Teachable Review (2025): Here’s The Truth!

Teachable is an online course platform for educators to create, market, and sell courses.

It has all the features and widgets that a successful online course needs.

But is it really the best platform for you?

I’ve extensively tested the platform (and other similar products), and now it’s time to share the review.

Let’s get started!

Key Features

Before I show you around, let’s take a quick look at the key features of Teachable.

• Course Builder: An easy-to-use drag-and-drop UI for course creation and organization.
• Customizable Templates: Professional, customizable templates to match your brand.
• Multimedia Content Support: Upload videos, audio files, PDFs, and other content types.
• Integrated Payment Processing: Secure payment gateways (with support for multiple currencies.)
• Student Management: Manage student enrollments, track their progress, and engage.
• Marketing Features: Built-in marketing features, including email campaigns and affiliate programs to boost sales.
• Analytics: Comprehensive analytics to track sales, student performance, and overall course success.

But now, let me share my experience and results!

My Experience

Let me show you what it looks like to use the tool first.

Getting Started on Teachable

To start using Teachable, you can activate the free plan.

On some other platforms, the “free” plan is not free. All you get to do is enter your email for free. Then it already prompts you to insert your credit card… I hate that, to be honest.

But on Teachable, I was surprised to see that this is not the case. There’s an actual free plan you can mess around with.

To get started, the tool first asks you to share some insights about your goals and such.

This is how easy it is to start on Teachable. After this step, you can already start creating your learning products.

Creating a Course

Then you get to choose your product.

As a course creator, I wanted to try the Online Course option.

Thus far, everything seems like smooth sailing. It didn’t take more than 30 seconds after signing up that I was already creating my first course. Epic!

Teachable has designed every step to be consistent and to make sure your course isn’t missing some key parts.

For example, here you get to choose the thumbnail of your course (if you have one.)

You can even use their cropping tool to make sure it fits nicely.

There it is!

Next, you can set up a price point for your course.

There are lots of options to choose from. There’s no option that would be useful not included in this list:

I went with a one-time purchase.

Then you can choose the pricing, name, subtitle, and description that show up on the checkout pages:

Once you’ve created the course name, image, and pricing, it’s time to start to create the content.

Because it’s 2024, there’s the AI option. I’m not a huge fan of this but just for the heck of it, let’s give it a shot.

After this step, it takes about 30–60 seconds to create the course content drafts with AI. (If you start from scratch, you don’t have to wait.)

Working with Your Course

Once the contents have been created, you will see your course content dashboard for the first time.

This is the main view where all the magic happens from course content creation to marketing and supporting your students.

Before I launch my course, there are obviously a lot of things I need to do.

First, let’s go through the curriculum. Remember, this is entirely generated with AI and I haven’t touched any of it just yet.

If you want to rearrange these lectures, just click on the six dots on the left-hand side and drag and drop the lesson.

Now, let’s start adding/editing the course content.

Adding Course Content

For example, here’s the text section that the AI rendered for the “Why Blogging Is Important in 2024” part:

I have to admit that the AI-generated content is generic and boring. If I wanted to publish this, I’d have to go through it carefully and write it from scratch.

But at the same time, I like it because now I don’t have to start from scratch. I have an entire course curriculum in place. This way I get to avoid the blank page syndrome.

But that being said, you’re not just limited to text (obviously.)

By opening a lesson and scrolling below, you’ll find the add content button:

This gives you an option to add different types of content to your course. This could be videos, audio, quizzes, media, code examples, and more.

For example, here I’m uploading my lesson to the Video Content view:

One thing to keep in mind is that the free trial doesn’t allow you to upload more than 10 videos.

After you’ve uploaded your video, it takes a while to process it to optimize the size while retaining the quality. You can exit the view at this point.

Depending on the length of your video, this might take up to an hour or two.

One cool thing that many platforms don’t offer is custom thumbnails for your videos.

This is awesome because by customizing your thumbnails to be eye-catching, you make sure your students watch all the content and don’t skip lectures that easily.

Also, this way you can control what your materials look like.

Speaking of the looks, on every lecture, there’s a Preview button on the top-right corner:

This allows you to view that lesson in the eyes of your student.

For example, here’s what my course looks like right now.

I think this is an awesome feature because this shows what the course actually looks like. You can verify that everything works out the way you anticipated for your students.

But now, let’s add more content to the course:

For example, I think a quiz is a wonderful way to test the knowledge of a student. I always add those to my courses.

On Teachable, adding a quiz is super simple. Just type in the question, mark the correct answer and hit save.

Now, let’s move on to more practical stuff on Teachable.

Useful Features and Widgets

Let me review some of the most practical must-know features of Teachable.

(I won’t go through them all because this would literally be an e-book after that.)

Before you launch your first course, it might be a good idea to not just host it on a blank profile. To this end, you can use the Site > Bios feature. This allows you to update a profile picture with a short description of yourself.

This way when potential students visit your profile, they will get an impression of what you do and who you are (and why they should trust your education.)

If you’re a first-time course creator, make sure to visit the Get Started tab on the left:

Here you can find video tutorials, other products, and the options to set up an arrange your school.

Then the next one you don’t want to miss is the Theme tab (on the left-hand side too.)

Here you can choose your course Logo, Thumbnail, and Favicon.

For example, here are the ones I created:

Then you can also choose your color scheme and fonts.

Once you’re ready, just preview your course. Here’s mine, for example:

Then, if you’re not happy with the random URL that Teachable gives for your course, you can always change it from the Domains tab.

This allows you to purchase a custom domain name for your course. Instead of being, for example, artturi-jalli-s-school.teachable.com, you could do artturijalli.com/courses/ or such.

Then, one of my favorite features is being able to give discounts to students.

You might think that it’s a hassle, but it’s not. Giving discounts has been made easy on Teachable. Just visit Site > Coupons page and create a discount.

You can set the discounts to expire at a certain time. You can create a set number of discounts. You can do anything to create a scarcity offer for your product.

Also, you can track the performance of the coupons here, too. You can see how many coupons have been used and how many of those are left.

Speaking of performance, head over to Site > Breakdown to see how your courses are performing.

This view shows you how many sales you’ve made, how many partner sales you’ve gotten, and so on. It will also give you the total earnings day by day.

Student Engagement Features

Last but not least, let me show you some community and student engagement features.

To view a list of students, you can check it at the Users > Students tab.

This not only shows you the students but also allows you to create an affiliate program for your students to promote your course. This can be an additional income stream that your students can earn with too. But that’s a different story.

One cool feature is the Coaching widget that allows you to arrange coaching with your students without hassle. You can use this at the Coaching tab on the left-hand side menu.

This allows you to track your students’ progress, keep notes, send messages, and so much more.

This would be inefficient and inconsistent without a feature like this that takes care of it all.

Speaking of engaging with your students, you can also set up a community. This allows you to communicate with your students with ease.

You can set up common spaces for frequently asked questions and topics.

Although you could use Slack or WhatsApp to do this, I think Teachable nails it because this way you can communicate in the same place where you study.

Now that I think about it, it’s an overall theme in Teachable. Everything happens in the same place.

Learning, coaching, communications, reports, billing, sales, and marketing. Everything is under the same umbrella.

Going Live

Now that I’ve shown you most of the important features of Teachable, it’s time to go live with your course.

If you have a big audience waiting for the launch, one thing you need to do is customize your sales and post-purchase pages.

You can do this in the main view of your course by scrolling down a bit.

You can click the links to view the pages:

For example, here’s my sales page:

To edit it, just click “Edit sales page.”

Here you can move things around and change texts, fonts, images, and whatnot.

For example, here I’m editing the text area that’s way too long to my liking:

Once you’ve done all your edits, it’s time to launch the course. To do this, scroll back up and click “Launch your course.”

And Voila! Your first Teachable course is live.

Now, I must say that this is such an awesome platform.

You can do everything in the same place with very easy and intuitive controls.

And let’s be honest, the AI features are cool but they won’t get you far. You still need to do most of the work 🙂

Also, keep in mind that you don’t need most of the features when you’re just getting started.

Build a loyal following to which you market the course first.

Then once you get hundreds of students, you can start worrying about order bumps, CRO, affiliate programs, coaching stuff, and whatnot.

Pros

• Teachable has one of the smoothest onboarding flows I’ve seen. You don’t need to be tech-savvy at all to get started. Even if it’s your first time creating a course, you’ll figure it out in minutes.
• The video player is clean and responsive. It looks professional and loads fast even on mobile (which many competitors still struggle with in 2024.)
• You can connect third-party tools easily (like ConvertKit, Zapier, or Mailchimp) without a headache. The integrations actually work.
• The built-in tax handling is a lifesaver. It automatically calculates EU VAT and other stuff you’d normally have to deal with manually.
• I liked how you really get control over pricing, student data, and your site: It’s not a marketplace doing all the marketing for you.
• The interface is clean and intuitive, even if you’re not techy. I was able to build a course fast without major hiccups.
• The built-in payment processing works smoothly (especially if you’re in a supported country). No need to wrestle with plugins or weird hacks.
• Good for getting started quickly: you don’t need a big tech stack or dozens of tools to launch something viable.
• Teachable has all the features for course creation, promotion, and management. And I mean all. Almost too many tools and widgets for some new creators, to be fair!
• There’s a generous free trial for the product. This allows you to create a course and market it (with some limitations.) Most platforms don’t offer one like this.
• The tool is super easy to use. It’s as easy as hosting a social media profile. Everything is organized nicely and flows smoothly.
• The pricing is not through the roofs. Even though this is such a well-rounded platform, even the most expensive option is less than $200/mo, which other similar platforms usually double or triple.
• Everything makes sense. The tool combines community, marketing, sales, student support, progress tracking, coaching, secure payments, and whatnot. It all happens in the same place instead of having to use like 10 platforms to host a course successfully.

Cons

• The reporting and analytics section could be more visual. Right now, it’s mostly numbers and charts that don’t always give you quick insights at a glance.
• Customer support can be slow during busy times. Sometimes it takes over a day to get a human response.
• There’s no real mobile app for creators (only for students). It would be awesome to manage or edit courses from your phone.
• The customization is more limited than I hoped. If you want full design control or advanced layouts, you’ll hit walls.
• The pricing structure and feature gating can feel frustrating. Some key stuff is locked behind higher tiers.
• Support and response times are mixed; at lower tiers, you may wait and feel like you’re on your own.
• If you plan to scale big (lots of products, complex communities, heavy branding), you might outgrow what the platform can do before you know it.
• Sometimes I get lost in all the features. This is not good if you’re just getting started. But at the same time, it’s a pro too! 🙂
• The AI content is not a good idea. There you need to do so many customizations and factual fixes that I would probably just start from scratch.
• The customization is limited. You can choose your landing page designs, logos, and whatnot, but there are some obvious customization limitations in the product too.
• The free plan is limited. Although I like the free plan, you won’t run far with it because it’s heavily limited.

Pricing

• Free: $0/mo
• Basic: $39/mo
• Pro: $119/mo
• Pro+: $199/mo

Alternatives

My absolute favorite course platform is Thinkific. You can read my complete review of the platform here:

To Take Home

Teachable is a great online course platform for building courses and other learning content.

I love the fact that this platform combines everything that it takes to make a successful and streamlined course.

You can host, edit, manage, promote, sell, engage, and do whatever you can imagine to be useful for a perfect online course.

If you’re just getting started, though, make sure not to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of features. You don’t need most of it before you hit hundreds of students 🙂

Read Also