Teachable Alternatives: Comparing Teachable to Competitors
Are you looking for a Teachable alternative for your online course or membership site?
Read our in-depth overview, comparisons of popular competitors, native software features, and pricing.
Before we dive into our Teachable comparison
We’re always curious about the person or company behind the reviews we read online, so we want to give you the full disclosure as you dive into this one.
We are the creators of the AccessAlly LMS plugin for WordPress, and we are affiliates for some of the tools that we evaluate in the reviews you’ll find here on our site. This means that we may earn a commission if you click a link in this review to the tool’s website and make a purchase.
However, we never let an affiliate incentive sway us in our reviews, but the commission earned on these referrals make it possible for us to invest time into researching and writing about our personal experience and knowledge acquired for a lot of the course and membership tools you might be comparing.
Now let’s dive in to see how Teachable compares to its competitors, and why current users might start looking for a Teachable alternative in the first place.
Why people choose Teachable
Before we get into our list of Teachable alternatives, let’s look at why you might consider implementing Teachable for your online course.
- You’re not tech-savvy: Teachable’s course builder is easy to use. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for you to create the course structure and add content quickly. Teachable’s course builder is one of the easiest to use, and most advanced. You can add multiple media types for each lesson and reorder the content at your discretion.
- Native email functionality: Another reason course creators choose Teachable is based on the email functionality. You can send course-specific emails to your students directly from Teachable. While you’ll most likely still need a CRM or marketing automation system to manage your sales and marketing funnels, you can manage emails specific to your course on the Teachable platform.
- All-in-one platform: With Teachable all of the features and functionality you need, aside from integration with your email marketing system, are built into the platform. You won’t find yourself adding another plugin or integration each time you want to expand on your existing functionality. While this is convenient and can reduce tech complications from duct taping different tools together, you may find yourself upgrading to unlock these features. With Teachable, more features means more money.
Why people recommend Teachable
You might have posted in a Facebook group asking people what they use for their membership site or to sell their online courses, and received a lot of “Teachable” answers. Why is that?
- Teachable has a great affiliate program: If you see people recommending that you choose Teachable or reach out to them to know more about their experience with the platform it might be because they want to earn a commission from their recommendation.
If someone is strongly advocating for a specific tool, without listening to you and your specific needs, take a step back and consider what’s in it for them. Teachable affiliates can earn close to $900/year per referral so be sure the recommended tool checks all of the boxes for your specific needs before making an investment.
- You need to launch quickly with a simple course layout: If you’re just getting started online and don’t want a custom design or layout for your courses, Teachable is a good choice. You can choose a Teachable theme, input your color selections, upload your content and your lessons are created with a preformatted layout. There’s no coding necessary to create a clean, organized course design.
- Advanced e-commerce functionality: In addition to Teachable’s internal payment gateway, Stripe, and PayPal integrations, you have the option to set up both Apple Pay and Google Pay as well. These additional gateways create the potential for increased conversion rates on mobile devices.
Unlike most platforms, Teachable also collects and remits VAT for your business when you pay a little more to use their back-office feature. Some shopping cart integrations and tools will handle this for you, but most learning management platforms don’t.
Why people look for Teachable alternatives
If you’ve tried Teachable and found it limiting, or you’ve outgrown the Teachable system you might already know why you want to move. Here are some of the other common reasons why people look for Teachable substitutes.
- Lack of design flexibility: Teachable’s design options are limited to the themes they provide, and your course layout is restricted to what the Teachable framework permits so you’re forced to conform your design to work within their system. This tends to be a drawback for those who value custom design and want to put their unique stamp on their courses and membership area.
- Ownership: Teachable is a platform-as-a-service tool and its code is not open source. In short, you’re building your courses on rented land. If you cancel your Teachable license, your content can’t easily be exported and imported into the new system. When you host your courses on a platform like WordPress, you own your content and can also look at all of the source code that runs your business and you retain full control over everything. Fortunately, some plugins, like AccessAlly, can help you migrate your members and students if you decide to move away from this platform.
- Marketing automation and CRM integration: With Teachable, you’ll need a 3rd party tool such as Zapier to sync your signups with your CRM to create a more personalized and engaging experience. Alternatively, you can limit your communication to Teachable’s built-in email functionality but Teachable doesn’t include functionality to build sales and marketing funnels so you’ll need to manually remove buyers from existing funnels or set up some zaps with Zapier to take care of this for you. This just adds one more piece of complexity to your setup.
- Lacks gamification: If you want to create a very engaging course experience, Teachable isn’t for you. You can issue a certificate of completion for completed courses, but there’s no badge or points system.
- Community forum: Teachable doesn’t include a native forum feature to create engagement and interactions between your course participants, but they do offer a commenting feature that can be incorporated into your courses for users to engage with one another.
One client's story about finding a Teachable Alternative
"AccessAlly is the better option, hands down
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 ensures that I can retain members long-term by engaging with them and providing them with an experience unique to them. That’s priceless.”
-Eden Fried, EdenFried.com
Compare Teachable Competitors' Pricing
Teachable’s pricing ranges from $39/month + 5% transaction fees on top of your payment processing fees, up to $299/month based on the features you need to deliver the course experience you envision for your members.
If you want to take advantage of Teachable’s Back Office features to remit your VAT payments, automatically process affiliate payments, and process payments via PayPal, Teachable will withhold an additional 2% of your revenue.
Also, be sure to factor in the cost of your marketing automation system or CRM to ensure you have the complete picture of your total costs.
Here is the cost breakdown for some of the most commonly compared Teachable substitutes:
| Teachable | $468/year Plus 5% transaction fee |
$3588/year No transaction fees, includes bulk student enrollment |
| Kajabi | $1490/year Includes only 3 products, and limit of 10,000 contacts |
$3990/year 100 Products, 100,000 contacts, limited email sending |
| Thinkific | $588/year Unlimited courses and students |
$5988/year Additional features and groups |
| Podia | $390/year No memberships or affiliate functionality |
$790/year Includes 3rd party code and embedded checkout forms |
| Mighty Networks | $280/year Community forums only, no online courses, plus 3% transaction fee |
$980/year Includes online courses, plus 2% transaction fee |
| MemberPress + LearnDash | $448/year No course or student limits, basic functionality |
$918/year Includes group licensing, affiliate functionality |
| LifterLMS | $299/year Ecommerce and CRM addons included |
$999/year Quizzes, groups, and social learning |
| AccessAlly | $990/year Unlimited courses and students, affiliate, and bulk courses |
$1290/year All LMS functionality |
Want more in-depth Teachable Replacement Comparisons?
Now that we’ve looked at all of the reasons why someone might choose Teachable, or switch from Teachable to another LMS solution, it’s time to compare Teachable alternatives!
In these in-depth comparison pages, you’ll see where each tool shines and where it falls short so you can make the best decision for your particular business and online teaching needs.
Teachable might be right for you if...
- You want a basic course-website and have no plans of expanding your offerings in the future
- You’re not attached to a specific design and willing to flex your vision when met with system limitations
- You don’t have a CRM setup and have no plans of setting one up in the future
- You won’t mind setting up your business on ‘rented land’ and manually migrating when your business grows
Researching course platforms on your own is great, but if you want to talk to someone, we're here to help!
If you’re wondering whether you’re on the right track or not, 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.
We’ll start by asking you a few questions and guide you in the right direction.