Teachable hosts your courses. Circle powers your entire learning business.

In June 2025, Teachable eliminated its free plan, restructured all paid tiers, and introduced caps on the number of products and students per plan. Existing users were given 30 days to migrate to new plans, often at significantly higher prices. 

One long-time user on Trustpilot described going from $69/month to $189/month for the same feature set. Circle's pricing has remained stable and transparent, with no member caps on any plan — Professional, Business, and Circle Plus all include unlimited members and unlimited courses.

Teachable charges a 7.5% transaction fee on its Starter plan ($29/month billed annually). On a $100 course sale, that's $7.50 going to Teachable — on top of standard payment processing fees (2.9% + 30¢ for US cards). To drop Teachable's platform fee to 0%, you need the Builder plan ($69/month annual) or higher.

Circle charges lower platform transaction fees across every tier: 

• 2% on Professional ($89/month)
• 1% on Business ($199/month)
• 0.5% on Circle Plus (custom pricing)

But the bigger picture is total cost of ownership. If you're on Teachable and also paying for an email tool, a community platform, and a live events tool, those monthly costs add up faster than a modest transaction fee. You can learn more by using our community ROI calculator or exploring our pricing page.

No. Circle includes unlimited members and unlimited courses on every plan. Teachable introduced product and student caps in June 2025: the Starter plan is limited to 5 published products and 100 students, Builder to 10 products and 1,000 students, and Growth to 50 products and 5,000 students. If you outgrow those limits, you're forced into a higher-priced tier. On Circle, your business scales without hitting artificial ceilings.

Yes. Circle's course builder supports drag-and-drop lesson creation, drip scheduling, cohort-based programs, quizzes, and video hosting. What makes it different is that courses live inside your community — students can discuss lessons, attend related live events, and interact with each other without leaving the platform. 

On Teachable, courses exist in isolation. On Circle, they're part of a connected learning experience that keeps students engaged after the last lesson ends.

Circle includes: 

• Native live events and streaming (no Zoom needed), 
• Community discussions with activity feeds, DMs, and chat, 
• Gamification with points and leaderboards, 
• AI Agents trained on your content, 
• Workflow automations with conditional logic, 
• Email Hub for broadcasts and automated sequences, 
• A website builder, and 
• Branded mobile apps via Circle Plus. 

Teachable focuses on course delivery and requires 3–4 third-party tools to deliver what Circle provides natively.

Teachable's community feature is a basic forum with topics and threaded posts. There's no activity feed, no direct messaging, no chat, no gamification, and no AI moderation. 

As one independent review put it, Teachable's community feature isn't designed to work as a standalone platform. 

Circle's community is the product — built around structured spaces, activity feeds, DMs, group chat, gamification (points, leaderboards, badges), and AI Copilot. Members see what's new the moment they open the app, which creates the daily engagement habit that a flat forum cannot.

Yes. Circle handles the full event lifecycle natively: scheduling, RSVP pages, live streaming, automatic recording, gated replay by access group, and post-event workflow triggers — all without leaving the platform. 

Teachable has no native event hosting or live streaming. Creators on Teachable typically patch together Zoom for live sessions, manually download and re-upload recordings as course content, and use a separate tool for event registration. That's three tools and a manual workflow for something Circle does in one click.

No. Circle's Email Hub handles broadcasts, automated sequences, behavior-triggered campaigns, segmented sends, and contact management natively. 

On Teachable, native email is limited to one-time broadcasts — Teachable's own help center recommends integrating a third-party ESP for anything beyond basic emails. That means paying for and managing ConvertKit, Mailchimp, or another tool on top of your Teachable subscription, with your member data split across two platforms. 

Circle keeps email and member behavior in one system, so your re-engagement campaigns, upsell sequences, and event reminders all run on the same data.

Yes — you can use Circle purely as a course platform if you prefer. But most creators who switch discover that adding even basic community features (a discussion space, a welcome thread, a live Q&A) dramatically improves student engagement and completion rates. The community tools are there when you're ready — they're not forced on you. And unlike Teachable, you won't need to bolt on Zoom, an email tool, and a separate community platform when you do decide to expand.

Yes. Circle offers managed migration support for courses, email lists, and payment setups. Our team handles the heavy lifting — moving your course structure, lessons, and files so you don't have to rebuild from scratch. The typical timeline is 2–4 weeks. Course migration is available as a standard service on Business plans and as a priority service on Circle Plus. Learn more about course migration →

During migration, your students will receive an invitation to join your new Circle community. The process is designed to be as seamless as possible — most creators run both platforms in parallel for 2–4 weeks to ensure a smooth transition. Circle's onboarding tools, including welcome emails and guided setup workflows, help students get comfortable quickly.

For most course creators, yes. Circle includes a full course builder with drag-and-drop lessons, drip scheduling, cohort-based delivery, quizzes, and video hosting — plus everything Teachable can't do: native community, live events, email marketing, workflow automations, and AI. The one area where Teachable currently leads is course completion certificates and built-in tax compliance across 200+ countries.

If certificates and automated international tax remittance are critical to your business, evaluate both platforms on those specific features. For everything else — community, events, email, automations, AI, branded apps — Circle goes well beyond what Teachable offers.