This is even though I get my login info correct. No matter what, I always have to verify my login, and either type in a code or click on a link in an email that I have to wait for.

It shouldn't be this hard, and if you are signing in on a previously used device, you should not have to go through the same sequence as you need to if you are using a new-to-Teachable device. At the very least, there should be an option to not have to verify the sign-in for two to four weeks.

Pros

* I love how easy it is to make an online course
* I love having a branded course and they make it easy

Cons

* I don't like how every Teachable course looks identical minus the colour scheme and logo.
* I wish it wasn't so obvious I use Teachable over other softwares

Alternatives Considered

ClickFunnels

Reasons for Choosing Teachable

Ease of use Simplicity

Switched From

Thinkific

Reasons for Switching to Teachable

Cost is better

Pros

Teachable is very user friendly and they offer an intuitive user interface. They have features like drag and drop or duplicate that make creating training courses a breeze. I've used other course creation software and I find that Teachable is easier to understand. They also have a lot of documentation and offer support. Also, check out their facebook group...there's lots of valuable info exchanged there about course creation.

Cons

I'm on the basic plan and I think it's a little pricey, but I get it; they're in business to make money. I wish they had a plan between the free plan and the basic plan with less features than the basic as this would probably be a better fit for me.

Pros

It's bright and engaging. Pricing okay. Help tutorial videos.

Cons

Not user-friendly, too many back links and limited design features. Too pricey compared to other platforms. I did not stick with using this platform even after attending trainings.

Alternatives Considered

Podia

Reasons for Choosing Teachable

Pricing and design options

Switched From

Thinkific

Pros

I love teachable. It makes it wasy for any user to add a product and sell it online. Compared to a lot of other self hosted solutions, Teachable makes it easy to start with selling right out of the bat. Just add your content, and adjust a few tweaks, add price. And voila, information product for sale, without you needed to know any coding or any website creation knowledge.

Cons

I don't have much to say in the negative about this platform.
It plain and simple works, and has good fees.
Only think I can think of is better design control. If they add that and also some conversion boosters that might be a thing to note, which I thought was missing.

Pros

Have a couple of trainings hosted on Teachable and have found it to be great software. Easy to set up and pretty flexible. I like that it's hosted, meaning I don't have the pressure of worrying with the security and uptime of using my own host.

Cons

Wish the first level had more features, like being able to integrate with Zapier in the way that I need it to, which is automatically adding people who buy via my shopping cart.

Pros

It was pretty easy to set up your course, add video etc. I liked the courses on marketing/etc that they sent out weekly to join for free.

Cons

Not very customizable, customer experience is just okay. Many were confused as to how to login etc initially. No autosave of your work, I lost hours to a system glitch where you press enter and it just deletes your course text and there's no autosave to backup to.

Pros

What I like most about Teachable is that this platform is well organized and its structure courses so simple that couldn't be down in any other way better. I like that it counts my learning progress in the upper left corner. And I like that Teacher lessons show what data it contains like video, a document to download, pictures etc. Nice feature when I'm going through the course the lessons that I went through I marked completed and that's why I know exactly where I left my learning process. Also, one of the greatest differences of the platform is that interface which allows you to focus on the main thing - learning the course and there is nothing that will bother you or took your intention away from it. Just press the fullscreen button and start learning. No interfering elements are involved.

Cons

Cons... I cannot think of any of it right now, because I don't see them. I don't use Teachable platform for distributing my own content just as a learner when I enrolled in somebody else course, but I know for a fact that Teachable despite its simplicity and well-organized structure also provides its own web host, payment processor and if you will put your free course on teachable it will not take any fees from you for peoples enrollments.

Pros

Teachable has so much functionality I expect from my Learning Management System. And the support/team behind it empowers me to provide beautiful courses to my users. Its coupon functionality, homepage design, and course builder are intuitive and powerful. Just recently they have made it possible to give students a certificate for completing the course, which has long been a request of our users.

Cons

I wish there was more API functionality through Teachable. There are useful webhooks, but manipulating data within the platform is limited.

Pros

It is easy to use and they provide lots of webinars and training. The training is not only focused on user interface, but also entrepreneurial skills.

Cons

Not much. It could be cheaper. I like that they have a three-tiered program but even these could each be cheaper. Maybe a payoff in the end for the company would be a better strategy.

Pros

Teachable really can help new teachers who would like to start selling their lessons, as they provide a great free plan. After someone start earning some money can upgrade to the next plans, getting the advantage of great extra features. I hope that they won't change their free plan with adding more limitations, as many other services have done in the past.

Cons

I don't like the fact that many features are available only via the Zippier integration. That means, you need an extra tool to learn and you need am extra service to pay every month. At least, teachable should be able to let professionals create 2-3 upsell options, and more importantly to give the the ability to create membership plans for their courses, with a trial period that automatically would upgrade to the standard pricing plan. Now someone needs to duplicate the course, create two separate pricing plans, integrate with Zapier and create a route where when someone pass the trial period, zappier will delete him from one source and then enrolling him to the other. Too complicated.

Pros

It's easy to use, the platform is simple and straight forwards although you don't have much control.

Cons

My students are from the UK, they pay in GBP, I am also in the UK, I receive my money in GBP.
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, which messes up your income.
You'll end up having two customers who bought the same course, but because the exchange rate changes so frequently you receive different amount for both of them, and when you have lots of students you can really loose track as to how many students you sold the course to, and how well you did business wise.

Pros

Offers a free plan to try the basic features .

The interface is very intuitive and with supporting docs and responsive customer support , the learning curve is not steep at all . The course making interface is simple drag and drop editor and very easy to use .

The aesthetic look of the front end can be made as good as your creativity can take you .

Cons

The content types that can be added are files , videos , quizzes , etc . Just like Udemy by and large . Nothing built on authoring tools like say, articulate can be hosted here . That's a big let down .