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Thinkific

Thinkific

Overview

What is Thinkific?

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.

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Recent Reviews
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Video Reviews

1 video

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User Review: Organizational Tools Set Thinkific Apart in the Learning Management Space
02:46
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Pricing

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Start

$99.00

Cloud
per month

Grow

$199.00

Cloud
per month

Expand

$399.00

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.thinkific.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Thinkific?

Course Creation Software

A solution to turn knowledge into learning products that help to command attention, create excitement, and delight learners with a curated collection of tools and features. From online courses with connected communities to live lessons and memberships, Thinkific can be used to boost engagement and add variety to course offerings.

Websites to Market a Business

Can be used to create a professional web storefront to promote an online course — no coding skills required. Thinkific's offers a selection of ready-made, customizable themes to create a site that reflects the brand.

Income Generation By Selling

The user brings the knowledge and expertise, Thinkific brings the tools. The platform's built-in marketing and e-commerce features make it simpler to sell and promote learning products — without any annoying sales tactics.

A Learning Community

One place to build and grow a learning community. Thinkific Communities complements online course offerings with exclusive members-only content, live lessons and events, and coaching.

It offers control over content and business insights into a target audience, while students get an even better learning experience.

Business Growth

As a business's needs grow, Thinkific's apps and tools help users market a business and build online programs that scale with customers, employees, and partners.

Thinkific Videos

This is a software unboxing created by the TrustRadius team which dives into Thinkific, the course creating and certification platform. This demonstration will test the limitations of the tool, how easy it is to setup and get started. Stay tuned to the end for the final review conclusion!
Thinkific provides their learning management 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.

Thinkific Competitors

Thinkific Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Thinkific starts at $0.

Teachable, Kajabi, and Podia are common alternatives for Thinkific.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of Thinkific are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(45)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-12 of 12)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 26, 2022

The best LMS platform for both customer education and personal courses. Thinkific is the future for online learning!

Simon Dunant | TrustRadius Reviewer
Simon Dunant
Director of Online Learning
Engaging Networks (Non-profit Organization Management, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Thinkific Plus to deliver our customer education programs at scale to clients and partners and we also use it for training our internal employees.

Previously we used a different self hosted LMS platform solution which we had to put a lot of resources into managing and supporting on the techstack side which was holding us back from focusing on actually delivering our learning effectively. Thinkific solved this for us because it is a SAAS based LMS, and took away all the hosting and maintenance headaches.

Thinkific was also way more user friendly than our previous LMS, and being cloud based gives us the opportunity to easily include other business users in the administration and operation of it. Thinkific really opens up the availability of an LMS to other areas of our business, meaning we can offer the power of online education to parts of our company that didn't realise the benefits it could offer.



Pros and Cons
  • Enables course creators to deliver high quality courses very fast
  • Offers unlimited hosting for videos included in the subscription price
  • Provides an easy to use administration interface that's powerful and accessible
  • Easy to scale subscription tiers on B2C plans, cost effective highly scaleable B2B plans (Thinkific Plus) ideal for companies who want to start a customer education program
  • Amazing support and account management team - great mindset and people in the teams.
  • Built in community features lag behind other dedicated community platforms (though community isn't their main goal of course)
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
October 13, 2021

Thinkific is the best LMS on the market today.

Tameka Allen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Tameka Allen
Online Courses Consultant | Digital Marketer | Content Creator
Allen Digital Group (E-Learning, 1-10 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use Thinkific to give clients access to my online courses. Some of those courses are stand-alone digital products and others accompany my service offerings. It helps me to generate additional revenue based on work I've done one time. And most importantly, it helps me to stop trading time for money.
Pros and Cons
  • A simple user interface is very intuitive for my clients.
  • Easy to create several types of courses in minutes - no coding required.
  • Users can include different types of content in their courses - video, text, presentations, quizzes, worksheets, surveys, assignments and more!
  • The landing pages can be hard to build. The formatting doesn't display well.
  • I wish Thinkific offered support via chat in addition to email.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would highly recommend Thinkific from beginning to advanced course creators. It has all the essentials needed to launch various types of online courses. The only areas I would not recommend Thinkific for are the landing pages. It's really hard to make simple customized changes. The other part is they don't offer support via chat. It can be challenging to wait several hours to hear back from support through email. When they answer, they help you resolve the problem, but it would be helpful to hop on chat for answers to quick one-off questions. If these issues were resolved, I would rate them a 10.
September 24, 2021

Thinkific solves it for the best price, you know?

Stephanie Herrera | TrustRadius Reviewer
Stephanie Herrera
Co-Founder
Escuela de Arte Online (E-Learning, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I've found that Thinkific is the best-priced e-learning platform for my needs. I use it for my online art school and I love how everything works seamlessly. I use ClickFunnels to sell my courses and then make a connection to Thinkific through Zapier. To me, it's been the only choice, it allows me to keep track of all my students, their progress, enrollments, etc. Also I love I can just upload my video lessons directly in Thinkific without having to pay for Vimeo. I really like the look of the platform as well, it's very clean and neat. Thinkific basically solved all my e-learning needs.
Pros and Cons
  • The price for the basic tier is very good compared to other platforms and what you get in it.
  • The look and feel of the site is simply beautiful, even if I'm allowed to customize to certain extent, they maintain things very neat.
  • Allowing to upload videos directly to the platform is a lifesaver.
  • I would add some more blocks for page design to have more options as to what I can do, like a proper gallery where you can open and close images.
  • I would expand the text options within specific blocks, like being able to hit enter inside a text box and having my paragraphs separated if I wanted to.
  • Adding new integrations would be awesome, so you don't have to pass through Zapier. Maybe a ClickFunnels integration?
Likelihood to Recommend
Thinkific is definitely best suited to deliver e-learning courses. It is well designed for this, working flawlessly when it comes to course building, which is extremely easy, allowing me to upload videos directly to the lessons or in bulk if I want. The videos have a 2GB max limit, but that's more than enough to have a 20 minute lesson. Also it provides several types of lessons which I really like. For example, the Live lesson allows you to set a zoom meeting inside the platform so you don't have to deal with students making it to the meeting.
As for the less appropriate, I tried creating funnel like landing pages inside Thinkific with all my creativeness and designer skills but I utterly failed, heh. Thinkific is not that great for page design. It allows you to do a certain amount of things and that's it.
September 03, 2021

ZERO SECURITY. Use at your own RISK

RK
Rajesh Kamath
Consultant
MPowered Prosperity Projects (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I evaluated Thinkific as an online course platform for one of my clients to host their meditations and healing courses.
Pros and Cons
  • The software is relatively easy to use.
  • It is fairly restricted when it comes to site development but that is no different from similar competitive offerings.
  • More pricing options are provided vis-a-vis competing offerings but only available with higher (and more expensive) plans.
  • Most options are available with higher priced plans.
  • The biggest negative with the platform is that [in my experience] it offers ZERO SECURITY. A paid subscriber can access the content URL using a simple "View HTML" that can then be shared with anyone. Absolutely anyone.
Likelihood to Recommend
[In my experience] with no security, the platform is a NO GO for all except those who are fine with their content being pirated.

[I feel] discussions with support were more worrying. Instead of suggesting a way to fix through product development, the suggestions ranged from "most of our subscribers do not have a piracy mindset", "use script to disable right-click" (which isn't a solution since the user can easily view the page source), and such useless options. They admitted that this was an issue but neither had a timeframe to resolve nor a direction/commitment to sort this immediately.

Despite notifying the company that their documentation states the exact opposite and is intended to mislead customers, the support team agreed but the documentation (https://support.thinkific.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030721673) still remains unchanged as of date.
April 22, 2021

Hit the Ground Running with Thinkfic

Michael Chow | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michael Chow
Learning Experience Designer / Graphic Designer
ULearn.tech (E-Learning, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Before this pandemic and work from home or teaching on Zoom, I wanted to create an online course. Having an online system and teaching online are two different animals here. One leading online via Zoom means you are teaching face to face in real-time. While Thinkific, it's all Asynchronous.

There are pros and cons to both formats, but asynchronous is much easier to deal with learners in some parts. I found Thinkific an easy platform to get up to speed and running in no time at all. As long as you have the course outline, curriculum, or material, it will be a snap. If you don't, expect a bit of a climb.
Pros and Cons
  • Community forum
  • Online tutorials and videos
  • Free account to try it
  • Themes could be updated, a bit dated
  • Better user usability experience with the interface
Likelihood to Recommend
The reason I highly recommend Thinkific say over any other platform is the control of the use of your courses and how it is marketed. Better access to the funds and you can have unlimited students on their free plan and can build up to three courses. This includes all the hosting for content like videos. You'll also have access to their quizzes and surveys, as well as instant access to any revenues you bring in.
May 06, 2020

Thinkific Over-delivers for New Course Creators

Kate Murray, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Kate Murray, MBA
Digital Media Consultant
Vogue Media (Marketing & Advertising, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Thinkific as a platform to deliver several digital courses. It is used for delivering content such as video modules, text, and downloads, but also serves the purpose of both lead generation as well as customer retention efforts. The main problem it solves is delivery of digital course content to multiple users.
Pros and Cons
  • User Interface Design for the Course Creator
  • Ability to Customize Branding
  • Intuitive Flow for the Student
  • When viewing your content as a student, it does not provide easy navigation back to the Creator Dashboard which is not necessarily the most intuitive navigation for the creator.
  • With the basic plan, you don't have the ability to allow students to have a monthly payment option for purchase. For this feature, you must upgrade. I think it should be part of the basic plan.
  • I'm not a fan of their affiliate interface. It is not very robust. I actually purchased this software originally because they included an affiliate dashboard within the system making it easier to convert students into affiliates, but I quickly realized that it was not robust enough for my needs.
Likelihood to Recommend
Overall, I'm very happy with Thinkific and will continue to use it to deliver my digital courses. It's perfect for those who have only one (or several) courses. It's also a good price point at only $49 per month to get started for someone who is just dipping their toe into the pool with digital courses. When I first started creating digital courses almost 10 years ago, there were not many software options available to deliver the content. Now there are many and I have tried many and have found Thinkific to be among the best for digital course newbies.
February 28, 2020

Get your Courses up QUICK - with a platform that keeps growing.

Verified User
Executive in Product Management
Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 1-10 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Thinkific as an LMS for several online courses that have thousands of enrolled and active students and is a primary source of our business offerings and revenue. If you are looking for a way to easily offer online courses to a large community, I highly suggest checking out Thinkific.
Pros and Cons
  • It was straightforward to get everything set up and ready to go. Within a day, I had all of our payment processing systems, CRM, and WordPress website integrated.
  • It provides a great user experience for students. We have had little to no complaints about how to navigate their online courses and access their content.
  • I'd like to see their affiliate link functionality be a bit more robust and flexible. For example, we'd like to host the course landing/sales pages on our WordPress website, but to do that, we have to create a redirect in Thinkific. This makes for unique user experience if someone clicks our affiliate link - they're taken to one page and 10 seconds later redirected to another page.
  • Their quiz feature is tricky if you're trying to do something that is "self-assessment" based versus having right or wrong questions.
Likelihood to Recommend
  • I have actually already recommended Thinkific to a variety of colleagues!
  • Thinkific is excellent for anyone looking to set up an online course and doesn't want the hassle and cost of a custom platform. It can be expensive if you're going to white-label it (we do, and it costs $500/month), but that's much cheaper than the development cost of maintaining your own platform.
February 25, 2020

Simple & Intuitive Learning Management System That Looks Great & Easy to Use

Alvin Landicho | TrustRadius Reviewer
Alvin Landicho
Cloud Integration Consultant
Axle Cloud (Information Technology & Services, 1-10 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Thinkific internally to provide a basic Cyber Security learning course for every new user on our system as part of the onboarding process. We also use it as an onboarding and training tool for another client who runs a program for high school students to learn the basics of accounting and bookkeeping while being paid for actual work, like an internship.
Pros and Cons
  • Learning management system that is easy to author
  • The user interface is clear and intuitive for the end-user
  • When creating content, there are some quirks with the editor that need getting used to.
Likelihood to Recommend
We found that using the Thinkific platform was great for any self-paced learning situation. Internally for our IT company, we use Thinkific to provide a cybersecurity training course for all new users to our platform as an onboarding step to ensure that every user has a baseline level of security awareness. The platform allows us to use video, audio, slides, gifs, quizzes, and many other text editing tools to provide a varied self-pace learning environment. For another client, we were able to integrate Thinkific with a custom made gamification engine that tracked student progress and rewarded accordingly.
January 31, 2020

An LMS that works for you!

Verified User
C-Level Executive in Corporate
Accounting Company, 1-10 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Thinkific is a wonderful learning management software. It is being used across the whole organization and I recommend it to clients. This software helps us solve the problem of storing and presenting training materials. Instead of creating separate documents, videos, PDFs and PowerPoint presentations this also use to combine various types of media into one platform.
Pros and Cons
  • Classroom-style course outlines.
  • Quizzes and other knowledge checks.
  • Better corporate pricing for users that are not charging for courses.
  • Allowing the users to be split versus paid and unpaid.
Likelihood to Recommend
Online course creators are an area they do well for and seem to market to them. I would like to see a lower price point for those users that are not charging for their courses. It is well suited for finding and storing all kinds of training materials in one location.
January 27, 2020

Thinkific makes it easy to create a profitable course website

Joe Gatto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Joe Gatto
Internet Marketing Coordinator
Capstone College Partners (Financial Services, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Thinkific across the whole organization to create, host, and distribute our course to teach financial advisors how to do college planning for families with college-bound teens. Using Thinkific solved the problems of piecing together our course with various WordPress plugins, iframes, and payment processing software. We also can create a free course to generate leads by offering significant value to financial advisors who aren't going to go "all-in" on college planning but benefit from knowing more.
Pros and Cons
  • It's easy to create a course website
  • Thinkific courses look professional
  • The WSIWYG could be better
  • The templates could be slicker
Likelihood to Recommend
Thinkific is well suited to small organizations that don't have the time or skill to make a beautiful course website from scratch. It's great for start-ups and soloprenuers who want to get their message out to the world and present it professionally. It's also great for creating excellent lead magnets.
August 29, 2019

Thinkific runs a good portion of our business

Verified User
Manager in Marketing
Internet Company, 1-10 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Thinkific to house our bestselling courses which have over 200,000 students. Thinkific is one of the key tools we use to both sell and host our courses. We believe online courses are one of the most scalable businesses out there and Thinkific helps us to streamline our course sales. We actually currently have Thinkific integrated with our main WordPress website at superhumanacademy.com, so it really touches every aspect of our business.
Pros and Cons
  • Ease of use: getting started with the software is really easy
  • The product team is world-class: they listen to feedback and regularly implement suggestions that we provide them.
  • Our students love the course experience
  • We also love how easy it is to integrate with our existing tech stack—Zapier, Active Campaign, etc.
  • Upsells are tough. We have to do lots of custom stuff.
  • The checkout process is also not very customizable.
  • A/B testing options are very limited. We have to do lots of work arounds to effectively test things.
Likelihood to Recommend
Anyone looking to scale their business by leveraging online courses should be using Thinkific. We also use it for onboarding new team members, and for our new coaching program. Really anywhere where you'd want to distribute knowledge in a professional setting, I'd use Thinkific. It's not really appropriate for uses outside of video, because the page builders they have aren't the best in my opinion.
August 09, 2019

New Course Creators Ultimate Course Platform

Ayo Bamgbose, Assoc CIPD, MSc | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ayo Bamgbose, Assoc CIPD, MSc
Online digital business coach
Social Media Design School (E-Learning, 1-10 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As an online content creator and teacher, it is important that I'm able to create and host my teaching material on a mobile-friendly site that is accessible for students globally. Thinkific allows me to do just that whilst being able to integrate it with third-party tools that allow my business to work on autopilot whilst providing great online support for my students.
Pros and Cons
  • Ability to customise your school to match your branding and to therefore link to your own company website
  • Ability to upload images, videos, presentations, PDFs and audio recordings as well as create quizzes to assess your students knowledge
  • Able to drip your course content for when it's ready to be released and not be pressurized to only publish a full course when it's ready
  • Integrate with third-party tools such as PayPal, MailChimp, Google analytics and Zapier to name a few
  • Promote individual courses on your website by embedding widgets
  • Although it has some great third-part integrations it would be great if it offered more such as links with email service providers such as MailerLite
  • Assignment feature to be available on the lower tier plans
  • Improve the file size uploads for images and videos
  • Provide a lot more themes
Likelihood to Recommend
Thinkific is very well suited to start-up course creators with a low budget as it offers a free plan that currently allows you to create three courses and keep all the profit that comes from selling your courses. I love that it does not penalise you for being on a free plan with a transaction fee or withholding payment for 30 days as other course sites do.

For other new course creators needing to upload more than three courses to test out which is working best, Thinkific, unfortunately, wouldn't work for them as that's that limit. I understand the need to put limitations on the number of courses a company can create on a free plan but I think three is a little bit mean as other course sites offer up to 10.
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