SchoolMessenger, a West Corporation solution managed by West Education, the company's education unit, is a school community software featuring secure email, social media monitoring, school website, and mobile app.
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Thinkific
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Thinkific headquartered in Vancouver provides their system for online course and content creators to distribute their lessons to unlimited students, featuring content schedule distribution, some marketing features, certifications, as well as quizzes and surveys.
$0
per month
Pricing
SchoolMessenger
Thinkific
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Start
$99.00
per month
Grow
$199.00
per month
Expand
$399.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SchoolMessenger
Thinkific
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Thinkific customers save 25% when they subscribe on an annual basis.
This is great for schools who want a bulk package of services at a competitive cost. Older website designs limit functionality and have a very square design. SchoolMessenger has more modern templates with newer capabilities which is better for visitors of the site. The functionality is great for parents who are accessing the site on the go, which happens more often than you know.
Thinkific is well suited for users who who want to make an impact teaching online, whether that's to B2C with independent course creators, or B2B where you're training clients, partners and internal staff for a company (which is how we deployed the Thinkific Plus plan). Deployment or migration is easy and the speed and ease of course creation and publication is second to none. It's probably the easiest LMS to administer whilst still providing a powerful suite of tools that give you the insight you need to grow your course business.Thinkific is ideal for creating a customer education program for your business, automating onboarding of client training and training partners too. The range of plans Thinkific offer equally make it ideal for smaller personal course creators too.
We will continue to use Thinkific for our company pieces of training. Until we are able to create our own in house portal, this is an excellent source to have a learning management software tool that is easy to use and easy to implement without much technical training to administer
SchoolMessenger serves our main purpose of sending out emergency notifications and notices to parents. It is great to cut down on the paper use and the ability to attach documents to our notes. We have used this to send home notifications from our Parent-Teacher Organization. Parents have thanked us for sending a back ups due to papers being misplaced and knowing that they have a backup through email.
I've used other learning management systems over the last 5 years and believe Thinkific is easily one of the ones that make getting started with zero tech skills or know-how easy peasy. Everything is laid out very well in how to set up your online school, create your courses and market and sell your courses. They provide a lot of great videos tutorials and offer a useful webinar series to help you understand how to market your courses like a pro
I've never had any issues with accessing Thinkific but I can see when it has been a problem for others. When I get updates on when they are doing maintenance to their platform I tend to make sure that is not the day I plan to be working on my school so as not to get frustrated
Overall, this is a good, effective, and cost-efficient product. It is missing some key functionality we had with a previous program which limits my total score, but I still think a lot of school districts can get a lot out of SchoolMessenger. The features and functions they do include work well.
When it comes to the performance of Thinkific for me I find that it's good but could be better. I tend to think that the larger the files and videos you upload on your courses may add to the impact of it's uploading (not sure if that's actually true or not). But overall the performance of Thinkific via my tablet and desktop is very good when I have a fast speed broadband speed
The support is fantastic. I have never had such complete support from a technology service. Every issue has been resolved while I was on the phone. I never had to wait for a callback or an advanced support tech. Their people are very well trained in their product and how to meet their customer's needs.
I rate Thinkific a ten because of its excellent customer service, ease of use, high-quality product, fair price with excellent ROI, and because they keep making improvements. Using Thinkific solved the problems of piecing together our course with various WordPress plugins, iframes, and payment processing software. It's easy to create a course website for people who can't write code.
The implementation period took time like it would in earning and using any new tool. It was more about being organised, having better time management processes in place and having people you were able to reach out to if you were every able stuck. The other key ting with the implementation period was giving yourself a realistic time scale to get the job completed.
Overall, if I had the choice, Thinkific would be one of the tools in using an online course for instructors and private institutions. The higher-tiered plan is a bit steep for contractor instructors who may need to pay for it themselves to show the course would be a good course for the school to create. The free 3-course is helpful without the bells and whistles. The free program offers you to create three courses and keep all the profit from selling your courses minus a small transaction fee that won't break the break.
The opportunities to scale your online course business with Thinkific is endless. They provide a great range of plans with features, integrations and support to suit the needs of any business as different levels. The key here is knowing where to start with the budget you have and then knowing when it's time to scale up and the tools and resources it will require.
Ability to attract leads with a FREE membership library option
Ability to quickly and easily deliver course content without much of a learning curve for course creators
If you need affiliates to help sell your product, even though they advertise that they have the option for affiliates, if you want to do it right you must use an additional integration for affiliate software.
