Whop vs Teachable

Affiliate disclosure: we earn a commission when readers sign up to Whop through our links. We have no affiliate relationship with Teachable. The sections where Teachable wins are there because they are true.

Teachable is a lecture hall. Whop is a storefront. A lecture hall is purpose-built for one thing: delivering a structured course with rows of seats, a projector, and completion certificates on the wall. Excellent if that is exactly what you need, but it charges fixed rent whether the seats are full or empty. A storefront does not care what you sell. A course, a community, a coaching call, a Discord server, a PDF, a signal group, all gated automatically on payment, with no rent until something sells. And that storefront sits inside a marketplace where 22.5M+ buyers walk past. Most creators come to this page thinking they are choosing between two course platforms. The real question is whether you need the lecture hall or the storefront.

The fee headlines push you toward the wrong answer. Teachable's Starter plan reads "7.5%" and Whop's reads "3%," so Whop looks cheaper at a glance. It is, but not for the reason the numbers suggest. The Starter plan stacks that 7.5% platform fee on top of card processing of about 2.9% + $0.30, which lands the effective take rate near 10.4% per sale, higher than Gumroad. On a $997 course that is roughly $102.93 gone before you see a cent. Whop's all-in effective rate is closer to 5.7% to 6%. Below roughly $1,483/month in revenue, Whop is cheaper in absolute dollars. Above it, Teachable's Builder plan flips the math, but only if you actually use what it sells beyond the bare course player.

We cover the real all-in fees at three revenue tiers ($1K, $5K, and $20K/month), the feature parity table, the exact crossover where Teachable stops costing more, and the honest cases where Teachable is the right call. We have an affiliate relationship with Whop and none with Teachable, so weight our enthusiasm accordingly. The Teachable-wins-here sections exist because they are accurate. If you already know you are launching small and need something that sells, gates access, and does not freeze mid-launch, try Whop free.

Short answer: Whop wins for first-time sellers, community plus course bundles, anyone under roughly $1,483/month, and anyone in a Stripe-flagged niche, because it has no monthly fee, bundles dispute handling, and adds marketplace discovery. Teachable wins above that revenue threshold for mature course creators who need LMS-grade features: branching quizzes, completion certificates, compliance enforcement, and clean management of large catalogs.

What Whop and Teachable actually are (and why the comparison matters)

Before any fee math, the framing has to be right. These are not two interchangeable course platforms. They overlap on delivering a video course, but they are architecturally different products built for different jobs.

Teachable is a learning management system first. Its core is the course builder, lesson player, drip content, quizzes, completion certificates, progress tracking, and student dashboards, with payments layered on top through Stripe. It is engineered to deliver a structured, self-paced course experience and to prove that students completed it. If your business is the curriculum, Teachable is the lecture hall built for it.

Whop is a creator monetization layer first. Its core is checkout, access gating (Discord, Telegram, course modules, Zoom links, files), marketplace discovery, and payout rails, with a course player added on top. It reports 22.5M+ users, 211K+ sellers, and $3.4B+ paid out. It gates Discord and Telegram natively, acts as a partial Merchant of Record (US and EU/UK VAT), and handles disputes. No monthly fee. Our full Whop review covers the storefront and fee structure end to end.

The overlap is the course player. The difference is everything around it. Teachable wraps the course in an LMS. Whop wraps it in a storefront and a marketplace. That distinction decides the whole comparison.

The real fee math: who keeps more at $1K, $5K, and $20K/month

This is the centerpiece, and it is the part every existing article on this query skips. The two platforms use opposite pricing models, so the winner changes with your revenue. We assume US domestic card transactions and an average sale value of $297 (a mid-tier course or membership). For how Whop's rate is built, see our full Whop fee breakdown.

Fee inputs (verify before relying on these)

• Whop: $0 monthly. 2.7% + $0.30 card processing, plus a 3% platform fee on gating features, for an effective rate of roughly 5.7% to 6%.
• Teachable Starter: around $39/month plus a 7.5% platform fee plus card processing of about 2.9% + $0.30, for an effective rate near 10.4% per sale.
• Teachable Builder: around $89/month as of 2026, with the platform fee dropped to 0%, leaving only card processing of about 2.9% + $0.30.

One note on the Teachable numbers: plan prices shift, and the figures above reflect published schedules as of 2026. Confirm Builder pricing and the Stripe processing rate on Teachable's official pricing page before you commit. We mark these as approximate on purpose.

Three revenue scenarios

The pattern is the whole point. Whop's per-transaction model is cheap when volume is low, because there is no fixed cost dragging on you while you find your audience. Teachable Builder's fixed fee plus 0% platform fee is cheap once volume is high enough to amortize the subscription across many sales. The crossover lands near $1,483/month in gross revenue, which is exactly when the lecture-hall analogy clicks: below it you have not filled the seats, above it you have. For course creators whose priority is cutting the per-sale platform cut entirely, our guide on selling online courses without transaction fees maps out which platforms charge none.

Two callouts the headline numbers hide. First, the Teachable Starter plan is almost never the rational choice: at about $533/month in revenue, the 7.5% platform fee alone matches the roughly $50/month gap up to Builder, so anyone above $533/month should be on Builder or on Whop, not Starter. Second, all of this assumes US domestic cards. International cards add a surcharge on Whop and standard Stripe international rates (around 3.9% + $0.30) on Teachable, which nudges both effective rates up.

Where Teachable genuinely wins (be honest here)

Skipping the Teachable wins would make this a shill, and readers and search engines both punish that. Teachable has real advantages, and at scale they are decisive.

• Deep LMS features. Branching quizzes, completion certificates with customizable templates, enforced lesson order (students cannot skip to the final module), detailed progress dashboards, and SCORM-compatible content import. If your course has graded assessments, certification value, or legal compliance requirements (HR training, professional certification), Teachable is built for it. Whop's course player is functional but is not a learning management system.
• Large course catalogs. Builder allows 5 products, Growth 25, Advanced 100. If you run an academy with ten or more courses, Teachable's catalog architecture handles it more cleanly. Whop has no product cap, but its storefront UX is built around featured products, not sprawling catalogs.
• Native student mobile app. Teachable includes iOS and Android apps where students access courses on the go in a branded experience. Whop has a mobile app too, but Teachable's course-player UX is more polished for pure LMS delivery.
• Built-in email marketing. Teachable bundles basic email sequences and abandoned-cart recovery from Builder upward. Whop has no native email tool, so you pair it with ConvertKit, Brevo, or similar. This is the same gap you see when you look at how Whop compares to Kajabi: all-in-one suites bundle email, Whop does not.
• Cost at scale. Above roughly $1,483/month, Teachable Builder's fixed fee plus 0% platform fee beats Whop's ~6% effective rate. At $20K/month the gap is roughly $531/month. That is real money, and the more you sell, the wider it gets.

The honest take: if your revenue is consistently above $1,500/month and your course genuinely needs quizzes, certificates, or compliance enforcement, Teachable Builder is the right call. You are the mature-course archetype. You have filled the seats, so the fixed rent pays for itself, and you are buying the lecture-hall fittings (certificates, graded assessments, completion records) that Whop does not provide.

Where Whop genuinely wins

The cases where Whop is clearly the right call are not about shaving a few dollars off fees. They are structural.

• Zero fixed cost at launch. $0/month is not a gimmick. A creator selling their first $497 course to twenty students does not owe a monthly base fee before a single sale closes, so there is no breakeven-to-profitability risk. Teachable charges you the moment your trial ends, sale or no sale.
• The marketplace moat. Whop's 22.5M+ users browse and buy organically. No LMS competitor has a discovery surface like this. Publicly cited figures: Iman Gadzhi made $25M+ on Whop, TJR runs $1M/month, Airrack hits $250K/month. Teachable has no marketplace, so every buyer must come from your own ads, list, or SEO.
• Multi-product storefronts. Coaching call booking, Discord access, course modules, and downloadable worksheets, all under one Whop storefront, all gated automatically on payment. Teachable sells courses. Anything adjacent (community, files, live access) needs separate tools.
• Account safety on high-risk verticals. Teachable processes through Stripe. If you sell coaching, financial education, trading signals, or "make money" content (the exact niches Stripe flags as elevated risk), you inherit Stripe's risk engine. Whop was built knowing these are core creator verticals, and its compliance reviews trigger at predictable revenue milestones rather than at random. If you have lived through it, our guide on what a Stripe account freeze actually costs you is worth reading before you commit to a Stripe-dependent platform.
• Dispute handling. Whop "automatically handles and fights disputes on your behalf," helping protect from holds and account closures. Teachable does not fight chargebacks for you, that process runs through Stripe directly and the creator bears the full burden. For coaches and infopreneurs where dispute rates run 0.5% to 1.5%, that difference is material.

Which platform to pick: an honest decision tree

No hedging. Read the condition that matches you, then act on the verdict.

If you are deciding between platforms more broadly, our guide to the best payment processor for online courses ranks the full field, and our list of Teachable alternatives that drop the monthly fee covers seven platforms beyond this head-to-head.

Migrating from Teachable to Whop

If you have already decided to switch, here is the checklist. Budget for a 4 to 8 week overlap so no student loses access mid-move.

1. Export your student email list from Teachable as a CSV, then re-import as contacts in Whop or your email tool.
2. Download every video file before canceling Teachable. Videos on Teachable's CDN are not portable, so download the originals or keep your own copies.
3. Rebuild the course curriculum structure in Whop's course builder. Budget one to three hours per course.
4. Recreate affiliate links and coupon codes.
5. Redirect Teachable URLs to your new Whop storefront pages with 301 redirects if those landing pages had SEO traffic.
6. Notify existing students of the move with a re-enrollment invite link in Whop.
7. Plan for the fact that Teachable subscriptions do not auto-transfer: existing subscribers must re-enter payment details on Whop, which is why the overlap period matters.

Ready to migrate? Create your free Whop seller account here, no credit card needed.

Whop vs Teachable: the honest verdict for 2026

Teachable is for creators who have already filled the lecture hall. If your revenue is consistently above $1,483/month and your course genuinely needs quizzes, certificates, compliance enforcement, or large-catalog management, Teachable Builder keeps more of your money and gives you the LMS depth Whop does not match. We are not going to pretend otherwise, because at scale the fixed fee plus 0% platform fee is the cheaper structure, and the certification features are real.

Whop is for everyone still finding the audience, and for everyone whose product is more than a standalone course. No fixed rent, marketplace discovery across 22.5M+ buyers, native Discord and Telegram gating, dispute handling, and account safety on the exact verticals Stripe flags. The fee math favors Whop below $1,483/month, and the use-case match favors Whop for communities, bundles, and high-risk niches at every revenue level. $3.4B+ paid to sellers, 211K+ creators, no subscription. For most readers of this site, that is where to start, and you can read the full hands-on write-up in our six-week Whop test.

Frequently asked questions

Is Whop better than Teachable for selling online courses?

Neither is universally better. Whop wins on cost below roughly $1,483/month, plus marketplace discovery, multi-product flexibility, and account safety on high-risk verticals. Teachable wins above that threshold if you need LMS-grade features like branching quizzes, completion certificates, and compliance enforcement. For most creators just starting out, Whop's $0 monthly fee is a decisive advantage.

What are Teachable's real fees in 2026?

The Starter plan runs around $39/month plus a 7.5% platform fee plus card processing of about 2.9% + $0.30, for an effective rate near 10.4% per sale. The Builder plan (around $89/month as of 2026) drops the platform fee to 0%, leaving only processing, which is far cheaper at scale. Teachable eliminated its free plan in 2025 with no grandfathering. Verify current numbers on Teachable's pricing page before committing.

Does Whop have a course player like Teachable?

Yes, but it is not a full LMS. Whop supports video upload, drip content, chapters and lessons, and file gating. It does not support SCORM, branching quizzes, or completion certificates. For a standard creator course (video modules plus PDFs plus community), Whop's player is sufficient. For certified training programs or courses with legal compliance requirements, Teachable or Thinkific are better built.

What is the breakeven point between Whop and Teachable Builder?

Approximately $1,483/month in revenue. Below that, Whop's roughly 6% effective rate is cheaper in absolute dollars than Teachable Builder's fixed monthly fee. Above it, the math flips. At $5,000/month: Whop around $300 versus Teachable Builder around $234. At $20,000/month: Whop around $1,200 versus Teachable Builder around $669.

Can Teachable freeze my account?

Teachable itself does not directly freeze accounts, but its payments run through Stripe, which can. Coaching, "make money" programs, financial education, and trading signals are all Stripe elevated-risk categories. A launch spike, a dispute rate above roughly 0.75%, or a sudden volume jump can trigger an automated Stripe hold, locking funds for 90 to 180 days, regardless of which platform sits above it. Whop was built knowing these verticals exist and runs compliance reviews differently.

Does Whop have a marketplace like a course directory?

Yes. Whop's marketplace has 22.5M+ users who browse and buy products directly. This is Whop's single biggest structural advantage over every LMS competitor, including Teachable, Kajabi, and Thinkific. None of them have an equivalent discovery surface. Publicly cited figures: Iman Gadzhi made $25M+ on Whop, TJR runs $1M/month, and Airrack hits $250K/month.

What happens to my Teachable students if I switch to Whop?

Existing Teachable subscribers must re-enter payment details on Whop, there is no automatic migration. Export student emails from Teachable, send a re-enrollment sequence via Whop or your email platform, and plan a 4 to 8 week overlap. Video content must be re-uploaded (download your originals before canceling Teachable), and the course curriculum must be rebuilt manually.

Is Teachable worth $89/month?

At Builder tier, yes, if your revenue is consistently above roughly $1,483/month and you need LMS features. Below that threshold, you are paying for a lecture hall you are not filling. Whop gives you a storefront with no fixed rent and a built-in audience. The monthly fee becomes rational when the alternative (Whop's ~6%) costs more in absolute dollars and when you genuinely need advanced quizzes, certificates, or large catalog management.

Can I use Whop and Teachable together?

Technically yes. Some creators host course content on Teachable and gate access or sell memberships through Whop. The double overhead (the Teachable subscription plus ~6% on Whop transactions) is only rational above $5,000/month where the split serves a clear purpose: Teachable LMS depth for compliance or completion tracking, Whop for marketplace discovery and community gating. For most creators, pick one.

Last reviewed: 2026-06-14. Pricing data sourced from official Whop and Teachable documentation. Teachable plan prices are marked approximate and reflect published schedules as of 2026, verify current figures before relying on them. Effective rates may differ based on country, currency, plan, and feature mix. WhatPayment earns a commission on Whop links. We have no affiliate relationship with Teachable. Read our affiliate disclosure.