Teachable vs WordPress: Which Is Best for Course Creators?

If you want to build any kind of website, WordPress is the first platform that comes to mind. It was also the preferred option for creating online courses for a long time.

However, many specialized online course builders have emerged in the past decade, offering a simpler and more streamlined way to create and sell courses. And Teachable has been at the forefront of this trend.

So, which is a better option for course creators?

In this Teachable vs WordPress comparison guide, we’ll dive deep into the features and capabilities of both platforms to help you make an informed decision.

Let’s get started!

What Are Teachable and WordPress?

Despite both platforms being used to create online courses, WordPress and Teachable are fundamentally different.

Teachable is a cloud-based platform built from scratch to help people create and sell online courses. It integrates all the essential features needed to create a course structure, host your content, deliver your content to students, build a website, and collect payments.

Moreover, it’s a plug-and-play solution, meaning you just need to create an account, add your content, and start selling. You don’t have to worry about technicalities like hosting, updates, or security.

WordPress, on the other hand, is a generic content management system (CMS) that’s used to build all types of websites, including eLearning websites.

You’ll need a WordPress LMS plugin to add course creation and management functionality to your site, and LearnDash is what we recommend. It’s also the most popular WordPress LMS plugin.

Because WordPress is a self-hosted solution, you’ll need to purchase a hosting plan, install WordPress on your server, set up your website, and then add the LMS plugin. Additionally, you’ll need to handle all the technical aspects of running a website, including security and updates.

Pros of Teachable vs WordPress

• It is super easy to use and requires no technical skills to set up and start selling courses.
• All core course creation and selling tools are integrated into a single platform, eliminating the need for multiple plugins.
• The end-user experience is intuitive and sleek out of the box, without the need for any design or customization work.
• The platform is extremely scalable, meaning you can have as many courses and students as you want without worrying about bandwidth or hosting limitations.
• Teachable offers dedicated customer support, including email and chat support, to help you with any technical issues.
• The pricing is flexible, and you can even start for free.

Pros of WordPress vs Teachable

• You can extend the functionality of your website with thousands of WordPress plugins, giving you unlimited flexibility in terms of features.
• You have complete control over your website’s design and customization options.
• You get best-in-class blogging capabilities and lead generation tools.
• It’s easier to migrate to a different hosting provider and LMS plugin if needed.

With this overview in mind, let’s explore the important differences between the two platforms in more detail.

Key Differences Between Teachable and WordPress

In this section, we’ll compare Teachable and WordPress on key aspects, such as features and functionality, ease of use, customization, scalability, and pricing.

Ease of Use and Setup

Teachable is much easier to use and set up compared to WordPress.

It provides you with the basic infrastructure needed to sell courses online. You just need to create an account to get started; there’s no installation or complex setup involved.

The process of creating a course is also straightforward. ​You can bulk upload your videos and reorganize them into sections by dragging and dropping them, and Teachable will make it available to students through the user-friendly course player.

Watch how Teachable’s course builder works

All the learning tools, such as quizzes, certificates, and live classes, are also easily accessible and can be set up with just a few clicks.

Moreover, Teachable creates a sales and a checkout page for your course. You just need to modify the content and design and integrate a payment gateway to start receiving payments.

So, you can quickly set up your courses, and the end product looks more professional without any technical knowledge or coding skills.

WordPress, on the other hand, requires more technical skills to set up and manage. To create a course on WordPress, you’ll need to:

• ​buy a web hosting account,
• install WordPress,
• find and install a theme,
• ​install essential plugins for site security and caching,
• buy and install an LMS plugin like LearnDash to add the course functionality,
• install a shopping cart/eCommerce plugin.

Even when it comes to creating a course in LearnDash, it’s more work compared to Teachable. Let me give you examples of some additional steps needed:

• Add your videos to a platform like Vimeo before using them in LearnDash
• Get the necessary add-ons for features like certificates or course grids
• Customize the layout and design of your course pages using a page builder plugin like Elementor
• Create a sales page from scratch and create the necessary connections

Moreover, you’ll need to manage the technical aspects of running a website, such as updating plugins and fixing any issues that may arise. This can be time-consuming and frustrating, especially for non-techy users.

As a result, WordPress has a higher learning curve and requires more effort to set up and manage compared to Teachable.

So, Teachable is a clear winner in this department, making it a more user-friendly platform for course creators of any technical level.

Features and Tools

Teachable has all the tools needed for course creation and selling built into the platform. It includes a course builder, content hosting, a website builder, and eCommerce tools.

When it comes to course creation and engagement, Teachable does an excellent job:

• User-friendly course builder
• Content hosting for videos, PDFs, and other media
• Quizzes, assignments, and certificates
• Live classes via Zoom
• Well-designed course player
• Free iOS mobile for students
• Native community builder
• Support for coaching and memberships

Now, LearnDash does a great job at course creation as well. It has a more advanced quizzing tool and supports features like grade books and gamification that Teachable lacks.

However, it misses out on some commonly used features like content hosting, mobile app, live classes, and community builder.

So, Teachable has more to offer for course creation and selling out of the box, making it the preferred choice for many course creators.

One area where WordPress has a clear edge is site building and blogging capabilities. With WordPress, you have limitless options for designing and customizing your site and blog.

While Teachable also includes a page builder, it’s not as flexible and is good for creating course sales pages, not a complete website.

In fact, many course creators use both platforms in tandem. They create their courses on Teachable and their main website/blog on WordPress with a link to their Teachable school.

Third-Party Integrations

Teachable is a closed system, so you have to rely on the features and tools provided by the platform.

It does have third-party integrations, so you can integrate with analytics tools and email marketing platforms, and any other tool that has a Zapier integration.

It does have a few custom integrations to extend the functionality of your Teachable website, such as Circle for communities, Wobo for interactive workbooks, and DropInBlog for blogging, but that’s about it.

On the other hand, with WordPress, you have access to thousands of plugins and integrations for almost any feature or functionality you can think of. This makes it a more flexible and extendible platform.

Let me explain this difference with some examples:

• Teachable’s page builder isn’t very flexible, but there’s no way to change it. However, with WordPress, you can use a page builder plugin like Elementor for more customization options.
• Both Teachable and WordPress don’t support multilingual websites by default, but you can use a plugin like Weglot to add language options to your WordPress site.
• LearnDash has built-in gamification features but also integrates with plugins like GamiPress and BadgeOS for more options. Teachable, however, doesn’t support gamification features natively or through third-party integrations.

In fact, extendibility is one of the prime reasons why people choose WordPress and LearnDash.

However, from our experience, Teachable offers enough features and flexibility to meet the requirements of the majority of course creators.

Platform Scalability

Scalability is an important factor in helping you determine the right solution for your business. You wouldn’t want to use a solution that in any way hinders the growth of your course business.

While it’d be incorrect to say WordPress isn’t scalable, there are two major challenges:

• First, you spend a lot of time managing your website and troubleshooting instead of creating and selling new courses.
• Second, as your business grows, you need to ensure you have the right server resources and solutions for smooth operations.

For example, as your site traffic increases, it is quite probable that your site speed and performance will be affected. You will need to add additional servers/RAM and take care of a lot of other technical aspects in order to suit your new scale.

However, with Teachable, website management and maintenance are minimal, so you can focus on what you should—creating and selling courses.

Moreover, it doesn’t really matter whether you have 100 or 10,000 students on your site or whether you have 10 or even 1,000 courses. You may need to upgrade your plan, but you don’t need to upgrade the server or switch hosts.

As a result, Teachable examples include businesses of all sizes—creators with a few thousand students as well as enterprises with hundreds of thousands of students (e.g., StackSkills) use Teachable to sell courses.

Customer Support

Teachable offers excellent customer support with its dedicated team of experts.

In case you encounter any issue on the platform, you simply reach out to the support team via email or live chat, and they are quick to respond and help you resolve your issue.

Besides that, Teachable has a comprehensive knowledge base covering all aspects of using the platform, including step-by-step tutorials.

WordPress, on the other hand, doesn’t offer dedicated customer support for its users.

You’ll depend on the support provided by the individual plugin developers, meaning you have to deal with multiple support teams for different issues.

Plus, plugin conflicts are very common, and troubleshooting them can be time-consuming and frustrating.

So, unless you’re a WordPress expert yourself, you’ll likely need to hire external support to manage your WordPress site.

Pricing Plans

No Teachable vs WordPress comparison can be complete unless we take a look at the cost associated with using these solutions.

To sell courses on WordPress, you’ll incur different costs:

• Web Hosting – $300 per year (Rocket.net)
• Video Hosting – $240 per year (Vimeo)
• LearnDash LMS Plugin – $199 per year (LearnDash)
• Theme + Other Essential Plugins – $300 per year

So, you should expect to pay $1,000+ per year to run a course website.

There will be extra costs for LMS add-ons and third-party plugins. For instance, adding a community to your website requires the BuddyBoss plugin, costing $299/year.

And remember that this is the cost that you’ll incur if you’re just getting started. Web hosting and video storage costs can be much higher for bigger learning platforms.

Also, you need to make most of this investment upfront rather than paying on a monthly basis.

Teachable, on the other hand, has a simple pricing structure. You pay a monthly fee according to the plan you select:

• The free plan lets you create one course and have up to 10 students, making it good only for testing the platform.
• The Basic plan, which costs $59 per month + a 5% transaction fee, allows you to create up to five courses and unlimited students.
• The Pro plan ($159/month) lets you create up to 50 courses, and there’s no transaction fee.

All paid plans include the essential features like course builder, unlimited video hosting, website builder, and payment processing.

Though the Basic and Pro plans differ in features as well, you can start with Basic and upgrade to Pro as your business grows. Read our Teachable pricing guide to learn more about the plans and features.

While Teachable isn’t the most affordable option, it offers more flexible pricing that requires less upfront investment compared to WordPress.

Moreover, if Teachable doesn’t meet your requirements because of pricing or features, you can explore other course hosting platforms. We’ve listed the best alternatives to Teachable that may suit your budget and needs.

When Should You Use Teachable vs WordPress?

You now have a fair idea of the differences between Teachable and WordPress for creating and selling online courses.

But when should you use Teachable over WordPress and vice versa?

We recommend Teachable in the following scenarios:

• You have little to no technical knowledge and need a platform that is easy to use, with minimal setup and maintenance required.
• You prefer a more streamlined platform where you can focus on creating and selling your courses rather than managing the technical aspects of your website.
• You’re starting from scratch and want to get your course website up and running quickly.
• You sell on WordPress but frequently face technical issues and are frustrated with the technology.
• You don’t want to invest a significant amount upfront and prefer a pay-as-you-go model.

If you want to explore Teachable further, you can read our Teachable review or create a free account to test out the platform.

On the other hand, WordPress will be a better option in the following situations:

• You want to build a comprehensive educational platform with custom features and functionality.
• You want to customize every inch of your website, and you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with coding and design work.
• You have experience building WordPress websites or have access to a developer.

If you think WordPress is the right option for you, we recommend using the LearnDash plugin. Read our LearnDash review, or try out the plugin for yourself.

Teachable vs WordPress: Final Thoughts

Teachable and WordPress are both great platforms. However, Teachable is a more streamlined option for creating and selling online courses.

It requires minimal setup and maintenance, making it ideal for anyone who wants to focus on course creation and selling rather than technical aspects.

At the same time, it offers an awesome feature set that will meet the needs of most course creators.

You can try Teachable and quickly see if it suits you. You can try it for free.

We recommend going with WordPress only if you have specific requirements that can be met by Teachable or another hosted course platform. In this case, our recommendation would be to use the LearnDash plugin.

We hope we could help you answer the WordPress vs Teachable question. If you have any further questions, please leave us a comment below.

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