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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

(46)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
Most Important Features
  • Hosting courses
  • Accepting payments
  • The app store
  • Live sessions via Zoom
Return on Investment
  • Quick return on investment
  • Helps create passive revenue
  • Saves time from doing 1:1 work
Alternatives Considered
Thinkific offers a stable tech platform (fewer glitches and downtime), has no transaction fees and has more features than Kajabi, Teachable, and Podia combined. When stacking them against one another, it's clear Thinkific is the better choice. In my opinion, it's the best LMS on the market today and it keeps getting better.
Other Software Used
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.
Most Important Features
  • The price is fair. Basic tier is $49/month or $39/month payed annually, and it has all you need to get your online school all set and making money.
  • As I said before, direct video uploading to the lessons is awesome. Definitely the best for my type of school, which is all done in video.
  • Being able to connect it to my ClickFunnels account through Zapier. If I couldn't do this, I would not use Thinkific, period.
Return on Investment
  • As a startup school, it was hard at first. Even paying $49 a month makes it hard when you don't have students. They do have the Free tier, although it lacks quite a bit of stuff to actually make it work.
  • The free lessons should be controlled better. With this I mean that someone has to make an account in your platform to watch a free lesson, and it fills up the platform with unwanted traffic. I would not ask for an account to watch a lesson.
  • It's been great to not have to worry about students while they work through the lessons. The platform works so well by itself that it allows you time to do other things.
Alternatives Considered
ClickFunnels is great for funnels, but as of now, it does not do well with e-learning. Maybe they'll change that in ClickFunnels 2.0. But for now, I use Thinkific because I need a place where the students can come into their own dashboard, find all the courses they have purchased on a single place and be able to track their progress.
Other Software Used
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.
Thinkific Feature Ratings
Return on Investment
  • 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.
Alternatives Considered
I have used Kartra, Kajabi, WishList Member, and ClickFunnels to deliver digital content in the past. Out of all of these platforms, I selected Thinkific because overall, it just worked better. I very much dislike when software tries to become something it's not, and this is happening a lot lately with different technology. The company decides to pivot and tries to add something to its tech stack and it's completely inferior. For example, Thinkific has a 'sales page builder' and aims to help course creators sell their course, however, it's not that good. Why? Because Thinkific is a course delivery platform, not a sales page builder! I think software needs to be phenomenal at what they do and stop worrying about trying to be something they're not. As another example, ClickFunnels is a great sales page builder but a terrible course delivery platform. So the reality is, you need both. But in the scheme of things, you have Kajabi who is trying to be everything to everyone and tries to combine it all and they have failed miserably. I'm not a fan of Kajabi at all. Thinkific's user interface is much, much better.
Support Rating
10
I had a question when I first started using the software and they literally replied within an hour. Sometimes companies (such as ClickFunnels) outsource their customer service to countries where English is not the primary language, and the barrier is steep. I have a background in technology and web development, so I consider myself a very experienced user of this type of software, and when I asked a question of a ClickFunnels representative, they didn't even properly understand the question. It was a lot of back and forth (and lost revenue) that could have been avoided, all because the customer service rep did not understand English. I am a fan of Thinkific because they have great customer service.
Other Software Used
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.
Thinkific Feature Ratings
Return on Investment
  • Internally the free tier was sufficient for our needs.
  • Our other clients are on paid tiers, and the ability to integrate with other systems was worth it
Alternatives Considered
While researching for a learning management system, our main criteria were ease of setup, simplicity of the user-facing interface, and cost. Moodle was a product we looked at as the community edition was free. It was taken off our list as it required a significant amount of setup and didn't seem very easy to use. Thinkific is so simple to use and intuitive.
Support Rating
9
We haven't needed to contact support as their knowledge base provided all the answers to our questions. The majority of the platform was intuitive and easy to use and navigate, so that is why we have given it a high support score. We didn't even need to contact support when we were integrating with our gamification engine.
Other Software Used
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.
Thinkific Feature Ratings
Return on Investment
  • We recently moved to a subscription model, and Thinkific helped us to bring in recurring revenue through that.
  • We also used to sell a lot via webinars, and Thinkific helped to deliver that product.
Usability
10
Out of the box, Thinkific is very user-friendly. Though if you want more customizations, you do have to understand some code.
Support Rating
10
Their support team is incredible. They get back to you really fast and are very attentive and willing to help. They often take our suggestions into account and create product updates for us. If they don't have a solution right away, they work to make sure it gets solved.
Alternatives Considered
We have lots of our courses up on Udemy, but you don't have that much control over the courses because it's a marketplace. We've also experimented a little bit with ClickFunnels and we thought Thinkific was the best.
Other Software Used
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