After 6 months of use...
I switched from Teachable to Forento about 6 months ago and have identified a few major flaws in it’s use. However lets’s talk about the pros!
-The design is brilliant, I loved every part of the user interface and fluditiy when viewing my course
-The custom domain was easy to setup and connect
-Upload speed was pretty decent
-Incedible value for money IF you only host one course
Which leads me on to the cons:
-You can’t manually add students into one specific course. If like me you have a multi tier mentorship and add users frome external platforms, there is no way of adding students into one speicific course of yours. Once they have access, it’s to the overall dashboard where all of your courses are displayed.
-If you have taken payment outside the platform, the only way for them to get access to the course internally is by marking the course as free… which if you are hosting multiple paid courses across a tiered mentorship systems proves extremely problematic.
-If a course is set as free, and a student begins the course, then you switch it back to paid on Forento, they can no longer acess the training material
-Once you upload your videos, make sure you have a backup and you are not able to re-download your own content
Customer support has been mehhh, 50-50. Sometimes I’ll get a reply within a few days, sometimes it can take over a week.
The team have told me the above will eventually become available on a subscirption based model (was told this would roll out last week but then recieved no communication from them).
If you have just ONE course, then by all means - it’s a great platform, for a great cost.
If you offer a tiered structure, you may want to look elsewhere. I’ve found onlinecoursehost.com (also offered on AppSumo) has resolved all of these issues. The interface is more old school but functionally, it’s ticked all the boxes.
Adrian-forento.io
May 9, 2024Hi jaywells, thank you for taking time out of your day to share your thoughts about Forento in a review.
I understand you're happy with the general product experience, but miss features for taking external payments. One of the reasons there's no way to assign access to a product for a specific member is our sales commission model.
As you mentioned in your review, we have been working on an upgrade that will allow creators to use external payment gateways. The upgrade enables creators to either manually assign access to products for members, or set up automated processes through Zapier. This upgrade is available to all LTD members as of earlier today.
We also built a feature that allows creators to download their video content from Forento, at your request. However, I realize it was published a day after you posted the review.
If you have any questions or want to share additional feedback, feel free to do so here or in the live chat on our website. Again, thank you for the review.
//Adrian at Forento