The Pros & Cons of Teachable for Hosting Your Course

We’re on a mission to help you find the right platform for your course — not based on what’s most popular, but based on which platform has the features you need to succeed.

Choosing to create a course is no small decision. You have to create the curriculum and share some of your best expertise, while also finding the right platform that wows your students and houses all your content.

Of course, there are plenty of platforms out there to choose from. You’re here because you don’t know which one to choose. In this blog, we’re covering Teachable and its pros and cons when it comes to hosting courses.

What is Teachable? 

It’s sort of all in the name. Teachable is an online course and coaching creation software offering engaging online courses and coaching products. It helps you teach.

Much like Podia, Teachable is really great at helping new course creators build offers easily and swiftly. According to their site, Teachable is an “all-in-one platform” that handles everything from web hosting to payment processing. If you’ve read our other platform breakdowns, though, you know we’re partial to one all-in-one tool: Kajabi.

But let’s say you’re just starting out with online course creation or you’re a service provider looking for an easy course platform to test out a new offer. There’s one clear benefit to trying out Teachable: They have a free plan. Of course, the free plan comes with limitations, but it’s a great way to get your feet wet and play around with their platform.

That’s not the only pro of using Teachable, though.

Pros of using Teachable for your course(s)

We can’t deny that Teachable’s course creation tool is super simple, making it an easy “Yes” for many folks who are just curious about how a course would work. All you have to do is create a free account, login, and hit “Courses” on your dashboard. From there, you can hit “Create New Product” and you’re rockin’ and rollin’.

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You can name your course, add content to it, and even create sales pages and customize branding (depending on your plan) all from this product dashboard. It’s basically foolproof.

What else does Teachable have going for it? 

• You can create unlimited courses (with paid plans). This is definitely where Teachable shines, because many tools have a cap on the number of courses you can create by plan.
• The page editors are flexible, making it easier to make your course and its marketing collateral your won.
• You can connect your domain to your Teachable account, so people can navigate to your course straight from your website. (See the cons section for more on this, though.)
• It supports advanced pricing options, like memberships, subscriptions, bundles, and one-time payments.
• It makes affiliate selling easy, with affiliate links, transactions, and payouts all hosted on their platform.
• Students can shine, because Teachable offers fun features like completion certificates and quizzes!
• You can use Zapier integrations to notify you of student feedback or support needs.

And the last pro we’ll mention? While Teachable isn’t quite as affordable as Podia, it’s still on the more affordable end of the spectrum for a paid account. 

Cons of Teachable

We’ll preface this entire section by saying we’ll (probably) always and forever choose Kajabi. It doesn’t even have anything to do with what we’re about to tell you here. But if you’re not ready for Kajabi and you’re looking for a beginner’s course platform, you should know at least a few downsides to Teachable before you get started.

First up, Teachable is a bit slow to pay out their creators. Unlike other platforms that allow integration with Stripe and others for shorter payouts, it can take up to 30 days in some cases for Teachable to send payment to your accounts. If you’re a new creator needing to make cash now… this is a major element to consider.

While you can still connect your course to your domain (through a button that says something like “Login here”), Teachable does not offer white labeling. That means all pages will able have a Teachable URL, i.e. launchbff.teachable.com.

If you want to send promotional emails for your new courses, or even send update emails to your students, you will need your own email tool for that. While Teachable says they offer “email marketing integrations,” these connections can be difficult. Plus, with a separate email tool, that’s another monthly fee you’ll have to pay! 

While the site page builder is flexible and you can customize many features, it’s not the most robust. You are stuck with the platform’s capacity for customizations, which is frustrating for sales page design or landing pages.

The final decision: To Teachable or not to Teachable?

We’ll give it to you straight: If you’re not sure you’re going to love creating courses, or you just want to try creating one and see how it goes, Teachable is the way to go. You can get a free monthly subscription — it’s not just a free trial.

You can use that free subscription to at least navigate the bare bones of the platform and see which tools you really think are worth paying for. Plus, if you’re really new to the online entrepreneur world, Teachable is a low-risk way to create something and see if it sells. There’s nothing wrong with creating a minimum viable product and then scaling from there if it works.

However… If you:

1. Know you want to create courses
2. Already have a course and you’re looking to migrate platforms
3. Plan to really scale your offers with promotions and marketing
4. Want to craft a really strong brand presence in your courses

… Teachable is probably not the right tool for you, even the paid versions. We say this because the platform doesn’t have a ton of customizations available, and there are limitations on the content customizations you make. Plus, if you can’t really design sales pages to be in line with your brand, you may miss out on sales to begin with.

Of course, we can’t decide for you. It’s all up to you. So we’d recommend giving Teachable a try if you’re still curious. You can get 1 month free here, or you can simply sign up for their free account.

If you’re wondering if other platforms, might be better for your course, check out our other breakdowns on Podia and Thinkific. And don’t be afraid to look into Kajabi. We know that some people think it’s a beast of a tool, but you can truly do so much with it.

If you want a platform that lets you create a killer course sales page…

Your course sales page design has to be out of this world — and Teachable doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles you need to make that happen. Wondering which platforms do? We’d lean more toward ClickFunnels, Kajabi, or Showit. 

But you don’t have to design sales pages on those platforms from scratch; check out our sales page kits. Our Jac Collection in particular is bold and colorful, and can be customized to match your branding!

This bold and colorful sales page kit will help capture your audience’s attention and encourage potential customers to take action. 

You’re not just getting a well-designed template. You’re getting a done-for-you (yet extremely customizable) sales page that will turn visitors into loyal customers in just a few clicks.  With these templates, you get a Sales Page, Checkout Page, and Thank You Page. 

All of our templates offer customizable fonts, colors, copy, and images & graphics — no code or design degree required. They are also mobile-friendly and easy to customize for any device.

Want to sell your new course on a platform that works for you? Check out the Jac Collection Sales Page Kit here.