Teachery is one of the most affordable, beginner-friendly online course platforms around—but is it the right online course platform for your business?
In this in-depth Teachery review, we’ll be helping you to answer that question.
We wanted to find out if Teachery could hold its own against the big players in the online course space, like Teachable and Kajabi. So we tried it out for ourselves and put together this comprehensive review to reveal everything we learned.
We’ll be walking you through all the main features you need to know about, highlighting what we think are Teachery’s biggest strengths (and its weaknesses), discussing pricing, and answering all your other burning questions.
Ultimately, we’ll reach a final verdict about whether or not Teachery’s worth the cost and let you know what type of businesses/users we think it’s most suitable for.
Ready? Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
What Is Teachery?
Teachery is an affordable online course platform built for creators. It was founded in 2014 by Jason Zook and Gerlando Piro, who wanted to make a simple and affordable platform that met the needs of creators like themselves.
In line with this goal, Teachery was developed with a focus on simplicity. It has a narrower feature set than many other online course platforms and doesn’t offer as many bells and whistles as high-end platforms like Thinkific and Teachable, but it does the basics really well and still gives you access to all the tools you need to create and sell online courses.
Teachery isn’t quite as popular as its competitors just yet in the US, but it has more search demand than Teachable globally. It’s a popular choice amongst beginner course creators who don’t require advanced features.
Who Should Use Teachery?
Teachery was made for creators by creators. You should definitely consider using it if you’re a:
- Creative looking to monetize your expertise
- Coach
- Private tutor
- Educator
- School
- Small business
- Entrepreneur
Or anyone else who’s looking for a simple, no-thrills online course platform that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
Getting Started With Teachery
Getting started with Teachery couldn’t be easier. They offer a generous 14-day free trial with no credit card required. All you have to do is head over to the website and click Start For Free to take it for a test drive.
Once you’ve signed up for the free trial, the onboarding process is refreshingly straightforward. Unlike other platforms, you don’t have to figure out how to navigate a complicated dashboard before you can start using it.
Instead, as soon as you sign up, you’re immediately greeted with a quick-start wizard that walks you through the steps needed to set up your first course:
You’ll be prompted to enter a name and description for the course, then choose three topics you want to cover and write a short description for each of them.
After that, you’ll be brought straight to the Teachery Course Editor, where you can see a live preview of the course you just created.
Obviously, you’ve only put together the bare bones of your course so far, so from here, you’ll need to customize it. We’ll talk more about the Course Editor and how to use it later.
For now, you can head back to the main dashboard from the left-hand sidebar. When you first access the dashboard, you’ll be greeted with another helpful tooltip that provides more information about what it is and how to use it.
These tooltips are a nice touch as they really help beginners to get the hang of the platform. There’s also a neat video walkthrough in their Getting Started guide if you need more guidance.
From your dashboard, you can see a list of your courses, manage your customers, and view analytics. You can also access your account information, manage affiliates, and access help docs.
It’s all very simple and easy to navigate as is, of course, intended. Teachery markets itself as ‘the simplest course platform’ and claims that their goal is to ‘keep it simple for you’—and that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Teachery Features
Once you’re in the dashboard, you’ll be able to access all of Teachery’s course creation features. Let’s take a look at each of them.
Course Editor
The heart of Teachery is its Course Editor. This is where you build out your course content and pages. To access it, just click on Create new course from your dashboard.
First, you’ll need to name your course and choose a template. You only have two options here: the Minimal template (simple and clean) and the Sidebar template (more modern and navigable with a sidebar).
Two templates isn’t a lot compared to other platforms—Kajabi, for example, has dozens of different course blueprints and themes to choose from—but there’s something to be said for keeping things simple.
Once you’re in the Editor, you can add lessons and sub-lessons to split your course up into multiple modules. Each lesson and sub-lesson has its own page, which you can access from the sidebar and customize in the main preview window.
You can move around the different elements on the page and add and rearrange content blocks to flesh out your online courses. Any changes you make are saved in real-time, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally losing your progress.
You can make as many courses, lessons, and sub-lessons as you like—Teachery doesn’t cap anything, which is one of the best things about this platform.
Embed Various Content Types
Teachery supports many different types of content. You can add videos, images, audio files, text, and presentations to your courses as content blocks. However, you can’t host them in Teachery, which is a shame.
Instead, you have to host them on a third-party service like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, or Soundcloud and embed them by pasting in a code snippet.
This isn’t a big deal, but it does come across as a little cheap. Teachery is upfront about the fact that they chose not to provide hosting to cut costs so that they could offer more affordable pricing to users.
Anyway, to embed your content, just open up the lesson page in the Course Editor and click Add Course Content Block, then paste in the embed code in the box at the top.
Under the Text Content heading, you can add written content in any language.
Drip Content
Under the Course Pages tab, you can set up your drip schedule. This allows you to control when your students get access to the different lessons in your course.
For example, you might opt to unlock all lessons for the student as soon as they make a purchase, so they can access everything from the get-go.
Alternatively, you might choose to lock later lessons until the user hits the completed button on the previous lesson. This will ensure they progress through your lessons in the intended order and can’t skip ahead.
You might even choose to set when each lesson will be unlocked manually based on your course start date. For example, you might choose to unlock the second lesson 7 days after purchase, the third lesson 14 days after purchase, etc.
You can also set a course expiration date in order to create a sense of urgency and incentivize your students to complete the material within a given timeframe.
Style Editor
Once you’ve put together your course content and structure in the Editor, you can tweak the design by clicking Style Your Course from the left sidebar.
You can get pretty granular here and change things like colors, margins, backgrounds, etc. You can tweak all the different elements on each page independently, including your course overview and lesson pages, as well as accompanying payment pages and login pages.
Overall, I liked how many customization options Teachery offers in terms of the design. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have as much control as you would if you used a dedicated page builder, but compared to other online course solutions, it’s not bad!
Customizable Landing Pages
In addition to your course and lesson pages, Teachery also enables you to build customized login pages, payment pages, and landing pages. You can access all three of these through the sidebar.
There are several default sub-pages within each page category, each of which has a different base template/structure.
For example, within the Login Pages tab, you’ll find a password reset page, course login page, billing page, etc. You can customize each of these pages individually. Aside from these default pages, you can also create your own new payment pages and landing pages.
The default landing page template has all the sections you need to capture leads and convert visitors to customers. There’s a testimonial section, FAQ section, pricing comparison table, and more. You can remove or add sections as you see fit and customize them by changing the content and images. And again, you can tweak the design of all your pages in the style editor.
Email Marketing
From the landing page interface, you can connect Teachery to ConvertKit or Mailchimp in order to automatically add the email addresses of customers that opt-in to your mailing list.
Alternatively, you can navigate to the Email Leads tab from the sidebar to download your email leads as a CSV file and upload them to your email marketing solution manually.
It’d be great if you could send out broadcasts to your leads and create email sequences from within Teachery, but sadly, you can’t.
Teachery doesn’t provide native email marketing features like this, so you’ll need to rely on third-party integrations with either Mailchimp, Convertkit, or other email service providers via Zapier.
However, if you don’t need to run real email marketing campaigns and just send out basic welcome emails to students who sign up, Teachery takes care of that for you.
You can also use Teachery to send congratulatory emails to students who complete your course automatically. Both emails are fully customizable.
Payment Options
From the Payment Pages tab, you can connect your Stripe account and set your course price. Unfortunately, Teachery doesn’t support PayPal payments yet, so Stripe is mandatory.
Teachery is pretty flexible when it comes to payment plans, though. You can choose between one-time payments, recurring membership payments, etc.
You can also improve your conversion rates and revenue by adding upsells and promo codes to your payment pages, which we’ll take a look at next.
Upsells and Promos
Under the Upsell tab, you can set up upsells to help you squeeze out a few more sales. Upsells prompt your customers to bundle up their purchase by adding additional course content onto their cart during the checkout process.
Once you’ve added an upsell, you can go back to the payment page in the editor in order to place it where you want it.
Generating promo codes couldn’t be easier. Just go to Payment Pages > Promo Codes > New Promo Code.
You’ll need to choose what kind of discount you want to offer (you can use a percentage-based discount or reduce the price by a set amount), input the code you want to use, set an expiration date and max redemption cap, and you’re done!
You can extend or expire the promotion at any time from the same tab.
Affiliate System
Another thing we like about Teachery is its built-in affiliate management system. You can set up an affiliate program in minutes from your dashboard.
All you have to do is navigate to the Affiliates tab, input the PayPal email address of the affiliate you want to add, choose their commission rate, and select the course they’re going to promote.
Once you’ve added an affiliate, they’ll receive an email with their unique referral links. Course affiliates get paid 30-days after each successful purchase via PayPal. You can keep track of their earnings from the Affiliates page.
Customer Tracking and Analytics
From the Customers tab, you can access a complete list of your existing customers and view their course activity.
You can click on any individual customer to take action on their account. For example, you can refund their payments, resend welcome emails, revoke course access, or unlock lessons manually.
You’ll also be able to see details like the lifetime value of each customer and their purchase information, but that’s pretty much it. Teachery is very limited in the analytics department and doesn’t give you access to advanced reporting features like some competitor platforms.
If you want to export your customer data, you can do so by clicking Download Customer List (CSV).
Teachery Integrations
Integrations are another area that Teachery falls down in. The platform only integrates natively with a handful of tools: Stripe, Mailchimp, Convertkit, and Zapier.
Fortunately, you can still connect Teachery to many other tools via Zapier, but it’s a bit of a hassle.
Teachery Support
We were very impressed with the level of support Teachery offered. Not only do they provide a ton of detailed, well-written help articles and video walk-throughs, but they also provide live chat support if you need extra help from a real human.
You can access the live chat from your dashboard by clicking the icon in the bottom-right corner. Response times are usually very fast, and you should get a reply to your query within a few hours at the latest.
Considering how affordable Teachery is, we didn’t expect to see this level of support. Many other platforms in a similar price range are limited to basic email/ticket support, so Teachery gets top marks for offering live chat!
Teachery Pricing
Teachery’s pricing model is very straightforward. There are two plans to choose from: a monthly plan ($49/month)and an annual plan ($470/year). The annual plan comes with a discount and works out a little cheaper.
Both include all features and come with zero fees and unlimited everything. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial (no credit card required), which also gives you access to the same premium features.
On the whole, these prices are very reasonable. They’re in a similar ballpark to other online course platforms, except most other platforms also charge additional transaction fees on top of the subscription cost. As such, if your sales volume is high, Teachery works out much cheaper.
Pros and Cons
Teachery is a great platform, but it isn’t perfect. Like pretty much every online course solution, it has its strengths and weaknesses. Before we wrap up our Teachery review, let’s quickly recap the main pros and cons.
Pros
Easy to Use
As far as ease of use is concerned, Teachery gets top marks. They keep it super simple with no complicated, messy dashboards or advanced features that take hours to learn. It’s designed to be accessible to anyone, even complete beginners with no prior experience or technical knowledge.
No Fees
Unlike some other online course platforms, Teachery doesn’t charge any transaction fees on course sales, so you get to keep every penny of revenue you generate. This makes it a much more economical option if you plan on having a high volume of sales.
Unlimited Everything
You can create as many courses, lessons, and pages, process as many sales, and have as many students as you like on Teachery, with no additional charges.
Great Affiliate System
The super user-friendly affiliate management system is one of Teachery’s biggest strengths. It makes it easy to quickly onboard new affiliates and start driving sales with none of the usual headaches.
Excellent Support
Robust documentation, video walk-throughs, handy tooltips, and responsive live chat are just some of the reasons we think Teachery’s support is excellent.
Cons
No Assessment or Reward Features
One of the things we liked least about Teachery was its lack of rewards and assessments. Without being able to create certificates, quizzes, surveys, etc., it can be tough to keep students engaged.
No Video Hosting
Another downside of using Teachery is you have to host your video content elsewhere and embed it in your course pages. This means relinquishing some control and ownership of your video files.
Limited Payment Gateways
You can’t offer PayPal as a payment option as Teachery only supports Stripe.
Limited Email Marketing and Automation features
Teachery’s lack of email marketing and automations means it can’t replace your whole marketing stack. You’ll need to integrate it with third-party tools to make the most out of it.
Our Teachery Review Final Verdict: Is It Worth It?
So, let’s get to the main question: Is Teachery worth the cost?
Ultimately, it depends on what you’re looking for.
If you just want an affordable, easy-to-use platform to create simple online courses, Teachery could be a great option. The simple interface paired with the affordable pricing plans that come with unlimited everything and no fees make it an ideal choice for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and creators.
However, if you’re a serious educator planning to put together a very extensive curriculum-based course, you’re probably better off choosing a different platform that allows you to add incentives, assessments, and gamification features to your courses.
Frequently Asked Questions About Teachery
Teachery vs Thinkific – which one is better?
Teachery and Thinkific are both great platforms for course creators, but each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Teachery is the better choice for complete beginners who only require basic features, whereas Thinkific is better for more experienced course creators that need advanced tools.
Teachery vs Teachable – which one is best?
Teachable offers a broader feature set than Teachery with a range of affordable plans. It’s a great choice for established course creators who want to grow their business, whereas Teachery may be a better choice if you’re just starting out.
How much does Teachery cost?
The teachery monthly plan costs $49 per month. If you choose the annual plan, it costs $490 for a year.
Who can sell online courses?
Anyone who has skills, knowledge, or expertise that they want to share can sell online courses. It has a very low barrier to entry as tools like Teachery make it easy to set up your course with no technical skills and start making sales.
How can I create an online course?
To create your online course, start by choosing the topic you want to teach. Then, outline a structure by splitting your course up into lessons and sub-lessons. After that, create your content (you might choose to focus on video content, audio lessons, or text content) and upload it to your course platform. Finally, start promoting your course and drive traffic to your landing page in order to make sales.
Is online teaching a profitable business idea?
Yes, online teaching can be very profitable if you’re successful. The e-learning industry is growing incredibly fast, and there’s a huge market for online educational content.
We hope you found this Teachery review useful. Good luck!
Teachery Alternatives
Not sold on Teachery? Here are some alternatives to check out instead.
Kajabi
Kajabi is a powerful, all-in-one platform that comes with advanced course creation tools and a broader feature set. See our full Kajabi review.
Teachable
Teachable is one of the most well-known online course platforms on the market. It comes with all the same features as Teachery plus course completion certificates, better course tracking and analytics, and more. See our Teachable review.
Thinkific
Thinkific is another popular online course platform. Its powerful Learning Management System (LMS) is a great choice for schools, larger businesses, and serious educators. See our Thinkific review.
Podia
Podia is a cost-effective all-in-one platform with built-in course creation tools. Like Teachery, it offers unlimited everything and no transaction fees. See our Podia review.
