Teachable vs Skillshare, which one is the best online course creation platform for your business? For those who are still considering between the two course builders, let the article below give you a helpful guide so you can easily decide for yourself.
No.1. An introduction to online course platforms.
An online course platform is a place where you are given all the tools and technical support to build your own digital classes with all kinds of content and look for your viewers. These kinds of classes are similar to traditional offline classes in the content of the lessons, the way instructors deliver their knowledge and experience but through video, image, text, audio, and PDF files.
Viewers/Learners of online courses cannot directly interact with their instructors but they are able to listen, watch, take notes, do the homework, take the tests and complete exams to test their knowledge.
To find the best online course creation platform, it’s not important to only choose the one that can help you to build your own courses easily or quickly sell your knowledge, it is more important to decide whether the platform is suitable for your kind of performance and original purposes or not.
No.2. What is Teachable and SkillShare?
Teachable and Skillshare, they are both online course builders providing creators with many unique features that are suitable for people with different types of contents. However, the more they are different from each other, the more we need to consider before deciding which one is our best platform.
Teachable - All-in-one courses platform for beginners.
What is Teachable?
Teachable is basically a web-based course builder on the internet, which allows bloggers, creatives and entrepreneurs to create coaching services, know-how into a thriving knowledge business and sell online courses to their followers. Teachable is the most well-known and trustable online course builder for beginners in the world at the moment. Up till now, there’re more than 35,000 courses of all sizes and subjects by over 22,000 instructors were created to instruct an amount of approximately 7 million students all over the world on Teachable.
Indeed, with its popular, simplicity and generic platform with a bit of advanced infrastructures, Teachable offers many of the essential tools and features that are very user friendly that you need to create and deliver an appealing, interesting and engaging online course as well as you could build the whole course without knowing any related technical skills. At the same time, it is super easy to use, not to mention its beginner-friendly pricing.
Teachable only provides you the infrastructure to build your course website and host your courses, everything else like promoting or doing the marketing for your course, you need to do it yourself.
Teachable’s customers are solopreneurs, creators, bloggers, youtubers and artists who are interested in starting a course business, adding a side-income or looking for ways to make money online.
On Teachable, creators can also create quizzes and checklists and award certificates, membership site and communicate with their followers
As one of its famous reviews is: “Even if you have coding knowledge or technical skill, you can still set up your course on Teachable and start selling it." The quote prefer to the various categories of features that allow creators to:
- Quickly and easily build a website just by a drag and drop.
- Design optimized landing pages that could boost conversions and sales.
- Insert Thinkific buy buttons and go checkout if you have a WordPress site and shortcode plugin.
Teachable outstanding features
- Unlimited students for each course.
- Course creation setting.
- Coaching program creation setting.
- Instant payouts (through Teachable Payments; PayPal users receive payments monthly).
- Custom domain support
- Two levels of admin user.
- Integrated email marketing.
- Third-party integrations.
- Training courses for creators are available.
- Ability to create coupon codes.
Who is it for?
Teachable is the best platform for course creators who wish to have full control of their courses design, branding, list building, customizing, selling, etc. And also, with those who want the ultimate marketing integrations. Teachable marketing and analytics are so powerful that you can also integrate with many ESPs.
Pros & Cons of Teachable
Pros:
- Complete control over your content.
- Publish or unpublish your courses at any time.
- Friendly to beginners and those who have no technical skill.
- Advanced coding options available.
- Free Plan for practicing and for those who have tight budgets.
- Offer one time payment, payment plan or subscription to course.
- Process refunds, create guarantees.
- Clean and clear design for both viewers and instructors.
- Accept payment from over 130 currencies.
- Friendly with iOS devices.
- Offers learning tools like graded quizzes, content dripping, certificates, etc.
- Offers many integrations with third-party apps.
- Have great reporting and analytics tools.
- Useful marketing tools with a well-optimized checkout process, 1-click upsells, etc.
- Supports Apple Pay and Google Pay on native gateways.
- Can have your own affiliate program.
- No commission on course sales.
- Excellent customer support.
Cons:
- Limited site building capability.
- Limited to the offerings of the site templates.
- Need additional third-party software to send drip email.
- Any added upgrade takes extra cost.
- Doesn’t support advanced quiz or assignment features.
- Doesn’t have inbuilt support for a community forum.
- No corporate sales option.
- No course accreditation.
- Limited pricing and payment options for recurring subscriptions.
- Has direct integration with few third-party marketing tools.
- Sometimes the text editor can be buggy, requiring you to refresh the page.
- There is a 30 day delay on payout on the Basic plan. (You can upgrade to decrease that time.)
- Open and close courses can be complicated.
SkillShare - an All-about-video course
What is SkillShare?
Skillshare is technically an online course marketplace, not a self-hosting platform like Teachable. This means that when you sign-up to Skillshare, you already have your audiences without any promotion activity needed. Moreover, your courses are searchable via the platform through their directory of courses. Besides, you can even get your course trending on Skillshare if you know how to promote your courses well.
The viewers just need to pay monthly for a reasonable price of $19 and they can have access to unlimited premium class on the platform. Which means that you will have no management on your course pricing, in other words, you cannot price your course as you want on Skillshare.
About payment methods, you don’t need to release your videos/classes continuously to make money, you already have audiences of your courses, you’re getting paid even when you don't create any course in a period of time. However, because you don't have any control over your course pricing at all, your money paid gets unchanged, and even less per hour of hard work that you put into creating your courses if you don’t make more and more videos/classes continuously in a period of time.
Skillshare outstanding features
- Visual course builder with drag-and-drop option setting.
- Payment making through PayPal is available.
- Inclusion in the Skillshare marketplace.
Who is it for?
Skillshare is suitable for course creators who wish to focus on video production and are interested in teaching various categories of tips and tricks. Also those who want to build a passive income stream, but still keep a full-time job.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Provides a built-in marketplace for online courses with over a million ready-built viewers.
- Instructors can get personalized support from community managers.
- Short, self-paced classes promote student retention and completion.
- Nice affiliate program.
- Their interface makes it easy to upload and publish new classes.
- Suitable for courses/videos with quick/short tips.
- You don’t need to release your videos/classes continuously to make money, you already have audiences of your courses, you’re getting paid even when you don't create any course in a period of time.
Cons:
- Creators have no control over their own courses.
- Not the best for in-depth courses.
- Instructors don’t earn money until 25 students have enrolled in their class.
- You can’t unpublish a class once you publish it.
- Don’t support quizzes, tests, questions of feedback back from viewers.
- Not connected to email marketing.
- To make a good & consistent income, you must post new courses often.
- Skillshare decides how much you are paid per minute and it changes every month.
No.3. The similarities between Teachable and SkillShare
- Unlimited course creation.
- Unlimited students.
- Online course builder with drag-and-drop functionality.
No.4. What do viewers/learners prefer about Teachable and SkillShare?
Easy and simple use/set up
Teachable is famous for the user-friendly website builder and full optimized set-up tools for creating as well as selling courses. If you think that creating courses on the internet is too complicated and time-consuming, then Teachable will prove that you are wrong. Because with Teachable, “All you need is an idea… and one simple tool.”
And with those who prefer to instruct or communicate with the learners just by conveying all of their knowledge through words and gestures in a video, Skillshare is the best choice. Since Skillshare only supports contents with video format and no tests, quizzes, questions or feedbacks, etc. This type of content can somehow be too simple and don’t let creators interact with their viewers as much as other platforms, but it absolutely has strength. With video format contents, all you need to do is to focus on your video production including structured content, your performance and the video effects. That way, your viewers also only need to focus on the video itself. This type of content is suitable for short/quick tips and I am sure that everyone loves that kind of quick-to-learn information.
Reasonable course fee
Teachable has the Basic Plan that offers you to have unlimited students per course along with basic course creation tools with just 29$/month when you pay for the whole year. And with the Pro Plan, which is the most popular and most prefered plan of the platform, it only costs you 99$/month with free transaction fee and all the extra features. Also, Teachable offers you 30 days refund guarantees for trial purposes.
Skillshare on the other hand, don’t have a Free Plan for beginners. However, it has a reasonable monthly fee at 15$/month for you to begin with and you can cancel the payment anytime you want in the trial period of one month without any extra fee.
No.5. Teachable vs SkillShare - Self-hosting vs Marketplace
To figure out which one between Teachable and SkillShare is the best online course platform, let’s get started by looking at some of the major things that you should consider when looking at a course builder, which are:
Type of course (Self-hosting vs Marketplace)
Your Teachable platform is a self-hosting platform, your own website where you can design and build everything for your online courses such as interface, all types of content, your forums, your payment page, your feedback, etc. And because it is your own place, you have to manage everything by yourself including marketing strategy, promotion and advertisement in order to attract your viewers.
Skillshare is different from Teachable, it’s a marketplace that already has its own available viewers. In comparison, you can see your Teachable as a house in the suburb which you have to take care of by yourself, and Skillshare is like a planned big city which has lots of buildings that are innovated and upgraded often. With the Skillshare platform, you don’t need to do marketing to attract viewers, but you also have no control of your courses.
Use and Set-up
Teachable enables you to add video, text, image, audio, and PDF files from cloud storage services, including Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox with drag-and-drop option and a highly engaging and functional website. Skillshare only supports content with video format and creators cannot give their learners any quizzes, tests and questionnaires related to the lesson as well.
Skillshare gives you access to a network of more than 5 million eager learners; with Teachable, you must rely entirely on your audience and your own marketing skills.
As mentioned above, as soon as setted up, creators with Teachable platform have to find the customers by themselves since your course is only a self-hosting website, which can be considered as an inconvenience in creating and selling a business. However, the advantage of a self-hosting website is you have full control of your own course. On the other hand, although Skillshare creators already have a stable number of viewers right after they sign up into the platform, they have no control over their courses at all. The two platforms have pros and cons, creators need to consider which one will suit best for their purpose and decide for themselves.
Features and functionality
Although Teachable is built with lots of amazing design and optimized tools that can help you easily build their own courses, you still need to learn and get to know lots of things before you could build your perfect dream courses. With Skillshare, creators don’t have many content format to go with, all of the course need to be upload under video format, which also an advantage of Skillshare when you sign up to the platform because all you need to focus on is the video production, not questionnaires, tests, quizzes, or anything else.
Pricing
Although Teachable do have a Free Plan for beginners, the higher price plans have even many more incredible benefits to go with. The Basic Plan costs you only 29$/month, the Pro Plan costs 99$ and the highest Plan which is the Business is 249$.
Besides, there’s a huge difference in the monthly price between the Monthly Plan and the Annual Plan. Instead of a Monthly Plan, if you choose to pay annually, you can save 10$ for the Basic Plan, 20$ for the Pro Plan and up to 50$ for the Business Plan with all of their benefits.
While the Free Plan limits the number of students in each course to 10, the Basic Plan offers you to have unlimited students per course along with basic course creation tools. You might also need to consider the Pro Plan, the most popular plan on the platform with free transaction fee and have extra features. The last plan is the Business Plan that is great for school, training organization and business creators with an online course marketplace.
SkillShare
SkillShare offers you 3 pricing plans, however, to create a course, you have to upgrade to the Premium Plan which costs you $15/month. The Premium Plan provides you the ability to create, publish and promote your courses and give you a portion of SkillShare’s monthly profits. The other plan is Team Plan which is priced on each student and starts at $99/student.
Sales pages
The Sales Page in Teachable can be easily designed and customized using custom HTML codes with a ‘Drag and Drop’ feature. To beginners, Teachable offers you a complete guide to create everything for your courses without any problems. Again, this makes it very convenient for people who don’t have experience with computers or web design.
Skillshare doesn’t provide you an option to get customized Sales pages. To promote your courses, you get a referral link that you can share with your potential students. When you upload your course, you’re allowed to use a title, subtitle, and class description to grab the attention of your students. That’s it. If you can use that and bring in a ton of students, you are ahead of the game.
Support and Security
The support teams of both Teachable and Skillshare are relatively good and will always host and back-up your materials so you don’t have to worry about losing anything. You also own your student course data and export your student data, contact list and revenue information any time.
No.6. Which is your best online course platform?
Teachable is the best online course creation platform for those who want to have their own self-hosting website and to have full control over their courses. Also, since Teachable supports content with many formats such as texts, videos, forums, quizzes, questionnaires and so on, this platform is suitable for long in-depth courses. However, you need to find the viewers yourself.
With Skillshare, this is the best course builder platform for those who wish to only focus on how to deliver their lessons using words and gestures and body language through video format content. But you should remember that you will have no control over the price of your courses on Skillshare. Besides, since everything on this platform is delivered through videos, viewers have interest to learn short, quick tips will love these types of courses.
Conclusion
Above are in-depth information about the two platforms with different types of course-management.
Whether marketplace or self-hosting online course creation platform, each has their own advantages and disadvantages, which creators must choose their purpose of building a course platform prior to deciding which one is the most suitable platform that they should have.
There are definitely advantages of publishing to course marketplaces like Skillshare. It’s possible to get extra exposure to an audience of students that you may not have reached otherwise.
On the other hand, some people love the money-making potential and user-friendly interface of Teachable. And the biggest issue with using these platforms is that you are entirely responsible for marketing your classes and attracting students. However, I think all these problems are all not big deals when you can have full control over the management and the price of your courses. It is fine when you don't have a sufficient amount of viewers at the beginning, it is still fine if you have to build trust in your audience from the start. Although your income may be low when you first open your course, as time goes by, if you put all of your effort and passion into it, learners will come to you with trust, and you won’t need to share your revenue with anyone.