Hesitating between Skool and Teachable?
This guide has you covered.
I’ve been creating and selling online courses since 2014, and this guide will show you the best option to get started.
I’ve been considering Skool for many months after being a Teachable user for 2+ years…
So let’s see which platform is the best.
Skool vs. Teachable: 2 different platforms
If you want to make the right decision on which platform to pick, it’s important to compare apples to apples.
Because Skool and Teachable are two different products…
Skool is mainly a community platform like Circle.
It regroups:
- Courses
- Community (has gamification to encourage interactions)
- Event scheduling in one platform
Below, the skool presentation video:
Teachable has been primarily built as a course hosting platform, even though they have been adding new features like communities and coaching recently.
So the choice will depend on what your primary focus is.
If your primary want a community, then Skool would be the best option because it has been built up with the objective in mind.
If you’re more of a course creator and really care about options and different ways to sell your online courses, then Teachable is probably the better solution for you.
Now, let’s get more into details…
📦 Number of courses you can sell
Skool allows you to ‘host’ an unlimited number of courses on their $99/month plan.
Whereas Teachable limits the products to 50 on their $119/month plan.
So if you’re looking for unlimited courses, Skool is the way to go.
It’s not only cheaper but allows you to host an unlimited number of products.
🔐 Protecting & Hosting your course videos
Uploading and hosting videos is an essential part of your course creation workflow.
On Teachable, you can bulk upload videos and never have to worry about hosting videos. It’s included in the price you pay.
What I love about Teachable is that you can directly drag and drop your course lessons and rearrange them. No need to copy and paste code.
There’s no native video hosting on Skool:
Source: Native video hosting on Skool? · Skool Community
They suggest using a third-party service like bunny.cdn.
While it’s a cost-effective service, it adds another layer of complexity and extra step in your workflow because you need to upload your video on bunny first, then copy the code and paste it into Skool.
When you’re creating online courses, you’d likely have a lot of different videos, which makes a lot of different copy and paste tasks.
The other drawback of Skool not having their own native hosting is that you can’t directly measure the student’s progress. After completing a lesson, the user has to manually mark the lesson as done.
Else, it will not show nor record the progress.
Whereas if you look at Teachable, you exactly know how many times a lesson has been played, and it basically gives you way more stats because it’s a player that works with the Teachable platform:
If you want to track user progress, then Teachable will give you way more in-depth statistics.
When it comes to video hosting, Teachable is a one-stop shop.
🇪🇺 🇬🇧 Taxes and EU/UK VAT
Both platforms allow you to manage and collect VAT.
The only drawback if you’re selling to a broader audience is that you can’t set a default currency to your Skool account.
You can manage over 120 currencies in Teachable.
So if you have an audience that’s sensitive to local currency billing, Teachable is the better option here.
Another drawback some EU based creators have noticed with Skool is that their invoices are not 100% EU compliant:
Else, both platforms are similar in handling VAT.
💳 Processing Payments With Skool & Teachable
In order to be able to sell your course, you need a sales page and a checkout page.
Teachable allows you to do everything on their platform. When it comes to Skool, you need to set up your sales page on your website.
Checkout pages
Sales pages (for your courses)
There’s no way to embed a Skool button on your website.
Skool doesn’t have as much versatility as Teachable when it comes to pricing.
With Teachable, you can either:
- Sell a monthly subscription (i.e: $99 per month until cancelled)
- Set up a payment plan (i.e: $99 for 3 months)
- Or charge a one-time payment (i.e: one-time payment of $99)
You can do the same with Skool.
But it will require you to set up a bunch of diffrent things:
you need to set up the type of payment in your shopping cart, and then make the right permissions with webhooks (like a logic for if the payment is cancelled, refunded, etc… then revoke access logic.)
Skool also recently launched Skool Payments.
It’s cheaper than Stripe – But you can only charge for a membership in exchange for access to your Skool community.
If you want to only sell your online course and keep the community as a nice add-on, then you’d need to either use workaround solutions like:
⌙ Stripe
⌙ Smartcart
⌙ or Thrive Cart
…and then use a Zapier webhook integration to pass on the data automatically to Skool.
All this adds other layers of complexity.
If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop, Teachable is the way to go.
Managing course enrollment
When someone purchases a product on Teachable, they get direct access to the course in their member’s portal – nothing else is required from your end.
In Skool, you need to first set up access levels like so:
Skool allows you to set custom access to each of your courses. You can decide who has access with a few choices:
- All members have access
- Only some members have access
- Members of a certain level have access (see section for points and levels)
Once you’ve set up your level of accesses, then you need to invite the user to that specific level.
In a nutshell, there are 4 ways to invite a user:
- Invite via email (manual)
- Invite members via a link (manual)
- Bulk invite members by uploading a .csv file (manual)
- Automate invites by sending a webhook (automated option)
If you don’t want to spend all day sending out manual invites, then you certainly want to go for the webhook solution.
But this will require a $20/month Zapier account…
If you look for simplicity in managing course enrollments, Teachable is the way to go.
Design and User Interfaces
I’ve been using Teachable for two years, and I still find the interface complicated.
There are too many nested options that are poorly organized.
The dashboard is slow to load, and looks like a dashboard of the 2010s.
I waste my time clicking around.
Skool, on the flip side, is more elegant, and way simpler to navigate.
Even though their lack of integrations and basic features I’ve been mentioning in this review make it a nightmare from another perspective when it comes to linking different elements of your business together like setting up webhooks, etc.
No winner on this.
Managing Affiliates
Affiliates are a great way to grow your income.
But managing affiliates is a kick in the butt.
Skool doesn’t allow you to manage affiliates yet.
Which means that you need to use your current shopping cart to track affiliate sales and payouts.
Teachable allows you to manage affiliates.
For that, you need to enable an option that is called Teachable back office and it will take an extra 2.8% on each transaction.
If you’re looking for an easy solution to manage affiliates, then Teachable is the better option.
👛 Pricing: Skool vs. Teachable: Which is cheaper?
Whether or not you should consider Skool or Teachable depends on what your primary goal is.
Skool is going to primarily act as a community whereas Teachable is a course hosting platform.
You can also use Skool as a course platform – as I mentioned previously.
Free plans
Skool doesn’t offer free plans.
The Teachable free tier allows you to publish one course (along with severe limitations, and giving up 10% of your revenue.)
It’s good for testing the waters.
If you want to host 5 courses or less
Teachable is the cheaper option because of their $39/mo plan (billed annually – or $59/mo if you chose to pay monthly).
If you plan to host more than 5 courses & have a community…
Skool is definitely cheaper than Teachable if you plan to host more than 5 courses and look for primarily building a community.
On Teachable, it would cost you at least $119/mo, whereas Skool would only charge $99.
You only would need to add a video hosting provider like bunny which comes at a few extra bucks per month.
No matter which course platform you decide to pick…
You want to make sure that you are building your course creation business on the strong foundations.
I’ve been creating and setting online courses since 2014…
So I might have a thing or two that I can share with you.
Click below to get my free email course: