LearnDash vs Teachable – Which One is Best for You?

If you want to create your own eLearning site and sell online courses, LearnDash and Teachable are two excellent platforms that can assist you in this regard. While both are entirely different software, they have their own strengths and weakness. Which one is best for you? We’re going to find out in our LearnDash vs Teachable post.

For the people who are navigating the world of LMS plugins, it might get a little bit confusing because there are so many. We have compared several LMS plugins in the past trying to figure out which one is the best plugin for you. While LearnDash is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, Teachable is another platform on its own. However, choosing the right platform is a crucial decision for the success of your online education website.

Teachable provides you with some amazing features for your eLearning site. It makes it easier to navigate and create your courses. On the other hand, LearnDash is very versatile and offers extensive customization options. Once you get the hang of it, you can create and sell courses like a pro with LearnDash. So which one should you choose, let’s find out in our LearnDash vs Teachable post.

LearnDash vs Teachable: Introduction

Since we’re comparing between LearnDash vs Teachable, it’s important to know what these platforms are. Let’s start with LearnDash.

LearnDash: LearnDash is an LMS plugin for WordPress. It allows you to create and sell online courses through your WordPress website. LearnDash is an open-source and self-hosted platform. The way LearnDash works is very simple. To get started, get the domain and hosting of your eLearning site from a reputed company. Then purchase a LearnDash plan from the official website, then get a suitable WordPress LMS theme.

Since you’re building your website using WordPress, you have access to thousands of themes and plugins to customize your site. You can install additional plugins to add more functionalities to it and you don’t need to know how to code.

LearnDash allows you to build your courses, and add lessons and quizzes to them. You can also design your own course certificate which the students will be awarded upon finishing a course. Whatever you need to create a website like Udemy or Coursera, LearnDash provides you with all the features you need.

Teachable: Teachable is a powerful platform that gives you the features and tools you need to start your online education business. Teachable, unlike LearnDash, is a separate platform and not a WordPress plugin. You don’t need to create a website for your eLearning site, rather your site will be hosted on Teachable. The platform also gives you ready-made templates to build your site. You can use the template and customize it to suit your needs.

You can create your online education platform with teachable without coding. But there is code-based customization available. Teachable isn’t as customizable as WordPress true, but the course templates do have some real flexibility.

To get started with Teachable, you just have to create an account for free and start building. Since it’s already hosted, you don’t need to create a website or go looking for a domain and hosting plan. It is easy to use and there are many attractive and effective course templates you can use to build your business.

There are more things to consider when choosing your eLearning platform. You have to consider, hosting, pricing, customization, reporting, student assessment, and much more. To understand how LearnDash and Teachable handle these tasks, we need to compare both platforms in these fields. Let’s compare LearnDash vs Teachable and see which one suits your business model.

👉 Learn More: Teachable Review – A Complete LMS Solution

Hosting

The first thing that we’re looking at is the hosting option. Since you’re creating online courses, they must sit on the internet. How your eLearning platform is hosted is a big part of the business. Let’s take a look at what LearnDash and Teachable have to offer in terms of hosting.

LearnDash: As LearnDash is a WordPress plugin, you have the freedom to choose your own domain and hosting option. If you want to host videos, you can use platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia which gives you advanced content protection and better quality. LearnDash also has LearnDash cloud which is a hosted site for your LearnDash site. With LearnDash cloud, you’ll get LearnDash pre-installed and LearnDash ProPanel.

Since LearnDash is a plugin for WordPress, you can choose a good domain and hosting service for your site. If you want, you can also get LearnDash cloud which will give you the best performance for LearnDash.

Teachable: Teachable is a fully hosted LMS. This means, you just sign up and never worry about running out of bandwidth to host your courses. Teachable also offers unlimited hosting for videos, even for the free plan. If that sounds suspiciously good, that is because it is. Hosting, especially video hosting is expensive. If a company is offering you this service for free, that means they are covering this cost someplace else.

For starters, you’ll be on a shared server with a bunch of other free plans. This results in a really slow website. Again, if someone else is uploading more videos, this will slow your site down a lot. If you want a faster site, the only option you have is to upgrade your Teachable plan. This will improve your site performance but ultimately you’ll be paying more.

But if you’re embedding videos from another platform (such as YouTube or Vimeo), then your site won’t slow down that much. Teachable gives you the ability to embed videos from other platforms. We will know more about this when we discuss videos.

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Reporting

LearnDash: Reporting is a very important part of an online education platform. In order to get an insight into how your courses are doing, you need to see the analytics. LearnDash does a pretty good job of delivering those insights through the LearnDash ProPanel. The Propanel allows you to track the progress of users, courses, or group. It is also possible to view the reporting on the front end if you want.

LearnDash Propanel is a separate add-on for LearnDash which costs about $49/year. If you purchase the LearnDash cloud, it will be included for free.

Teachable: The Teachable reporting system allows you to see a student’s progress on lectures and quizzes. It shows the new signups, active students, lessons completed, etc. If you have videos, you can also see how far the student has progressed on the video. A cool thing about Teachable’s reporting is that it uses a video heat map to detect which parts of the video students are replaying.

The reporting feature of Teachable is quite good and also provides you with all the basic stats you need to know. However, this feature is only available on the top two plans of Teachable the Pro ($159/month on the monthly plan) and the Business ($665/month on the monthly plan) plans.

Customization

One of the most essential parts of an LMS is the features and tools it provides for customization. You want to make the course look as customized as possible. Let’s see what LearnDash vs Teachable offers in terms of customization.

LearnDash: Since LearnDash is a WordPress plugin, you will be building your website and courses using a WordPress interface. That gives you the advantage of choosing from numerous LMS themes and plugins to customize your eLearning site without having to code a single line. That is the beauty of WordPress.

LearnDash is a plugin that allows you to create courses using a special course builder. You can add topics and then add lessons to those topics. You can add videos, texts, etc. to make your lessons more interesting. You can also add quizzes that the students have to take at the end of each lesson. You can also create challenge exams that allow the users to skip ahead of a course by answering a set of questions prior to starting the course.

With LearnDash you can also create unique certificates for each course. So when students complete a course, they will be awarded the certificate. From courses, and quizzes, to certifications, LearnDash has some of the most amazing customization options you’ll ever need. You’ll have access to a large number of themes and fonts to customize your website. This makes LearnDash very flexible and highly customizable.

Teachable: Teachable isn’t as customizable as LearnDash but it focuses mainly on providing users with ready-made templates that they can customize. It has a few templates that you can use to build your site and customize it to suit your needs. Teachable also has a course certification feature but it’s only available on the Pro or Business plans.

👉 Get Teachable NOW (Free Plan Available)!

The course builder of Teachable focuses on quickly building with lessons and then publishing. Teachable also has an interesting feature where it uses AI to build a course outline for you. Although this feature is experimental it’s refreshing to see that it’s adopting the new AI features.

Teachable is less customizable than LearnDash, but the users are quite satisfied with the platform. The reason behind this enormous success is that Teachable has themes that are professionally designed and tested to perfection. It doesn’t require further customization. With the free version, we got 2 themes.

If you’re not a web designer, normally you wouldn’t want to spend much time fidgeting with your website. Rather you would want to focus more on your business. Teachable is a stand-alone SaaS and it’s all about drag and drop which makes it easy to learn and easy to use for beginners.

The lesson builder of Teachable is very simple and straightforward. When you want to add content to a lesson, simply select it and you will have 11 blocks you can use. Some of these blocks are text & images, video, PDF viewer, audio, banner image, resource, quiz, etc. Using these blocks you can add content to your lessons.

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Assessments

LearnDash: LearnDash offers some great methods through which you can assess students. You can create a bank of questions to build or even randomize quizzes. You can choose from six different quiz types Multiple choice, single choice, true or false, sorting, fill in the blanks, etc.

Not only quiz types, but there are also several quiz customization options to make the assessment a lot more precise. For example, you can set the score a student receives after answering a quiz. You can also provide hints in the form of images, texts, lists, or custom HTML. You can also display answer feedback for each question.

You can also display the quiz scores on a leaderboard so that students can see how they’ve performed against their peers. All these features are built into LearnDash’s core functionality. With so many assessment features, you can truly build your eLearning site the way you want.

Teachable: For student assessment, Teachable provides you with basic multiple-choice questions. If you have the Pro plan, you can have graded quizzes. Teachable has a course compliance feature that isn’t available with the free plan. But these compliance features are really neat. For example, the enforce lesson order is a feature that forces students to progress through a lesson in a particular order. Again another feature requires students to watch at least 90% of the video to progress.

When it comes to the quiz category, Teachable has only the multiple choice quiz while LearnDash has so many others. In that case, LearnDash is much more flexible. Normally you might not need that many quiz types, but a little variation on quizzes is sometimes refreshing for the learners.

Videos

Video lectures are very important in online courses today. If you have videos, you can also include illustrations that make it a lot easier for the students to focus and learn. A good LMS plugin or platform should provide you with good video hosting options for your courses.

Videos are also important to market your course to new audiences. It can be a short video explaining why our course is important and what can expect to learn from this course. Let’s take a look at what LearnDash and Teachable provide.

LearnDash: As LearnDash is a WordPress plugin, you have the freedom to choose your own hosting option. You can upload videos to your hosting but this isn’t recommended as it will slow your site down. This also means that you won’t be storing your videos or any media files on LearnDash. Rather it will be stored on your hosting account.

A better option is to host your videos on other popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, etc. Then you can copy the video URL and add it to your video block to create video lessons. In that way, your website will be fast and won’t have any issues with performance.

LearnDash also has a feature that allows you to create your lessons from a YouTube or Vimeo playlist. You can simply copy the playlist URL and paste it into the appropriate place, LearnDash will automatically capture all the videos from your playlist and create lessons from it. After that, you can simply customize each lesson to quickly create an entire course within minutes!

Teachable: Teachable allows you to upload your videos (must be mp4, .avi, or .mov) on the platform. Teachable also allows you to embed videos uploaded to other platforms by using the code block. However, in the free plan, you’re only allowed to upload 10 lesson videos with a max file size of 2GB. In order to upload more videos, you need to upgrade your plan.

When it comes to video, both LearnDash and Teachable are great. You can upload directly to both platforms, as well as embed videos from other platforms. In this case both LearnDash and Teachable are great. Both platforms allow you to embed videos from third-party platforms. If you don’t want to use a third-party platform due to higher costs, you can always use YouTube.

If we compare LearnDash vs Teachable in terms of video, both platforms come to a tie. But LearnDash does have some good video features such as the video progression, which doesn’t allow students to progress a course until they finish watching the entire video.

👉 Get Teachable NOW (Free Plan Available)!

Pricing

When choosing an LMS platform, it’s essential to look at the pricing. An LMS software usually costs a lot as it comes packed with different features. Let’s compare the pricing between LearnDash vs Teachable.

LearnDash: LearnDash pricing is a bit different. You can either purchase one of the 3 plans for the base plugin, or you can purchase one of the two LearnDash cloud plans. The core LearnDash plugin has the following plans:

• $199/year for 1 site
• $399/year for 10 sites
• $799/year for Unlimited sites

LearnDash Cloud has the following plans:

• $24/month for the Annual plan
• $29/month for a monthly plan

Teachable: Teachable has a free plan and 3 more plans to pick from. It has a monthly and annual plan. Let’s check out the monthly plans:

• Free: $0 for 1 admin user
• Basic: $59/month for 2 admin users
• Pro: 159/month for 5 admin users
• Business: $665 for a custom number of admins

The annual plans for Teachable are as follows:

• Free: $0 for 1 admin user
• Basic: $39/year for 2 admin users
• Pro: $119/year for 5 admin users
• Business: $375 for custom admin users

LearnDash vs Teachable: Pros and Cons

Both LearnDash and Teachable are great options for building your online education platform. While Teachable targets teachers who don’t want to spend time customizing their eLearning platform and mainly focus on their business. LearnDash on the other hand, gives you a ton of customization options.

Regardless of which platform you choose, there are still some pros and cons that we need to address.

LearnDash Pros: First let’s take a look at some of the pros of using LearnDash.

• More customization options
• Multiple addons and integrations
• Lower price compared to Teachable plans
• Personalized options
• LearnDash Propanel offers in-depth analytics

LearnDash Cons: Despite having some really good plus points, there are some cons that you should also know about.

• Need a few technical skills
• It doesn’t have a free plan
• Might be a little time consuming
• Not all templates are user friendly

Teachable Pros: Even though Teachable doesn’t have as many features as LearnDash, it still has a large audience. The reason for this is its simplicity and effectiveness. Let’s take a look at some of the merits of Teachable.

• Easy to use
• No need to create a website
• Free plan included
• No hosting needed

Teachable Cons: Although it’s easy to use and you can publish your course quickly, there are some downsides to it. Let’s take a look at some of the issues you might have with Teachable.

• Limited customization
• Limited marketing tools and add-ons
• Paid plans are more costly than LearnDash
• No personalized options as your site is hosted on Teachable

👉 Get LearnDash NOW!

👉 Get Teachable NOW (Free Plan Available)!

Conclusion

So LearnDash vs Teachable, which one is better? Well, it is up to you to decide. While LearnDash gives you almost unlimited customization options and an abundance of features, you still have to choose your own domain and hosting unless you go for the LearnDash cloud plan. Then you have to choose a theme and start creating your courses. Whether it is a one-course or multicourse website, LearnDash gives you features to create both.

Teachable uses a much simpler logic. You don’t need to install any theme or plugins. In fact, Teachable has a free plan which you can use to start your eLearning site. You can easily use it to build your course. However, the paid plans are a bit more expensive than LearnDash. In terms of features, you get all the important features you need to create and sell online courses.

So if you don’t want to spend more time on customization and you’re simply looking to focus on your business, Teachable is the platform you want. But if you want more freedom in hosting, selecting themes, and customization, then LearnDash is a very good choice.

At the end of the day, we would say both platforms have their merits. It depends on what you’re looking for. That concludes our LearnDash vs Teachable post. Let us know in the comments section which platform you prefer building your eLearning platform on.