Teachable Review (September 2023) – Is it worth it?

Do you want to create and sell beautiful online courses?

Do you have skills and expertise that you'd like to monetize as an online course and community?

Do you want to build a beautiful course website?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, then this Teachable Review is for you.

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Why should you listen to me

There are dozens of Teachable reviews online, and you might be here because you’ve found this article on Google or on social media.

Before you skip and jump to the next review of Teachable, here’s why I think you should listen to what I’m about to share here.

As a former college instructor for nursing subjects, I know how to teach and how to impact student’s lives before online teaching became popular.

There are important factors that I’ve learned during my teaching years that I knew will be beneficial to teaching online courses.

And these are getting student’s feedback, progressing from the most basic information to the more advanced information.

And finally, by making sure you leverage audio, visual and interactivity when teaching so that you can get optimum student engagement.

If you can engage and capture a student’s attention even for a brief period, then learning will be more effective.

When I transitioned into a digital marketing career, what I’ve learned as a nursing professor can now be amplified through online marketing.

One of the biggest challenges online course creators face today is that after creating the course and making sure that it’s great, what do you do next?

This is where a lot of people fail and it’s actually one of the most important things to do after you’ve launched your course.

If you can’t promote your online course, then it won’t be found by your potential students.

This part is my expertise as you can see from my previous work experiences (this is what I do day in and day out right now).

How I discovered Teachable

I remember when Teachable was just launching out. The CEO of Teachable (Ankur Nagpal) reached out to bloggers and marketers like me to help get the word out. Back then, the platform was named Fedora and can be accessed

During that time, there was still a FREE Teachable account and plan to try out the platform.

When I first heard about it, I was eager to test it out and use it as a platform to provide FREE content to my readers, particularly as a way to provide a platform to give access to my EXCLUSIVE BONUSES.

Who is Teachable for?

To jump-start this review, this is are the people or businesses that should be using Teachable as their online course platform

If you are coaching and consulting for other people or groups of people, launching your course on Teachable allows you to launch quickly without the technical hassle and headaches associated with using WordPress or Self-hosted solutions.

If you’re a blogger and planning to take a piece of the pie on this multi-billion dollar industry of e-learning then Teachable will allow you to launch quickly without any of the headaches associated with hosting your video, launching your membership site, and even handling payments.

You can use Teachable to teach client onboarding information, answer FAQ, or provide content that are relevant to them.

Pros of Using Teachable

The dream of being able to earn passive income from your expertise and knowledge is usually hindered by a couple of things.

1. You need to be able to package your knowledge and expertise into an online course or membership website.
2. You need to be able to create a website or membership portal where people can pay for content that you’ve created. Some of that content can be free, but some of it will be paid.
3. You need to be able to accept payment conveniently online and allow people to sign up for your online course without tech hassles.
4. You need to be able to handle an influx of traffic from people who would like to sign-up for your courses.

My search for the best membership and online course platform resulted in discovering Teachable, and I’m loving it.

Here’s my top reasons why:

Ease of Use

With Teachable, everything has been prepared and meticulously thought of. From the sales page to the membership access for your students or members, it’s really streamlined and professional looking.

Even if you’re not a coder or a technical person, YOU can easily setup your own Teachable School with it’s easy to follow instructions.

Setup speed

I’ve tested myself if I can create an entire Teachable school that looks great in less than 2 hours. Watch that video and find out.

Teaching Tools

Teaching online is very much different when teaching live or in front of a class. You might think that online teaching can be less engaging and less personal, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

With Teachable, you have tools that can facilitate interaction and different modes of learning.

You can upload your Videos on Teachable and engage students Audio-visually. This is a powerful alternative to teaching and changing people’s lives because they get more value from Video than when just reading a regular article or blog post.

Drip-feed your content

If you have tons of content on your online course, you might want to try giving access in a drip-fed manner. What that means is that you SET the dates when someone can access a specific lesson or module inside your course.

Let’s say that for the first week, they can only access the lessons inside Modules 1 and 2, for the second week, they can gain access to Modules 3 and 4, and so on and so forth.

This is a great tactic to prevent your students from getting overwhelmed with information overload and paralysis by analysis.

Better content protection

If you’re only providing access to your Premium content via your paid students, then protecting that content from digital pirates and thieves is of utmost priority when using platforms like Teachable.

You can even activate additional security measures like Two-factor authentication where people need to confirm their login first before logging into your Teachable School.

Branded With Your Own Domain Name

If you want to look professional and not just some fly-by-night enterprise, branding and using your own domain name is a great way to start.

If you already have an existing website or blog, you can easily create a subdomain on your main domain and this can be your branded domain school.

So instead of having a school like: https://school.teachable.com you can actually have something like this: https://yourschool.yourowndomain.com

That looks much more professional and legit.

Different Pricing Options

Sometimes you’ll want to create a payment plan that is usually not available on most online course platform or even ecommerce websites. What if you want students to pay in increments rather than one-lump payment?

You can do that inside the default platform of Teachable. You can even use pricing plans, tiers and even coupon codes.

If you want a FULLY integrated and customizable shopping cart platform, I strongly recommend and use ThriveCart which is a powerful sales funnel, shopping cart platform (read my full review of ThriveCart here).

Cons of Using Teachable

Obviously, there are no perfect products. And Teachable is not an exemption. There are things that I didn’t like and I wished was better. Here are the things that I didn’t like in this platform.

Avoid using the Blog Option

I don’t use and will never plan to use or recommend the Blog option for Teachable because I believe that having a highly optimized blog is important for SEO or being able to get more free traffic from the search engines.

I’ll stick with WordPress when it comes to starting a blog.

No white-label option

While this feature will probably not be important and relevant to 90% of Teachable users, there’s a good reason that if you’re an agency or an institution that wants to provide a white-label account to your clients or members, it’s currently not possible with Teachable.

Limited Multi-lingual support

While you can always ADD any content in any language, there is no OFFICIAL support for Multi-language inside the Teachable platform.

If you want to accept payments in a different currency, try ThriveCart as it’s a dedicated shopping cart platform that allows for multi-currencies.

Detailed review of features

Now that I’ve briefly talked about the advantages and disadvantages of Teachable, let me show you a more detailed analysis of the top features inside this online course creation platform.

Pricing Plan for Teachable

If you’re ready to try Teachable, here are the options and the best deals available right now.

Free Plan

Obviously, the FREE plan is $0/month but it does come at a price. You can start with this plan to get a feel and insider’s access of Teachable. And upgrade when you are ready to take payments from your students.

Basic Plan – $29/month (billed annually)

This plan has a 5% transaction fee, drip course content, third-party integrations and unlimited students. The biggest downside of this plan is the 5% transaction fee which is on top of the transaction fees from Paypal or Stripe (usually around 2.9% + 0.30 cents).

This amount could easily add up if you are selling to a lot of students.

Pro Plan – $79/month (billed annually)

This is what I have and what I recommend for people who are serious in building their online courses There are NO TRANSACTION FEES. You get graded quizzes, advanced reports and more customizations with this plan.

Business plan – $399/month (billed annually)

The main difference for this plan is when you want to have 100 admin-level users. You can also do manual student imports and bulk student enrollments. Obviously this plan is suitable for corporate courses, schools, or a big organization that wants to provide online courses to their members and give them the ability to create their own Teachable School.

Discover Teachable Courses

This is currently in BETA right now and it’s an online MARKETPLACE where you can find some of the BEST TEACHABLE Courses available today.

Make sure that you sign up for their email list for a 20% discount.

Alternatives to Teachable

If you are still looking for other options other than Teachable, then this is what I’ve found. I was also searching for alternatives to Teachable because I wanted to be able to compare the benefits and features that are unique to each platform.

Online Class Platforms

When it comes to Online course creation platforms, there are 2 major differences in the options available today.

The first is the hosted solutions or software-as-a-service solution (SAAS). Usually, these are paid subscriptions on a monthly or annual plan. The great thing about hosted solutions is that you don’t usually need to manage any tech problems if they arise.

The second option on how to launch your course is on a self-hosted platform like WordPress combined with a membership plugin like Wishlist Member. The big benefit of this is that you OWN your data and platform. But you’ll also need to deal with the technical hassle and challenges of running your own platform.

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FAQ – Get Clarity and Answers About Teachable