I was verifying Teachable for this directory and hit something I didn't expect.
Teachable has stopped building its community feature. Not "deprioritised." Stopped.
Here's the line from their own help centre, in the article called "Create and manage community":
"We've paused investment in the Community feature to focus on improving the overall learning experience in Teachable."
The same article says they're not adding new features, they're not fixing reported bugs, existing communities keep working, and new schools can't create one. It then points you to course comments or to Discord and Slack.
Meanwhile, the homepage FAQ still says you can "add a community for your students."
So the marketing page and the support page disagree. Believe the support page. That's where the people who answer the tickets write.
First, what this is not
This is not Teachable going out of business. The course builder is good. The checkout is good. Teachable Payments handles cards, PayPal and tax, and pays out daily. If you want to sell a course and never think about a community, it still does that well.
It's also not a bug or a temporary outage. It's a decision, written down, in the docs.
What Teachable has actually said
One sentence. That's it. "To focus on improving the overall learning experience."
Which is a perfectly reasonable sentence that tells you nothing. So the rest of this is me guessing. I'll label every guess as a guess. I'm fine being wrong. If you work at Teachable and I'm off, email me and I'll print the correction at the top.
Guess 1: it was losing to the specialists, and they knew it
The old Teachable community used categories and topics. A review queue for flagged posts. A "topic timer" to schedule a post. Direct messages you could switch on or off.
That's a forum. A decent one, for 2016.
Now put it next to Skool. Skool has a single feed, a leaderboard, levels that unlock content, and a mobile app people actually open. Circle has spaces, live rooms, and paid tiers. SchoolMaker has XP and a 30-day leaderboard. Even Mighty Networks, which I'd call the slowest of the bunch, has a native email integration and a branded app.
So here's what I think happened at the usage level. A creator on Teachable wants a community. They turn on the feature. Their members compare it to the Skool group they're already in. It feels old. The creator either runs two tools, or moves the whole thing to Skool, or moves to Circle and bolts their Teachable courses on.
Either way, Teachable's community gets blamed in the cancellation survey.
The creators who stayed were the ones who didn't care about community. So the feature had low usage AND it was the thing people cited on the way out. That's the worst possible combination for a product manager defending a budget line.
Guess 2: a forum doesn't move the number they care about
Think about where Teachable's money comes from.
Plan fees, obviously. But look at the pricing page. The $39 Starter plan carries a 7.5% transaction fee. Builder and up are 0%, but you're pushed through Teachable Payments, which takes 2.9% plus 30 cents on US cards and 3.9% plus 30 cents internationally. Want your own Stripe? Only on higher plans, only if you're not eligible for Teachable Payments, and US schools pay a 2% integration fee on top.
That's a payments company with a course builder attached.
A member posting in a forum generates zero payment volume. A checkout generates payment volume. Every engineer on the community team is an engineer not working on the thing that produces revenue.
If I ran the numbers at Teachable, I'd have made the same call. I'd hate it, but I'd make it.
Guess 3: the owners
Here's the behind-the-scenes bit, and this is the guessiest guess of all.
Teachable isn't independent. Hotmart bought it in 2020. Hotmart is a Brazilian company, and Hotmart's whole business is a marketplace plus a checkout. Affiliates, payments, conversion. It's the thing that works in Latin America and they're very good at it.
Now imagine you're the parent company. You own a course platform in the US. The product roadmap has two directions on it: build a better forum to compete with a $9-a-month startup called Skool that's growing like a weed, or make the checkout and payouts better so more money flows through you.
One of those is your core competence. The other is a knife fight you're already losing.
I have no inside information. Nobody from Hotmart called me. But if you look at what changed at Teachable since the acquisition, it's checkout, payouts, taxes, fees, pricing. Payments stuff. And what got cut is the thing that doesn't touch payments.
That's not a conspiracy. That's a parent company doing what parent companies do.
Guess 4: the 2025 repricing was the same decision, seen from the other side
In mid-2025 Teachable rolled out new plans and migrated everyone onto them, with no grandfathering. Several competitors wrote it up and creators were loud about it on Reddit. The usual caveat: those write-ups come from companies who want Teachable's customers, so read them that way. But the shape of the complaints was consistent: higher prices, tighter product and student limits, and a 7.5% fee on the cheapest plan that used to be 5%.
Put that next to the community decision and a pattern shows up. Cut what doesn't earn. Charge more for what does. Push volume through the payment rail.
I don't think that's evil. I think it's a company that decided what it is.
Guess 5: the unbundling bet
Here's the version where Teachable is right and I'm wrong.
Kajabi's bet is all-in-one. Courses, community, email, funnels, one bill, one login. Teachable's bet is now the opposite: we're the course engine and the checkout. Bring your own Discord. Bring your own Kit. Bring your own Skool if you must.
That's a defensible position if creators assemble a stack rather than buy a suite. A lot of serious creators do exactly that. They'd rather have a great course player and a great community than a mediocre version of both under one roof.
The problem is timing. Skool's growth over the last two years says a lot of people want the suite, and they want it cheap. Teachable looked at that fight and said "not ours." Maybe that's discipline. Maybe it's surrender. We'll know in a couple of years.
What this means if you're choosing a platform
Three things.
Teachable and Skool aren't the same category anymore. Every "Teachable vs Skool" article on the internet is now comparing a course platform to a community platform. The honest answer is "which one is your product?" If your product is the course, Teachable. If your product is the room, Skool.
A half-built community is worse than none. This is the real lesson. Members don't judge your community against nothing. They judge it against the best one they're already in. If a platform offers community as a checkbox, go look at it before you build on it. If it feels like a forum, it'll feel like a forum to your members too.
Check the help centre, not the homepage. The homepage still says you can add a community. The help centre says you can't. This is why every listing on this site cites the vendor's docs and not their marketing. Marketing pages lag. Support pages don't, because they're written by people who'd get yelled at.
Where I'd put my money
If I had to bet: Teachable keeps the community feature alive but frozen for a year or two, then quietly removes it once enough schools have left it. The homepage FAQ gets fixed the day someone in marketing notices.
And "Teachable alternatives with community" becomes a search term, because that's what happens when a platform stops doing something its customers Googled it for.
If you're one of those people, the Course-First category here lists which platforms still build their community, and which ones, like Teachable, have moved on.
Sources: Teachable help centre, "Create and manage community" (checked 16 Oct 2026); Teachable pricing page and homepage FAQ (16 Oct 2026); Teachable help centre, "Custom Payment Gateways." The 2025 repricing details come from competitor and creator write-ups, which I've treated as secondary sources. The Hotmart acquisition was announced in 2020. Everything under a heading that starts with "Guess" is mine.