Teachable Merchant of Record alternatives (with price comparisons)

One of the biggest selling points of Teachable is that it acts as a Merchant of Record, which means they automatically handle not just calculating taxes for all countries all around the world, but also filing them on your behalf.

While this makes Teachable unique among hosted online course platforms, you can still replicate this in WordPress by using a combination of plugins.

Use an LMS which supports WooCommerce

Nearly all LMS (Learning Management System) plugins support WooCommerce.

Since LMS are complex plugins and no one is going to build an LMS for free, the WooCommerce integration is usually only available as a paid feature.

LearnDash is widely considered one of the best LMS plugins.

While it does not offer a free trial, the paid plugin integrates with WooCommerce out of the box.

But LearnDash is somewhat expensive (but much cheaper than the Teachable Pro plan).

I use an LMS plugin called AcademyLMS and I explain the reasons why I chose it at the end of this article.

Use a plugin to integrate WooCommerce and Paddle

Paddle is a payment gateway which acts as the Merchant of Record.

If you can configure your WooCommerce store to use Paddle as the payment gateway, then you can have the best of both worlds.

You can run an LMS on WordPress – which is much more configurable than Teachable (see the optional plugins section in the table below) – and also use a Merchant of Record for collecting payment.

Teachable Pricing

This is the Teachable pricing model.

As you can see, it costs $1428 per year for the Pro plan, which you need if you plan to sell more than 5 courses.

If you are certain you will not be selling more than 5 courses, Teachable will probably be your best choice. 

Price comparison

Let us do a price comparison between selling online courses on Teachable vs WordPress.

Feature	Teachable	WordPress
Price	$1428 per year	<$500 per year (See remaining rows for the calculation)
Web hosting	Included	<$100/year (I use Hostinger which costs about $60/year)
Video Hosting	Included	Usually <$100/year using BunnyNet which is probably the best video hosting for online courses
Merchant of Record Payment Processing	Included	Use Woo Paddle Checkout for $79/year
Learning Management System (LMS)	Included	Use AcademyLMS ($119/year) or LearnDash ($199/year)
Plugins (Optional features)		$150/year + < $100 lifetime
Video transcripts	Limited	Use TurboScribe for unlimited transcripts for $120/year
Browse video transcripts	Not available	Use custom post types plugin and AudioJots Toolkit for Online Courses – $49 lifetime
Search across all lessons	Not available	Use AJAX Search Pro plugin $39 lifetime
Glossary	Not available	Use the Glossary plugin at $29/year

Video transcripts

Adding video transcripts to your course videos can be very helpful.

Teachable does provide auto-generated video transcripts for all paid plans.

However, the auto-generated transcripts in Teachable have an important limitation. You cannot export them in any format other than SRT.

A full fledged transcription service like TurboScribe will offer more export options like CSV, which allows you to repurpose the transcript into an easy-to-skim article like format. In addition, TurboScribe accuracy is also likely to be better and get better over time because it is their core business.

Browse video transcripts

If you publish transcripts for each lesson in your video course, it is possible for potential students to skim them and see if they cover a topic they are interested in.

Autogenerated transcripts have become accurate enough recently that they are able to correctly identify technical jargon and are also able to handle various speaker accents. In fact the accuracy is now high enough that you can publish these transcripts without a lot of proof-reading, but if you would like to do some quick last minute proof-reading you can use the AudioJots spellcheck tool. 

But doing this manually can be very time consuming, so it might be a good idea to use the AudioJots Toolkit for Online Courses to help you with this process.

Search across all lessons

Teachable does not provide a feature where you can search across all your video transcripts.

However, this is fairly simple to build once you publish transcripts for your video lessons.

It could be as simple as adding a plugin like AJAX Search Pro, which provides more customizations and has a better user interface.

Or you can use a search service like Algolia, which has more powerful search, but is not quite as customizable and does not look native on your WordPress website.

Glossary plugin

This is actually an excellent example of something WordPress supports, which is simply never going to be possible on hosted services like Teachable.

So here is what a WordPress Glossary plugin does – once you define some glossary terms, it automatically scans all your existing content and adds a link to that term.

A page with video transcripts is a “target rich” environment for the glossary plugin, but there is a possibility it will end up creating too many links. A plugin solves this problem by only linking the first occurrence of this glossary term.

This combination of plugins and content which allows these glossary links to be automatically generated is a reason why people often say WordPress is extensible in ways that you probably cannot even duplicate on hosted online course platforms.

Why I chose AcademyLMS

If you do a pure feature comparison between LearnDash and AcademyLMS, you will find out that LearnDash has a much more comprehensive feature set.

I have used LearnDash before, but I chose AcademyLMS because I got a 60% discount on lifetime pricing for a multi-site license. This discount is not available anymore and I don’t know if the company will offer it again.

And AcademyLMS provides most of the features I need.

While this is a good choice for me, if you think LearnDash is better, it would be just as good a choice.