We build Prolaud, so we're not neutral — but everything below is verifiable, and we've flagged where Teachable is genuinely the better pick. Decide for yourself.
Teachable is a good place to sell a self-paced course. Teachers who leave usually want one of two things it does not give them: a real live classroom inside the product, or an entry plan where the platform does not take a percentage of each sale. Prolaud has the live room, the whiteboard, quizzes and a cohort community built in, takes 0% on every plan, and your students pay into your own Stripe or Razorpay account.
Teachable
Today
Prolaud
From day one
The honest verdict
Prolaud is the stronger Teachable alternative if you teach live. Teachable is a mature, well-liked platform for self-paced courses, with a polished student experience and years of refinement. Two things send teachers looking. First, its pricing page lists a 7.5% transaction fee on the Starter plan, at $39 a month on monthly billing; the fee reaches 0% on the Builder plan at $89 a month (teachable.com/pricing, as of October 2026). Second, a live class still means another tool: there is no built-in room with attendance, polls and recordings. Prolaud takes 0% of your sales on every plan, your students pay into your own Stripe or Razorpay account, and the live classroom, whiteboard, quizzes and community are part of the same product. Teachable remains the better choice if you sell self-paced courses, never teach live, and want a long-established ecosystem of integrations.
Cost example
Numbers below use public pricing — Teachable’s figures are from its own pricing page, as of October 2026. Card processing is left out: on Prolaud you pay your payment processor’s standard fee, so check whether the rival’s rate already includes it. Plug in your own revenue on the payout calculator to run your own numbers against the other platforms.
Your Teachable bill
Today$414
per month
Scales linearly with your sales
Double your revenue → roughly double the bill.
Your Prolaud bill
After switch$42
per month, Studio plan · flat
Stays flat regardless of sales
Sell ten times as much → still the same bill.
Your monthly swing
+$372
≈ $4,464 back in your pocket every year — at this revenue level.
Why teachers and creators move on
We've onboarded teachers from every category of platform. These are the same complaints, again and again.
Teachable's pricing page lists a 7.5% transaction fee on Starter ($39 a month on monthly billing) and 0% from the Builder plan ($89 a month) up, as of October 2026. On the entry plan, a share of every sale leaves before your processor's fee does.
Teaching live means pasting in a link to another meeting tool. Attendance, polls, raised hands and the recording all sit outside the place where the student bought the course.
The pricing page lists community from the Builder plan up (October 2026), so the entry plan sells the course without a place for the cohort to talk.
Teachable is a paid service with a 7-day free trial (October 2026). Prolaud's Starter plan is free with no time limit, so you can rebuild a course and try it with a few students before paying anything.
Removing Teachable branding is listed on the Growth plan, at $189 a month on monthly billing, and above (October 2026). Below that, your school carries the platform's name.
Student and sales exports work. A single download of the whole workspace, with courses, materials and branding included, is not one click.
What you get instead
Teachable sells the course well and leaves the teaching to other tools: a rented video seat, a separate whiteboard, a chat app. Here the room where you teach and the page where you sell are the same product: live classes, courses, community, whiteboard, quizzes, certificates and analytics, with one login and one student record.
You connect your own Stripe or Razorpay account and your students pay you directly. Prolaud never holds the money and never takes a percentage, so every sale shows up in your own processor's dashboard. Whatever Teachable's payment option does on your plan, it is worth checking who holds the money between the sale and the payout.
Your students, your courses, your orders: all exportable to CSV or JSON on every plan, including the free Starter plan. There is no "upgrade to export" gate.
Teachable's Starter plan lists a 7.5% transaction fee and its Builder and Growth plans 0% (teachable.com/pricing, as of October 2026). Prolaud takes 0% on every plan, including the free Starter plan. You pay a flat plan fee and your payment processor's standard fee, and nothing to us that grows with your revenue.
Free Starter plan, no time limit · No credit card
Side by side
Each cell reflects the rival's public pricing and feature pages when this page was last reviewed; dated figures say when. Hover any “partial” row for the caveat.
| Feature | Teachable | Prolaud |
|---|---|---|
Live classes built into the platform Schedule, host and record the class without renting a separate video seat. | ||
Recordings with chapters The recording attaches to the class, with chapter markers and the class chat alongside the video. | ||
Multiplayer whiteboard in the live room K-12 grade-band templates, brainstorms, SWOT, mind maps. Multi-cursor, saved per class. | ||
Quizzes built for test prep, not just recall Templates for SAT, AP and GMAT practice, code review and essay rubrics. | ||
Cohort community with @-mentions Post types (Announcement / Question / Win / Discussion) and a member directory. | ||
Certificates with a designer and a verify link Drag-and-drop designer, bulk issue from a CSV, and a public page where an employer can check a certificate. | ||
0% of your sales taken by the platform A flat plan fee, and nothing that grows with what you sell. | ||
Workspace export (CSV / JSON) Per-entity exports and a full-workspace download on every plan, free Starter included. |
Free Starter plan, no time limit · No credit card
Straight talk
Pick Teachable if your product is a library of self-paced courses, live teaching is not part of it, and you value a mature platform with a long list of integrations. On its Builder plan and above the transaction fee is 0%, so the fee argument goes away once you are paying for that tier. If that describes you, the classroom we build in will not change much for you, and we would rather say so than oversell the switch.
Other options worth a look
We compare honestly against each of these too — so you can hold Teachable up against the whole field, not just against us.
How to switch
Most teams are fully migrated inside a weekend. You don't lose your roster, your courses, or your branding.
Step 1
Export your student roster from Teachable (most platforms offer a CSV under "Students" or "Members"). Map the columns to name, email and phone.
Step 2
Bulk-import the CSV into /dashboard/students. The import matches on email, so running it again is safe.
Step 3
Recreate your courses. The curriculum builder lets you drag modules and lessons, paste video embed URLs and upload PDFs without a wizard. Most teachers move five courses in an afternoon.
Step 4
Apply your brand: logo, primary color, and a custom domain on any paid plan. The portal-template picker has 7 starting points if you want to refresh the look while you are at it.
Step 5
Tell your students you have moved, with the new portal URL. One announcement goes out in-app and by email, and reminders can be scheduled after it.
Stuck mid-migration? Email us — we'll walk through the CSV mapping or migration scripts with you on a call. No upsell.
The switching framework
Score each tool yourself, Teachable and us included — these are the questions that actually decide it.
Questions to ask before you switch
Does it ship live cohort tooling that respects classroom dynamics?
Is my data exportable on every plan, including the free tier?
Will my bill stay flat as my sales grow, with no per-sale cut?
Am I paid into my own payment account, or does the platform hold the money?
Can I migrate over a weekend without losing my roster?
Start free — keep 100% of what you earn.
Launch your academy freeCommon questions
The dividing line is where the class happens. Teachable is built to sell and deliver what you teach; the live class itself runs in another tool, so the record that took the payment never learns whether the student turned up. Prolaud runs the live room inside the platform — attendance, questions and progress land on the same student record as the purchase, which is what lets attendance weight an overall score and trigger a re-engagement nudge automatically. See the whole loop at prolaud.com/loop. This page also spells out where Teachable is genuinely the better buy.
A weekend for most teachers. Importing the student CSV takes minutes; rebuilding five to ten courses with their materials usually takes a day.
Yes. A custom domain is available on any paid plan: add it in your portal settings, point a CNAME at us, and the SSL certificate is issued for you. Your old Teachable address can redirect once you switch.
Add them with the CSV import, which matches on email, and enroll them in the rebuilt course. Their access carries on from there.
Progress recorded on Teachable does not transfer. Export it as a CSV before you leave so you keep the record; on Prolaud, progress is tracked from each student's first lesson.
It depends on your plan and your sales. On Teachable Starter, $5,000 a month in sales means $375 in transaction fees on top of the $39 plan fee (as of October 2026). On Builder or Growth the fee is 0% and you are comparing two flat plan fees. Prolaud's plans are flat at every level and take 0% of sales; the current prices are on the pricing page.
Yes. You connect your own Stripe account by pasting in its API keys, and students pay by card in US dollars, straight to you. Prolaud never holds the money.
Compare other alternatives
Each comparison is built the same way, so you can hold Teachable up against the rest.
The all-in-one promise with a live classroom inside it, a free plan to start on, and payouts into your own account.
See comparisonA course builder with the live classroom, whiteboard and community in the same product, and 0% of your sales taken.
See comparisonPodia's simplicity with a real classroom behind it: live cohorts, a whiteboard and test-prep quizzes, at 0% of your sales.
See comparisonFor when you outgrow the checkout link and need courses, live classes, a community and a real student record.
See comparisonFor teachers who want the live cohort at the center: a built-in classroom and whiteboard, with 0% of your sales taken.
See comparisonSame creator-mobile-first focus — with the deeper teaching surface and zero-commission commitment Indian educators ask for.
See comparisonBoth India-built. Skolasti is course-hosting with strong content-DRM and a per-coach price; we add live teaching, community, a free tier, broader product types and flat 0%-commission pricing.
See comparisonClassWalla gives coaching institutes a branded Android/iOS app from ₹4,999/mo or revenue-share. We're the open-web alternative: a free tier, flat 0%-commission pricing, a cohort community and 8 product types — no app install to browse or buy.
See comparisonSkool is a strong paid community with live calls. Prolaud is for when the class is the product: a whiteboard, quizzes, certificates and a storefront, with 0% of your sales taken.
See comparisonCircle is the best-designed community tool here, with live metered at 10 hours a month and a 15-person room on its $89 plan. Prolaud is built for teaching live, with 0% of your sales taken.
See comparisonMaven is built for live cohorts and keeps 10% of sales, with a marketplace attached. Prolaud runs the same cohort at 0%, on your own domain, for teachers who already have an audience.
See comparisonFree Starter forever. No credit card. Cancel any day. The export button still works.