AccessAlly vs. Teachable: a comparison

While AccessAlly started off as an “access management” tool for online courses, it quickly developed into a full-fledged membership plugin for WordPress.

That means you can create beautiful searchable member directories, sorted by your marketing automation platform tags. This allows members to opt in or out of your member directory, and even to purchase a premium listing.

You decide what you want to include in your member directory – like a biography, or even points earned, and course progress. Teachable offers no member directory.

Plus, with AccessAlly’s profile editing functionality, a member can update their name, email, address, and password… or any other custom field inside of your marketing automation platform.

All with one click, and everything gets synced between your membership site and your CRM. Teachable does not offer this in-depth integration, or easy to use interface for the member.

Teachable has built-in 2checkout, Stripe, and PayPal integrations, in addition to their internal payment gateway. You also have the option to set up Apple Pay and Google Pay as well.

You can also set up coupons and recurring payments with Teachable, just like AccessAlly.

Teachable gives its users the option to have VAT collected and remitted for your business if it applies when you use their back-office feature. This feature does come at an additional cost to your business though.  AccessAlly allows you to collect VAT at no additional cost.  You’ll just have to send it in on your own.

One feature, AccessAlly has that Teachable doesn’t is a multi-step order form. This is a great way to improve sales conversions and makes it possible to follow up with abandoned carts so you can recapture lost customers if they haven’t completed the checkout process.

AccessAlly also features multi-currency order forms, and you can create trial offers, order bumps, 1-click upsells, and toggles to offer full-pay or payment plans for you online courses and membership.

Teachable and AccessAlly both offer affiliate tracking functionality. You can create custom cookie windows and unique links for URLs hosted within and outside of Teachable and AccessAlly.

One advantage of using AccessAlly for your affiliate management system is the flexibility you have to create a custom affiliate management dashboard so affiliates can easily grab swipe copy, their links, and view their sales ledgers and leaderboards.

Teachable does not offer the ability to “license courses” to groups of people, which is also called Umbrella or Team accounts.

AccessAlly gives you the power to sell a “package” of licenses to your courses and content, and to have a team leader assign sub-accounts.

This is great for selling corporate training. It also allows you to design a “member management” dashboard, with custom operations to kick off automations directly by group administrators.

AccessAlly Pro will allow you to build out an even more robust, high-level teaching center…like if you’d like to run your courses through teaching assistants, or have someone monitoring participant progress. In this case, a team leader would be able to see student progress, quiz results, and even view recorded notes or questions asked.

AccessAlly Pro also makes it easy for students to upload homework attachments, like PDFs, Word documents, or other files for the administrator. Teachable offers no homework submission and replies, and no team feature.

Teachable automatically creates a member dashboard, where students can see courses they’ve previously purchased as well as what’s available.

AccessAlly gives you the same cross-selling dashboards, but with more flexibility in how you set up your pages and 1-click upsells. AccessAlly goes deeper by allowing you to manipulate custom fields inside of your marketing automation platform, apply tags and trigger automations.

You can also show different content inside of a page based on whether someone has a certain tag, or not.

AccessAlly also sports the ability to create gamified credit systems, where members can earn points for completing quizzes, sharing on social media, or being paid members in good standing.

Members can redeem points for bonus content, services, or other goodies. Plus, AccessAlly makes it easy to do all of the automation your heart desires: follow-up with members who haven’t logged in for awhile, drip courses on various schedules, and automatically generate a PDF certificate of completion when they pass a course.

With Teachable, you’re hosting your website and courses on their closed platform, with no easy way to take your content with you when you cancel or decide to move on. You’ve also got to upload your videos directly to Teachable.

Because the Teachable system is closed, you can’t easily extend it by installing add-ons and plugins. That means you can’t add an integrated forum, gamification, or other features that could improve your courses.

AccessAlly took a different approach: it’s a WordPress plugin that’s open source, so anyone can see and read the code, and it’s easy to back-up and export your content.

With AccessAlly, you can take full control of the look and feel, and add the functionality you want.

• • You need a bare-bones course website, with no plans for added functionality down the line
  • You want to have your site up and running quickly, so you can test your ideas without worrying about design
  • You don’t use a CRM like Infusionsoft, Ontraport, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, or Drip to do your email marketing automation
  • You don’t mind giving up full control to have your courses hosted for you on a 3rd party platform that you can’t easily export or leave

• • You’re a developer who likes get projects done quickly, and have happy clients who love the results of your work
  • You’re a course creator with a vision for the design and flow of your courses, and want to leverage marketing automation
  • You want everything to work seamlessly from one end to the other (payments, courses, and memberships)
  • You’re looking to create an amazing customer experience, that’s functional, profitable, and helps you stand out in the marketplace