Teachable vs WordPress: Where Should You Actually Sell Your Course?

Sell a $50 course on Teachable’s entry plan, and you keep about $44.50. Sell that same course from your own WordPress site, and you keep about $48.25. And Teachable’s subscription hasn’t even entered the picture yet.

That’s why the “Teachable vs WordPress” debate isn’t really about features. It’s about renting versus owning, and what that choice quietly costs you every month.

This guide compares the two on the five things that actually matter: pricing and fees, ownership, customization, course features, and getting started. With real math, not vibes.

Let’s jump right in! 👇

In a rush? Here’s the short version: ⏱️

Teachable vs WordPress in a nutshell

Quick definitions, so we’re on the same page.

Teachable is a hosted course platform. You pay a monthly subscription and they run everything, from the servers and video hosting to the checkout and student apps, while you log in and build your school inside their system.

WordPress is free, open-source software you install on your own hosting account. On its own, it doesn’t do courses; you add that with an LMS plugin. (LMS stands for learning management system. Sounds boring, but it’s just the software that handles lessons, quizzes, students, and payments.) Popular options include Masteriyo, Tutor LMS, and LifterLMS, and we have a whole guide to picking a WordPress LMS if you want the deep dive.

So the real comparison is: a furnished rental apartment versus building your own place with some very good flat-pack furniture. Both get you a roof, but the monthly bill and the paperwork are very different.

Pricing & fees

Let’s start where it hurts most.

Teachable has three self-serve plans, billed annually:

• Starter: $29/month ($39 if you pay month-to-month), plus a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale. Caps you at 5 products and 100 active students (Teachable removes these caps once you pass $10,000/year in sales, per its own FAQ).
• Builder: $69/month ($89 monthly). No transaction fee, but still capped at 10 products.
• Growth: $139/month ($189 monthly). No transaction fee, 50 products, and you can finally remove Teachable’s branding.

There’s a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee on all of them.

One more fee applies on both sides: card processing. Teachable’s own published rate is 2.9% + 30¢ per US card sale, and that’s the same ballpark you’ll pay with Stripe or PayPal on WordPress. Nobody escapes Visa and Mastercard.

Now the WordPress stack:

• Hosting: about $60–120 per year for decent shared hosting.
• Domain: around $10–15 per year.
• WordPress itself: free.
• LMS plugin: free. The free version of Masteriyo (our own plugin), for example, takes real payments out of the box: PayPal is built in, Stripe is a free addon, and there’s a 0% platform transaction fee.
• Card processing: the same ~2.9% + 30¢.

Time for real numbers. 🧮 Say you sell 120 courses at $50 in your first year, for $6,000 in revenue:

Read that again. 👀 Same course, same students, same card networks, and the WordPress stack leaves roughly $660–725 more in your pocket in year one. The gap grows with volume: at $30,000 in sales, the Starter plan costs about $3,650 all-in, while the WordPress stack costs about $1,150.

One nuance inside Teachable’s own lineup: because of the 7.5% fee, Starter is only cheaper than Builder below roughly $6,400 in annual sales. Past that point, the fee eats more than the upgrade costs.

💡 The fair counterpoint: part of Teachable’s cut buys real things: video hosting, iOS and Android apps for your students, and automatic handling of US sales tax, EU VAT, and GST (value-added taxes charged on sales). If the thought of filing VAT in three countries makes you sweat, that convenience has genuine value.

Here’s what the WordPress side of that math looks like in practice: a checkout page built with Masteriyo, where the only cut is the card processor’s:

🏆 Winner: WordPress, and on pure cost, it’s not close.

Ownership & control

On Teachable, your school lives on Teachable’s platform. You can point a custom domain at it, but the content, the database, and the student accounts sit in their system, under their terms.

That has practical consequences. Starter limits you to 5 products and 100 active students (though those caps lift once you pass $10,000/year in sales, per Teachable’s FAQ), removing Teachable’s branding requires the $139/month Growth plan, and Teachable has reworked its plans and prices more than once; the current Starter/Builder/Growth lineup is itself a recent rebrand. When you rent, the landlord sets the rent.

If the platform changes direction, your options are to pay up or pack up your content and migrate, and your student and order data is only as portable as their export tools allow.

WordPress is the opposite: the software is free and open source, so nobody can reprice it, and your content, student list, and order history live in a database you control. Host gets expensive? Move. LMS plugin annoys you? Swap it and keep everything else. It’s your house.

🏆 Winner: WordPress.

Customization

Teachable gives you clean templates and a page editor, and as long as you’re happy with their look, it’s genuinely pleasant to use. The moment you want something off-script (a different checkout flow, a custom lesson layout, fully branded transactional emails), you start hitting walls. Deeper styling means CSS snippets (small chunks of styling code) on the higher plans, and some pages simply aren’t yours to redesign.

WordPress has no ceiling here. You get thousands of themes, page builders like Elementor and Divi, and full code access when you need it. LMS plugins play along: Masteriyo, for instance, works with any properly coded theme and ships free addons for Elementor, Divi, Bricks, Beaver Builder, and Oxygen. 🧰

Here’s a course page running on WordPress, with the layout, the pricing box, and the curriculum list all styleable however you like:

🏆 Winner: WordPress. Teachable looks good out of the box; WordPress looks however you want. ✨

Course features

Here’s where Teachable earns its keep, honestly. Out of the box you get:

• Video hosting included (up to 1TB)
• iOS and Android apps for your students
• Certificates, quizzes, and drip content
• Memberships, bundles, coupons, upsells, and order bumps
• Abandoned-cart emails and built-in email marketing
• An affiliate program (from Builder up)
• Automatic US sales tax, VAT, and GST handling
• “Create with AI” tools on every plan

A WordPress LMS covers the core well. With the free version of Masteriyo you get unlimited courses, lessons, and quizzes, certificates, course reviews and Q&A, built-in email notifications, and a drag-and-drop course builder:

The gaps are worth stating plainly, though. The free quiz builder has 3 question types, drip content, subscriptions, and coupons are Pro features ($149/year at the intro rate, renewing at $299), and there’s no hosted video storage, so you’ll embed YouTube or Vimeo, or pay for separate WordPress video hosting. There’s no ready-made mobile app either, and sales tax is your problem, not the platform’s.

🏆 Winner: Teachable. On raw built-in features, especially video, tax handling, and the apps, it’s ahead. This is the criterion that justifies the subscription for a lot of creators.

Getting started

Teachable: create an account, start the 7-day trial, build your course, publish. No hosting to buy, no SSL certificate (the padlock that encrypts your site’s traffic) to install, no updates or backups to schedule. You can realistically have a course for sale in an afternoon.

WordPress: buy hosting, install WordPress (most hosts do it in one click), install your LMS plugin, connect PayPal or Stripe, and sort out SSL, usually free through your host. It’s a weekend project if you’re new, an evening if you’ve done it before. Our step-by-step guide to creating an online course with WordPress walks through the whole thing.

There’s also ongoing maintenance: plugin and theme updates, backups, basic security hygiene. Call it ten minutes a week, or pay a bit more for managed hosting and mostly forget about it.

🏆 Winner: Teachable. Nothing beats “no setup” for setup.

If you pick WordPress: choosing an LMS plugin

⚖️ DISCLAIMER: Masteriyo is a member of the Themeisle family of products. This shortlist sticks to the facts, and every option below delivers the pricing math from earlier.

The LMS plugin is the engine of your course site, so pick carefully. 🔍 Here are three solid options:

Want a longer list? Here’s our full roundup of the best free LMS plugins for WordPress. 📋

So, which one should you pick?

Quick recap: WordPress wins on price, ownership, and customization, while Teachable wins on built-in features and getting started. 🔁 So the verdict isn’t “one is better”; it’s which trade-offs match your situation:

• If you want to launch this week and never think about servers, SSL, or updates → Teachable. Pick Builder if you can swing it, because Starter’s 7.5% fee stings once sales pick up.
• If you’ll sell globally and want VAT and sales tax handled for you → Teachable.
• If you want to keep the most money per sale, especially as volume grows → WordPress.
• If you want control over design, checkout, student data, and your platform’s future → WordPress.
• If budget is tight and you can trade a weekend for hundreds of dollars a year → WordPress with a free LMS plugin.

The bottom line: if you’re validating a first course and speed matters more than margin, Teachable’s trial is a fine way to test the waters. If you’re building a course business for the long haul, WordPress wins, because the math only gets better as you sell more and you actually own the asset you’re building.

Which way are you leaning, Teachable or WordPress? And if you’ve already jumped from one to the other, how did it go? Share your experience in the comments section below! 💬

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