Looking for a Teachable review? Here's the thing: while there are tons of Teachable reviews online, few of them are in-depth. This one is different. We're going to cover it all. We've created a detailed look at the platform, including videos and images. We'll also show you what we think makes Teachable worthwhile, along with a few areas we think could be improved upon. If you've been looking for an honest, quality, no-stones-left-unturned review, this is it.
What is Teachable?
Teachable is an online course creation platform. It offers course creators the chance to build, market, and sell courses and coaching services through their platform. Teachable also offers additional features like memberships and comes with a course marketplace.
The Teachable Backstory
Originally created back in 2013, the first instance of the platform was called Fedora. As the story goes, Founder and CEO Ankur Nagpal had been instructing a course on marketing through another course platform. The experience was not as seamless as it could be. So, Nagpal decided to go all-in and created Teachable. Since then, the brand has blossomed. Teachable has helped over 100,000 course creators sell over $500 million in courses and the business continues to grow.
Who Teachable is Designed for
Most reviews out there like to call Teachable a tool for beginners. In our experience, this is usually to do with the look and feel of the platform, how intuitive it is, and the fact that it's just easy to use. And we think that’s accurate. Teachable is ideal for beginners but can work for intermediate course creators, too. It does what you need it to do, which is streamline the process of getting your online course live, saving you the time you would otherwise spend on coding, copywriting, marketing, selling, and everything in between.
Features
Completing in-depth reviews of various online course creation platforms is enlightening. You begin to appreciate the complexities of bringing a platform to life. And when it comes to delivering a product that over a hundred thousand customers love, the sheer number of customers is a testament to a job well done. Teachable’s collection of features and intricate details shows that the platform is truly designed for ease of use.
Take the sign-up process. It takes all of two steps to create an account. Best of all, if you’re not ready to commit financially, you’re not pressured to either. Teachable automatically offers a demo account for you to get started and you don't need to enter your credit card details until you’re ready to enroll students and make your site live.
Once you’ve signed up and created your new school, Teachable, like other online course creation platforms, asks a series of on-boarding survey questions to get to know you better. Sure, these may seem a little intrusive, but they are designed to help improve the platform. And if you’re serious about creating an amazing online course that's competitive, helping the good folks over at Teachable by answering these questions is well worth it.
Here's a look at a complete list of Teachable's features.
Your Dashboard
Dashboards can be tricky things to build. We like what Teachable has done. They've placed the most important elements of launching your course right in front of you. The mix of educational content and tabs that allow you to get started is a smart move.
Teachable’s dashboard is the first screen you see after completing the on-boarding questions. It shows core features you'll need to launch your course. These include signing up for a free live webinar that covers how to create an online school and first course, how to use Teachable to accept payments, and how to create a beautiful school that matches your brand’s look and feel.
You’ll also see tabs to create a product, customize the look and feel of your front-facing platform, set up your domain, and ultimately launch your school (greyed out until the above steps have been completed).
Your dashboard includes a collection of sections that you'll work in to launch your course. They are all neatly aligned in the left-hand margin for easy access.
Accessing Users
Users is where you’ll find all information related to people associated with your course. Users include students, owners, authors, affiliates, and anyone else you'd like to include. The Users section also comes with a filter and search bar to help you find people based on certain criteria. As far as filters go, Teachable’s thought of everything. While there are 33 filters available, we’ve created this shortlist is to illustrate how flexible Teachable’s filter feature is.
You can set filters by:
- Name or email address that doesn't contain a specific word or domain
- People that have signed up before and after a certain event
- Who logged in before or after the event
- Login counts greater than a certain value
- Country code
- If the contact source contains a specific value
- If a contact signed up with an affiliate code
- Who has or has not enrolled in a specific course(s)
This information may sound overwhelming but it’s really easy to understand when examined. Filters help you identify opportunities for sales and marketing campaigns you can run. For example, let's say you have a new course designed for learners in the US only. Using the filter function, you can find all learners currently in your database who are located in the United States and then create an offer that you can email to them.
The Users section also includes distinct tabs for the following:
- Students for courses
- Owners who have admin rights in your account, all of which can be controlled by the primary account owner (you)
- Authors who help you create course material and have access to sales information and more
- Affiliates who promote your courses
- Custom users who are given unique permissions to manage content in your account (note: this ability is only available for Teachable Business Plan clients).
The Users section also allows you to add students manually or export your contacts in a CSV file if you'd like to further analyze this information or use it in a third-party platform.
Site
Like the creation of your course, building your site is just as important. The Site section is where you go to manage site design, add unique pages, and more. Here's a look at everything you can do in the Site section.
Customize Your Theme
The Theme section comes with the ability to customize the font that will appear throughout your site, colors for navigation bars, footers, navigation bar links, buttons, headings, body text, and even your video player. The Theme section also allows you to add your brand’s unique site logo, a school thumbnail (a small image to represent your school in myTeachable accounts learners use), and a favicon.
While the theme Teachable offers is flexible, customizable, and easy-to-use, we think that offering a single theme makes the platform less flexible. When contrasted to competitors like Kajabi that offers over seven site theme options, or Thinkific’s four with multiple layout options, Teachable seems to fall short.