Kartra vs Teachable 2026: all-in-one marketing or simple course selling?

Kartra vs Teachable is a choice between doing everything in one place and doing one thing simply. Teachable is a course platform focused on getting a product live and selling it with as little setup as possible. Kartra is a marketing platform that runs funnels, email, checkout and memberships for the whole business. This compares their plans and fees, shows which plan each feature needs, and says plainly who each one is for.

The short answer

If your plan is to record a course, put it on a sales page and start selling, Teachable is the simpler and cheaper route. Every plan includes unlimited students, quizzes, drip content, order bumps, upsells, iOS and Android student apps, and a checkout that calculates and collects US sales tax, VAT and GST for you on Teachable's own payments.

If you sell through webinars, lead magnets and email sequences, and the course is one product among several, Kartra is the stronger tool. Its funnels, tag-based email and SMS automation, checkout, affiliate program and helpdesk all share one contact record. Teachable's marketing tools are lighter, and it expects heavier marketing to happen in other tools.

What each platform is built for

Teachable is built around the product. You create a course, a coaching offer, a digital download or a membership, give it a sales page and a price, and Teachable handles checkout, payments, tax, student access and payouts. Its plans are counted in products, and its extras, such as an affiliate program, certificates and student referrals, are there to help one creator sell more of what they have made.

Kartra is built around the customer journey. One account covers landing pages and funnels, email and SMS, checkout and payments, membership sites, video hosting, webinars, calendars, a helpdesk and an affiliate program. Everything shares one contact record, so a purchase can tag a contact, start a sequence, unlock a membership and credit an affiliate in one step.

One gets your course selling this week. The other builds the machine that sells it for years.

That is the trade-off running through the whole comparison. Teachable wins on speed, simplicity and the student side. Kartra wins on marketing depth.

Pricing compared

The two platforms limit different things. Teachable limits how many products you publish and allows unlimited students on every plan. Kartra limits contacts, so every lead on your list counts, and it removes the product limit from Starter upwards.

Teachable is cheaper at every matching tier, and its Builder plan, the first without a transaction fee, costs less than Kartra Starter on both monthly and annual billing. Teachable says annual billing saves 22%, and Kartra quotes savings of up to 22%. On Teachable, a published course, coaching offer or digital download counts as one product, while memberships, bundles and unpublished drafts do not count.

The limits matter more than the prices for most creators. A creator with a large free email list and three courses fits Teachable Starter or Builder, but would need Kartra Growth or Professional because Kartra counts every subscriber. A creator with 20 small products and a modest list fits Kartra Starter, but would need Teachable Growth for more than 10 products.

Transaction and processing fees

Both entry plans take a share of your sales, and on both the fee disappears on the next plan up.

Teachable Starter charges a 7.5% transaction fee. Builder, Growth and Custom charge 0% when you use Teachable's own payments, called teachable:pay. Processing is the same on every plan: 2.9% plus 30 cents for US cards and 3.9% plus 30 cents for international cards, with higher rates for PayPal and buy now, pay later. US schools that connect their own Stripe account instead pay a 2% integration fee per transaction, and lose Teachable's automatic tax handling.

Kartra Essentials charges 5% of every sale and rebill, invoiced monthly even if you pay for the plan annually. Starter and above charge no Kartra fee, and you pay your processor its normal rate on every plan.

The break-even points are low. On monthly billing, Teachable Builder becomes cheaper than Starter at about $670 a month in sales, and Kartra Starter becomes cheaper than Essentials at $1,200. If you expect real sales, budget for the second plan on either side. Our Kartra review covers the Essentials fee rules in full.

The cost of the features you actually want

Here is the cheapest plan on each side for the features that usually decide this comparison.

For a creator selling a handful of courses, Teachable Builder at $89 covers the domain, email, affiliates and 0% fees that Kartra spreads across Starter and Growth. For a business that lives on funnels and automation, Kartra includes tools Teachable does not offer at any price.

Courses and the student experience

Teachable gives students more on every plan. Courses include lesson comments, drip schedules, auto-graded quizzes, short answer assessments and course compliance settings that stop students skipping ahead, and students can learn in Teachable's iOS and Android apps. Growth adds certificates, bulk student imports and free subtitles and translations. Teachable also includes AI tools for creating course content.

Kartra delivers courses through membership portals with multiple access levels, granted or removed automatically by purchases and tags. Essentials allows one membership or course, and Starter removes the limit. Kartra hosts your videos and can use viewing behaviour in automations. Its pricing page does not list certificates or a student app, and its pages disagree on whether surveys and quizzes start on Starter or Growth.

Email, funnels and automation

Kartra is the clear winner here. Email and SMS sit in the same system as your pages, checkouts and memberships, and automations can react to a page visit, a purchase, a video watched, a form submitted or a tag applied. Kartra includes 100 pre-built campaigns, a funnel mapper, and advanced automations from Growth.

Teachable covers the marketing a course needs at the point of sale: sales pages, coupons, order bumps, upsells, bundles, abandoned cart emails and student referrals on every plan, with built-in email marketing from Builder. It does not list a funnel builder, SMS or tag-based automation, and its plans limit third-party integrations to 1 on Starter, 3 on Builder and 5 on Growth, so a creator with a separate email platform should check what they need to connect.

Checkout, payments and tax

Teachable's checkout is one of its best features. On teachable:pay it supports cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and buy now, pay later, lets students pay in their local currency, and calculates, collects and remits US sales tax, EU and UK VAT and other digital taxes for you. It can also pay your affiliates and co-authors automatically through an optional service called BackOffice. Teachable plans auto-renew until cancelled, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing cycle.

Kartra's checkout connects to Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Square and Authorize.Net, sells one-off products, subscriptions and payment plans, supports upsells and order bumps, and can be shown to buyers in 24 languages and 21 currencies. You choose the processor, which gives more control. Kartra's pricing page does not describe tax collection and remittance, so check its checkout settings or plan to handle sales tax and VAT yourself.

Coaching, support and running the business

Teachable sells coaching as a product type alongside courses and downloads, and memberships let students pay for ongoing access. Email support comes with every plan, real-time support from Builder, and priority support on Custom.

Kartra goes further into the operations of a coaching or service business. Booking calendars come with Starter, webinars are part of the platform, a customer helpdesk with support tickets arrives on Growth, and helpdesk live chat on Professional. For a coach who wants bookings, follow-up emails, payments and support in one place, that is a lot of separate software Kartra replaces.

Ease of use

Teachable is the easier of the two by a distance. Its plans, admin and checkout are designed so a first-time creator can publish and sell without technical help, and that simplicity is the main reason people choose it. The 7 day trial is short, so plan your first product before you start it.

Kartra takes longer to learn because so much is connected. Understanding how tags, lists, products, memberships and sequences interact is the real work. The pre-built campaigns help, and the 30 day trial gives more room to learn.

Can you use Kartra and Teachable together?

You can, through Zapier, with Kartra running pages and email and Teachable delivering the course. It is an expensive pairing, though. Teachable's Zapier and webhooks start on Growth at $189 a month, and Kartra's Zapier access needs API access, which starts on Growth at $229 and has to be requested. You would also split contact and purchase data between two systems. Most creators are better off picking one.

Which should you choose?

If none of those fits cleanly, ask whether you need a place to sell your course or a system to run your marketing. For the first, take Teachable. For the second, take Kartra.

Common questions