Migrating from Teachable: What Actually Changes

If you're considering moving a Teachable business to Classentra, the question isn't "which features overlap?" Most of them do. The question is what actually changes for you and your students in week one. This post is the practical readout.

What Changes

Pricing as of 2026-07-25. Verify current pricing directly with the vendor.

Billing routes through your Stripe account, not theirs. On Teachable, every transaction goes through Teachable as the merchant of record (or via Teachable Payments). On their Starter plan ($39 / month) you pay a 7.5% transaction fee, and payment processing (~2.9% + 30¢) is billed on top on every plan, even the higher tiers with a 0% transaction fee. On Classentra Educator and Studio, payments use Stripe Connect: funds land directly in your Stripe account, and Classentra charges one fee of 6% + 30¢ per sale on any paid plan. For US and Canadian Stripe accounts that fee is all-in, with card processing included and nothing added on top; elsewhere it is the percentage only and Stripe bills card processing to you.

In dollars, on a $5,000 / month course business (call it 120 sales at around $42): Teachable Starter runs $39 subscription + $375 transaction fee (7.5%) + roughly $175 in card processing ≈ $590 a month. Classentra Educator runs $39 + $300 (6%) + about $36 in fixed 30¢ fees ≈ $375 all-in. Roughly $215 / month back to you on the same $5K gross, and one predictable fee line instead of two.

Live teaching is suddenly first-class. Teachable was built for pre-recorded courses. If you wanted to host a live class, you ran Zoom on the side. On Classentra, sessions are part of the course: students join from inside the course (via your own Zoom/Meet/Teams link on any plan, or fully in-app with the optional +$19/mo Native Video add-on), attendance is captured automatically, and with Native Video recordings save back to the course. If you've been running a "live cohort" on Teachable using Zoom + Slack + a spreadsheet, that whole stack collapses to one tool.

Students sign in with magic-link, not a password reset. During the migration, your existing student list gets bulk-invited via the existing CSV flow at /org/[orgId]/settings/invite-bulk. Each student gets one email with a magic link: no password reset, no confused support tickets, no "I can't remember which email I used." On Teachable, your students were on Teachable's auth system. Now they're on yours.

What You Keep

• Your course library structure. Sections, lessons, drip scheduling: all of that translates. You re-upload your existing video files as Course Materials and rebuild the lesson order. It is manual; there is no importer today.
• Drip schedules. Set lessons to unlock by date or by cohort start. Same model as Teachable Power-Up scheduling.
• Your storefront, now with discovery. Your sales pages move to classentra.com, a clean URL under a domain with existing search authority, listed in Classentra's course discovery. If you're moving a whole academy or team and need your own domain and branded portal, that's the Organizations tier, so talk to us.
• Your existing Stripe account. No new merchant account, no re-verification.
• Your affiliates, though they re-enroll on Classentra's in-house affiliate program rather than carry over automatically. We can help with the email outreach to your top affiliates so the transition is clean.

What You Don't

• Teachable's specific quiz UI. Classentra has assignments and AI-graded feedback; the look-and-feel is different. Quiz-heavy businesses should review the Classentra quiz builder before committing.
• Teachable Communities. Classentra ships its own community feed. It is intentionally lighter than Teachable Communities today; the trade-off is that live teaching is built in instead of bolted on.
• The Teachable affiliate marketplace. Classentra's affiliate program is in-house: affiliates apply directly to your account, not through a marketplace.

Step-by-Step Migration Outline

1. Pick a Classentra plan. Educator at $39 / month ($29 / mo billed yearly) matches Teachable Starter's sticker price. The difference is the fee (6% + 30¢, all-in for US and Canadian accounts, against 7.5% plus separate processing) and live cohorts built in. And if you want to test the water first, our Free plan is real; Teachable dropped theirs (it's a 7-day trial now). Studio at $149 / month ($109 / mo yearly) covers multi-instructor, up to 10 staff.
2. Export your Teachable student list. Settings → Users → Export.
3. Bulk-invite via CSV. Use /org/[orgId]/settings/invite-bulk (the same flow that ships from Wave 1 of the B2B tier) to send magic-link invitations in one batch.
4. Re-upload your top 3 courses as Classentra Courses. Rich-text editor for lesson copy, Course Materials for recorded videos.
5. Wire Stripe Connect. Two minutes via Stripe's standard onboarding.
6. Set up your first cohort and live session. Pick a recurring schedule, share the join URL via Course Announcements.

The full guided version of this is the migrate-from-teachable page, manual onboarding from us included.

When Not to Move

Don't migrate just because someone wrote a comparison post.

You should stay on Teachable if your business is purely pre-recorded, you don't need attendance / grades / live cohorts, you have no affiliate-marketplace dependency that you'd lose, and the platform-fee math doesn't move enough at your current revenue to matter. Teachable's pre-recorded course player is mature, well-tested, and good at what it does.

Move when your business outgrows the pre-recorded model, when "I want to add a live cohort" stops being a stretch goal and starts being a quarterly priority.