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
Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
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Pricing
Thinkific
Higher Logic Vanilla
Editions & Modules
Start
$99.00
per month
Grow
$199.00
per month
Expand
$399.00
per month
Essential
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Corporate
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Enterprise
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Enterprise Plus
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Thinkific
Higher Logic Vanilla
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Thinkific customers save 25% when they subscribe on an annual basis.
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.
For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well. I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.
Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool.
Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur.
Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website.
There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with.
In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently.
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
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
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
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.
From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or InVision, and it outdoes Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason Vanilla was selected. However, the features are better on a couple more seasoned platforms and more equipped to deal with issues and technical problems.
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.
