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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

(1-4 of 4)
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.
Most Important Features
  • Quick and easy to use and publish content
  • Cloud based platform
  • Excellent set of features for creators and learners alike
  • Easy to navigate for students
  • Flexible admin user structure with useful permission levels
Return on Investment
  • Reduced time, money and reliance on external hosting and techstacks
  • Increased our speed of training delivery to our clients and partners
  • Increased the number of new students and the engagement of our courses
  • Opened up our LMS to other parts of our business
Alternatives Considered
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.
Other Software Used
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
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.
Most Important Features
  • NA
Return on Investment
  • [In my experience] with no security, the platform is a NO GO for all except those who are fine with their content being pirated.
  • Unfortunately discovered the security issue after four months of site development.
  • Probably would be wise to check if this is an issue with other competing online course platforms as well.
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