Understanding eLearning is simple. eLearning is learning utilizing electronic technologies to access educational curriculum outside of a traditional classroom. In most cases, it refers to a course, program or degree delivered completely online.
There are many terms used to describe learning that is delivered online, via the internet, ranging from Distance Education, to computerized electronic learning, online learning, internet learning and many others. We define eLearning as courses that are specifically delivered via the internet to somewhere other than the classroom where the professor is teaching. It is not a course delivered via a DVD or CD-ROM, video tape or over a television channel. It is interactive in that you can also communicate with your teachers, professors or other students in your class. Sometimes it is delivered live, where you can “electronically” raise your hand and interact in real time and sometimes it is a lecture that has been prerecorded. There is always a teacher or professor interacting /communicating with you and grading your participation, your assignments and your tests.
About
TEACHABLE:
Teachable is an ‘all-in-one’ solution for creating and selling online courses. When I say all-in-one, I mean you can build your course site, host & protect your content (videos, pdfs, quizzes etc.), hide it behind a paywall, deliver the content to the students and further engage with them, and you can do all this even if you have no coding skills.
“Teachable is to online courses what Shopify is to e-commerce.”
More than 20,000 course creators including some big names like Pat Flynn use Teachable to host and sell their courses.
WORDPRESS:
WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.
Product Features (Feature Comparisons)
Pricing (Plan Comparison)
No comparison between the two platforms can be complete unless we take a look at the cost associated with using these platforms.
In order to sell courses on WordPress, you would incur different costs:
- 1. Domain Name + Hosting – $50 per year (Siteground)
- 2. Video Hosting – $60 per year (Vimeo Plus)
- 3. LMS Plugin + Ecommerce + Membership Plugin – $499 per year (This is the price of LifterLMS, the plugin that I recommend for selling courses on WordPress. The cost if you use other plugins will be generally higher than this)
- 4. Theme + Other Basic Plugins – $200 per year
You should expect to pay $500-$3500 as cost for setup and development to a developer (unless you do everything yourself) and then you can expect to pay a minimum of $700 per year (around $50 per month).
This is the cost that you will incur if you are just getting started. The actual cost of creating & running a course site on WordPress depends on what solutions you choose.
The biggest disadvantage here is that you have make most of this investment upfront rather paying it on a monthly basis.
With Teachable, you have a very simple pricing starting from $0 per month to $99 per month. There is a High Volume plan as well which costs $299 per month and is used generally by big clients.
Teachable has a free plan which is good enough for you if you are just getting started.
However if you are serious about selling online courses, you can get on to Teachable’s Basic Plan or above. The Basic Plan has a mixed pricing where you pay a monthly cost of $39 per month or $399 per year and also share 5% of your revenue.
Even though sharing revenue might not sound like a great idea, the model works really well for those getting started. Rather than making a significant investment upfront, you can pay as you grow.
And when you actually grow and make enough money, you can switch to the Professional Plan and you would no longer need to share the revenue.
Another thing that I like about Teachable’s pricing model is that the pricing is not based on number of courses, students or even video bandwidth. So, you get unlimited students, courses and video storage on every plan.
Learn more about what’s included in each of these plans here.
As far as the actual cost that you are going to incur is concerned, it’s very close for both WordPress and Teachable in the beginning.
The only difference is that Teachable has a more flexible pricing plan and the level of commitment in terms of cost is lower for Teachable when you are getting started.
Plus WordPress can become really costly to manage and run as you grow beyond a certain point.
As a result, Teachable suits the needs of both beginners as well as advanced users while WordPress pricing doesn’t suit course creators who are just getting started.
Data and Insights:
Support and Resources:
Testimonials:
User Feedbacks and Recommendations:
You should now have a fair idea of what are the pros & cons of both Teachable & WordPress when it comes to selling courses online.
Both Teachable and WordPress are used by all sorts of instructors for creating different types of courses.
However Teachable stands out as an online course platform because of its ease of use, ‘zero’ updates & maintenance, customer support and pricing structure.
You can be confident that Teachable is the right platform for you if you tick any of the boxes below:
- You have little or no coding skills
- You have no prior experience in selling any sort of digital products
- You have been selling on WordPress but are facing technical issues too often and are frustrated with the technology
- You don’t have an online course site yet and you don’t want to spend months before you can launch one
- You want to focus on your core job of creating & selling courses so that you can scale your course business
If you wish to explore Teachable and see whether it works for you or not, you can click on the button below and check out Teachable!
Note: The free trial applies to users who’re upgrading to a Paid Plan for the first time
WordPress can be used in almost every possible scenario. However, I recommend using it over Teachable if:
- You want to create a Learning Management System and not just sell online courses (does elective/required courses, SCORM etc. sound familiar?)
- You want to customize every inch of your site and you are fine with either paying a developer to do that for you or you have the right coding skills to do it yourself
- You already have a course site on WordPress and it’s working fine for you
- You are more than familiar with WordPress and you can cope without dedicated customer support
If you think that WordPress suits your requirements more, I recommend LifterLMSplugin for creating & selling courses as unlike most other LMS plugins on WordPress, it has integrated LMS, membership & e-commerce capabilites.
Final Verdict
Teachable and WordPress are both great platforms. However Teachable is overall a better platform when it comes to selling online courses, simply because of its ease of use, ‘zero’ updates & maintenance and 24×7 support.
WordPress scores over Teachable when it comes to advanced LMS capabilities like SCORM compliance or when it comes to flexibility & customization.
If you don’t have any coding skills or you are just getting started, Teachable is the right choice for you.
However if you are comfortable with WordPress and require heavy customization on your site, go with WordPress.
And you can always give Teachable a try and within hours you can tell whether this platform is for you or not. You can get started on Teachable for free.
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]