Teachable has been a popular course platform for a long time.

As a course creator and marketing enthusiast, I’ve been playing with it for the last 3-4 years!

In 2020, ever since Teachable was acquired, the development has slowed down, there have been significant changes in their offering, and many new players with have emerged in the course market.

So, the question is – “Is Teachable still the best platform for hosting courses?”.

Let’s see.

What happened after Teachable’s acquisition?

In 2020, Hotmart, a Brazilian online education company, acquired Teachable for approximately $250 million.

The acquisition gave Hotmart access to Teachable’s user base and strong brand name in the US.

After acquisition, the initial founder of Teachable; Ankur Nagpal, remained as the CEO.

Initially, Teachable continued its operations without major disruptions.

However, 2023 was a turning point for Teachable.

Many major shifts happened:

• Pricing overhaul and limitations: Teachable rolled out a new pricing model with sharp cost increases for unlimited courses. Some users’ fees jumped from $40 to $600 monthly (Due to the removal of their unlimited courses feature), forcing many to migrate platforms.
• Customer support’s quality declined: The quality of customer support declined, with users reporting longer wait times and poor support. Tickets were left unresolved for weeks.
• Mass layoff: A significant layoff within the company further affected operations and customer support.

Even people who have been using Teachable for the past 5 to 10 years are now being forced to migrate to other platforms, such as Thinkific and Kajabi.

Some users felt like they were being held for ransom and didn’t want to switch to a different platform because they might lose student comments, analytics, and want to rebuild their entire system.

It’s fair to say this:

Hotmart (the recent owner of Teachable) are milking the popularity of Teachable with high transaction fee (7.5%)and absurd product creation limitations.

The role of Circle in Teachable’s downfall!?

In 2019, Sid Yadav (lead developer in Teachable) – quitted and started Circle.so to fill the need for community platforms – that was sort of emerging at the time.

They had the vision to bring together courses, discussions, live streams, chat, events, and memberships under one brand – Circle.so.

Ankur (the founder of Teachable) became one of the early investors in it.

With Ankur’s investment and strategic guidance, Circle.so successfully raised additional funds and began to roll out innovative features, quickly gained traction in the market.

While Circle.so was on the rise, Teachable was sold to Hotmart in 2020.

Even though Ankur continued as CEO at Teachable, who continued to support Circle.so as a stakeholder.

It is clear that Teachable’s original key people have shifted their focus to Circle.so, resulting in a decrease in Teachable’s speed of implementation and iteration of features.

Explore Teachable

Unique features of Teachable

Despite these issues, you may still choose Teachable, depending on how crucial these unique features are to you:

Intuitive and flexible course creation interface

Teachable’s course creation interface supports custom codes, direct pricing plans setup, course bundles, and the ability to offer course completion certificates.

It also allows you to bulk upload multiple files at once, saving time. It supports bulk uploading of videos, documents, audio files, and banner images.

Good course experience

Teachable provides autoplay, autocomplete, play or pause, forward or rewind, miniplayer, and settings for controlling quality, speed, and subtitles.

Also it comes with the ability for you to take timestamped “lesson notes,” similar to Udemy.

This feature is one of a kind and is not present in any competitors of Teachable.

Course compliance options

Teachable offers enforceable lesson order, video watching, and quiz completion.

You can control how content is delivered to students and force them to complete courses in a specific way.

Additionally, the Teachable Pro plan and higher offer graded quizzes with multiple-choice questions and student-level reports.

Indepth student and video analytics

For allowing you to track individual student performance, Teachable also offers robust student-level analytics, progress, quiz performance, video engagement, and more.

Note that if a student clicks on “complete and continue”, then only a lecture will be marked as complete.

Also video level analytics.

It also provides heat maps, giving insights into how students are interacting with the course content.

There is also a video retention graph available, showing you how long users watched your video and where they are dropping. It also displays the total number of video views and the average length of time your users watched the video.

Feature-rich payment methods

Teachable comes with a built-in payment gateway (unlike other platforms), that effectively handles EU/VAT and complex affiliate payouts.

Additionally, Teachable supports purchases using Apple Pay and Google Pay, resulting in friction-free checkouts and increased conversions.

Mobile app

Teachable comes with a fairly good iOS app. However, Android app is not available. The lack of an Android app may exclude a large number of students from enrolling in Teachable courses.

It’s app has some limitations, such as students being unable to access coachings, leave comments, or use course compliance features within the app.

However, it does allow students to pick up where they left off on another device, stream course videos, view lecture text and attachments, take lecture quizzes, and view their scores.

However, it’s just for use-friendly course comsumption and it doesn’t support push notifications and mobile app checkouts, unlike apps like say Kajabi.

Additionally, there is no white-label version of their app, which means your courses will be under their brand.

If you’re looking for a course platform with mobile app support for both iOS and Android, I would recommend Kajabi.

On the other hand, if you want white-label apps, Learnworlds or Passion.io may be a better fit for you.

What’s bad about Teachable?

Limited marketing tools

Teachable includes several built‑in conversion tools that help with sales, such as:

• Order bumps and in‑lesson upsells to increase average order value
• Coupons and bulk coupon generator for campaigns and partnerships
• One‑step checkout with Apple Pay and Google Pay support via Teachable Pay
• Trust boosters like guarantee badges on checkout pages

However, Teachable lacks native email marketing and automation.

For example:

• Native email integrations are primarily with Mailchimp and ConvertKit
• Many other connections require Zapier, which adds cost and complexity

If you need deeper funnels, broadcasts, and behavioral automation, you need to plan on pairing Teachable with your email platform and using Zapier for gaps.

Communities are limited

Teachable now includes a built-in community feature.

Here’s what you can do:

• Create a community and restrict access to enrolled students only
• Organize discussions using categories and tags

But the feature set is basic compared to dedicated community platforms. For example, there are no advanced gamification or automation features

Limited design flexibility

Teachable’s design options are more limited than other platforms.

However, there are still ways to customize the look and feel of your course pages.

Teachable offers a number of these themes.

Another option is to use the Power Editor, which allows you to customize the design of your course pages using HTML and CSS.

This gives you even more control over the look and feel of your course pages.

However, most people end up using WordPress or other landing page builders for more flexibility. You can use a website builder such as WordPress with Elementor to create your own landing page. This way, you can have full control over the design and content of your landing page.

Lack of built-in automation

Teachable lacks automation features that allow you to set up triggers and actions within your courses (unlike Kajabi or Circle).

However, there are workarounds to this.

One option is to integrate with Zapier, which allows you to set up triggers and actions within your courses.

Using Zapier you can integrate with the services you need. There are 19 triggers and 5 actions available for you to automate the tasks.

For example, you can set up automation so that when a student completes a course, they are added to an email list and assigned a lead score of 100!

Their pricing explained

Teachable offers a limited free plan that allows you to publish only one product, but you have to pay a 10% transaction fee for each sale.

However, even the basic plan costs $59 per month, supports publishing only up to 5 courses and it comes with a 5% transaction fee. This limitation has recently upset many people.

If you want to avoid transaction fees altogether and publish up to 50 products of each product type, you need to upgrade to the Pro plan.

They also have a business plan that includes support for unlimited courses, coaching products, and digital downloads.

Additionally, it provides advanced features such as access to the Power Editor for advanced team customizations, custom user roles, and bulk student enrollment functionalities.

Bottomline

Teachable has lost ground due to pricing changes, course limits, and weaker support. Forcing users to pay extra to keep courses active was a major misstep that pushed prices way up.

That said, you might still want it if specific features matter to you.

Things like course compliance options, a mobile app, and a built-in payment gateway are hard to find elsewhere.

Whether Teachable works for you depends on what you need for instructional design.

If you want a platform that’s strong on courses, and you’re not after an all-in-one solution with marketing automation or communities, Teachable could be a good fit for you!

Or else, you may look at other course platforms we have featured in our blog post.