Why I’m moving my online courses from Teachable to ThriveCart
When I first started offering online craft courses, I chose Teachable as my course platform. And honestly, it was a great choice at the time! It’s user-friendly, popular, and easy to get started with — especially when you’re still learning how all of this works.
Over the years, I tried a few other platforms (Podia and Thinkific), but I always ended up back on Teachable. That is, until now.
This year, I’m moving all of my courses from Teachable to ThriveCart, and I want to walk you through why I’m making this change — and also share a bit about how the transition is going.
First, a quick word on Teachable
Teachable* has been a solid platform for me over the years. If you're just getting started with online courses, it can be a really good option. It costs around $39 USD per month for the basic plan (if you have under five courses), and it’s pretty easy to use. Just note that they charge a 5% transaction fee on top of regular payment processing fees, for the lowest pricing tier.
One great thing about Teachable is that a lot of people already have accounts there, which means your students might already be familiar with the platform — fewer login headaches!
And if you're in the UK or somewhere that deals with VAT (value-added tax), Teachable handles all of that for you. This can save a ton of time and stress when it comes to taxes. I need to add GST (goods and services tax) because I’m in Australia, and ThriveCart does this really easily for my Australian customers. I could never do that on Teachable’s inbuilt sales pages.
So why move?
As my business has grown, so have the number of courses I offer. That means the cost of staying on Teachable has gone up — way up. I’m now paying $1,428 USD per year, which is about $2,200 AUD.
Compare that with ThriveCart, which is a one-time payment. I paid $495 USD for the core version, and added an extra $295 USD for the "Pro" upgrade — and that’s it. No ongoing fees.
That upfront cost might feel like a lot, but once it’s paid, you’re done. If you’re planning to sell courses or digital products for more than a year or two, it quickly becomes a more affordable option.
ThriveCart: Not just a checkout platform
ThriveCart started out as a tool for creating checkout pages — and it still shines there. You can design beautiful, flexible sales pages with ease. You can also embed checkout forms directly into your own website, which is what I’ve done for my Newsletters for Creatives course. If you scroll down that page, you’ll see the purchase form is right there, no clicking away.
Depending on the course, I might use a short cart, a full sales page, or an external checkout link — ThriveCart makes all of these easy to set up.
You can also create different sales pages for different currencies. This is great if you want to offer one version in USD and another in AUD.
Bumps, upsells, and extras
Another big reason I love ThriveCart is how it handles upsells and bumps — those little extras you offer during the checkout process.
A bump is a small, related product that a buyer can add to their cart with one click.
An upsell is shown after the initial purchase, offering another product that pairs well with the first one.
Teachable has some of this built-in, but I’ve never found it very easy or flexible. ThriveCart, on the other hand, lets you create as many upsells or downsells as you like, and you can design each page exactly how you want.
Student view of a text lesson on ThriveCart
Student view of a lesson on Teachable
Side-by-side there’s barely any different from a student’s view between ThriveCart (left) and Teachable (right).
What about the courses themselves?
While ThriveCart started as a sales building site, they now offer something called ThriveCart Learn*, which is where your actual course content lives. It's clean, simple to use, and quite intuitive. While it’s still developing in some areas, I’ve found it surprisingly powerful — and I prefer it over Teachable now that I’ve gotten used to it.
Yes, moving from one platform to another takes some effort. But overall, I found the process manageable, and I’ve been really happy with how my courses are turning out in ThriveCart. But this is also something to keep in mind if you’re totally new to sharing online courses, and just setting up your first site; perhaps start with ThriveCart straight away.
A few things to keep in mind
As much as I love ThriveCart — and I do love it — no platform is perfect. If you’re considering making the switch or starting out with ThriveCart, here are a few limitations and quirks I’ve noticed along the way. Most of these aren’t dealbreakers, but it’s helpful to know what you’re getting into before diving in.
1. Video hosting isn’t included
Unlike platforms like Teachable or Kajabi that allow you to upload your videos and PDFs directly to the course itself, ThriveCart doesn’t host any of your course files. That means you’ll need to store your content somewhere else and then embed or link to it within the course.
For videos, I personally use Vimeo, which gives me more control over how the videos look, whether they can be downloaded, and where they can be embedded. I’m currently on a plan that costs around $200 USD per year, which might sound like a lot, but even with that additional cost, I’m still spending significantly less overall than I was with Teachable’s higher-tier plans.
You could also use a free option like YouTube (with unlisted videos), but keep in mind that YouTube isn’t designed for private or paid content, and there’s always a risk that someone could share the link. Vimeo gives you more privacy and branding options, which is why I chose it.
For PDFs, worksheets, and other downloads, I either store them on Google Drive, Dropbox, or on hidden pages on my Squarespace website. I link to these from inside the course lessons or embed them as needed.
While it’s an extra step to manage your own file storage, the upside is that you maintain full control over your content — and you’re not locked into a single ecosystem.
2. No built-in course marketplace or landing page
One thing to be aware of is that ThriveCart doesn’t provide a “shopfront” or central course directory where people can browse all your offerings in one place.
Platforms like Teachable and Podia give you a branded course homepage that automatically lists all of your products. ThriveCart doesn’t do that — you’ll need to create your own course directory using your website or blog.
If you’re only selling one course, this won’t be a big deal. But if you offer several courses, workshops, or digital products, you will want to think about how to share them to your audience.
Personally, I’ve created a courses page on my SquareSpace site that acts as a central hub. From there, visitors can click through to the individual ThriveCart sales pages or embedded checkout forms. It’s a teeny bit more to set up, but I would probably do it that way anyway; I want my audience and customers to come to my website. Not to mention I love using SquareSpace and know how to create design layouts the way I want.
This approach also gives you a lot of freedom in how you present your work. You’re not locked into a default layout or forced to display everything in a marketplace-style format. This means your site and courses page look the way you want, with your branding and any details that you have on your website.
3. Formatting quirks inside ThriveCart Learn
ThriveCart Learn is the part of the platform where your students will actually access their course content. It’s clean, simple, and generally user-friendly — but it does come with a few formatting oddities that are worth mentioning.
For example, you currently can’t create numbered lists, which seems like a small thing, but can be a bit frustrating if you’re outlining steps or instructions. The formatting takes a little time to get used to, but I’ve found some workarounds that I actually think ended up better because of the limitations.
When I copied my content over from Teachable, I found that a lot of the formatting didn’t transfer well. Line breaks disappeared, lists got flattened, and images had to be reinserted. I ended up needing to manually reformat many of the lessons, which took some time — so if you’re planning a big migration, give yourself a plenty of time to do it.
If you going into the job knowing it will take some time then it definitely makes for a less stressful process. Once I got into the flow I found it easy enough and started to navigate it well.
That said, once it’s all set up, the end result is clean and easy to navigate. Students haven’t had any complaints, and I actually like how streamlined the experience is for them. Students don’t know the back-end “issues”, so once it’s shown to them the page looks excellent. Like being on stage - don’t tell them the mistakes and no-one will know!
Hopefully ThriveCart will improve the editor over time, as it does seem to be a big downfall. I’ve seen a few tutorials online about converting Teachable content (text, not videos) into html which then formats it for ThriveCart. I found this so much more tedious then manually reformatting the sections. At least it made me realise I wasn’t the only one coming up against that issue.
Lucky we’re creative artistic people who find solutions to things, work through something, and make it work. But, remember, ultimately the important thing is getting your work out there and not worrying about these little things. I realised that I actually like the simple design aspect as it really make me focus on the content and not over-complicating things with it needing to be perfect.
4. No student commenting under courses
Teachable and Podia (and many other course platforms) have the ability for students to comment under each lesson. You can toggle this off if you’d prefer. This can be a great way to engage students and get conversation going; but I do think it really depends on the type of courses you offer, your audience, and if it’s a live course or on-demand. (I’ll talk about those in another blog post).
ThriveCart doesn’t have built in ability for this. You’d need to integrate with something like Disqus or add Facebook comments. Both of these require extra steps to set up, including creating an account in Disqus, and adding in code snippets (though that’s easy enough and there are full step-by-step instructions).
The other downside of this is that people need to create their own account on Disqus, and be logged in, for their comment to work correctly. I’m all for keeping things simpler and not asking my students to create more accounts. I also don’t like using Facebook, so I wouldn’t implement that.
Honestly, this is not even near to something that would turn me away. While I did have comments set up on Teachable, my courses are not actually designed for student interaction like that. The few comments I used to get were something a student could email me about. And once I got a very random comment from someone saying I could use a machine to get faster results on one of my slow hand-stitched projects (perhaps they weren’t my ideal audience).
For my Stitch Circle Community membership I use an online forum, which I host on Circle. This is where we have our conversations, connections and sharing; so we don’t need comments under the course lessons.
ThriveCart admin for course creation
Teachable admin for course creation
You will notice above that Teachable has a lot of other sidebar features, such as coaching, community, membership and digital products. I have found that I don’t love or need the usability of these features; I’ve never used them at all. Digital downloads are set up in ThriveCart under regular product sales pages, and I do my coaching on separate sites.
All the sales pages and dashboard settings are in a separate tab in ThriveCart, which means that on your course building page that’s all you see. You go to each section to look at daily sales and reports, create sales sheets, or coupon codes.
5. No global design settings for branding
This one is more of a workflow quirk than a true problem, but if you're particular about your branding (like I am!), it’s something to be aware of.
Currently, there’s no global design setting that lets you apply your brand colors, fonts, or style preferences across all your courses or sales pages in ThriveCart. That means if you create a new course, you’ll either need to:
Manually apply your design preferences again (colors, logo, fonts, etc.), or
Duplicate an existing course or sales page to keep the formatting consistent.
The same goes for things like adding your support email or refund policy — there’s no “global footer” or universal block that appears across all your courses or sales pages. You have to copy and paste it into each one individually, which can feel a bit clunky if you’re managing several products.
This isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it does slow things down when creating new offerings. I’ve started keeping a design checklist and a copy/paste file with things like support info, standard messaging, and formatting snippets (especially my branding hex codes and fonts), which makes setup a little faster.
This is something I’m just used to now, and it’s simply part of the process of creating a sales page or a course layout. Every platform has something or other that we need to learn and make do, and that’s part of this process of being online creators and small business owners.
Wrapping up
While these limitations do take a bit of getting used to (though really, probably not any more than when we start using any other platform), none of them have been big enough to make me regret switching from Teachable to ThriveCart. In fact, the flexibility and long-term savings far outweigh the extra effort required in setup and organisation.
If you’re looking for a platform to create simple or extensive sales pages on, or start building your online courses, then ThriveCart is absolutely worth considering. I know that the upfront payment seems a lot when you’re just starting out; but I believe that we do have to invest into doing this thing. If you’re not sure if you’ll make that money back on your course I do have a few other course hosting suggestions, or alternatively step back and re-assess what you’re offering and if it’s right for your audience, at this time.
Remember though, it really is more important to create your things and share them, than testing everything or holding back because you can’t make a decision about the right option. Just pick one and go with it. You can always change to another one at a later time. Nothing is permanent, everything evolves. I’ve shifted my students to different platforms and not once had a complaint.
*some links in this post are affiliate links. This means that if you purchase using my link I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Please know that I only ever share platforms and offerings that I personally use or know to be a potential fit for you. And all reviews or thoughts I share are honest, open and a way for you to find the best option.
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