Kartra vs Teachable: The Hunt for the Best Online Course Hosting Platform (2021)

Find out whether Kartra is better than Teachable or not Below!

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If you’re here, then it means that you’re on the lookout for an excellent platform to host your online courses or educational venture, and have come across Kartra and Teachable. With great reviews about both of these, you might be at a dilemma of which one to choose. We’ve got you covered, with a detailed report about each software, their features, the similarities between them, and the exclusive services offered by each one of them. 

At the end of this read, you will get a clear idea of what you are looking for, and more about Kartra and Teachable. The thorough overview shall help you reach a decision that you won’t regret, keep reading to find out!

What is Kartra?

Kartra is a software that mainly offers sales funnels, done for you campaigns, and a marketing tool suite. It is much more than meets the eye. If you’re looking to start a new online project, be it an educational platform or selling a digital service, Kartra can do it all without any external software integration. Because Kartra has all the features you need, be it a helpdesk customer service, email automation, web page building, or even a membership portal, Kartra has it covered. 

What is Teachable?

Teachable is one of the best platforms out there for creating and hosting your online courses. For any online educational platform, the aesthetics of the page play an essential role. The page needs to be catchy and striking and must have the ability to glue customers into it. Apart from this, there must be a user-friendly page interface that your customers can explore with ease. These are a few of the things to be kept in mind while creating an online course platform.

Teachable offers customizable web page templates that you can edit and personalize using a simple drag and drop editor. This easy customization feature makes your job hassle-free, while also helping you provide the customers with the right amount of aesthetic that they are looking for. With Teachable, you can now have your online educational venture that is highly functional, attractive, and very soon, successful. It also lets you be in total control of your course, giving you the freedom to decide your price rates and marketing strategies.

Due to its accessible handling features and user-friendly controls, Teachable was featured in the “Top 20 Learning Management System Software (2020)” and “Top 20 Training Software (2020)”. An added benefit is that you do not need any coding knowledge to navigate your way through the operations, which means any newbie could quickly figure out how to use it.

Features Common to Both Kartra and Teachable

These are the features that both Kartra and Teachable have in common,

1. Webpage Templates

With Kartra and Teachable, you don’t have to build your page from scratch anymore. Both these platforms come with pre-designed templates that only need to be personalized according to your need. This saves a lot of time and effort from your side and makes the job way more relaxed. 

Kartra offers many templates, much more than Teachable, but both do help you build a good landing page, squeeze pages, forms, and webinar pages. 

2. Editing Your Page – Drag and Drop Editor

Both Kartra and Teachable have the drag and drop editing feature that you can use to customize your page easily and arrange the various elements. These do not need any previous experience to be operated and can be learned quickly on the go. 

3. Host Your Sites – For Free!

With Kartra and Teachable, you don’t need to search for a separate platform to host your online business venture. They let you do this for free, as a part of the package, and the elimination of a third party host removes the chance of errors and downtimes. 

4. Integrating Software

Today, integrations are necessary to have a seamless experience and to make up for the services not provided by your host. With integrations, you can integrate external software into your platform, and enjoy the benefits of both.

Kartra and Teachable are integration-friendly. They support integrations with third-party software to provide you with a better experience. They also support the use of Zapier, which allows you to integrate with any application or software that does not support direct integration.

5. Email Marketing

The email marketing and automation service can be used to market your products via emails, gain contacts and customers, and promote the product while also nurturing a good relationship with the clients.

Kartra has a great email marketing feature that uses behavioral adaptive marketing, ensuring higher efficiency. They also have a high delivery rate for their emails, which do not end up in the spam folders, promotional or social tabs.

Teachable has an email marketing system that focuses on marketing the online courses hosted on the website.

6. Affiliate Management Program

Somewhere down the lane, if you decide that you need affiliates and more contacts, you might have to contact the third party to host that. But not with Kartra or Teachable. Both these platforms offer an affiliate program with which you can hire affiliates, manage them, and even pay them instantly

Exclusive Features of Kartra (Not Available in Teachable)

1. Sales Funnels

Kartra has pre-built sales funnels that are used to turn leads into potential customers with a single click. Funnels are a great way of attracting customers, and they increase the traffic into your page. With these pre-built funnels, you can increase visitors’ inflow and increase the number of customers for your product/service. These funnels can be shared with others as well.

2. Marketing Campaigns

Kartra has many pre-designed marketing campaigns that help you build up sales and profits. One example of this is the “four-day cash machine,” the brainchild of Frank Kern, a marketing legend who backs up Kartra. With this campaign, it is expected ti give you higher profits for 4 days. Another campaign is the “quick launch campaign” wherein you can launch a new product quickly and easily, and receive higher profits. These campaigns are customizable.

Another exciting feature of the Kartra campaign is that they are shareable, you may share the campaigns (just like the sales funnels) with others.

3.   Helpdesk

It is of utmost importance to maintain customer relationships, and that is why the helpdesk is such a vital feature for any platform or venture. While others have to depend on a third party to get this done, with Kartra, you have the helpdesk system at your fingertips.

Customers can voice their concerns using the ticketing system, and all queries are answered within 24 hours.

This is another feature that is not offered by Teachable, and one of its major setbacks.

4.  Video Hosting

Kartra eliminates the need for a third-party video hosting platform or the need to embed your video link from other platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. You can host your videos in Kartra itself, even though there is a restriction on storage and bandwidth. 

5.  Calendar

The Kartra calendar is an excellent feature using which you can plan your events and schedule them. Apart from this, clients can view your schedule and book appointments with you all by themselves using the Kartra Calendar feature. It also gives automated reminders so that the scheduled event/meeting is not missed.

This option is not available on Teachable, and you’ll have to use separate software to avail of this benefit.

6.   Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Another striking feature of Kartra is the behavioral adaptive marketing, which means that the customers’ interactions and patterns are recorded, to provide each one with personalized suggestions. BAM is a great feature that takes the game up a notch for marketing and customer strategy. 

7.   Shopping Cart

Kartra has an inbuilt checkout page and shopping cart feature so that you do not need to consider an integration for that. This is another reason why Kartra is preferred for a business that is just starting out.

8. Affiliate Marketplace

With the affiliate marketing, you can now host your products in the Kartra marketplace, recruit, manage, and pay your affiliates, and have them collect leads for you. You also have the option to become an affiliate for someone else’s product. The payments for the affiliates can be made instantly, via payment gateways such as PayPal.

Exclusive Features of Teachable (Unavailable in Kartra)

1. Quizzes to Test Progress and Understanding

Regular assessments help strengthen foundation and concepts. Teachable, primarily being an online teaching platform, offers this option to test the students’ progress and understanding. With the Teachable quizzes, you can now set a passing grade for your quiz, and a limited number of attempts that a student has for each assessment.

2. Community Forums and Blogs

Having a community of students/ course-takers makes sure that they have a forum to share their ideas and thoughts. This also means that there is a common platform for them to interact and discuss the course content, encouraging healthy conversations that lead to mutual progress.

That is why Teachable has the option to build forums and blogs, like Kajabi. You can enable the forums using external software as well.

This feature is not available in Kartra as it was not precisely made to be a course creation platform. 

3. Student Management

While running an educational platform, we need to ensure that the students are taking the courses and are understanding the concepts taught. One way to do this is through assessments and quizzes, as discussed above.

Another way is through effective student management. Teachable provides a student feedback module that can be used to create surveys, polls, or Google forms to get student opinions. The opinions may include their suggestions for improvement of the course, any setbacks that they face, features that they find useful, and suggestions on what they want to learn about in the future.

4. Course Player and Comments Section

Teachable has its course player that is built into the platform. It offers an excellent user interface, also giving you an overview of the entire course. All formats of study materials can be uploaded on the platform, be it PDFs or videos.

The comments section can be enabled or disabled for your videos. Enabling this option lets students interact with your video, provide feedback, and voice their queries. The students can also engage in discussion with the help of this feature.

5. Mobile Application

Teachable has an iOS application that can be downloaded. Students can view their course content using the app, and also download the material for offline learning.

6. Course Completion Certificate

This is a feature exclusive to Teachable and not available on Kartra. Some of the subscription plans in Teachable lets you award the students with course completion certificates. They boost morale and motivate the students to work towards achieving more. The system might also encourage students to register for another course with your platform as well. The certificates are customizable.

Pricing and Plans – Kartra

Kartra has a trial version of 14 days at $1. This trial period can be extended to 30 days. The following are the Kartra plans offered:

Starter Plan

With the starter plan, you can have one customer domain, 2500 contacts, and 15,000 emails per month. You can host 100 pages, sell up to 10 products, and build two membership sites, all priced at $99 per month. This plan supports a bandwidth of 50GB, which determines the videos you can host.

Silver Plan

With the silver plan, you can have three customer domains, 12,500 contacts, and 125,000 emails per month. You can host an unlimited number of pages, and no restriction on the number of products you can sell, or the membership sites you can host. This is priced at $199 and supports a bandwidth of 125GB.

Gold Plan

With the gold plan, you can start five customer domains, have 25,000 contacts, and send 250,000 emails per month. Again, there is no restriction on the number of pages you can host, the membership sites you can have, or the number of products you can sell. The plan comes at $299 per month and offers a bandwidth of 250GB.

Platinum Plan

With the platinum plan, you can start ten customer domains, have 50,000 contacts, and send 500,000 emails per month. There is no restriction on the number of pages you can host, the number of membership sites you can have, or the number of products you can sell. This plan is priced at $299 per month and offers a bandwidth of 400GB.

Pricing and Plans – Teachable

Teachable has three plans with varying features, as discussed below.

Basic Plan

The basic plan comes at $29 per month when paid annually, and at $39 per month when paid monthly.  The plan takes 5% transaction fees but offers you integrated affiliates, custom domain, and training to create courses. You can have two admins only, and will also be provided with product support and email marketing.

Professional Plan

This plan comes at $79 per month when paid annually, and does not charge any transaction fees. With the professional plan, you can have five admins for your page, offer the students graded quizzes, and customize your themes. You will also experience all the features of basic plan, such as instant payouts.

Business Plan

This is the last and most expensive plan, coming with a tag of $299 per month when paid annually. It has all the basic plan features along with a few exclusive features such as priority product support and the ability to have 100 admin-level users. You can also have a bulk enrollment of students with this plan.

Comparative Overview of Kartra and Teachable

Both Kartra and Teachable serve different functions. Kartra is a marketing platform that provides you with the best marketing service for selling your product or service. Teachable is an online learning platform for you to host your courses, gain students, and provide top-notch quality classes.

Both Kartra and Teachable are great at what they do, but neither can fill the other’s shoes. While Kartra can host an education platform or a course, its features will never match up to Teachable because Kartra was not aimed at that particular area. That being said, Teachable cannot perform the functions of Kartra.

Therefore, in terms of hosting an online educational platform, Teachable will be the winner because Kartra does not have the necessary features to host such a venture as well as Teachable. Even though Kartra is versatile and flexible in its own field and can launch some of the best marketing campaigns and sales funnels, these are not the requirements for starting an e-learning project. 

If you’re looking forward to hosting your course-creating platform and building a website to present your content, then Teachable is what you need. It is one of the best at what it offers and has unmatched features.

If you are looking forward to having a product launch and sale website, Kartra is all you need. It will take care of all your marketing needs, funnels, email automation, and customer support.