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Migrating from Teachable: What Actually Changes

Moving from Teachable to Classentra changes how you bill, how you teach, and how your students show up. Here's the practical readout — what changes, what you keep, and what you don't.

By Classentra Editorial

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

Billing routes through your Stripe account, not theirs. On Teachable, every transaction goes through Teachable as the merchant of record (or via Teachable Payments). They take a transaction fee on every plan except the highest. On Classentra Pro and Business, payments use Stripe Connect — funds land directly in your Stripe account at 0% platform fee, and you get standard Stripe payouts on Stripe's standard schedule.

In dollars, on a $5,000 / month course business: Teachable Basic at 5% fee = $250 / month gone before Stripe's own ~$150. Classentra Pro at 0% fee = $0 platform fee plus the same ~$150 Stripe. About $250 / month back to you on $5K monthly gross.

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 native. Students join from inside the course, attendance is captured automatically, 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 custom domain. On Pro and Business, point your existing CNAME at Classentra and we issue the cert. Your storefront URL doesn't change for your students.
  • 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. Pro at $59 / month matches Teachable Basic on price and adds live cohorts. Business at $179 / month covers multi-instructor.
  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.