AccessAlly vs. Teachable: a comparison

Our fans tell us AccessAlly allows them to earn more from their online courses and membership sites. We think you’ll love AccessAlly’s power features, along with its’ sophisticated interface.

If you’re curious to see how AccessAlly really stacks up to Teachable, read on!

How is AccessAlly different from Teachable?

AccessAlly and Teachable both offer a platform to deliver online courses.

This is where the similarities end, and where the differences begin.

Deep 2-Way Street Integration with your Marketing automation platform

With Teachable, the extent of its integration with most email platforms is that you can activate or deactivate members, and more advanced automation requires a third-party tool like Zapier to create one-way integrations to pass data from Teachable to your CRM.

Recently, Teachable has built out more direct integration with CRMs and marketing automation systems. At the time of this review, you can integrate your Teachable account with ConvertKit and MailChimp, Awebber, ActiveCampaign, and MailerLite.

With AccessAlly, you can perform any number of operations based on the actions that members are taking in your membership site.

If they log in or visit a certain page, take a quiz, watch a video you can kick off an automation — the possibilities are endless… and deeply integrated.

Thanks to AccessAlly’s deep 2-way street integration, you can use automations to create members and update their access instantly.

In Teachable, each individual course is separate from one another. With AccessAlly’s use of tags, you can unlock bonus content, have free courses, ongoing memberships or any mix of delivery imaginable.

member directory examples

Styled Member Directories, and fully Integrated member profiles in your CRM

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.

Beautiful & Customizable out of the box

Teachable’s downfall for brand-conscious entrepreneurs is their limited theme customization.

It’s great for beginners who aren’t very specific about the look and feel of their sites, but not ideal for those who want full design flexibility.

With Teachable, you have to fit your brand into existing cookie-cutter templates. That means losing some of the trust that a custom design can convey for a high-end membership or course website.

Want to change what shows up on a member dashboard? Put the progress bar in a different location? With Teachable, you’re out of luck.

Their basic plan is the most restrictive when it comes to what you can or cannot customize, but if you invest in their higher-level plans, you have more flexibility. The platform has been evolving to keep up with the popularity of WordPress page builders in recent years.

On the other hand, AccessAlly is a plugin for WordPress, so it offers full design flexibility and integrates seamlessly with any WordPress theme.

AccessAlly also comes with a beautiful mobile-friendly interface that you can customize, which is great for:

    • Displaying progress tracking, pie charts, and checklists
    • On-brand cross-selling dashboards
    • Affiliate centers, complete with tracking and downloads

We’ve even heard of folks hiring designers and developers to knock off AccessAlly’s look and feel, because it provides such a great user experience.

One client's story about finding a Teachable alternative...

Eden Fried

AccessAlly Is Going To Grow And Scale With Me Over Time, And That's Unbeatable

“Honestly, Teachable or Thinkific would have been the *easier* option, but AccessAlly with my WordPress theme is hands down the *better* option. It’s going to grow and scale with me over time, and that’s unbeatable.

AccessAlly allows me to provide a dashboard for all members, and it also allows me to create a member-directory (great for forming that community), an editable profile, plus lots of gamification features that can help members track their progress and reward them for their achievements.

I also love that my students can take notes right within the site. How cool is that?

The fact that AccessAlly integrates directly with my ESP also gives me incredible functionality to track my students’ progress, send them reminder emails and keep them coming back to the membership.”

The capacity to do just that ensure that I can retain members longterm by engaging with them and providing them with an experience unique to them. That’s priceless.”

– Eden Fried, EdenFried.com 

Take multi-currency payments with abandoned cart follow-up, coupons, and trials

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.

iPad with Screenshot of Homework Submission

License Your Courses, Teaching Assistants, And Have Students Submit Homework

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.

Looking for a Alternative With Fewer Restrictions?

You want full control of your content, members, and their experience on your site.

So you can spend your time doing what you do best, not struggling with frustrating platform restrictions.

With AccessAlly, you’ve got all of the power and flexibility of WordPress, without any limits on your business’ growth potential either.

Get a Free AccessAlly Demo Experience

Self-Directed courses, advanced quizzes, and certificates of completion

With Teachable you can only offer a course that has dripped content or that is immediately available. With AccessAlly, you can do both of these but you can also have students unlock content and lessons based on their actions.

When it comes to quizzes, Teachable offers simple true/false and multiple choice questions for a graded quiz. On the other hand, AccessAlly has 3 different advanced quizzes for personality tests, scoring students, and graded quizzes.

Plus once someone completes a lesson, module, or course you can automatically generate a full customizable certificate of completion with AccessAlly. Teachable has no built-in certificates or badges.

With AccessAlly you can also unlock sections of page, or use CRM tags to display different content based on a member’s previous actions – including offering badges.

examples of badges available for download

Gamification, Automation, Cross-Selling Dashboards With 1-Click Upsells

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.

Teachable Alternative That's Open Source, Offers Extensibility, And Full Control

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.

Why Course creators choose AccessAlly over Teachable

Amber Vilhauer

AccessAlly Is The Only Sophisticated Solution That Comes To Mind

“Hands down the sophistication. I’ve used most membership softwares on the market but I needed something special, high class, sexy for this latest venture. Only one name came to mind: AccessAlly.”

– Amber Vilhauer, AmberVilhauer.com

Cindy

Until AccessAlly, i didn't have a good way to organize my private clients' access...

“One of my favorite ways of using AccessAlly is with private clients. For each private client, I create a special page for them with all the recordings, my calendar, notes, bonus training, etc.

Until I had AccessAlly, I didn’t realize how valuable this would be – for both me and my clients.”

– Cindy Schulson, MarketingFromWithin.com

Looking for something that integrates both ways?

Marketing automation tools are here to stay.

Use your marketing automation tool to power your course and membership program by taking advantage of AccessAlly’s deep 2-way street integration.

It’s built to help you sell more, teach better, and engage with your students longer.

Get a Free AccessAlly Demo
Email marketing envelope

Your workflow on AccessAlly vs. Teachable:

AccessAlly Logo
  1. Set up your WordPress site with your favorite customizable theme
  2. Install the AccessAlly plugin on your WordPress membership site
  3. Run through the AccessAlly onboarding wizard to integrate with your CRM and select payment settings
  4. Create your first offering with the Offerings Wizard and add your content
  5. Create emails in your CRM or in AccessAlly
Teachable logo
  1. Setup your storefront and/or website pages
  2. Use Teachable’s domain or connect your own
  3. Customize the look and feel of your pages
  4. Upload your content and customize the look and feel of your course pages
  5. Connect any additional integrations needed with your email automation tools or setup emails in Teachable
  6. Enable your payments and setup terms of purchase
  7. Add any additional learning enhancements such as quizzes or certificates.
  8. Stay up to date on platform feature changes and make changes accordingly

See How AccessAlly and teachable Features Compare

We’re a digital marketing software company built by marketers and software engineers. With our particular background and expertise, we’ve designed AccessAlly to give you everything you need in an easy to use, powerful package.

Protected course content Included checkmark Included checkmark
Built-in Recurring Stripe and PayPal payments Included checkmark Included checkmark
Course builder for modules, lessons, and topics Included checkmark Included checkmark
Automatically creates tags, pages, and menus Included checkmark Included checkmark
Deep 2-Way Integration with Infusionsoft, Ontraport, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and Drip Included checkmark
Multiple currencies, automated expiring coupons, and order bumps Included checkmark
Cart abandonment automation Included checkmark Included checkmark
Progress tracking, and progress-based unlocking content Included checkmark Included checkmark
Multiple types of quizzes, and auto generated certificates of completion Included checkmark Included checkmark
Course Licensing with Teams or Umbrella Accounts Included checkmark
Searchable member directories and editable custom fields through profiles Included checkmark
Gamification where members can earn points, and activity-based automation, login tracking Included checkmark
Media player, video bookmarks, tagging automation on quizzes Included checkmark Included checkmark
Cross-selling dashboards, with 1-click upsells Included checkmark Included checkmark
Built-in affiliate tracking with multiple tiers, links, and reporting Included checkmark Included checkmark

Should I use AccessAlly or Teachable?

Teachable might be right for you if...

    • 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

AccessAlly might be right for you if...

    • 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

Marketers all over the world are loving AccessAlly

Jane Copeland

I simply adore AccessAlly

 

“I moved to AccessAlly after being frustrated and experiencing many issues with the platform and membership management plugin my programs were hosted on before.

Moving to Access Ally has not only been a joy but also hiccup free!

When choosing which membership site to move to, I wanted to give my students a high end quality learning experience and this is exactly what I now have. Thank you for creating such a beautiful and easy to use product. I simply adore it!”

– Jane Copeland, CopingWithJane.com

Petri Goldman

My Clients Absolutely Love it and I do too!

 

I’ve tried a TON of different membership softwares and AccessAlly is by far and away the best-looking, most functional and most strategic one.

I was so fed up with my last membership site because the user-interface was terrible for my clients (and it didn’t look good, which bothered my over-achieving perfectionist self).

Now, I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of customer feedback from my clients telling me how much they absolutely love it… and I do too!

– Amanda Goldman-Petri, MarketLikeANerd.com

Migrating from Another Online Course Tool like Teachable to AccessAlly is easy

With the AccessAlly migration wizard, you can import all of your Teachable members and create their accounts quickly and easily.

You can also import members directly from your marketing automation platform, and AccessAlly’s migration wizard will ensure all of your members have the right tags and permissions.

Then you can run through the Offerings Wizard to add existing course content, and you’ll be ready to showcase your new members’ area.

Take AccessAlly for a test drive

Get your own free demo sandbox account so you can experience the flexibility AccessAlly has to offer.

Yes, see it in action
Picture of keys

Find answers

Didn’t find an answer to your question? Just reach out to us, we’re happy to help!

Can I see examples of AccessAlly sites?

You can find videos and case studies with screenshots and descriptions of how people are using AccessAlly on our showcase page here.

Can I talk to someone about my project?

Researching course platforms on your own is great, but if you want to talk to someone, we’re here to help!

We can help you sort out all of the different options. We’ll let you know if AccessAlly is a good fit or not, too.

Book a free discovery call

Planning to develop an enterprise level program?

We’d love to find out more about your project and find out if AccessAlly is a good fit.

Book a discovery call to start the process, or tell us about your project and select “Enterprise” on our contact form.

Book a free discovery call