Marvelous vs. Teachable: Which Online Teaching Platform is Right For You?
Creating a remarkable online course is just the beginning. When it comes to selling courses, memberships, or online coaching, success is not only about what you teach but how you bring it to the world.
Marvelous and Teachable are hosted online teaching platforms that let you sell courses directly from your website. From videos to digital downloads, you can upload all types of content, structure your material, handle payments, and build communities.
Teachable has been around since 2014 and remains a popular choice. However, newer online course platforms have emerged in the last decade. Marvelous, a standout platform for creators in the wellness industry, is a great alternative to Teachable.
Let’s dive into what matters most to creators and the differences between Marvelous and Teachable. This way, you can confidently choose the platform that speaks to your goals.
Marvelous vs. Teachable: Teaching Platform Comparison
Marvelous and Teachable both have a lot to offer creators, but there are some key differences between the two platforms. Choosing the right fit will depend on what type of business model you’re building. Here’s a quick overview that highlights their main features:
Marvelous:
Marvelous stands out as a stunning and stylish creator platform made for wellness businesses. It’s an all-in-one hub to build and sell online courses, memberships, communities, and coaching programs. With Marvelous, you get a beautiful online presence without needing to hire a designer or handle any code.
One of the strengths of Marvelous is its built-in marketing tools that make it easy to promote your products: email marketing, an AI-powered sales page builder, and more. You have no limits on media uploads or live-stream recordings for Solo plans and beyond. We focus on simplicity while giving you options to grow, experiment, and get creative with how you serve your clients. There’s no steep learning curve—most clients set up their accounts in minutes.
Marvelous creators have launched platforms from all around the world. While you can use the platform to create in any niche, our users are primarily heart-centered entrepreneurs who often focus on healing through practices like: meditation, yoga, Pilates, nutrition, and more.
Teachable:
Teachable is an online course builder designed for creators aiming to sell courses, coaching services, and digital downloads. You can develop your course using media like videos, slides, and quizzes. However, you can’t sell live events or host your community directly on Teachable.
Teachable offers three sales options: courses, memberships, and online coaching. It doesn't accommodate live events or drop-in class passes. While Teachable lets you use various media formats—audio, video, images, and text—to cater to various learning styles, there are file size limitations for uploads. products: email marketing, an AI-powered sales page builder, and more. You have no limits on media uploads or live-stream recordings for Solo plans and beyond. We focus on simplicity while giving you options to grow, experiment, and get creative with how you serve your clients. There’s no steep learning curve—most clients set up their accounts in minutes.
Teachable users range from creators, influencers, and entrepreneurs to business owners in diverse niches. They span from artists teaching watercolor painting to experts in houseplant care, academic tutoring, and beyond. It's mostly an online course platform.
So, which tool is right for you? Both platforms let you sell online courses, coaching, and memberships. They both also offer:
No-code course builders
Landing pages
Third-party integrations
Affiliate marketing
Content uploads via drag-and-drop
But while Teachable is primarily an online course platform, Marvelous gives you everything you need to run your teaching business in one place. You’re not limited to selling pre-recorded videos or bundling products to create recurring revenue streams.
Let’s say you decide to start selling pre-recorded online workshops. As you grow, you might want to offer live events for your students. But that usually means investing in another tool or finding one that will work with your current setup.
With Marvelous, you don’t have to scout for new tools each time you want to experiment with how you serve your students. You can host live-stream events, email your students, send text reminders, and build an online community, all within the same platform.
Ready to explore the features of Marvelous and Teachable?
Inside the Features: Marvelous vs. Teachable Platform Comparison
Marvelous keeps things simple while giving you plenty of options to grow, try new things, and get creative with how you serve your community. It’s everything a creator needs to teach online and make a living from what you know.
The Marvelous platform is set up so you can expand your online business without a ton of extra costs or hassle. You can start building multiple revenue streams with little additional work or investment, and you don't need to be a tech expert or know how to code.
To help you figure out if Marvelous is right for your business, let's take a closer look at what it offers and how it stacks up against Teachable.
Use Live Streaming to Connect with Your Community
The Teachable learning platform limits sales to courses, coaching, and memberships. Marvelous expands these offerings to let you sell courses, coaching, and memberships, as well as host live events such as classes, Zoom sessions, webinars, and workshops.
Marvelous does more than livestream a broadcast. It lets you run collaborative Zoom sessions simultaneously, which is great for bigger online studios with multiple instructors. However, you don’t have to use Zoom to livestream on Marvelous. There’s still a broadcast feature if you want to focus more on delivering content rather than face-to-face interactions with your students.
If you want to build a community on Teachable, you’ll need to integrate with Circle, a third-party community platform. But to use this integration, Circle requires you to sign up for a separate paid plan.
Marvelous offers a private community and chat with every plan. Depending on your plan, you can create multiple Community Groups right within the platform. This means you can create a more meaningful and engaging learning experience for your students without needing any extra tools.
Both Marvelous and Teachable let you upload different file formats like video, audio, PDFs, and images. But Teachable limits uploads to 2GB, while Marvelous offers unlimited video storage starting from the Solo plan.
Design A Beautiful Online Presence
Both Marvelous and Teachable offer an intuitive drag-and-drop builder that lets you create an online course without needing any coding or advanced tech skills. It will take just minutes to get up and running on either platform.
Plus, both platforms offer customization and branding options so your online platform can feel like you. Course design templates are available for both platforms to help you get started quickly.
Marvelous has Design Templates that let you create a beautiful landing page to welcome students and clients. The platform also comes with a Canva integration that makes it easy to make Marvelous an extension of your brand. The platform also helps you create engaging landing and sales pages using Marvelous Pages and Marvelous Magic Pages.
On the other hand, Teachable provides a clean, simple course creation interface that empowers you to craft multimedia-based courses with ease.
Marvelous lets you upload your logo, pick a color scheme, add studio imagery, and choose fonts to ensure your online space mirrors your brand. Teachable also offers customization options for logos, backgrounds, typography, and overall theme colors.
Both Marvelous and Teachable paid plans let users create a custom domain and custom links.
Build a Learning Experience That Caters to Different Learning Styles
Online Courses
Marvelous and Teachable provide course-building tools that let your students engage with all types of content. You can sell unlimited courses to any number of students on both platforms, regardless of which plan you’re on.
However, the number of courses you can host on Teachable varies depending on the plan. Only the higher-tier plans allow you to create unlimited courses.
Both platforms let you create online courses that run over a set period of time. Students can work at their own pace, or you have the option to drip course content to your students by setting the start and end dates of the course. You can decide if each lesson becomes available based on a schedule or only after the student completes the previous lesson.
Bundles
A bundle groups several courses, coaching sessions, or digital downloads together and sells them as one package at a single price. When someone buys this bundle, they gain access to all the included content, whether it's courses or coaching.
With Marvelous, you can mix and match your video, audio, and document files, plus any live-streaming sessions however you like. For example, you could create a beginner yoga package with ten instructional videos and two audio meditations. Or you could bundle three healthy cooking videos with three private live-streaming sessions or even curate a package of twenty audio files.
Teachable lets course creators add up to 200 products in a single bundle. Their Free plans limit users to one published bundle at a time, but all paid plans offer unlimited bundles. Teachable paid plans also let creators sell unlimited 1:1 coaching and digital downloads.
Online Coaching
Individual coaching, also called private or one-to-one coaching, allows you to focus all your attention and energy on just one client. It’s a chance to increase student engagement, provide personalized feedback, and create a space for a deeper client relationship.
Both Teachable and Marvelous offer excellent options for online coaching. Marvelous lets you connect your studio with Calendly or Acuity so clients can book sessions without leaving your platform. You can also manually schedule sessions, curate a media library and upload personalized content for your clients or their sessions.
Teachable includes 1:1 student coaching across all paid plans. In their online coaching, users can add intake forms to get upfront information about clients to prepare for their first call or make sure they’re a good fit for your service. You have the flexibility to add assignments, calendars, or meeting times as specific milestones for your clients.
While Calendly integrates with all paid plans on Teachable, their Zoom integration is only available for users on Professional and Pro plans.
Student engagement
On Marvelous, you can create intake forms before a student starts a course and review assignment submissions. With Teachable, you would need to do this on a third-party tool.
Both Marvelous and Teachable come with quizzes so you can check your student’s progress and retention. Teachable also includes course completion certificates to acknowledge their achievements.
Create Recurring Revenue with Membership
Membership learning puts students in control of their schedule. Students can access materials at any time, which means they can fit your teachings into their daily routines.
Establishing a membership also means nurturing a supportive community around your brand. Plus, membership subscription fees also provide a steady stream of recurring income for the business.
Both Marvelous and Teachable allow you to create memberships, but each platform takes a different approach.
Marvelous offers a subscription model where you can set up your recurring pricing on five different schedules. It lets you organize your content through custom categories, tags, and playlists and you can even schedule media release dates and times.
However, Teachable doesn’t offer memberships as a standalone product. To create a membership model, you’ll need to bundle multiple courses or products together.
Sell Unlimited ClassCards™ Products
ClassCards™ is an electronic version of the physical class passes from in-person studios. They let you create a 5-punch, 10-punch, 20-punch ClassCard, which gives flexibility for both students and studios.
ClassCards are a win-win for studios and students alike. They generate more revenue for a business than a day pass or drop-in, but they also allow new students to test out different memberships and teaching styles.
Teachable doesn't currently offer any class passes for their courses, memberships, or online coaching options.
Another tool Marvelous offers instructors is called the Tip Jar. This tool is a site-wide option that allows visitors to send tips or donations. Once activated, it adds new tipping options to your site via Stripe, with PayPal support coming soon. You can also promote your Tip Jar page through your other social pages.
Teachable doesn’t offer a similar feature that lets its creators receive tips or donations at this time of publication.
Connect With Third-Party Integrations
Integrations help your apps talk to each other. When something happens in one app, it automatically triggers an action in another app. This automation streamlines tasks, which saves creators time and effort by syncing their favorite apps.
Both Marvelous and Teachable offer various third-party integrations like Deadline Funnel, which is a powerful way to add limited-time offers to your Marvelous checkout pages.
Marvelous also integrates with some of your favorite apps like:
Zapier
Zoom
Flodesk
Deadline Funnel
Mailchimp
Twilio (SMS Notifications)
ConvertKit
Canva
Acuity
Unsplash
Calendly
Instagram
Teachable offers integrations that let you connect with some popular social media advertising platforms, like Meta and TikTok. It also offers integrations for email marketing and analytics tools:
Circle.so
LinkedIn
ConvertKit
Mailchimp
Deadline Funnel
Mailerlite
DropInBlog
Sumo
Google Analytics
TikTok
Hotjar
Wobo
ActiveCampaign
Zapier
Google Tag Manager
Pinterest
AWeber
Mobile App
Both platforms offer mobile apps. The Marvelous Mobile app brings the online platform to your students' phones. It’s always up-to-date with the desktop version, with updates and new features synchronized in real time.
Students don’t have to download anything from the app store to use the Marvelous Mobile app. The app is accessible from their mobile browser, which is convenient for students and means creators keep more of their income by bypassing the percentage cuts from Apple and Google.
Teachable has an Online Course app that lets students access course content, whether they’re on the go or offline. However, the app is only available to iOS users and is available for download from the Apple store.
Why Do Course Creators Choose Marvelous?
You can talk with an actual human in customer support
Marvelous offers direct customer support through calls or chat. There are no chatbots, just real humans. You can reach them six days a week, from 5 am to 9 pm PST Monday to Friday. While support isn't available on Saturdays, customers on any plan can connect on Sundays from 7 am to 3 pm PST.
Teachable provides live chat support on weekdays from 10 am to 5 pm EST, specifically for Pro and Business plan users. Other paid plans have access to email customer support seven days a week.
Promote your products with built-in marketing tools
Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools for creators. In fact, 87% of brands say that email marketing plays a vital role in business success.
Marvelous simplifies email marketing by offering creators a built-in system to reach their customers. With unlimited marketing emails, it tracks open rates, clicks, and unsubscribes.
However, Marvelous also integrates with popular email marketing platforms like ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and other apps through Zapier. If you already have an audience and prefer to keep your marketing efforts in your existing email platform, Marvelous can accommodate that.
Teachable has integrated email marketing through third-party providers, but the platform doesn’t offer a built-in email marketing tool. This means creators must subscribe to another email service to use email marketing.
Marvelous.bio provides a free link-in-bio alternative for single link sharing on social media. With Marvelous.bio, you can keep one link with all your most important URLs in one spot. Teachable lacks a similar single link-sharing tool.
Marvelous also offers a Landing Page Builder and Marvelous Magic Pages™, an AI-driven sales page generator that lets you create unlimited sales pages in minutes with the option to choose your tone of voice.
Teachable offers an easy start with its sales page template for course landing page creation. You get guidance on key selling points, like where to include your instructor bio, call-to-action buttons, and student testimonials.
With Marvelous, you can automate event reminders for students who opt for SMS notifications. Teachable doesn't currently offer text message notifications for its users.
We Streamline Customer Management
Marvelous offers simplified customer management, providing a simple way to track your student enrollment status with a centralized view.
Marvelous Mail also lets you personalize emails based on a student’s specific course or membership enrollment. By tailoring your messages, you ensure that students only receive information that truly matters to them. Plus, you’ll see more engagement: segmented emails are proven to get up to 30% more opens and a whopping 50% more clicks compared to unsegmented, one-size-fits-all newsletters.
Teachable also offers customer management support, which lets you monitor student enrollments and track their course progress. However, it doesn't offer the same targeted email functionality as Marvelous.
Marvelous vs. Teachable Pricing Comparison
Payment Processing
Marvelous starts with a budget-friendly Starter Plan at $39/month and offers higher-tier plans for added features. There are no extra fees beyond payment processors, which grants creators full control over their earnings. They also provide a free 7-day trial that lets you explore the entire platform.
Teachable offers various plans to match the needs of creators. For free plans, Teachable enforces a $1 transaction fee and a 10% transaction charge. Additionally, their Basic plan includes a 5% transaction fee. Their free plan has limited features and includes a $1 transaction fee and a 10% transaction charge per sale. Paid plans begin at $29/month for the Basic plan, which also carries a 5% transaction fee. Each plan offers more features with reduced transaction fees as you upgrade.
Pricing Plans
| Marvelous | Teachable | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Free 7-day trial on any plan | Has a free plan with limited features |
| Lowest cost plan with basic features | Essentials $48/month (billed annually) $57/monthly | Basic $39/month (billed annually) $59/monthly |
| Second paid plan tier | Solo $104/month (billed annually) $129/monthly | Pro $119/month (billed annually) $159/monthly |
| Third paid plan tier | Pro $149/month (billed annually) $179/monthly | Business Custom pricing |
| Fourth paid plan tier | Growth $208/month (billed annually) $250/monthly | - |
When you sell your products on Marvelous, you keep all the revenue you earn, except for the standard Stripe or PayPal processing fees. Marvelous will never charge additional transaction or revenue fees.
Marvelous vs. Teachable: Which Online Platform Is Best For You?
As we wrap up, it’s clear that Marvelous and Teachable both offer unique strengths. Marvelous stands out as a platform for wellness creators and heart-centered entrepreneurs—providing a space where disciplines like yoga, Pilates, mindfulness, nutrition, and more can thrive.
On the other hand, Teachable has its own strengths and weaknesses that cater to a broader range of online course creators. It’s a solid choice for anyone who wants to teach online courses.
Ultimately, the choice between Marvelous and Teachable is about aligning your platform choice with your specific goals. For those rooted in the wellness sphere and seeking a platform to grow, experiment, and create within that space, Marvelous emerges as the go-to choice.
