Thinkific

Thinkific beats the competition hands down simply because the team behind the platform care and put an enormous amount of personal effort into helping their customers. Competitors that I evaluated were more focused on their targets than our goals as a customer, Thinkific acted as a true partner during selection, onboarding and deployment. Whilst self hosted solutions might appear cheaper, in the long term you'll end up paying more in additional hosting and techstack costs, not mentioning time and headaches. Thinkific wipes out the technical headaches because it is cloud based, and truly cares about its customer's success. Thats why we selected Thinkific.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We chose Thinkific because of its price point and financial structure, the ability to customize it to suit our needs, the range of features it had, and also the look/feel of the course experience itself.

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.

Thinkific is easier to use, and has a lower price point than Teachable. Thinkific has better site tools and customization. Teachable has better marketing tools but it was not a feature we needed. Thinkific has a limited free edition. I liked the customizable branding of Thinkific. Another benefit of Thinkific was its drag and drop features to build your courses.

We started with Teachable but didn't like it because their customer support was so bad. There is a learning curve with both of them. In the beginning, it is hard to get used to the interface and create the course. All the questions come in the first two weeks, and then you will have learned your way around. Thinkific had an excellent onboarding session. They also have their own staff answer specific questions by email within 24 hours. Teachable used Zendesk people who didn't know what they were talking about and didn't respond fast enough.

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.

Prior to using Thinkific, I used Teachable free ad then a paid plan for about 18 months as it was one of the most recommended course platforms back in 2015 and 2016. I moved to Thinkific in 2017 when I wanted to try something different that offered a lot more features, integrations and flexibility.