Which community and membership stack is best for you? I break them all down and show you what their sales pages won't say out loud!
A course and coaching platform, not a community platform. Teachable has paused its Community feature. From $39/mo with a 7.5% fee on Starter, 0% from Builder ($89). Shared student app, broadcast email, native Mailchimp sync.
Teachable is a course and coaching platform. It is not a community platform, and as of October 2026 it has stopped pretending to be one.
The help centre says investment in the Community feature is paused, no new features, no bug fixes, and it points you to course comments, Discord or Slack instead. The homepage FAQ still says you can "add a community for your students." Believe the help centre.
If you're here because you want a feed, a leaderboard, or a place members talk to each other, keep scrolling to Skool, Circle or SchoolMaker. If you want to sell courses, coaching and downloads with a tidy checkout and don't care about community, Teachable still does that job well.
Four plans, USD. No free plan. 7-day trial on every plan and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
A "product" is a published course, coaching offer or download. Memberships and bundles don't count toward the cap.
The 7.5% on Starter is the number to watch. At $500/mo in sales that's $37.50 on top of your $39 plan, so Builder pays for itself around $670/mo in revenue. Below that, Starter plus the fee is still the cheaper total.
7.5% on Starter. 0% on Builder and up. That's Teachable's cut and it comes on top of processing.
Processing through Teachable Payments: 2.9% + 30¢ on US cards, 3.9% + 30¢ international, PayPal 3.49% + 49¢ US. $15 per chargeback.
Teachable Payments is the default and for most schools the only option. It handles cards and PayPal, pays out daily, and sorts sales tax.
Want your own Stripe? Only on Pro and above, only if you're not eligible for Teachable Payments, and US schools pay a 2% integration fee on top. We've rated it "Platform processor only" because that's what nearly everyone gets.
Covered above. The old community used categories and topics, not spaces, with per-category notification levels. New schools can't create one. There's no gamification of any kind, and never was.
Course comments still work on every lesson. That's your discussion layer now.
This is the strong part. Curriculum builder with video, text, quizzes, drip, and an AI outline tool. Coaching products with scheduling. Digital downloads. Bundles and membership tiers that gate courses by tier.
Certificates are Growth only, at $189. Thinkific includes them on cheaper plans.
Does it send members a digest? No. Without an active community there's nothing to digest. Students get transactional emails: enrolment, receipts, comment replies.
Can you email your students from inside it? Yes, one-off. The Email Users tool sends to one student, everyone in a course, or the whole school, with filters from the Users list. Plus abandoned cart emails. No sequences, no scheduled sends, no automation. Rated "Broadcasts only."
Can you get your list out? Yes, and this is better than most. A native Mailchimp integration in the App Hub adds every new student to your audience. The help centre has separate articles for Kit, ActiveCampaign and MailerLite. And the Users CSV export is one click (owners only, file emailed to you).
Students in: Bulk CSV import with name, email and optional password, with enrolment into a product at import. Growth plan and up only. On Starter and Builder you add students one at a time or push them in via Zapier.
Students out: Users CSV and Transactions CSV, both from the admin, both emailed. Comments and community posts: no export we could find.
Courses in: No importer. Rebuild by hand, or pay for Custom and get migration assistance.
Courses out: This one stings. Teachable says plainly there's no way to export a course as a single unit, no bulk download, and support won't do it for you. Videos and PDFs download one block at a time. Text you copy and paste.
Shared Teachable iOS and Android student apps on every plan. No branded app option.
Community feature is paused with no new features or bug fixes, and new schools can't create one. 7.5% transaction fee on the $39 Starter plan. No bulk course export.
Checked 16 Oct 2026 against the Teachable pricing page and homepage, and these help centre articles: Create and manage community, Email Users, Mailchimp and Teachable, Custom Payment Gateways, How to export school content and data, Add and Manage Students and Affiliates in Your School (bulk import), and Bulk user actions.
The course platform with everything in one bill: courses with quizzes, unlimited email and automations, funnels, payments, and a community tab. $179/mo to start, $143 on annual. No free plan, a 2,500-contact cap on Basic, and the community is the weakest part of the package.
The cheapest real course builder with a community attached. $54/mo, or $40 on annual, 30-day trial, 0% fees if you use Thinkific Payments. The community is one feed with 5 Spaces on Basic, the email tool is a few canned sequences, and bringing your own Stripe on Basic costs 5%.
Courses, downloads, community spaces, and real email marketing in one plan, from $42/mo billed annually. 5% fee on Mover, 0% from Shaker. Daily or weekly digests, eight native email integrations, no mobile app, no gamification.
