# Teachable vs Kartra (2026) · Funnel Critic > Source: https://funnelcritic.com/compare/teachable-vs-kartra Head-to-head ## Teachable vs Kartra Pick Teachable when the school is the product. Pick Kartra when the launch, the email list and the affiliates live together. By [Marta Ovalle](/authors/marta-ovalle), reviewed by [Funnel Critic Editorial](/authors/funnel-desk-editorial). Published 18 October 2026\. We update this page every 90 days. **Disclosure:**We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It never affects our rankings. ### Quick answer Pick Teachable if you are building an education business where student experience, mobile apps and tax-handled checkout matter more than funnel simulation and affiliate management; pick Kartra if you are launching or scaling a course or membership with pages, email, checkout and (from Growth) automations and affiliates on one login. You have already cut the list to two. One side is a school for courses and coaching. The other is a launch account that can also host a course. If your visitors come from ads, read the paid-traffic section further down. For this choice, [open the Kartra pricing breakdown](/reviews/kartra/pricing) and match the tier to the tools you will still use after launch week. ### Side by side The two tools you are choosing between, plus one more worth knowing if you run paid ads. | Tool | Free trial | Best for | | ----------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Teachable | 7-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee | Education businesses selling courses and coaching | | [Kartra](/reviews/kartra) | 14 days | Established coaches and creators who want pages, email, checkout and memberships in one account | | [ElasticFunnels](/reviews/elasticfunnels) | 14 days, no card | Teams running paid traffic | ### What you are really choosing between #### Kartra vs Teachable: course school or launch platform Teachable's [homepage](https://teachable.com/) frames the product as a school for experts and businesses: courses, coaching, memberships and digital downloads. Teachable Payments handles tax in 45+ countries, and students get native iOS and Android apps. Someone shopping for that school cares about the student getting to the next lesson, and about tax being handled at checkout. Kartra's [comparison page](https://kartra.com/resources/compare/kartra-vs-teachable/) draws the other line. Kartra's page says Teachable omits funnel creation and funnel mapping, and that its email depends on other tools, because Kartra treats it as a course-delivery product. The email line conflicts with Teachable's current [pricing matrix](https://www.teachable.com/pricing), which lists built-in email marketing and an integrated affiliate program on Builder, Growth and Custom. Funnel mapping is described only on Kartra's page. Teachable's own pages in this comparison describe the school, the apps and the tax handling. On [r/onlinecourses](https://www.reddit.com/r/onlinecourses/comments/1su73w0/which%5Fplatform%5Fdo%5Fyou%5Fuse%5Fand%5Fhow%5Fmuch%5Fdo%5Fyou%5Fpay/), a creator who has also used Kajabi and a WordPress LMS says Teachable felt simpler, cost more once the school grew, and offered less customization than they wanted. On [r/smallbusiness](https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1fptzw5/those%5Fof%5Fyou%5Fwith%5Fonline%5Fhosted%5Ftraining%5Fprograms/), someone running hosted training calls the Teachable interface neat and a bit stronger on marketing than Thinkific, and expects limits with a large team or with advanced customization. That comment calls Kartra a heavier marketing setup with a steeper learning curve, and more software than a simple host needs. Early comments in Kartra threads on Reddit are about how long the setup takes. On [r/EcommerceWebsite](https://www.reddit.com/r/EcommerceWebsite/comments/1lwhdt2/thoughts%5Fon%5Fkartra%5Fneed%5Freddit%5Freviews/), users say there is a real learning curve at the start. Once the setup is familiar, they say the platform can run the business. A 2026 pricing thread on [r/SaaSy](https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaSy/comments/1svbkui/kartra%5Fpricing%5Fdoes%5Fanyone%5Fstill%5Fthink%5Fits%5Fworth/) says the bill felt justified with funnels, email and a membership inside Kartra, and expensive when the setup was simpler. If you use most of the bundle, the subscription is easier to justify. If you use only a corner of it, you pay for tools you never open. If the curriculum is the business, stay with the school, on a plan that already includes email if you will write to students from the same place. If you still need landing pages, an email list and checkout, Kartra is built for that launch. Growth is where Kartra includes affiliate tracking. ### Where each one wins and loses #### Teachable ##### What works * The homepage presents the product as a school: courses, coaching, memberships and downloads. * Students get native iOS and Android apps, and Teachable Payments handles tax in 45+ countries. * Built-in email and an integrated affiliate program are listed from Builder upward. ##### What to watch * The first plan still takes a cut of sales made through Teachable Payments. * Live courses, coaching offers and downloads count toward a publish cap. * Creators who also used Kajabi and a WordPress LMS describe a customization ceiling as the school grows. #### Kartra ##### What works * One platform genuinely replaces the stack. You get pages and funnels, email and SMS, checkout, memberships, courses, a calendar, a helpdesk and an affiliate program under a single login. They share one database, so a sale and its follow-up email stay on the same customer record. Reviewers single out the detailed analytics and how convenient built-in affiliate management and payments are once everything sits in one place. * Checkout and memberships are strong for selling knowledge. The checkout supports upsells, coupons and several payment processors, and the membership and course tools host your content and drip it out. For a coach selling a course or a membership, that is the core job done without plugins. * No transaction fees on the main plans. Starter and the higher tiers charge 0% on sales. Essentials charges 5% on sales. * The drag-and-drop builders, more than 100 ready-made campaigns, and Kartra AI let a creator publish a funnel, emails and a checkout in a few hours, without hiring a developer. * You can try it before a long commitment. Kartra has a 14-day trial page and a 30-day trial page. A subscription payment can be refunded within 30 days. A card is required to create the account, and billing support says the trial fee is non-refundable. ##### What to watch * Bugs across the builders are the top complaint. Long-term reviewers describe a page builder that malfunctions, with frequent logouts and glitches in the email, page and membership tools. It is usable, but expect rough edges, and some reviewers feel updates polish the surface while core problems linger. * Getting a reply from a person is the slow part. Kartra's contact page offers an assistant at any hour, and you can be transferred to a person in that chat. The page lists no phone number. Trustpilot reviews through 2025 still describe chats that never start and tickets that take a day or longer. * It is overkill for beginners. Kartra bundles eight to twelve tools. If you only need one or two, you still pay for the whole set and still have to learn your way around it. Reviewers repeatedly say beginners find it overwhelming. They point those readers toward simpler, cheaper tools. It pays off for established businesses that use most of the bundle. * The entry plan offers very little and carries a fee. Essentials looks cheap, but it caps you at 500 contacts and 5 pages while charging a 5% transaction fee. Unlimited pages, zero transaction fees and video hosting start on Starter. Automations and affiliates start on Growth. * Kartra hosts your pages, and those pages cannot be exported. Everything lives on Kartra's servers. If you leave, set aside time to rebuild the pages. Your contacts export as a CSV file, and your pages stay behind. ### What they cost Compare the plan you will still be on in month six. The lowest plan on each side charges a percentage of sales and limits what you can publish. The next plan up removes that percentage. On Teachable, Starter is the self-serve plan with a fee on Teachable Payments sales. Builder, Growth and Custom drop that platform cut. Card processing can still apply on top of it. Builder is also where built-in email and affiliates appear. Growth adds certificates for finished courses and lets you remove Teachable branding. A published product, in Teachable's definition, is a live course, a coaching offer or a digital download. Memberships, community and bundles sit outside the cap, so a membership site does not use up the allowance the way a stack of live courses does. Teachable [retired Basic, Pro and Pro+](https://support.teachable.com/en/articles/11682410-new-teachable-plans-in-june-2025) and replaced them with Starter, Builder, Growth and Advanced. Older write-ups that mention Pro are talking about a plan Teachable no longer offers. Kartra Essentials charges a fee on each sale and caps contacts, pages and products. Those limits are listed in the pricing table. Starter removes the fee, offers unlimited pages and products, and includes unlimited email and SMS. Growth adds funnel simulation, surveys, quizzes and helpdesk support, plus affiliate tracking. Paying for the year costs less per month than paying month to month, on every plan listed for both platforms. | | Teachable | Kartra | | -------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Monthly | Starter $39, Builder $89, Growth $189 | Essentials $59, Starter $119, Growth $229 | | Annual rate | Starter $29, Builder $69, Growth $139 | Essentials $52, Starter $99, Growth $189 | | Sales cut | 7.5% on Starter with Teachable Payments. 0% on Builder, Growth and Custom. | 5% on Essentials. 0% from Starter up. | | What you can publish | 5, then 10, then 50 live courses, coaching offers or downloads | Essentials: 500 contacts, 5 pages, 1 product. Starter: 2,500 contacts, with unlimited pages and products | | Email and affiliates | Built-in email and affiliates from Builder up | Unlimited email and SMS on Starter. Affiliates, automations and a helpdesk on Growth | | Trial | 7-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee | 14-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee | Move from Teachable Starter to Builder when sales are already landing and you also want email and affiliates inside the school. The transaction fee is why moving up changes what you pay overall, and the higher monthly price is the tradeoff. Teachable never states the sales volume where Builder costs less than Starter. Multiply your course price by the rate in the sales-cut row. On Kartra, Starter is the plan that removes the sales fee and the page cap. Affiliate tracking arrives on Growth, along with funnel simulation and the helpdesk. Essentials charges that sales fee and caps the list, the pages and the product count. It is a poor fit for a school with several live courses. It also falls short when the launch sends a lot of email. Both pricing pages put a money-back guarantee next to the trial. On Kartra that guarantee refunds a subscription charge you have already paid. It is separate from the trial length. Teachable pairs its trial with the same kind of guarantee on its pricing page. ### A third option, if you run paid ads Paid traffic needs the ad click and the refund on the same record. Neither a course school nor a launch bundle is built for that. A team buying clicks on Meta, Google or TikTok needs clicks, orders, rebills and refunds tracked together. When the school and the email tool are separate, someone still has to merge exports before they can see which ad produced the sale. ElasticFunnels is a funnel platform for teams that run paid traffic: affiliates, product vendors, agencies and ecommerce brands. Pages, same-URL split testing, checkout, CRM and attribution sit on one data layer. Same-URL split testing is the part those teams look at first. Variants rotate on the server under a single campaign link, so the ad platform keeps the learning already on that link, and a test does not send the ad back through review. An AI builder can generate a page from a prompt or clone one from a URL. The checkout can add an order bump, a one-click upsell and a subscription. Sessions, orders, rebills and refunds share the timeline, and the CRM, automations and call center read the same record. Starter, Growth and Scale each include the same features. They differ by page views, brands, domains, team seats and automation runs. Starter is $97 a month for 50,000 page views, Growth is $197 a month for 250,000, and Scale is $497 a month for 500,000\. Billed annually, those totals are $937, $1,891 and $4,771\. Extra page views are billed as overage, and the account stays on its plan. Bot, datacenter and test traffic is not counted. Revenue through ElasticFunnels' own checkout carries a 0.5% fee. That checkout charges through Stripe, NMI, PayPal, Klarna or Authorize.net. Sales sent to an outside checkout or a network are not charged that fee. A split across several merchant accounts applies to NMI only. Each first sale is weighted across the merchant's NMI accounts, with rules for card brand, product and amount, and a daily cap on each account. The upsell and the rebill stay on the account that took the sale. Stripe, PayPal, Klarna and Authorize.net each connect as one account. The trial runs for 14 days and requires no credit card. During the trial you can set up pages, funnels and a custom domain. ElasticFunnels is newer than the platforms it competes with, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against. Until you run real volume through it, you are largely taking the vendor's word for it. Few independent reviews exist yet, because the product has only been around since 2023\. That record is too short to confirm the split-test and attribution claims before you spend. You can still use the pages, the checkout and the CRM, and judge the claims on your own traffic. Between these two, Teachable is the default for an education business on Builder or Growth, where student delivery, the apps and tax-handled checkout are the job. Choose Kartra Growth when the launch needs pages, email and checkout together, including affiliate tracking. Kartra Starter covers the launch when affiliate tracking can wait. **My take.** Name the bottleneck before you name the software. If students are getting lost in the lessons, start with Teachable on a plan that has already dropped the platform cut. If the list, the pages or affiliate tracking is what is stuck, start on the Kartra tier that includes those tools. When each sale has to be tied back to the ad that caused it, use the paid-traffic section above. The drawback of that option is how little independent writing exists about it. Our default pick ### Teachable Teachable is the default for an education business on Builder or Growth, where the school and the student area are the job. ### Frequently asked questions Is Teachable or Kartra easier in the first month? Comments from people who have tried several hosts describe Teachable's screens as the simpler set, with a ceiling once they want more control. Kartra's users describe a learning stretch before the extra tools feel worth the time. A first school follows the simpler screens. A first launch that includes pages and email in the same month is the case for accepting that stretch. Which one costs less once sales start? The low subscription is not the low cost. Each vendor's first paid row still takes a cut of sales, and the next row drops that cut while raising the subscription. At a high sales volume the cut dominates. At a low volume the subscription dominates. Your price and your expected sales decide it. The rates are in the sales-cut row. Can Kartra host the course if I leave Teachable? Kartra can host a course or a membership beside the pages and the email. That is a fair swap when the launch tools are why you are moving. It is a weak swap when you chose the school for the student apps and the tax handling, because Kartra's own comparison treats those as outside its pitch. Do I need Kartra Growth for an affiliate program? Affiliate management is listed with the Growth additions, along with automations, funnel simulation, surveys and the helpdesk. The plan under it already removes the sales cut and uncaps pages, products, email and SMS. Move up when an affiliate program or an automation is on the launch checklist. Can I send paid ads to either checkout? You can send ad traffic to a Teachable checkout or a Kartra checkout. Rotating page variants under the same campaign URL, so the ad platform keeps its learning, is a different job. That is what the paid-traffic section describes. ### What we read about Teachable #### From Teachable * #### Other sources 5 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context. 1. \[t-home\] [Teachable homepage ](https://teachable.com/) Blog 2. \[t-pricing\] [Teachable pricing ](https://www.teachable.com/pricing) Blog 3. \[t-plans-2025\] [Teachable: new plans in June 2025 ](https://support.teachable.com/en/articles/11682410-new-teachable-plans-in-june-2025) Blog 4. \[r-scale\] [r/onlinecourses: what creators pay ](https://www.reddit.com/r/onlinecourses/comments/1su73w0/which%5Fplatform%5Fdo%5Fyou%5Fuse%5Fand%5Fhow%5Fmuch%5Fdo%5Fyou%5Fpay/) Reddit 5. \[r-training\] [r/smallbusiness: hosted training programs ](https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1fptzw5/those%5Fof%5Fyou%5Fwith%5Fonline%5Fhosted%5Ftraining%5Fprograms/) Reddit ### What we read about Kartra #### From Kartra * * Funnel mapper and simulator * Checkouts and shopping cart * Plans and pricing * Native integrations #### Other sources 7 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context. 1. \[r-eco-vs-tc\] [Kartra vs ThriveCart on Reddit ](https://www.reddit.com/r/EcommerceWebsite/comments/1j5nemr/kartra%5Fvs%5Fthrivecartwhich%5Fone%5Fshould%5Fi%5Fgo%5Ffor/) Reddit, 7 Mar 2025 2. \[k-vs-tc-upsell\] [Kartra upsell notes on Reddit ](https://www.reddit.com/r/EcommerceWebsite/comments/1lwhdt2/thoughts%5Fon%5Fkartra%5Fneed%5Freddit%5Freviews/) Reddit, 1 Aug 2025 3. \[k-pricing-page\] [Kartra Plans and Pricing ](https://kartra.com/plans-and-pricing/) Blog 4. \[tp-chat-2025-04\] [Kartra reviews on Trustpilot ](https://www.trustpilot.com/review/kartra.com) Trustpilot, 15 Apr 2025 5. \[tp-hours-2025-01\] [Kartra reviews on Trustpilot, Canada ](https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/kartra.com) Trustpilot, 25 Jan 2025 6. \[tp-ticket-2025-01\] [Kartra reviews on Trustpilot, Canada ](https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/kartra.com) Trustpilot, 25 Jan 2025 7. \[capterra-support\] [Kartra vs Builderall on Capterra ](https://www.capterra.com/compare/184946-202345/Kartra-vs-Builderall) Capterra If your traffic comes from ads, start the ElasticFunnels trial. You can add a page and a domain before the trial ends. [Try ElasticFunnels free (opens in a new tab) ](https://elasticfunnels.io/?utm%5Fsource=funnelcritic&utm%5Fmedium=affiliate&utm%5Fcampaign=review) ### Related reading The [Kartra review](/reviews/kartra) walks through the product. The [pricing page](/reviews/kartra/pricing) compares the plans. A premium course brand is closer to [Kartra vs Kajabi](/compare/kartra-vs-kajabi). An email-first list is closer to [Kartra vs ConvertKit (Kit)](/compare/kartra-vs-convertkit). If you are comparing a paid-traffic checkout with this bundle, read [ElasticFunnels vs Kartra](/compare/elasticfunnels-vs-kartra). If you have ruled Kartra out, see [Kartra alternatives](/alternatives/kartra). Read the [ranked shortlist of funnel tools for startups](/best). --- [Funnel Critic](/) Independent reviews and comparisons of funnel, page and checkout tools for startups running paid traffic. Ranked from real user reports and verified pricing. 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