The Teachable alternative for creators who now sell to institutions.
You started with one course and a checkout. Now a training manager wants forty seats under her company's brand, a school wants parents to see progress, and a client wants a report on what its staff can do. That is a different product, and Teachable was never built to be it.
Who should move, and who should stay
Teachable is a course-hosting platform for creators: a course builder, a checkout, certificates and basic analytics, with Teachable acting as merchant of record so sales tax and VAT are handled for you. Lurno is a multi-tenant learning platform for institutions — one account holds a tree of sub-organisations, each with its own branding, custom domain, administrators and reports. Move to Lurno when your buyers have become organisations rather than individuals: when every client company or campus needs its own branded academy, when instructors, reviewers, mentors, managers and guardians all need different access, and when the report that decides renewal is about competencies and completion rather than sales. Stay on Teachable if you are one person selling courses internationally and you want the tax handled: Lurno has no checkout today — payments and checkout are in development — so money would keep arriving wherever it arrives now.
- Multi-tenancy
- One platform serving many organisations whose data never mixes. In Lurno each client company, campus or school is its own organisation inside a tree: its own branding, its own domain, its own administrators, its own catalogue. The operator sees the whole tree; a client sees only itself. The separation is enforced underneath the platform, not by a filter on top of it.
The two customer shapes Lurno was built for look like this. A corporate academy runs training for 15 client companies from one tenant. A K-12 publisher runs 114 schools on a single platform. In both, the unit being served is an organisation with its own staff, its own brand and its own reporting line.
Lurno and Teachable, on the things that decide this
Teachable's feature set is deliberately narrow — that is the point of it, and also the ceiling. These are the rows that decide it once an institution is the buyer.
| Capability | Lurno | Teachable |
|---|---|---|
| What the product is shaped around | An institution and the organisations inside it | A creator hosting and selling their own courses |
| Separate branded academies per client organisationTeachable has no multi-tenancy or sub-organisations; one school is the supported shape. | Nested sub-organisations, each with its own branding, custom domain and administrators | No |
| Roles for instructors, reviewers, mentors and managers | Custom roles from a permission catalogue; a role granted at a branch cascades down it | Designed for a creator and their own audience |
| Checkout, sales tax and VAT | Payments and checkout are in development — you keep billing where it is | Built in, with Teachable as merchant of record, so sales tax and VAT are handled |
| Transaction fee | None — there is no checkout to take one | 7.5% on the Starter plan |
| Published entry price | $119 / month (Team), or $101 billed annually. Sub-organisations and custom domains start at $299 / month | From $29 / month, billed annually |
| Assessment and grading | 19 question types, 7 assessment types, rubric grading, peer review, portfolios and one grading queue | A course builder with certificates and basic analytics |
| Certificates | Certificates with a public verification page | Yes |
| What the reports are about | Certified metrics on outcomes, competencies and completion risk, asked in plain language | Designed around sales rather than learning outcomes |
| What procurement asks for | audit log that cannot be quietly edited, access reviews, GDPR consent, DSAR and erasure with a two-person rule, a DPA and a FERPA addendum | Scoped for creators rather than institutional procurement |
Teachable figures checked on 24 August 2026 at teachable.com/pricing. Lurno figures are the published tiers on pricing.
What actually changes
A client stops being a coupon code and becomes an organisation
Each company, campus or school you train becomes its own organisation in your tree: its own logo and colours, its own domain with automatic TLS, its own administrators who add and remove people without asking you. You keep one catalogue and one view across all of it.
- Nested sub-organisations, so a group of twelve schools is one client with twelve children, not twelve accounts.
- Partner sign-on (silent SSO), so a client's users arrive already signed in from a portal they already use.
- Notification email leaves from the client's own domain, not yours.
You answer 'did they learn it', not 'did they buy it'
Sales analytics tell you a course sold. An L&D manager renewing a contract wants to know which competencies her team can evidence and who is at risk of not finishing. Reporting runs on certified metrics with defined dimensions, so two people asking the same question get the same number.
- Competency frameworks with evidence and automatic mastery, so a claim about a skill points at the work that proved it.
- Psychometrics with adaptive IRT/CAT for anyone whose assessments have to hold up.
- Ask in plain language; the query is validated against the metric catalogue and runs read-only under your own permissions.
Other people can run the teaching without running you
Selling to institutions means other people doing the work: contract instructors, a reviewer who only moderates grades, a client-side manager who sees their own staff and nobody else's. Roles are built from a permission catalogue, granted at a point in the tree, and reviewed on a schedule.
- Rubric grading — analytic, holistic and single-point — plus peer review and one grading queue.
- A guardian portal scoped by data category, for the schools that ask for parent access.
- Every permission change lands in an audit log that cannot be quietly edited, with access reviews on top.
Where Teachable is the better choice.
A solo creator selling courses internationally who wants tax compliance handled and does not want to think about infrastructure. Teachable acts as merchant of record, which means it — not you — is the seller of record for VAT and sales tax in the buyer's country. That is a genuinely hard problem, it is the reason a lot of creators are on Teachable, and Lurno does not solve it: our checkout is in development, so revenue would keep running through whatever you use today.
The narrow feature set is a feature too. A course builder, a checkout, certificates and basic analytics is a product one person can hold in their head. Lurno's organisation tree, permission catalogue, rubric grading and metric registry exist because institutions ask for them; if nobody is asking you, that is surface you would pay for and not use.
So stay if most of your revenue is individuals paying by card, if you are the only person who ever touches the course, and if the reporting you need ends at what sold. Come and look at Lurno when a client asks for their own branded academy, when someone else has to grade, when a school asks about parent access, or when a procurement questionnaire lands asking about audit trails and a data processing agreement.
The parts Teachable was not built to have
Nested sub-organisations
A tree, not a flat list. A publisher runs 114 schools; an academy runs 15 client companies. One catalogue, separate tenants, one view across all of it.
Your brand, your domain
White-label branding per organisation, custom domains with automatic TLS, and notification email that leaves from your own domain.
A role for everyone who teaches
Custom roles built from a permission catalogue, plus groups and a branch tree where a role granted at a branch cascades down it.
Assessment with a paper trail
19 question types, 7 assessment types, rubric grading, peer review, portfolios, psychometrics with adaptive IRT/CAT, and certificates with a public verification page.
Reporting on learning
Certified metrics with defined dimensions, plain-language questions, and competency frameworks tying a claimed skill to the evidence behind it.
Payments and checkout
In developmentDesigned, not built. Today learners are enrolled by an administrator and organisations pay you as they already do — invoice, purchase order, or the checkout you have.
The rest of the shortlist
Every comparison names who the other platform is genuinely better for.
Before you move anything
Bring the client that outgrew your course platform.
Thirty minutes, your own material, your own client list. We will build the organisation tree in front of you and be straight about what is still in development.