Is Heartbeat or Teachable cheaper?

Heartbeat starts at $49 per month, or $40 per month billed annually (Build) (14 days trial). Teachable starts at $39 per month (Starter), or $29 per month billed annually (7 days trial).

Heartbeat 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 assessment

Teachable compared with Heartbeat

Heartbeat is a community platform with courses and events attached, built around chat that feels familiar to anyone coming off Slack, and its discussion product is far better than Teachable's. Teachable is the better commerce engine, with unlimited video hosting, order bumps, upsells, affiliates, certificates, and branded mobile apps at every tier. If the members are there for each other, Heartbeat; if they are there for the course and the forum is a support channel, Teachable.

Choose Heartbeat if

Coaches, cohort operators, and creators running a chat-heavy paid community of a few hundred to a few thousand members who want Discord's conversational feel with a paywall, a course builder, automation, and their own domain, and who value real-time energy over threaded permanence.

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	Heartbeat	Teachable
Category	Community	Community
Starting price	$49 per month, or $40 per month billed annually (Build) (14 days trial)	$39 per month (Starter), or $29 per month billed annually (7 days trial)
Pricing model	Flat monthly subscription banded by member count, with a separate percentage transaction fee on everything sold through Heartbeat's checkout that falls as you move up tiers.	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, no credit card required	7 days, plus a 30 day guarantee
Best for	Coaches, cohort operators, and creators running a chat-heavy paid community of a few hundred to a few thousand members who want Discord's conversational feel with a paywall, a course builder, automation, and their own domain, and who value real-time energy over threaded permanence.	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 live community in an afternoon. Channel structure, a course outline, a landing page, and Stripe connection are all self-serve, and the custom domain is included from the entry tier so you are not deferring that step.	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	Low for anyone who has used Discord or Slack, which is most of the target market, and that familiarity is the main argument for the chat-first model. Automation workflows are the one area with a real learning curve, and they are also where most of the operational value sits.	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 Scale, 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	2020	2013
Headquarters	New York, New York, United States	New York, New York, United States
Ownership	Venture-backed, angel and seed stage	Owned by Hotmart, a Brazilian creator commerce company

Strengths and limitations

Heartbeat

Strengths

The chat-first structure genuinely produces a different community feel from forum-shaped competitors, and voice and video rooms create spontaneous conversation that scheduled events cannot.
A custom domain on the $49 entry tier, which almost nothing else in this category offers at that price.
Unlimited channels, courses, events, and documents on every plan, so the entry tier is feature-complete rather than crippled.
Native iOS and Android apps included from the entry tier, which is a meaningful engagement advantage over web-only platforms like Bettermode and Discourse.

Limitations

Member-count pricing bands are the wrong shape for free communities, since 5,000 members costs $149 a month whether or not any of them pay you anything.
The 5 percent Build transaction fee is the highest published rate among serious platforms here, and stacking it on Stripe means roughly 7.9 percent all-in on the entry plan.
The branded mobile app requires the $849 Scale tier, which is a very expensive way to get your own icon on a phone.
The step from Grow to Scale is a 5.7-fold price increase triggered by member count, with no intermediate tier to soften it.

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

Heartbeat

Flat monthly subscription banded by member count, with a separate percentage transaction fee on everything sold through Heartbeat's checkout that falls as you move up tiers.

Build$49
Grow$149
Scale$849

Heartbeat is priced well at the bottom and awkwardly at the top. Fifty dollars a month for a custom domain, unlimited courses and events, mobile apps, a member directory, and a real checkout is the best entry-level package in this category, and the 14-day trial with no card required makes it genuinely low-risk to try. The problem is the shape of the curve. Member-count banding punishes free growth, the 5 percent Build fee is steep enough to matter as soon as revenue is real, and the leap from $149 to $849 is severe for a community that has grown members without growing income. The sweet spot is a Grow-tier community: a few thousand members, real revenue, 2.5 percent fees, and unlimited workflows for $149. Either side of that band, a competitor is usually cheaper.

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

Heartbeat

Heartbeat is the best answer for a specific and common situation: you have a community that behaves like a Discord server, and you want to charge for it without losing what makes it feel alive. Channels, threads, and voice rooms preserve the real-time energy, while courses, documents, workflows, and a checkout make it a business, and the custom domain on the $49 plan undercuts everyone. The catch is the pricing shape. Member-count bands punish free growth, the 5 percent entry fee is the steepest here, and the $149 to $849 cliff arrives on member count rather than on revenue. Buy it for a paid chat-first community in the few-hundred to few-thousand range, ideally sitting on the Grow tier where the economics are genuinely good. Look elsewhere if your community is free and growing, if you need SSO or public search visibility, or if a lightly funded startup holding your subscription revenue is a risk you would rather not take.

Read the full Heartbeat profile

Teachable

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 profile

Heartbeat 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.