12+ Teachable Alternatives to Build your Online School- 2021 Edition

The entire concept on online education is pretty straightforward and all it really requires is a student and a device. While up until early 2000s, education and learning meant a packed classroom and the physical presence of a teacher was a no- brainer. But now, with the advent and the advancement of the internet and such, the geographical gap has been bridged and the usage of tools makes you feel like you are in a classroom. It can be received from whatever device you wish to use and it only requires a good e-learning tool to facilitate this. It seems like the concept is here to stay because computer ownership is easily accessible all across the world and internet speed has been increasing. It is also a rather economically viable option. E-learning has been, over the years trying to make learning more effective and measurable. This also has lead to a major rage in the building of e-learning platforms and a creation of those in abundance. It also seems that we might be heading toward a future that offers automatic learning. Irrespective, here, we would be discussing a myriad of LMS that have been built to help the creation of online schools. One of the very bests is Teachable, but there is a good lot of alternatives of the same that you can consider.

Teachable Alternatives: Why Should you be Lookin at One

Teachable has its own share of cons because it is difficult to cater to everyone’s needs, via just one platform. Despite being one of the very bests and highly appreciated for a variety of reasons, it is hard to say that it is all in one, because the site themes have very limited potential and does not support advanced quizzing features and has no in-built gamification system, which assures engagement and is offered by quite a lot of platforms. Their built in email marketing feature, even though free, lacks in design elements and their Sales Page is not as customizable as ClickFunnels. They do not offer direct integration with many third-party solutions and has very limited whitelabeling options.

12+ Teachable Alternatives to Build Your Online School in 2019

1)Thinkific

Features:

It allows easy creation and customization of your course to help match your brand. It make launching a course, simple and quick and requires no coding. All you have to do is upload, drag and drop content content to make a curriculum of your choice.
They support all the multimedia course content that would help keep students engaged. The offer videos, text, quizzes, downloads, survey, discussions, Google Docs and more.
You can customize the look and feel of your course with just one click and decide whether you wish to have private and hidden courses, prerequisite lessons, multiple instructors, drip schedule content and more.
They assist in building and creating a website to effectively sell your courses. The site includes pre built instructor, curriculum, key learnings and course review sections. All you have to pick one of the themes and customize all the elements of your brand. The drag and drop feature helps effortlessly organize, delete, or rearrange sections of your course pages. You can have your own domain name and go beyond with complete access to HTML and CSS.
You can market and sell your courses with an entire suite of effective business tools. They have flexible pricing options to suit every size and style of businesses. They offer membership sites and subscription courses and allow you to boost course sales with promotional features and coupons.
They assure that you will get paid immediately and charge in more than a hundred currencies. They accept all credit cards and assure that the payments are absolutely secure.
Their advanced marketing tools help reach more students. With customized commission rates and direct tracking, you can incentivize partners and reward affiliates for sharing courses. By sending the right emails at the right time, you can easily make sure of a highly targeted campaign.With advanced data tracking, you can improve your campaigns and integrate with a wide variety of external business marketing apps.
You can make the entire learning process better with clear progress indicators, unlimited replays of course material, and language controls.
You are given the option to track students’ progress and encourage them. You can analyze and optimize your business with group and cohort reporting, detailed segmentation, data exports and more.
They guarantee the safety of your content and include SSL certificates. Other than that, they have daily backups.

Pros:

They seem to take you through an entire journey, from the landing page to the course completion one which looks great aesthetically.
It allows easy customization and helps a user create their own brand.
You do not necessarily have to be a tech savy to use it. It has a simple interface.
They provide detailed reports on your work and the students’.
Even if you are using the free account, you can make money.
The support team is incredible and quick to find solutions.
They allow you to host almost anything imaginable including content made on authoring tools.
They offer unlimited video hosting, even on the free plans.

Cons:

The formatting system is inefficient which leads to students missing out on training parts.
It has a standard view and does not have a variation in themes.
The marketing platform is a little too rigid.

2)Academy of Mine

Features:

Their drag and drop builder helps create a course in a few moments.
They offer a very flexible website builder that helps in creating a landing page in just a couple minutes and unlimited page using their Visual Builder, and requires no coding.
They have an integrated dashboard to manage all courses, students, orders in one place.
It is an all in one platform that supports all known devices, has flexible settings that can customize almost all parts of the site, guarantees security with TLS 2.0 encryption and SSL, and has prebuilt layouts.
The platform is offered in English, Spanish, Portugese, French, German and many other language.
They assure automated E-commerce and you may connect your course with different payment gateways, which includes- Stripe, Paypal, Authorize.Net, PayuLatam, PayFast, EWay and more.
They allow you to conduct quizzes and exams in the form of Multiple Choice and True False questions, provide assignments and evaluate them. It also has an inbuilt gradebook that shows progress and grades.
They have an incredible marketing dashboard that offers integration with Google Analytics and webmaster tools and includes Keyword Manager and Competitor Manager.
They also have an inbuilt messaging capability that allows instructors to send messages to students directly inside the platform.

Pros:

Incredibly easy to manage and runs on auto pilot, which allows the creator to manage multiple projects at once.
It allows simple management and navigation of student information and grades.
The Support Team is reliable and always responsive and if required, also does a bit of coding for you.
Their pricing is affordable, and in comparison to other LMS, offers the best price.
The AOM builder they provide for making the sites is brilliant and shows good results.
They allow you to upload SCORM files built on authoring tools like Articulate , Lectora , etc .
They do not charge you on sales and you get to keep all the money that you make.

Cons:

The grading of student is not necessarily in easy print format and one has to copy and paste in a Word document to help get them clean and on one or two pages at most.
They have few video guides to illustrate how to work with the platform which causes hindrances in understanding the process completely.

3)Podia

Features:

They help not just create but also market and sell and manage your online course and assure that all plans that they offer come with no limit on bandwidth, file size, number of courses, customers, sales or anything else.
They offer a a simple content builder, easy branding customization and support for content of all kinds, be it video or audio or more and assist in earning through sales page.
They accept a variety of payment options which includes Stripe, PayPal, and most international currencies, making it easy, safe and secure to sell to your audience.
They give you the liberty to choose at which level individuals get to see any piece of content you create, giving you total control over what you build for your members.
They allow you to digital downloads however you wish which includes eBooks, PDF’s, cheat sheets, checklists, video files, audio files and text
They provide detailed analytics on what is working and what is not and what you need to work on.
They have a tool called Podia Editor which gives you complete control over the look and feel of your Storefront and Sales Pages and makes it easy to customize your Storefront and Sales Pages to look exactly how you want it to.
They assist in building you own sales team and increase your sales.

Pros:

The interface is incredibly easy to use and it is equipped with everything that one would need to build an online course. Not only that, they make it a point to bring in new features consistently Not just that, they also have all that you would need to sell an online course, be it monetization, marketing, affiliate program and more.

Not many course creation platforms assure this, but Podia is not one of them and guarantee a great interface on the students’ side and make sure that they have an enjoyable experience.
They have a beautiful design and such and it is quite aesthetically pleasing, no matter what. So, one does not necessarily have to worry about how their website looks, because they assure that it would look appealing.

They allow live chat with the support and it is incredible because not only do they make it a point to find solutions to the issues but also reply real quick and are available at all hours.

Their pricing is very fair and reasonable and unlike a number of course creation platforms, they do not claim any part in the money that you make. Also, they integrate easily with Stripe and PayPal to make money transferring a breeze.

Cons:

Many other platforms offer a variety of ways to teach, which includes quizzes, but Podia does not have that yet.

They do not provide much of the details in their analytics, for instance, which portion did the student stop reading or watching and so. So, that makes it difficult to improvise on the same platform.

They allow customizations but they often do not give out results that you had in mind and sometimes, not even close to it. There are some limitations with the customizations of the sales and course pages as well.

4)Teachery

Features:

They have unlimited courses, students and lessons, so if you wish to create 1,000 online courses and rack up 10,000,000 students, they will support it all.
They have a simple live course editor that has updates on-the-go to make sure that you do not miss out on anything. They make every piece of the text editable, so you can translate your course into any language.
They can host course video, audio, presentations, images and more.
Their course style editor puts you incharge and lets you customize and design the look of buttons, background colors, sub-lesson colors, and even the lines in the quick jump section of the course.
They have direct integration with Strip to allow to quickly and easily sell your online courses. They allow you to create promo codes, sell courses outside of Teachery, and create payment plans, monthly or yearly or recurring payments and such easily.
Their sales/landing/email page creator makes promotion of your online course a breeze and if you aren’t ready to sell your course but want to collect email addresses, they allow and facilitate it.
They allow direct integration with MailChimp or ConvertKit email marketing account. They also allow Zapier integration to automate nearly anything with any email provider. They also integrate with Disqus for commenting and in-course community interaction.
They provide custom domains, course homepage and more.
Also, they allow tracking and makes it really easy. Also, they provide detailed reports and analytics with all the details you would want.

Pros:

They offer a large number of integrations to make the creation of the course simple.
Their course editor and other tools helps quickly create a course.
You can have however many courses and students that you wish to have.
They support a large variety of multimedia to make your courses more enjoyable.
It is easily customizable and you can make changes to whatever you want to make it seem like your brand and you can have your own domain name too.

Cons:

5)Pathwright

Features:

They allow your learners access the courses on whatever device they wish to use, write, review, and print notes from anywhere in the path and also be a part of discussions and ask questions. They help stay engaged and on track and up-to-date with email and in-app notifications for due date reminders, discussion responses, feedback, and more.
They allow creators to check students’ progress easily and include start dates to lock access to the content until an upcoming date. They allow grading of everything easily with their super-fast workflow. You can make your courses private, public, or for members only and also set registration and access windows, including seat limits. They have an Ask to Answer feature that helps assign a question to a specific staff member who’s most qualified to answer and allow you to reply to questions and discussion email notifications by mail. They provide and allow you to evaluate completion rates and performance stats for your whole course, each lesson, and each step to see what needs to be refined.
They allow you to share extra and post attachments and notes to guide your learners further. They help create a unique environment for each course and assign projects and collect any type of student work—papers, images, videos, and more and you can add automatic grading or award points personally on any step of correction. Their drag-and-drop Path Builder helps map out each lesson before adding your content and embed into lessons whatever you want.
They guarantee absolute security with full SSL encryption on every screen and daily back-ups. They assist in personalization of your brand with colors, logos, images, and more and provide weekly enhancements and bug fixes without installing anything. They also offer easy integration with Google Analytics, Intercom.io, and more.
They allow you to set prices, sales, previews, and more from your storefront and you can sell multiple subscriptions that unlock access to all your courses or just few. For easy payments, they offer easy integration with Stripe. They facilitate creation of free trial periods for monthly subscriptions.

Pros:

They give you full control of your money and they will not take any cut from what you earn and the only transaction fees you’ll incur come from Stripe, the payment provider—2.9% + 0.30.
It is one of the very few platforms that is both student and instructor centric and will not just provide innumerable benefits for one.
They help in real time engagement of the learners and is accessible in all possible devices.
They help customize each course and text and it goes down to even the background.
They allow you to include video or audio media for lectures, demonstrations, and more in your teaching process.
They allow you to post discussion questions on any learning step to help learners make connections.
They offer multiple integrations and allow you to embed almost any kind of hosted external content.

Cons:

6)Kajabi

Features:

They have fully customizable themes and you can logo, images and colors to brand your home on the web.
They provide your customers one place to login and access the list of all the products they have purchased from you.
You can create many pages and add information that rarely changes, such as an ‘About Us’ page, ‘Contact Us’ page, Privacy Policy or legal disclaimers.
Their Reports Dashboard shows Sales by day, week, month, and offer and also access affiliate Sales reports.
Their themes are fully mobile responsive and are beautiful on computers, tablets, and phones.
They allow easy video hosting.
They help increase retention by setting your content to drip out to users on a schedule based on when they bought the product
Their Bulk Import helps quickly and easily adds new members to your products by pasting in a list of names and email addresses.
Their Multiple checkout helps reduce friction in the checkout process and up your conversions.

Pros:

They have everything to offer- email or landing pages or sales pages or shopping cart or website or blog or marketing funnels or online courses.
Their Customer Support is incredible and ready to offer help at all times.
It has an easy to use interface and has simple functionality.
They keep adding to their features regularly.
Their integration with Stripe makes receiving and sending out money a breeze.

Cos:

It is slightly on the expensive side.
Their email feature is not robust with their stats and data and it is hard to transfer.
They do not give you a very detailed statistic and do not necessarily show all data.
There are limitations with their build outs and sales funnels.

7)Braincert

Features:

They provide everything you need in just one platform with integrated e-commerce, real time collaboration and social learning marketplace. They provide to you your very own, custom, easy-to-use, and cloud-ready learning and teaching platform. They facilitate WebRTC based HTML5 Virtual Classroom in 50 languages and offer web conferencing which is powered by collaboration tools with a fully branded personalized link.
They allow you to collaborate with your attendees in real-time and face to face. They also have a responsive whiteboard that looks that same on all devices. They have a variety of shapes, lines and tools to make it easy to deliver any type of creative and educational training online. They have a variety of document readers, annotation tools, cloud media player and RTL, mobile and tablet support. They help easily customize your virtual classroom theme and colors by using the easy-to-use color picker tool.
They offer LaTeX Equation Editor, which is a strong interactive tool that helps create and display complex LaTeX mathematical equations inside whiteboard using a graphical UI without typing any LaTex code and Wolfram|Alpha that gives you access to the world’s facts and data and calculates answers across a range of topics. Other than that, they support multiple languages and offer the system of multiple screen sharing.
They allow you to deliver both public and private courses and allows you to assign, manage, and track assignment tasks for students enrolled in your course.
They have a powerful centralized dashboard to manage all your course contents, create courses, view reports, create shopping cart – all from a single administration cockpit.
They allow you to make traversal rules to make sure the lectures are seen and completed sequentially and offer discounts to your customers by creating coupon codes. Other than that, their star feature is their powerful reporting and their system of enrolling new students automatically by sending them an e-mail notification.

Pros:

Their virtual classrooms is spectacular and is not the feature one can find on many platforms.
It is very easy to use and makes training others easy too.
It is very easy to create a classroom and schedule classes.
White labeling capabilities allows enterprise clients to customize as they please.
The multilingual option and other extensions makes it the go to platform.

Cos:

There are certain files and documents that are not entirely supported, i.e, it does not work well on Braincert, for example, CSV files.
Their size limitations for a Powerpoint are not always compatible and makes a mess of the presentation.
They do not allow you to arrange the course on your front page.
They do not provide enough folders to assure an organizational structure for your courses.
They have some technical glitches like when uploading files, the file disappears, file appears only for attendee not for presenter or vise versa

8)Ruzuku

Features:

They accept payments through a variety of gateways which includes Stripe, Paypal, Infusionsoft, or 1ShoppingCart.
They allow you to create a custom design that suits your style and assure a complete white label experience. They also guarantee your own branded domain and a super easy platform.
They allow custom integrations to make the course sale and sign-up process quick and easy.
They have simple, powerful course management and beautiful courses that you can launch quickly with no fuss.
They hold all class materials like —handouts, recordings, videos to make your content rich and they help handle it all with ease.
The engagement emails provide notification about all activity in the course and is really helpful.
Their teleconference interface makes management easier and assist in running webinars.
They allow you to copy a previous course and run it again and send email notifications when a student posts a question

Pros:

Cos:

Verdict:

Teachable Alternatives: List of WordPress LMS (Learning Management System)

9)Learndash

Features:

They offer advanced quizzing, and support eight types of questions which includes- Single Answer, Multiple Choice, Sorting, Matching, Fill-In-The-Blank, Free Text, Survey, and Essay questions.
Based on quiz performance, they show custom messages and you can select whatever media you prefer for both questions and answers.
They creator is allowed the flexibility for set the price, choose the payment schedule and more.
They also allow you to group users, alter progressions, clear data and more.
They give reports on user enrollment, progress, and quiz performance and allow you to quickly run it.
You can approve, comment, and award points on submitted assignments.
They allow seamless integrations with Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, iSpring, or H5P and allows you to use both LearnDash and ProPanel across your network and work with any modern WordPress theme.

Pros:

It has great architecture.
It is associated with some of the best platforms that guarantee statement.
They comply with high e-standards.

Cos:

It is quite expensive and costs about $299 for their best package.
Even when you are already paying a good amount to buy the theme already, they still have to pay for LearnDash to integrate into the theme.
Users have to be passive while making use of it, because their code is not published.

10)LifterLMS

Features:

They have direct integration with WooCommerce that helps sell courses individually or as a bundle.
Their design experience is simple with their drag and drop course building tools and integrations.
Their course import and export tool makes moving platforms simple.
They provide a wide variety of marketing and moneymaking tools like recurring payments, multiple gateways, unlimited pricing models, and coupons.

Pros:

They practically allow you to build a simple online course website without paying anything at all with their free main plugin.
Their customer and technical support is live during office hours and provides a number of free training courses.
Their tool called Social Learning unlocks the power of Facebook likes to improve how students view your courses and interact.

Cons:

Despite the free plugin, you would not be able to earn unless you buy one of the preferred gateway from the options available, that is, Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, and WooCommerce available for $99 each.
You need knowledge about CSS if you want to customize colors.

11)LearnPress

Features:

Their user interface has everything you would need and is easy to use and would assist in making the entire curriculum layout as well as edit and maintain it in a simple and quick manner.
You can export course and import to other website.
You can share the course, manage it, watch the statistics about number of students who watch it, how it’s trending, and more.
Despite it being free, you can earn through the following gateways- Paypal, WooCommerce, Stripe, etc.
The WordPress forum can help with the communication with your student or instructor.
They keep adding to the features and developing and improving it.

Pros:

It offers a free core plugin.
It is an open source system which means that anyone can use, study, change and redistribute its source code.

Cos:

It lacks some of the major features likes front end course creation.
The architecture is not fulfilling and has no standard compliance.
The student management is not quite efficient in comparison to most other LMS platforms.

12)WPLMS

Features:

It has an easy to use interface that is stacked with an intuitive mega menu, an easy to locate search option, an image slider for the homepage and other such elements.
It offers gamification and integration with the BadgeOS plugin.
Their theme is brilliant and comes with a plenty of design layouts, and has a variety of of premium plugins like visual composed, layerslider, revolutionslider, eventon and more.

Pros:

It is compatible with a variety of plug ins which includes LearnDash, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce.
It does not require constant updates and such and is pretty low maintenance.

Cons:

It requires so many plugins, which slows down the site.
You need to purchase licenses to all kinds of other plugins that they include in their theme.

13)Academy

Features:

Their engagement engine makes learning fun with gamification, social learning and epic meaning and levels, badges and leaderboards.
Their interface and platform is scalable and flexible and grows with your business.
It is completely web based and brings unlimited storage.
It helps assess your learners’ progress, identify skills gaps and push the content they need to get them back on track.
It is responsive on all sites.

Pros:

Their gamification brings great levels of engagement.
It is quite easy to make your own and highly customizable.
The customer team is friendly and approachable and gets the work done in no time.

Cons:

They do not have due dates or deadlines system and the addition of that would be helpful.
The classroom management requires a lot of effort for both the creation of events and their management.

Verdict:

Abhishek Dey

I and my team research various e-learning platforms and can help you choose the right toolkit to get you started. I am just a mail away, so reach out to me if you want to tap into the power of online learning business. mail: [email protected]