Circle vs Teachable
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentTeachable compared with Circle
Not really the same product. Circle at $89 is a community platform with courses attached, with far better spaces, member directory, events, and discussion design, but takes 2 percent of paid memberships. Teachable at $89 is a course platform with a forum attached and takes nothing. If members are paying to talk to each other, Circle wins outright. If they are paying for the course and the forum is a support channel, Teachable is the cheaper honest answer.
Choose Circle if
Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax.
Choose Teachable if
Individual creators and very small businesses launching a first or second paid course who want a branded school on their own domain with branded mobile apps included, at the lowest credible monthly price, and who need a discussion area for students rather than a community as the product itself.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Circle | Teachable |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $89 per month (Professional) (14 days trial) | $39 per month (Starter), or $29 per month billed annually (7 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing. | Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers plus a custom tier, with caps on products, admins, active students, and imported students, and a transaction fee that applies only on the entry plan. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days on Professional and Business | 7 days, plus a 30 day guarantee |
| Best for | Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax. | Individual creators and very small businesses launching a first or second paid course who want a branded school on their own domain with branded mobile apps included, at the lowest credible monthly price, and who need a discussion area for students rather than a community as the product itself. |
| Setup time | A working community in an afternoon. Signing up, creating spaces, connecting a custom domain, and wiring Stripe are all self-serve and take a few hours combined. Getting the content and the onboarding sequence right is the part that takes weeks. | Hours, not days. Teachable is the fastest platform in this category to get from signup to a live sales page, which is exactly why it remains the standard first course recommendation. |
| Learning curve | Moderate for the admin, low for members. The spaces model, permission layers, and paywall rules interact in ways that reward reading the docs before you build, and communities that improvise their structure usually rebuild it once. Members need no instruction. | Low. Products, sections, lectures, and pricing plans are the only concepts, and the community adds two more (spaces and roles). There is no funnel or automation model to learn because there is no funnel builder. |
| Platforms | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app, Branded iOS and Android apps on Circle Plus, Custom domain hosting | Web, Branded iOS and Android apps included on every plan |
| Compliance | GDPR, Payment processing handled through Stripe | GDPR, PCI DSS handled through teachable:pay and its processors |
| Founded | 2019 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Remote-first US company | New York, New York, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Owned by Hotmart, a Brazilian creator commerce company |
Strengths and limitations
Circle
Strengths
- The broadest feature set on a published price in this category: discussion, courses, events, live streaming, chat, payments, affiliates, a website builder, and native mobile apps all on the $89 tier.
- Unlimited members on every plan, so growth does not trigger a pricing cliff the way it does on Heartbeat or Bettermode.
- Custom domain and a white-labeled member experience from the entry tier, which is the thing free chat platforms fundamentally cannot offer.
- Native iOS and Android apps with push notifications keep engagement materially higher than a browser-only forum.
Limitations
- No free plan at all, which makes Circle a poor fit for a small free community and a hard sell for anyone testing whether a community is worth running.
- The transaction fee stacks on Stripe and is charged on gross, so a low-margin membership business pays Circle more than the subscription costs and cannot reach the 0.5 percent rate without a sales conversation.
- Branded mobile apps and custom SSO are both locked behind the unpriced Circle Plus tier, so the two things a maturing community most wants next are exactly the two things with no published cost.
- Admin and moderator seat caps of 3 and 10 on Professional are tight for a volunteer-moderated community and force an upgrade for reasons unrelated to features.
Teachable
Strengths
- Branded iOS and Android apps included on every plan including the $39 entry tier, which no other course or community platform matches at that price.
- Zero platform transaction fee on Builder and above with teachable:pay, so the effective cost falls to card processing plus a flat subscription as revenue grows.
- Custom domain on every paid plan with a genuinely branded member experience.
- The simplest course builder in the category, which is why it remains the usual recommendation for a first course.
Limitations
- The community is the weakest of any product in this category that charges for one: no leaderboards, no gamification, no serious events layer, no chat, and limited discovery within the discussion itself.
- Starter at $39 has no community at all and takes 7.5 percent of every sale, which makes it misleading as a headline price.
- One admin user on both Starter and Builder. The second team member costs $100 a month more.
- Imported student caps of 5, 50, and 1,000 make bringing an existing audience onto a cheap plan effectively impossible.
Pricing compared
Circle
Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing.
- Professional$89
- Business$199
- Circle PlusCustom
For a community that is genuinely a business, Circle is fairly priced and hard to assemble from parts. Courses, events, live streaming, native mobile apps, a custom domain, recurring billing, affiliates, and search over unlimited history at $89 a month would cost more than that in separate tools, and the tools would not share a member identity. For a community that is not yet a business, Circle is expensive in a way the sticker hides: $89 plus 2 percent plus Stripe plus $99 of Email Hub is a real monthly commitment for a group that could sit on a free Discourse instance or a Discord server. The cutoff is roughly whether the community produces revenue. Above that line Circle is good value, below it the fee structure works against you.
Teachable
Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers plus a custom tier, with caps on products, admins, active students, and imported students, and a transaction fee that applies only on the entry plan.
- Starter$39
- Builder$89
- Growth$189
- CustomCustom
Builder at $89 a month with a 0 percent platform fee, a custom domain, branded iOS and Android apps, and a community is one of the best value packages in this category, and at high revenue Teachable is cheaper than almost everything else here because it takes no cut at all above Starter. The value collapses in two places. Starter at $39 is a trap for anyone with real sales, since 7.5 percent on $5,000 costs more than four Builder subscriptions and it has no community anyway. And the single admin seat on both Starter and Builder means a two person team pays $189, at which point Kajabi's much larger bundle is only slightly more. The community you get for the money is functional rather than good: no gamification, no real events layer, no chat. Judged as a course platform with a student forum, this is excellent value. Judged as a community platform, you are paying for something else and getting the forum as a bonus.
Editorial verdict on each
Circle
Category LeaderCircle is the safe default for a community that is actually a business. Nothing else on a published price puts discussion, courses, events, live streaming, payments, affiliates, a custom domain, and native mobile apps in one product, and the company behind it is large, profitable, and shipping. Buy it if you are charging members and want the whole membership experience under your own brand without stitching five tools together. Do not buy it for a free community, because there is no free plan and the value proposition collapses without revenue to justify it. And go into the pricing with clear eyes: the honest monthly cost is the $89 plus a percentage of everything you sell plus Email Hub, and the exit cost is a discussion archive that will not move anywhere useful. Those are acceptable terms for a real membership business and bad terms for an experiment.
Read the full Circle profileTeachable
Teachable is the cheapest credible way to run a branded course business, and its community is a fair bonus rather than a reason to buy. Builder at $89 a month, or $69 annually, gets you a custom domain, branded iOS and Android apps, ten products, coaching, an affiliate program, a discussion forum, and a 0 percent platform fee, which at $50,000 a month in revenue makes it one of the cheapest platforms in this category on total cost. The Starter plan should be treated as a demo rather than a plan, because 7.5 percent on real sales costs more than upgrading and it has no community anyway. The genuine reservations are the single admin seat below $189, the very tight imported student caps that punish anyone bringing an existing audience, the absence of any email marketing, and a community product that has barely moved in three years and is comfortably beaten by Circle, Skool, and Heartbeat. Buy Teachable for the course, the checkout, and the branded app. Do not buy it because you want people to talk.
Read the full Teachable profileCircle profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Teachable last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.