Teachable vs an LMS: Selling Courses vs Delivering Training

Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi and their peers are course selling platforms. Moodle, TalentLMS, Docebo and Cornerstone are learning management systems. People conflate them constantly, and the mistake is expensive because you usually discover it after building everything.

What course platforms are for

Selling to the public. They include payment processing, checkout pages, email marketing, affiliate tracking, and student communities. The learning features are deliberately simple because the buyer is a creator, not a training department.

What an LMS is for

Delivering and evidencing training inside an organisation. Enrolment rules, completion tracking, compliance reporting, certification expiry, manager dashboards, SSO, and audit trails. Payments are usually absent because nobody's buying — they're assigned.

The question that decides it

Who pays, and what happens if someone doesn't finish?

• An individual pays, and non-completion is their problem → course platform.
• An organisation pays or mandates it, and non-completion is a compliance risk → LMS.

Where people get caught

Selling to businesses on a course platform

You build on Teachable, then a corporate client asks for completion reports for 200 staff, SSO, and evidence for their auditor. Course platforms generally can't do this well.

Running public sales through an LMS

Possible, usually miserable. Checkout, marketing pages and email sequences are either bolted on or absent.

Assuming SCORM is portable between them

Most course platforms don't support SCORM at all. If your content is a SCORM package, it may simply not upload. Conversely, LMS platforms often can't host a video-course-plus-community experience.

The both-markets problem

If you genuinely sell to individuals and to organisations, you'll likely need both — and content that can exist in both places. That's the practical argument for authoring your course independently of the delivery platform, and exporting to whatever each channel needs: SCORM for corporate LMSs, HTML or embedded video for a course platform.

Building natively inside one platform is faster at first and much more expensive to unwind later.