Today we’re doing a Teachable review. Teachable is a SaaS LMS platform that helps you create and publish your online courses. You can sell your courses and earn a profit using Teachable. The platform gives you all the tools you need to build and sell your courses, you don’t have to code a single line. In order to find out how good this platform is, we’re going to do a Teachable review.
Learning Management System, or LMS in short is software that helps you build and manage an online education portal. Teachable is an LMS service that helps you create and sell your online courses through a website. In this post, we’re doing a Teachable review where we will explore the various features and other aspects of this platform.
The LMS industry today is very popular and it has been gaining this popularity for some time now. According to an article on Fortune Business Insight, it has been estimated that the LMS industry will grow from USD 18.26 billion in 2023 to USD 47.47 billion by 20301. This is totally normal as more and more people are preferring to learn skills online and get certified. That means a huge number of the workforce will be created through online courses.
Therefore, industry experts are more keen on creating online courses as they will contribute to the next generation of the workforce and also make some profit. But the problem with that is, it takes time to create, design, and publish a course let alone a website. Teachable gives you a fast and easy way to bring your courses to life. In this Teachable review post, we’re going to review the service and check out its various LMS features.
What is Teachable
Teachable is a Learning Management System or LMS that helps educators, teachers, instructors, etc. create online courses. It allows you to publish your courses and provides you with the tools to market your courses and build an audience. And finally teach students and make money.
Teachable provides with an easy-to-use interface that you can use to create and manage your eLearning site. The backend interface of Teachable is very similar to WordPress with the left side menu and the main content in the center.
As for features, Teachable provides you with the following (including but not limited to):
- Web hosting
- Course builder
- eCommerce functionalities
- Accepting payments
- Drip content system
- Quiz builder for courses
- Certificates for students
- Marketing tools
- Communication with students
- Third-party integrations and much more,
Teachable has 100,000+ users all over the world. That makes it one of the most popular LMS platforms today. You don’t need to know coding or programming to create and host your website. Teachable takes care of all those technical aspects. All you need to do is what you do the best, create lessons and teach students.
Who can use Teachable?
You might be wondering if Teachable is suitable for you. Teachable has been designed in such a way that even if you’re a newbie, you’ll face little to no difficulties with the platform. We explored some of the features, created courses, set up payment methods, and it was a smooth experience.
However, for the first time, it might be a little difficult if you have absolutely no experience with CMS such as WordPress or LMS platforms. Trust us when we say, it’s not that big deal. Spend some time, you’ll understand everything.
So to answer the question, Teachable is meant for –
- Teachers and instructors who are looking to sell courses online
- Industry experts such as photographers, artists, programmers, etc.
- Content creators
- Fitness coaches, etc.
Basically, anyone who wants to teach others through their online courses can use Teachable.
Teachable review – Key features of Teachable
Teachable, like other LMS is a program with a large number of features. Going through each of these features will take an enormous amount of time. So, to save you time, we’re going to mention some of the important features of the platform.
From course creation to marketing your courses, Teachable provides you with the tools to do everything you need.
Setup wizard
In popular WordPress LMS plugins such as Tutor LMS and LearnDash, a setup wizard is launched as soon as you install and activate the respective plugin. We can see a similar feature in Teachable. As soon as you start your Teachable website, you’ll be asked a series of questions. Some of these questions will help the program understand what you’re looking for and help set everything up for you.
However, you can later change these settings. The wizard takes you through the LMS setup process and asks you a series of questions. The answers to these questions will help the wizard to set up the perfect site for you. Once the setup is complete, it takes you to the backend or Teachable admin interface.
Teachable admin backend
After the setup is complete, you will be brought to a page where you can manage all your created LMS sites. The sites are referred to as ‘schools’. If you’re enrolled in some other Teachable schools, you’ll see those here as well.
Here you can access any of your schools or create a new one. You can also change a few settings, manage your billing, and get help from the Teachable team by submitting a ticket.
Teachable course builder
On the backend, there’s an option called courses. This is the section where all your courses are stored. Clicking on the ‘New Course’ button will prompt the builder to launch. First, you can choose your course name. On the next screen, you can see the entire structure of your course.
Here you can create your course outlines, or generate outlines through the use of an AI tool. The AI feature is currently experimental so it might not be very accurate. But it could be a fun thing to do if you haven’t planned out your course outlines yet. If you click on ‘Edit Curriculum’ it will take you to the course builder. Here you can create and name your sections and lessons. The structure is somewhat similar to the LearnDash course builder.
You can also drag and drop sections and lessons. That’s all very nice, but what about adding content to your sections and lessons? Well, if you click on a lesson it will open up the lesson content page. Here you can add content such as texts, images, documents, etc. to the lesson.
You can also add quizzes to your lessons from here. With our current plan, we can only see the MCQ quiz where you can create a question and type out as many options as you want. Then you have to select the correct answer. In this way, you can add as many quizzes as you want to the course. With upper paid plans you can access more quiz features.
In this way, you can create your lesson contents in a flash. If you have video content, simply select the video block from the right side and add your video. You can upload your video file but it has to be 2GB maximum. With the free plan, you will only be able to upload 10 lesson videos and if you want to add your YouTube or Vimeo video, you have to upgrade to the pro plan. So, that’s how you can add content to your lessons and create your entire course.
Course bundles
Teachable has the course bundle feature which allows you to combine some of your courses and sell those in a bundle at one price. This also gives you the opportunity to sell more courses to your students and make more profit.
In one of our previous posts, we also discussed the Tutor LMS course bundle feature which was added to the plugin in a recent update. The bundling process is really simple, you just give a name to your course bundle and select the courses you want to add to it. Then select pricing structure and boom! You’ve got yourself a course bundle.
Drip content
Drip is a feature that allows you to publish lectures over a period of time. You can publish lecture sections, on specific dates or a specified amount of days after a student enrolls in your courses. You can also include email notifications that let the students know when a new section gets released. However, the Drip feature isn’t available on the free plan, so you have to upgrade to a paid plan to access this feature.
Course certificates
When you’re creating an online course, it is also essential to include a certificate that the students will receive upon completion of the course. Many popular LMS platforms give you the option to design your own course certificates. In fact, Tutor LMS, a WordPress LMS plugin, created Tutor LMS Certificate Builder that allows you to design course certificates with ease.
Teachable also allows you to design your own custom certificates for your courses. There are a few certificate templates for you to choose from. You can also create a custom certificate using Liquid/HTML. However, the certificate feature is only available on Teachable Pro and above plans.
After picking a template, you can further edit it and alter the colors, design, text, and much more. You can have one active certificate for a course and when a student completes the course, the certificate will automatically be generated. You can also manually issue the certificates.
Your courses can have multiple certificates but only one has to be active at a time. Certificates that are already issued to the students cannot be deleted unless they are revoked. Yes, it’s also possible to revoke certificates from students in case it’s required.
Live classes
Teachable also allows you to create live classes through the use of third-party live-streaming applications. For example, you can use YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo, and any other streaming platforms that allow you to embed a code snippet of the broadcast. However, to add a live class link, you need to first open up the builder.
After adding the code snippet there’s also a preview option that allows you to see how it will look to your students.
Online course website creation
By default Teachable has 3 pages, the sales page, thank you page, and checkout page. In Teachable, there are two types of pages:
- Site pages
- Product pages
Site pages include the homepage, terms of use, privacy policy, etc. These pages are the ones that the user normally interacts with when they visit your school or LMS website. To edit these pages, you can simply go to the Sites > Pages tab and select School Pages.
The product pages include the Sales page, Checkout page, and Thank You page. When purchasing a course, a visitor will have to interact with these pages. To edit these pages, you can simply go to the Sites > Pages tab and select Product Pages. First, you have to select a course (product) from the dropdown.
👉 Learn More: LearnDash vs Teachable – Which One is Best for You?
Creating pages
You also have the option to create more pages for your school. By going to Sites > pages, you’ll find an option to add a new page by clicking on the “Add New Page” at the bottom.
This will create a new page and will take you to the page builder where you can create the page from scratch. If you’ve worked in WordPress Gutenberg page builder, this setup might be familiar. On the left-side menu, there is a number of blocks. Clicking on the blocks will add it to the page and selecting those blocks will allow you to edit the components of those blocks.
WordPress page builders like Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, etc. use similar tactics to build pages. Using this method, you can build pages for your LMS site on your own.
Course design template
For your course page, Teachable offers two different design templates. These designs can be accessed from Courses > Design Template. If you don’t see the Design Template menu item, then select a course first.
The templates that are available for you are:
- Simple
- Colossal
By default, generally, the Colossal template might be activated. You can choose either one for your course page.
Customizing the website theme
You can also customize your website theme. To do that you have to go to Site > Theme and from here you can upload your site logo, school thumbnail, and favicon. You can also change your font family and select a color palette for your site.
You can also change your site title from this section. There is a preview button on the top right corner of the screen. Click there to see how your website looks.
Reports and analytics
If you’re running an LMS site, you need reports and analytics. These will give you information on which courses are doing well, how well your students perform, etc. Teachable has a good report and analytics system. From your Teachable dashboard, if you scroll down you will get some reports that show you new signups, lessons completed, active students, etc. for today and the current month.
You can also integrate Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to view advanced analytical reports on your LMS site. To do that you need to Settings > Apps and install Google Analytics 4 (GA4) application on your Teachable site. However, do note that it’s not available on the Teachable free plan.
After this installation is complete, a popup will appear where you can paste your Google tag ID. Google Analytics will display your traffic number, where your traffic is coming from, which devices are being used to visit your site, and much more important information. Since this is a Teachable review, we’re not going deep with the Google Analytics 4 integrations. You can check out the documentation on how to get it set up.
Integrations
As you’ve already seen Teachable has quite a number of apps or third-party applications that you can install for your Teachable school. However, these only become available on the paid plans. The available apps include:
- Aweber
- DropInBlog
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
- Google Tag Manager
- Hotjar
- LinkedIn Tag
- MailerLite
- Pinterest Tag
- TikTok Pixel
- Meta Pixel
- Mailchimp
- ConvertKit
- Sumo
- Segment
- Zapier
- Circle SSO
- ActivateCampaign
Teachable also has webhooks that allow you to share information from your school with other online applications. Since we’re doing a Teachable review, it’s also important to look at the integrations. Although we haven’t tried each and every one, as far as we know, these all work perfectly. If you want full details of third-party integrations, you can check out the Teachable documentation.
Custom Domains
By default, all teachable schools are hosted on teachable subdomains. If you get the Basic or any plans above Basic, you can choose any custom root domain. You can choose any domain registrar such as GoDaddy, WordPress, BlueHost, HostGator, etc. No matter which registrar you go with, there are five basic steps in getting a custom domain:
Step 1: Purchase your domain from your preferred registrar.
Step 2: Edit your domain’s nameservers to change your DNS settings.
Step 3: Make a CNAME record that points your school’s custom domain at it.
Step 4: Include the domain in your school admin’s Site > Domains area.
Step 5: Set the domain as the main domain for your school.
That’s how you can get a custom domain for your Teachable school. It is also possible to get a custom subdomain for your Teachable LMS site. Check the official documentation if you want to get a custom subdomain.
Pricing
In this part of our Teachable review, we’re going to look at the various pricing plans of Teachable. You can start building your Teachable school for free as you’ve seen in the beginning. Once you’re satisfied, you can move on to a paid plan. You can also get an advanced plan for 14 days for free, to test if everything is ok. Teachable has two types of subscriptions:
- Monthly
- Annual
The monthly plan requires you to pay a set amount each month while for the annual plan, you pay only once a year. Let’s take a look at the monthly plans first. The monthly licenses have 3 plans but the first one is free. So we’re only stating the other two:
- Basic – $59/month
- Pro – $159/month
Now let’s take a look at the annual plans. With an annual license, you can save up to 33%. Here are the annual plans:
- Basic – $468 ($39/month)
- Pro – $1,428 ($119/month)
The basic plan adds more features to Teachable and the Pro adds even more features. But all the plans have some common features. These common features are:
- Student management
- Lecture comments
- Basic quizzes
- Integrated payment processing
- No-code course builder and web pages
- Email support
- Admin and author seat
- Student referrals
Teachable also has an enterprise solution, the Business plan. The Business plan costs $499/month and billed $5,988 annually. It gives you unlimited courses, coaching products, and digital downloads. You also get 20 admin and author seats, Advanced theme customization, and much more.
👉 Get Teachable NOW (Free Plan Available)!
Conclusion
So that concludes our Teachable review. Overall, Teachable is an amazing LMS solution. It is a complete package when it comes to creating, publishing, and selling online courses. If you have a low budget, or if you’re new to eLearning Teachable is suitable for you. As there’s no coding necessary, you don’t need much technical skills to create and sell courses. As we’ve seen in this review, there’s no need of coding in order to get your courses online.
You can create courses, add quizzes to teach your students. You can also add a course certificate to your courses so that students will receive those certificates at the end of the course. If you want to arrange live classes, you have to embed the code of your streaming service. Teachable doesn’t have any built-in live class application right now, so that’s the thing you have to do if you want to take live classes.
We would say Teachable is something to consider if you’re looking to create an online education platform. As the free plan provides you with enough features to create great courses and make a profit, it’s suitable if you’re starting out. Even if you have long experience in web development, Teachable is still a good choice. (Stat Source 1).
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