With so many online course platforms on the market, it can be challenging to decipher which is best for your needs. So, to shed some light, we’re comparing two players in the e-learning industry: LearnWorlds vs Teachable.
Hopefully, by the end of this review, you’ll be better positioned to decide which (if either) is the better fit for your venture.
Let’s start by exploring their key similarities and differences, then jump into comparing the features and prices.
Teachable vs LearnWorlds: Their Main Similarities
- Both Teachable and LearnWorlds enable you to offer students graded quizzing and course completion certificates.
- When you sign up for Teachable and LearnWorlds’ cheapest packages, you’re charged a transaction fee whenever you make a sale. However, if you upgrade to one of their higher-priced plans, these fees are waived.
- Both LearnWorlds and Teachable come with similar marketing features, including coupons, free courses, affiliate marketing, and various payment options.
- Both LearnWorlds and Teachable make it easy to build an online school and connect a custom domain.
- Both e-learning platforms offer free SSL certificates with all packages.
- Both offer one-on-one coaching.
Teachable vs LearnWorlds: Their Main Differences
- LearnWorlds allows you to create student communities, whereas Teachable doesn’t offer similar functionality.
- LearnWorlds’ course builder places a heavier focus on video content.
- LearnWorlds provides a broader range of quiz and assessment types. Whereas, Teachable limits you to multiple-choice questions.
- You have to opt for LearnWorlds’ most expensive plan to launch a white-labeled website ($249 a month). In contrast, with Teachable, you’ll unlock this with its mid-tier package ($119 a month).
- LearnWorlds offers users 24/7 support via email. Alternatively, you can telephone LearnWorlds Monday to Friday from 8:00 to 17:00 EST (UK and US numbers available) or use their live chat service. However, Teachable only provides support via email and live chat during business hours (8:00 to 20:00 EST), and live chat is only available on the Pro plan ($119 per month).
- Only LearnWorlds allows you to offer group coaching as a product. Teachable just supports 1:1 coaching.
- Teachable offers a free plan, whereas LearnWorlds doesn’t — however, it has a 30-day free trial.
LearnWorlds vs Teachable: Their Core Features Compared
Now, let’s see how the key features (course building, quizzing and testing, certificates, community building, marketing, and payment options) of these two e-learning platforms stack up to each other.
Course Building
The course builder is the meat of any e-learning platform. The building blocks your editor provides have a direct bearing on the kind of learning experience you create.
That said, let’s see how LearnWorlds and Teachable compare when it comes to course building features.
Teachable
Teachable’s web page builder is incredibly intuitive. You just drag the elements you want to use and drop them wherever you want on the page. And, rest assured, your finished work will be completely responsive. It doesn’t matter what device students use to access your content; they’re sure to have a great experience!
Alternatively, you can work with a website you already have up and running by linking it with Teachable — so whether you start from scratch or pick up on a work in progress, the choice is entirely yours.
When it comes to course creation, you can use video, text, image, audio, and PDF files. Once you’re finished creating your course materials, it’s easy to import them to Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive.
If you want to dig deeper into your online store’s customization, use Teachable’s power editor. This provides direct access to Teachable’s code, so if you have the know-how, you can make advanced edits to bring your exact vision to life.
Another nifty feature is that the text on your Teachable site automatically translates to reflect your student’s native language.
On top of that, there are plenty of course compliance tools available. This means you can require students to pass a quiz to a certain standard or complete specific lessons or modules before proceeding with the course. You can even limit the number of quiz retake attempts students can make and send an alert when students use up all their attempts.
Teachable also offers an easy-to-navigate SEO setup. This comes in handy for ensuring your online school is search engine friendly.
The sheer number of helpful drag-and-drop building blocks Teachable provides for course creation is commendable. These include:
- Banner blocks
- Text blocks
- Image with text blocks
- Curriculum blocks
- Featured courses blocks
All these blocks are self-contained, so the customizations you make to one won’t affect the others, making it incredibly easy to use and navigate.
LearnWorlds
When it comes to course creation, LearnWorlds’ focus is video content.
Within a matter of clicks, you can automatically extract an interactive transcript of your video. This comes in handy for making your video content more accessible and easier to navigate. Plus, you can add all sorts of things to your videos to make them more engaging, including titles, image overlays, links, interactions, and questions.
You can even choose and design the learning pathways students take. For instance, you can drip-feed content to them. Or, create pre-set performance thresholds to ensure students go through your course content sequentially. Alternatively, you can empower students to consume your course at whatever pace they wish, and in whichever order.
I also love that LearnWorlds’ course player enables students to highlight course content and add notes as they go through the lessons and modules. This works wonders for creating a truly interactive and engaging student experience.
Course Building – Winner: Teachable
If you’re really keen on video content, LearnWorlds is the best choice for you. However, Teachable wins out in the end as the better all-around course builder with a more significant number of building blocks at your disposal.
Coaching
In addition to course building, both Teachable and LearnWorlds let you add coaching functionality to your website.
Teachable
On all of its paid plans, Teachable allows you to offer 1:1 teaching to customers as a new product, using the existing coaching scheduling and video conference tools that integrate with Teachable.
You can add intake forms to your landing page to obtain crucial information for your appointments upfront — for example, details about your customers’ backgrounds and what they hope to gain from a coaching session.
You can also bundle coaching and courses together for a more attractive offering. For instance, more invested customers might purchase a course and a follow-up coaching session at the same time.
LearnWorlds
In 2022, LearnWorlds also introduced one-on-one coaching and group live session features.
This enables you to offer another teaching style to monetize your audience. This goes hand-in-hand with LearnWorlds’ Calendly integration to schedule your live sessions.
The Winner: Teachable
Teachable marginally takes the win. It’s clear that the platform considered the needs of coaches more fully. For example, intake forms help you prepare for your appointments, and the fact you can bundle coaching with courses adds more versatility.
In contrast, LearnWorlds’ coaching features feel more like a convenient add-on, though if you’re interested in coaching whole groups at a time, this is a viable go-to.
Quizzing and Testing
Quizzes are an effective and interactive way of engaging students with your course material. It also gives you and your students a chance to evaluate their progress.
So, without further ado, here are the quizzing and testing options LearnWorlds and Teachable both have to offer.
Teachable
You can set graded quizzes, which works wonders for monitoring your student’s progress. While this is a neat feature, it’s somewhat limited.
Teachable quizzes are restricted to only multiple-choice questions and true/false responses. If you’re hoping to set students’ open assignments, this isn’t an option.
However, you can use these quizzes as a compliance measure — something students have to complete and pass before proceeding further along your course.
LearnWorlds
In contrast, LearnWorlds’ testing engine is nothing short of sophisticated. You can create pretty much any quiz you want: graded, ungraded, open/closed questions — you name it, you can do it with LearnWorlds.
With LearnWorlds’ Pro plan (and higher), you can create and use a question bank. This is where you make a giant pool of questions that you can call upon to set up your quizzes. Needless to say, if you’re looking to create randomized tests, this is the easiest way to do so.
Quizzing and Testing – Winner: LearnWorlds
It’s plain to see that LearnWorlds offers more where quizzing and testing are concerned. Its range of quizzing options is second to none.
However, if quizzes and tests don’t form a considerable part of your course, Teachable’s offering may be substantial enough.
Certificates
Nothing is as satisfying as hitting a milestone, and completing an online course is no exception. This is why offering students digital certificates to reward their hard work is a fabulous way of rounding off your online course creation.
Not only does this work wonders for cultivating a sense of achievement, but it also exudes professionalism, which helps to establish you as an industry authority.
Teachable
Teachable makes it easy to design and issue course completion certificates. There are three templates to choose from — all of which lay an excellent foundation for a professional-looking certificate.
Just add your own logo, text, and signature, and voilà, you’re good to go. Alternatively, you can create your own designs from scratch.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds, too, enables you to reward students with course completion certificates. You can create personalized certificates using PDF templates and an online PDF editor to add the user’s name and course.
Since you’re creating your own PDF docs, the design is entirely up to you. Once complete, just upload it to the LearnWorlds platform, and you’re good to go!
Unlike Teachable, LearnWorlds doesn’t officially issue course completion templates for you to edit. Still, on their blog, you’ll find several course certificate templates created with Canva, so this is certainly an option available to you.
Then, all that’s left is to link up a ‘completion action’ with the certificate to issue them at the right time. You can award certificates for finishing part of a course, as well as for full course completion. For example, once a student passes a quiz, this action could trigger the issuing of a certificate.
Lastly, it’s up to you whether students can share certificates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
Certificates – Winner: Teachable
Both Teachable and LearnWorlds make it easy to create course completion certificates. However, Teachable makes certificate creation slightly easier with its templates.
Community Building
Establishing a community surrounding your online course is as much a marketing feature as it is an excellent way of enhancing the student experience. When you enable students to unite over your course materials, you give them a safe space to ask questions, network, and make friendships.
And who knows? Once they form personal connections with your brand at the heart of those relationships, your students are far more likely to sign up in groups for your next courses. So, with all that said, how do Teachable and LearnWorlds compare?
Teachable
We can reach a quick conclusion here. Teachable doesn’t offer any community-building features — you can’t even create a discussion forum on your courses. To work around this, you could open a private Facebook group that’s only available to course members.
LearnWorlds
With its built-in social networking feature, LearnWorlds excels in this area. Here, everyone enrolled in your courses gets a public profile that represents them.
Your students can communicate and network with one another, making it easy to share their experiences, swap ideas and tips, discuss any issues, provide feedback, and communicate with the instructor.
Community Building – Winner: LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds wins this round. They provide an innovative way of cultivating a sense of community and engaging students with your course content. Unfortunately, this is an area in which Teachable severely lacks.
Marketing
Once you’ve created your course, you need to market it. You could have the best class in the world, but if no one knows about it, no one is going to buy it! This is where marketing features come in handy.
Teachable
Much of Teachable’s in-built marketing functionality hinges on its affiliate marketing platform. This enables brand advocates to advertise your offering on their website or social media platforms. Then, anytime someone purchases your online course using your affiliate’s designated link, they’re credited for the sale and earn a commission.
This works wonders for improving your profit margins and inspiring loyalty amidst your audience. You can specify which courses are available to affiliates to market and easily manage your ambassadors’ payments while controlling what percentage the affiliate will get.
Teachable also allows you to create and promote free courses. These are often just the ticket for encouraging potential students to engage with your content before committing their hard-earned cash.
You can also generate customer coupons to make your offer more appealing.
Lastly, you can build attractive, high-converting sales pages using Teachable’s page editor, which uses the same intuitive drag-and-drop function I’ve already mentioned.
Teachable also allows you to sell digital downloads as a project. Alternatively, you could offer free resources to prospective students as a lead magnet. Examples include pdfs, e-publications, spreadsheets, and more. The platform also allows you to set custom pricing tiers for your digital downloads, allowing you to flexibly bundle what’s included in each pricing tier.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds also offers an in-built affiliate marketing program functionality that you can activate through your academy dashboard. You can set the commission you want to offer your affiliates and the referral cookie expiration period. Plus, on the Learning Center plan, affiliates can even self-register. You can also track commissions and you’ll receive in-depth analytics on your affiliates’ success.
You can also design beautiful sales pages that include one-click funnels. It’s easy to create and publish opt-in forms where customers can sign up to learn more about what you’re offering.
On top of that, you can build customizable checkout experiences that instill confidence in your customers. At this point, you can upsell your products and services, enable customers to use their coupon codes, and offer shoppers course bundles and subscriptions.
LearnWorlds also allows you to sell digital products such as eBooks and PDFs through your online school and even comes with a built-in eBook builder.
Marketing – Winner: A Tie!
All in all, both LearnWorlds and Teachable’s marketing features are pretty basic. Neither offers much in terms of email marketing, but both provide coupon and landing page creation as well as simple affiliate marketing.
Payment Options
The payment options available to you have a massive bearing on your conversion rate. With that in mind, here are the payment options offered by LearnWorlds vs Teachable.
Teachable
Teachable provides a wide range of flexible payment structures you can offer students, including:
- Membership subscriptions
- Single, one-off payments
- Course and coaching bundles
- Payment plans
What’s more, Teachable accepts over 130 currencies via PayPal, Mobile Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
Teachable also features its own payment gateway called teachable:pay. Using this payment method makes you eligible for features such as automatic author and affiliate payouts, automated tax form collection, and more. It also handles the remittance of US sales tax and other digital content taxes, and you can opt for daily, weekly, or monthly payouts to your account.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds and Teachable are somewhat similar where payment options are concerned. LeanWorlds also enables you to offer students:
- Memberships
- Subscriptions
- Course bundles
- One-off payments
LearnWorlds accepts multiple currencies and five payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, Klarna, Apple and Google Pay, Shopify, and PagSeguro.
Payment Options – Winner: Teachable
Where payment options are concerned, LearnWorlds and Teachable aren’t too different — apart from one thing: Teachable offers its own payment gateway. As this unlocks a few additional benefits, we’ve crowned Teachable the winner here (just!).
LearnWorlds vs Teachable: Customer Support and Training
If something goes wrong, who can you turn to? This is where customer support and training are imperative. Let’s see what both LearnWorlds and Teachable offer concerning customer care.
Teachable
Teachable offers support during business hours via support tickets or email, (8 AM to 8 PM EST). Basic plan users and upwards can access live group coaching sessions. Here, you’re in contact with a customer success manager who will provide tailored advice on improving your courses and moving your business in the right direction.
Pro customers or higher also unlock live chat, which is available from 10 AM to 5 PM EST Monday to Friday.
Teachable gives all paying members (regardless of which paid-for plan they’re on) access to their exclusive community, which offers industry-relevant discussion, privacy, and a space to speak freely about the intricacies of running an online business. Members automatically grouped with other users at similar stages in their business careers. As your business grows, you level up within the community too.
You also get access to Teachable’s online ‘university’ called TeachableU. Here, you’ll find several training courses and self-help guides on how to make the most out of Teachable.
Their online knowledge base is brimming with tutorials, too.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds offers 24/7 support. On top of that, if you’ve opted for the Pro Trainer plan, you’ll also receive access to the LearnWords Academy and priority email support.
Alternatively, if you’ve subscribed to the Learning Center plan, your onboarding experience is amped up a notch with two hours of premium onboarding. Here, an expert will walk you through importing courses, branding tips, getting set up, customizing your online school design, and much more.
If you don’t have time or aren’t sure how to migrate your content over to LearnWorlds, the support team can also take care of that for you.
Finally, there’s an extensive online knowledge base and the LearnWorlds Academy, which features dozens of courses on how to create course content, boost sales, and get more leads!
Customer Support and Training – Winner: A Tie!
Both LearnWorlds and Teachable provide hands-on support teams, so should you ever get stuck, you’re never on your own. Plus, both platforms offer extensive online knowledge bases that should cover most of your questions.
Beyond this, the choice is made more difficult by both platforms having their advantages and downsides. For instance, Teachable offers live chat, whereas LearnWorlds doesn’t. On the flip side, LearnWorlds’ support is 24/7, whereas Teachable sticks to its office hours.
LearnWorlds vs Teachable: Pricing
No matter the platform you choose, ultimately, the goal is to profit with your online school. So, you’ll need to weigh up your costs and expenses.
It’s up to you to find the service that provides the best value for money — especially if you’re working on a strict budget. Here’s how LearnWorlds vs Teachable compare on pricing.
Teachable
All of Teachable’s pricing plans boast unlimited video uploads, students, and hosting. You also get access to integrated payment processing, student management features, lecture comments, basic quizzes, 0% fees when you ‘sell’ free courses, and VAT (value-added tax) for EU customers.
The Free Plan
Teachable offers a freemium package. This comes in handy for testing out Teachable’s course builder and familiarizing yourself with the software’s core features.
That said, the free plan comes with some pretty severe limitations. Most notably, you can only create a single course and one digital download, and you’re charged a whopping 10% and $1 on every sale you make. You can, however, sign up unlimited students and make use of the integrated website builder.
The Basic Plan
Teachable’s cheapest paid-for plan is its Basic package, which sets you back $39 a month (when billed annually). For which, you get:
- A reduced transaction fee of 5%
- Up to two admin-level users
- Up to five courses
- A custom domain
- Unlimited coaching and digital downloads
- Access to an integrated email marketing platform
- Access to Teachable’s third-party integrations
- Access to Teachable’s private community and live-group coaching for additional support and learning
- Coupon code creation and distribution
- You can drip course content
The Pro Plan
Teachable advertises the Pro plan as its most popular. However, there’s a substantial hike in price with this package. It will set you back $119 a month (based on annual billing). However, you will unlock loads more features.
As well as everything in the Basic program, you also get:
- 0% transaction fees (which is a huge bonus!)
- Five admin-level users
- Access to live chat support
- Unlimited courses
- Set graded quizzes
- Affiliate marketing
- Award students with course completion certificates
- Set course compliance rules
- Market with upsells
- Create an unbranded website
The Business Plan
Then, there’s Teachable’s most expensive and extensive package: the Business plan. This will cost you $499 a month (based on annual billing).
For this, you’ll get everything in the previous programs, plus:
- A custom number of admin-level users
- Custom implementation and migration services
- A dedicated customer success manager and priority support
- Import students manually and in bulk
- Assign your team custom user roles
- Access to advanced theme customization
- Advanced and custom reporting
LearnWorlds
Like Teachable, there are also three paid-for packages available, which we go into in more detail below.
The Starter Plan
This costs $24 a month, and like Teachable, it also comes with a transaction fee. But instead of 5%, you’re lumped with a $5 flat fee on every course you sell.
That said, you can create as many paid-for courses as you want (you can’t make free courses on the Starter plan). You can only make three kinds of web pages with its page builder:
- Homepages
- Course catalogs
- Login pages
Starter plan users get access to exam and quizzing functionality and the eBook builder.
On top of that, you can seamlessly integrate with several third-party apps, and you get a custom web domain and SSL certificate. You also have access to 24/5 email support.
The Pro Trainer Plan
LearnWorlds’ Pro Trainer package is the next step up and will cost you $79 a month. With this program, you get everything in the Starter plan, plus:
- Five admin- or instructor-level users
- Unlimited free and paid courses and landing pages
- The complete page builder
- Access to assessments and certificates, as well as live classes and webinars
- 0% transaction fees
- Offer customers installment plans, subscriptions, and memberships
- Create a fully customizable checkout page
- Customize your course player
- Premium integrations
The Learning Center Plan
LearnWorlds’ most expensive plan comes in at $249 a month. This entitles you to everything in the previous two programs, as well as:
- 20 admin- or instructor-level users
- Full white-labeling
- Upload students in bulk
- Publish interactive videos
- Access to more integrations
- More reporting options, including progress reports, user segments, and course insights reports
- 24/7 premium support
Pricing – Winner: A Tie!
Since Teachable has increased its prices in recent years, deciding who offers better value for money is no longer as straightforward.
Teachable offers an attractive free plan for complete beginners, but its more affordable plans limit your course creation immensely.
In contrast, LearnWorlds provides access to unlimited courses and webinars for less, but if it’s a fully white-labeled site you’re after, you’ll end up paying more.
On the other hand, Teachable unlocks white-labeling for cheaper but requires you to shell out a significant amount of money ($499 a month) to access features such as custom reporting, priority support, and advanced theme customization.
LearnWorlds vs Teachable: Final Thoughts
Ultimately, both platforms provide similar services (easy-to-use course creation features, course completion certificates, SSL certificates included with all their packages, etc.) for similar prices and suffer from similar drawbacks (neither offers much in the way of email marketing or funnel building and both charge hefty transaction fees with their lower-tier plans).
So, all in all, you can’t go too wrong with either. But, there are a few factors to decide on before making your final decision.
LearnWorlds is more suited to those further along in their careers. They make it easy to migrate your content to their platform and continue growing your business.
Also, thanks to its community-building features, LearnWorlds really lends itself to building thriving and engaged audiences. Not to mention, the platform boasts powerful video content tools with flexible payment and quizzing options.
Teachable, on the other hand, is a little easier to use and better suited to beginners. Its quizzing functionality isn’t as advanced, but they offer a wide range of building blocks for your courses. However, to unlock full customization with this tool, be prepared to spend a considerable sum on your site every month. In light of that, you may find that migrating to another service such as LearnWorlds as you scale is advisable.
If you’re still not sure, why not give their free trials a shot? This is the best way to test out their interfaces and see which course editor works best for you.
Whichever you decide, we’d love to hear how you get on in the comments box below!
