LearnDash Vs. Teachable – Which One is A Better Choice?

When you decide to choose an LMS – LearnDash and Teachable are two popular names that you hear often in the market. 

Both are very successful platforms and have earned a reputation of being easy to use, yet sophisticated enough to accommodate all the features that you may need for your e-Learning site. 

In such a situation, it becomes tricky to make a choice. Which one do you choose while building your online education business? It’s a critical choice that you can’t afford to mess up if you want your business to be successful.  

Fortunately, you don’t need to think about it too much now that you’ve arrived on this page. In this article, we shall do a side-by-side comparison of both these platforms to figure out which one is a better choice.

Let’s get started!

LearnDash vs. Teachable – Fundamental differences

LearnDash and Teachable are two very different e-Learning platforms because of their fundamental differences in their nature. 

While LearnDash utilizes the power of WordPress to create a robust LMS platform, Teachable is a cloud-based solution. 

Teachable provides a complete solution for selling your courses, which allows you to host your course content, sell it, collect payments, send targeted emails, and everything in between. 

LearnDash, on the other hand, focuses more on course creation and course management features. It provides everything you may need to organize your course content and deliver it in a certain way, but you need to rely on a number of other WordPress extensions (i.e. WooCommerce for selling, PayPal/Stripe for collecting payments, etc.) in order to create a complete e-Learning site. 

There are both pros and cons of this approach, and depending on your requirements you may like or dislike it because on one hand it provides you a high degree of flexibility and control over your site and course content, and on the other hand it also increases your initial setup cost.

1. LearnDash vs. Teachable – Features and Functionality

At a basic level, both LearnDash and Teachable seem to be having all the necessary features that may be needed by someone who wants to create an e-Learning site. However, when you dig deeper you learn that there are some major shortcomings in Teachable when compared to LearnDash.

Common features:

• Synchronous learning
• Asynchronous learning
• Blended Learning
• e-Commerce features
• Learner portal
• Mobile learning support

Features unique in LearnDash:

LearnDash comes with great Gamification features that can be used to make learning, a fun and rewarding experience for your learners. There are in-built gamification features, plus dozens of extensions that can add even more gamification to your e-Learning site. In addition, it’s also SCORM compliant. Both these things are not present in Teachable.

Features unique in Teachable:

It comes with in-built video conferencing functionality, which means that you don’t need to integrate your site with Zoom or any other external video conferencing tool to teach your students. 

That’s not the case with LearnDash, and you need to integrate Zoom or any other external video conferencing tool with your site in order to give lectures and other assistance.

Winner – LearnDash.

2. LearnDash vs. Teachable – Content creation and management

LearnDash relies on the CMS capabilities of WordPress to provide robust content creation and management functionality for your courses. 

There’s no doubt in the fact that WordPress is the best CMS in the world, so it’s no surprise that the content creation and management capabilities of LearnDash are miles ahead of any other LMS, including Teachable. 

There are hundreds of LearnDash compatible themes and plugins to present your content any way you want, and there is also no dearth of skilled developers to build some custom solutions for your requirements if you’ve got the budget. The same is not true for Teachable. 

It doesn’t mean that Teachable doesn’t provide the necessary tools for course creation and management – it certainly does, otherwise, it wouldn’t be successful. 

But the fact that nothing comes close to WordPress in content management and presentation is still true.

Teachable provides a visual course builder, multimedia embedding functionality, content dripping, and other necessary features for course creation and management through a polished user interface, but still, it doesn’t provide as much control over course creation and management as LearnDash does.

Winner – LearnDash

3. LearnDash vs. Teachable – Ease of Use

If you look at the UI of both these platforms you’ll find that both of them have an intuitive interface that is easy to use. But, if you’ve used WordPress before then you’ll naturally find it much easier to start using LearnDash than Teachable. 

The good news is that both platforms have got detailed guides to get their first-time users started with ease, so you don’t need to worry much about how your or your teaching staff will be able to start using either of them. 

Winner – Both are fairly easy to use with detailed guides available for first-timers.

4. LearnDash vs. Teachable – Support

In this area, both platforms are on par with each other. Both LearnDash and Teachable have robust support teams, knowledgebase, and community forums to help you fix any issues that arise during the setup or management of your e-Learning site. 

Most of the time you can find the solution yourself from knowledgebase or community forums. But even if you get stuck somewhere, you can contact the support team of your platform and they respond quickly with the right solution. That’s true for both these platforms. 

Winner – None. Both have robust support teams.

5. LearnDash vs. Teachable – Selling your courses

This is one area where Teachable clearly excels LearnDash.

It comes with e-commerce functionality already integrated into its system, so you don’t need to do any hard work to set it up. You can start selling your courses as soon as you’ve uploaded your course content. Just connect the in-built system with your bank account, and you’re good to go. 

The same is not true for LearnDash. With this platform, you need to obtain a payment gateway and integrate it with your site in order to start accepting payments and selling your courses. 

Clearly, you’ve got some serious work to do if you want to start selling your courses through this platform. You may also need to take someone else’s help if you’re not that tech-savvy. 

But depending on what you want and your skill level, there’s also a benefit of the LearnDash approach on payments. When you set up everything related to payments on your own, from the choice of payment gateway to the setup of checkout pages, it gives you complete control over the checkout process.

You can customize everything from your payment gateway provider (i.e. PayPal, Stripe, or something else) to the design and layout of your checkout pages. 

That level of flexibility can’t be achieved when the payment process is set up and managed by someone else (i.e. Teachable team). 

Winner – Teachable (if you’re skilled enough to set up a payment gateway, then LearnDash).

6. LearnDash vs. Teachable – Gamification

As we already told in the features section, LearnDash has a clear upper hand in this department too. 

It not only comes with many in-built gamification features but also has the advantage of many plugins that can add even more gamification features to any e-Learning site based on it.

It already comes with features like reward points, leaderboards, badges, certificates – all of which should be enough for any basic e-Learning site, but if you need more functionality then dozens of gamification extensions are also available for it.

Teachable, on the other hand, is almost completely devoid of gamification functionality. The system is also completely closed, unlike LearnDash which is based on open-source software, so you can’t rely on any extensions too for adding new gamification features.

You need to live with whatever is included in the core LMS. Or, you can integrate it with a third-party gamification platform like Pointagram with help of Zapier to achieve some level of gamification. 

Winner – LearnDash.

7. LearnDash vs. Teachable – Pricing

The pricing of both these LMS platforms is also very different. 

Pricing for LearnDash

• $199 per year.

LearnDash doesn’t offer any monthly pricing options but costs much less on annual basis.

Pricing for Teachable

• Starts from $348 per year.

If you wish to acquire it on a monthly basis, you can also purchase it at $39 per month, with the costliest plan priced at $299 per month. 

Winner – No clear winner. All people stuck in such a situation will automatically lean towards Teachable to build their site because it has a got affordable monthly plans. But for those who can afford to pay the annual fees, it will be better to go with LearnDash because it’s much cheaper than Teachable on an annual basis.

Final verdict: Which one is a better choice?

Now when we’ve evaluated both these LMS platforms all important criteria, it’s time to come to conclusion and decide which one is a better choice for your e-Learning site. But before we do that, let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of both these platforms:

LearnDash Pros and Cons:

Teachable Pros and Cons:

In a nutshell, both LearnDash and Teachable offer robust content creation and management features, ease of use, and reliable customer support. 

However, if you want to make learning an interactive experience with help of gamification and plan to scale your business significantly into a full-fledged online school, you’ll be much better off with LearnDash than you’ll be with Teachable. 

Not only will you be able to provide a consistent user experience from the beginning but also you’ll be able to customize it as per your needs by tweaking its code in the future as it’s an open-source system. This can’t be achieved with Teachable. 

On the other hand, if you want to create a very specific niche learning site that will stick to the niche even in the future as it grows, then you can consider Teachable. 

Not only the setup will be easier but also you’ll be able to start selling your content much faster than LearnDash. You can also choose it if you don’t have the budget to pay for the annual license of LearnDash. 

So which platform would you like to choose and why? Share it in the comments as we’d love to hear your thoughts!