• How to choose the right learning management system for creating a learning community and helping it thrive
• Five alternatives to Teachable we recommend considering first:
• Disco
• Kajabi
• Thinkific
• Podia
• Teachfloor
• How you can try all of Disco's features for free
• Where to watch a live demo of the Disco platform

Finding the best learning management system for hosting your virtual bootcamps, academies, or other online courses is a big task for founders — especially with the wealth of options out there on the market.

Teachable is one of those options. Founded six years ago, Teachable gives founders and creators of online courses a platform on which to host these learning experiences.

But learning doesn't happen in a silo, and siloing members to only learning within the bounds of a course without offering other asynchronous or group learning opportunities, like events, denies them deeper, more enriching learning experiences.

Your learning management platform should support the personal and professional development of your members through any experience you want to offer them, while also tackling more administrative, operational, and marketing tasks.

That platform exists for you — and it could very well be one of these five Teachable alternatives. Keep reading to find the online course platform that best suits your growing learning community.

The 5 Best Teachable Alternatives

Disco

Disco, which means "to learn" in Latin, is a purpose-driven community platform designed to power a variety of learning experiences with community at the center. Unlike Teachable, which primarily focuses on course creation and sales, Disco provides a comprehensive suite of tools for building, operating, monetizing, and scaling your learning community. It's more than just a dance style that brings communities together for fun, it's a comprehensive suite of tools that supports the creation and execution of community and courses, all in one.

Community Building on Disco

Community engagement is at the heart of everything we do at Disco. We offer engagement features like the ability to create dedicated channels, private spaces, and direct messaging. Additionally, Disco offers personalized branding customization options, custom domains, and tailored labels to create your community, your way.

Key Features of Disco

• Powerful Automations: Streamlined community management and intelligent automations to enhance productivity and focus on member engagement.
• Scalable Operations: Scale your learning community using Disco's AI co-pilot, advanced integrations, and adaptable templates.
• Versatile Products: Create relevant learning pathways by tailoring onboarding flows, member profiles, and learning products to individual needs.
• Actionable Analytics: Data-driven insights and time-saving automations to boost member engagement and drive success.
• Seamless Slack Integration: Effortlessly integrate with your existing Slack community to elevate member engagement.
• Flexible Customization: Personalized branding options, custom domains, and tailored labels to create your community, your way.
• Revenue Optimization: Comprehensive and insightful revenue dashboards to effectively monitor sales, growth, and promotional campaigns.

Pricing for Disco

Disco offers a 14-day free trial and has several pricing tiers:

1. Basic: This includes basic branding, channels & DM's, deep Slack integration, basic analytics, event hosting, member groups, and Stripe, Zapier, and Zoom integration.
2. Organization (Most Popular): This includes everything in Basic, plus full custom branding, a powerful AI co-pilot, advanced communication tools, the ability to sell memberships, custom profile fields, multiple Zoom accounts, advanced analytics and reporting, and HD video streaming.
3. Max: This includes everything in Organization, plus advanced AI co-pilot (coming soon), and migration support.
4. Enterprise: This is built for large enterprises and includes unlimited learning products, a dedicated success lead, quarterly strategy reviews, custom training, integration services and support, product roadmap shaping, and SAML SSO (coming soon).

For specific pricing details, it is recommended to get in touch with Disco directly as the pricing information is not explicitly mentioned on the website.

Pros: Disco

• An all-in-one learning management system that brings community and learning together on one platform, so you don't need a big tech stack.
• Advanced community features for branding your space and hosting unlimited students.
• Control your whole platform and community on one intuitive interface, including how you build, market, and monetize.
• Modular approach to building out your learning experiences and community to create something completely unique to you, including video courses, digital downloads, and a seamless creation platform to support other types of learning.

Cons: Disco

• Only offers a 14-day free trial rather than a lifetime free plan.
• No mobile app (some other LMS or community platforms offer one).

Disco combines learning with community and helps turn your own online courses or business into a powerful experience that can be brought to life on our inclusive platform. It's a comprehensive Teachable alternative that supports the growth and scalability of your learning community, providing a more holistic and integrated approach to learning. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, Disco has a solution that can meet your needs. Experience the transformative power of Disco’s comprehensive learning community platform with a free 14-day trial.

KAJABI 

Kajabi, in their own words, is “the best way alternative to teachable turn knowledge into income” and is another Teachable alternative founders consider.

Generating income is a huge part of creating learning communities and opportunities within them for learning, but it's only one piece of the pie. While Kajabi supports the creation, nurture, and scaling of learning communities, their main objective is to generate profit for the community feature anyone that creates courses and wants to share their knowledge with the world.

Pricing for Kajabi

Build Mode - Free 

Sign up for Kajabi and check out their key features, build a website, and send marketing emails for $0. You can't publish content or start generating sales until you upgrade to the Basic plan.

Basic - $149 a month

Create three funnels through unlimited landing pages to start selling your course compliance products. You have to upgrade to access templates and the ability to create assessments for testing how members are resonating with your courses.

Growth  - $199 a month

At the Growth stage, Kajabi lets you customize your platform and generate additional revenue with affiliate sales pages and selling. Add additional admin users and more products and sales funnels.

Pro - Custom

Kajabi's Pro Plan uses custom pricing to add more functionality and a code editor that allows you to really make the site your own.

Pros: Kajabi

• Offers a free plan that lets you build out your experiences before making sales
• Support for memberships of online courses, personal coaching, and podcasts
• Leverage digital marketing features to launch landing pages, sales funnels, and email marketing campaigns for finding new members and fostering current ones

Cons: Kajabi

• Less support for fostering and growing your community — more focus on generating income by selling online courses
• No integrations — have to build specifically using Kajabi's tools, which means you'll have to start from scratch and do a lot of custom development (which can eat up a lot of time and money)

Kajabi vs disco

At Disco, we care deeply about the intersection of learning and community. Kajabi also cares about those things, too, but their offerings and ethos show that they care even more about helping creators make money via course sales.

THINKIFIC 

Thinkific is a customizable learning platform for online course creators who want to design a custom website for launching, marketing, and hosting their courses.

Their website builder lets you design and sell unlimited courses, but a few reviewers note some of those features are less interactive than they could be. Thinkific also offers built-in community features that foster conversation and connection.

Pricing for Thinkific

Free - $0 a month

Thinkific's free plan really lets you build out most of your community's features and functionality — more so than many of the other courses we've noted in this piece.

Their free pricing tier supports one course, one administrator, and one community and allows you to fully own your course content. You have the option to use some integrations, widgets, and features from their app store like quizzes and surveys and receive email support from the Thinkific team.

Start - $74 a month 

Take complete ownership over all of your learning content plus your own website and custom domain with Thinkific's Start Plan.

You can also build individual profiles and set members up on payment plans to start enjoying your content. Host live lessons, create an affiliate program for selling opportunities, and enjoy more advanced web editing features for deeper customization.

Grow - $149 a month, 

3x the communities, 2x the administrators, and the option to remove Thinkific branding from their individual platform are the main features of Thinkific's Grow Plan. The bulk student emailer and enrollment features let you grow your community better and faster, but those advanced features are more standard at lower price points on other platforms.

Expand - $374 a month

Thinkific's Expand package supports up to 10 communities, 5 administrators, and priority customer support. It's best suited for larger learning communities and businesses looking to scale and support bigger memberships.

Plus - Custom

Thinkific offers custom pricing and dedicated customer support that can address your every need at any time for enterprise-level customers or massive communities with large memberships to support. 

Pros: Thinkific

• More options of different price points for growing businesses to upgrade to
• Unlock affiliate selling to generate more revenue
• Learnings and webinars within the Thinkific community

Cons: Thinkific

• No push notifications to members and no bulk email capabilities within the platform until the most expensive price point, which makes marketing and messaging within the platform difficult
• No mobile app
• Fewer integrations — have to build specifically using Thinkific's tools, which means you'll have to start from scratch

THINKIFIC VS DISCO

Thinkific has created a name for itself in the space and is a good course platform. The ability to customize options within the platform allows communities to feel like they're creating a platform of their own, but their lack of integrations and marketing capabilities of Disco and other platforms. Having to start from scratch rather than migrating and integrating your current LMS seamlessly takes far too much time, effort, and money that could be spent in course building email marketing features and community cultivation.

PODIA

A content management system rather than a learning platform, Podia is a neat platform for creating video hosting and marketing digital learning products like online courses and community membership.

It cannot, however, support the curation of your learning community and multiple learning experiences. Folks typically use it to support endeavors like coaching, digital asynchronous courses, and workshops selling courses.

If you don't need all the features and additional functionality that a LMS provides, Podia may be worth exploring.

Pricing for Podia

Free - $0 a month

Podia's collects an 8% fee plus a transaction fee from Stripe (their preferred payment processor), so these free trials aren't *technically* free. Podia gives you a subdomain under which to sell online courses and start inviting your community into the platform. Draft courses for when you're ready to upgrade and sell them.

Mover - $39 a month

Podia removes the transaction fees and allows you to link your own domain name, if you choose, with the Mover plan. You can unlock the ability to also sell courses online and coaching, but not webinars.

Shaker -  $89 a month

Podia's Shaker plan unlocks affiliate generation and lets you sell community access to unlimited webinars.

Earthquaker - $199 a month

Podia brings its creators into their fold with a monthly mastermind, priority live chat support from their team, and a tailor-made onboarding call that helps you better shape and monetize your community for just under $200 a month.

Podia: Pros

• Podia's use cases are broad, and creators of all kinds may find the platform to be conducive for their many learning businesses
• It can be more affordable than a learning management system
• Clean UX and UI, making the customization very easily

Podia: Cons

• Podia is not a learning management system — you can't foster the progress and journey of your learners by understanding their unique challenges

PODIA VS DISCO

Founders and operators of learning communities who want to move the industry forward and create meaningful experiences for members, there is better support from other services, like Disco or one of these other Teachable alternatives, rather than a content management system like Podia.

TEACHFLOOR

Teachfloor is a great end-to-end option for onboarding members, conducting course creation, running live classes, supporting their journey, and collecting payments for cohort-based courses.

Cohort-based courses are wonderful learning experiences, but they're only one kind of learning experience. Self-paced courses, masterminds, and only add to the learning enrichment. Disco supports all types of learning experiences, while fostering your community to gather and collaborate.

Teachfloor supports integrations with Zapier, Zoom, and Stripe so you have what the marketing tools you need to host and monetize your cohort-based course. It's another really comprehensive tool, but it doesn't support all types of learning.

Pricing for Teachfloor

Pro - $69 a month

Teachfloor doesn't offer a free plan. Teachfloor's Pro plan lets you run unlimited courses and invite up to four instructors.

Business - $349 a month

Teachfloor doesn't offer a mid-tier price package. For over 5x the price, Teachfloor lets you add up to 15 instructors, create a custom domain, and customize your platform with your logo and brand identity. 

Enterprise - Custom

Teachfloor then jumps right into Enterprise-level custom pricing where you have more of a tailor-made plan fit for your business.

Teachfloor: Pros

• Host cohort-based courses with comprehensive student support with peer and instructor review, chat function, white labeling, and email automations
• Offers a free trial

Teachfloor: Cons

• Doesn't support other types of learning experiences like event series, self-paced courses, and masterminds
• No free plan
• No built-in community
• Lack of tiered pricing options — makes you jump from one low price point to a high price point

TEACHFLOOR VS DISCO

Cohort-based courses can be life-changing experiences for the students who enjoy them, but they're just one of many different learning experiences that founders of learning businesses can and should offer. Teachfloor doesn't support those additional experiences the way Disco does.

Try Disco today (and start for free!)

The Disco Ethos

Learning deserves to be accessible to all and led by community. We've built our company with that ethos in mind. Disco is the purpose-built OS platform that supports all different types of communities and learning experiences within them.

Free Trial and Product Demo

Enjoy a free trial for 14 days to try out all of Disco's features before deciding on a learning management system. You'll see what makes us different from the rest.

Want to deep dive into the platform before starting your trial? Watch a free product demo and learn from our team how your business can thrive on the Disco platform.

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