Thinkific Review: The Best Online Course Creation Platform
Whether you are creating a course to supplement your existing business or creating an online course empire, you need to have a platform that will take you to the next level and help you share your knowledge with the world.
Thinkific is one of the first choices that come to mind when we think of these goals.
If you are interested in Thinkific, this review can help you out.
In this Thinkific review, I will walk you through the various features, costs, pros and cons about this LMS.
I aim to help you determine if it is, or is not, an excellent platform for your online course website or business.
Table of Contents
What is Thinkific?
Thinkific is a learning management system (LMS) designed to make the lives of online course creators easier. If you are looking to create an online course business, build a website, or sell online courses, Thinkific is a great option to consider.
Thinkific is also an education platform that lets you create a webpage to help you create and sell your own courses. It is designed to make course creation easier for people who want to build a website.
History & Team
Thinkific was founded in 2012 by Greg Smith while he was teaching an LSAT class on the weekends. Because he had to take the time to create everything for his class, he did not have time to spend with his family.
Smith took what he learned and along with his team, including Matt Payne, Matt Smith and Miranda Lievers, he created Thinkific to help people design courses and build their websites.
Thinkific has 500+ dedicated employees and is represented in over 35 countries.
Around 48% of their leadership team positions are held by women. Their educational software platform helps you market, create, deliver, and sell your own online courses.
How much does Thinkific cost?
Thinkific offers four different pricing levels. All of their pricing plans include Thinkific’s core features.
| Feature | Teachable | Thinkific | LearnWorlds | Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free Plan | Yes (limited) | Yes (1 course) | No (30-day trial) | No (14-day trial) | No (14-day trial) |
| Starting Price | $39/mo | $49/mo | $24/mo | $39/mo | $69/mo (annual) |
| Transaction Fees | 5% on free plan | None | None | None | None |
| Course Builder Key Feature | Good (drag and drop) | Excellent | Advanced (interactive) | Simple | Good |
| Website Builder | Basic | Good | Good | Yes | Yes (full) |
| Email Marketing | Basic | Basic | Basic | Yes (built-in) | Yes (advanced) |
| Community Features | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Certificates | Yes | Yes | Yes (advanced) | No | No |
| Affiliate Program | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Best For | Creators, easy setup | Free start, course-focused | Interactive learning | Digital products + courses | All-in-one business |
| Visit Teachable | Visit Thinkific | Visit LearnWorlds | Visit Podia | Visit Kajabi |
The core features are email and phone support, instant access to your funds, choice of site language, full e-commerce, secure cloud hosting, easy drag and drop course builder, discussion forums, build out your entire website, upsell offers, student notifications, multiple instructor profiles, and easy, built-in SSL certificates.
Let’s understand the different plans that Thinkific offers:
Thinkific Plans
Thinkific Free
Yes. Thinkific offers a free tier.
The free plan includes the core features and, content hosting, limited courses but unlimited students, surveys and quizzes, and instant access to your funds.
Thinkific Basic
The next level is the basic level.
The basic level costs $49 per month. It includes everything from the free level plus unlimited courses and students, manual student enrollment and export, coupons, Zapier triggers, email and WordPress integrations, email students, custom domain, drip schedule content, and affiliate reporting.
Thinkific Pro
The next level, which is the most popular level, is the pro level.
The pro plan costs $99 per month. It includes everything from the basic level plus communities, 2 site administrator accounts, assignments, 5-course administrators/authors, membership and bundles, priority support, private and hidden courses, advanced customization, advanced course pricing options, and certificates.
Thinkific Premier
The premier level is the final level.
The premier plan is charged $499 per month. Included in the premier level is everything from the Pro level plus an onboarding package which includes an onboarding call, training, and a launch preparedness review.
The premier level also includes 5 site administrative accounts, single sign-on (SSO), 15 group analysts, and 50-course administrators/authors.
The premier level also includes an unlimited growth package.
The unlimited growth package includes the bulk enrollment of students, bulk emails, groups, brilliant exam integration, advanced segmentation, Zapier actions, communities, webhooks, infusionsoft integration, public API, removable branding, and import students.
Features
Thinkific offers 100s of features to help you build your courses and the website.
Here are the core features:
- Instant access to your funds
- Student notifications
- Upsell offers
- Full e-Commerce
- Discussion forums
- Easy drag & drop Course Builder
- Secure cloud hosting
- Build out your entire website
- Choose your site language
- Multiple Instructor profiles
- Email and phone support
- Easy, built-in SSL certificates
Let’s talk about these in detail.
Drag & Drop Course Builder
Thinkific’s drag & drop course builder features include the ability to drag and drop and quickly upload quality content to your curriculum.
Integrations
They also support Captivate, Articulate, video, discussions, quizzes, downloads, Typeform, Google Docs, texts, and surveys. As usual, Thinkific provides video hosting for your course.
Thinkific also helps you market your site with a complete set of business tools.
Customizations
You can also customize and restrict the running of your course system with features such as membership sites, private and hidden courses, evergreen and expiring content, prerequisite lessons, cohorts, multiple instructors, and drip schedule content.
You can showcase your courses with customizable themes to help get more attention and create a more professional online presence. You can use your own domain name for a much better search presence.
Payment Methods and Subscriptions
You can offer subscription courses and membership sites on your webpage. You can also use coupons and promotional features to boost your sales. Payments on Thinkific are 100 % safe. They accept all credit cards and charge in over one hundred currencies. You can get paid immediately.
Marketing Tools
Thinkific also has advanced marketing tools available. These tools include direct tracking, customized commission rates, integration with over one thousand marketing and business apps, advanced data tracking including Facebook, Google Ads, and retargeting campaigns, and easily connecting with your favorite email providers such as Mailchimp and Convertkit.
Student Friendly
With Thinkific, you can offer students language controls and unlimited replays of lessons.
You can also set up customized completion pages and certificates acknowledging the completion of a course.
You can track your students’ progress and keep them motivated by sending out automated reminders and progress emails.
You can optimize and monitor your business with cohort and group reporting, data exports, detailed segmentation, and more.
Security & Backup
Thinkific also offers data security features. Their security features include built-in security and SSL, secure cloud hosting with daily backups, 24 hours a day and seven days a week monitoring with 99.9% uptime, and instant access to updates.
Support
Thinkific offers a blog, help center, and resources, including video tutorials to help you set up your site and grow beyond.
Thinkific also offers online Thinkific experts.
These course creation experts can help you with course setup, content migration, and curriculum design. They also have site creation experts who can help you with your site setup, website design, and customized web development.
They also have marketing experts who can help you with customer acquisition, branding, and marketing along with technical implementation experts who can help you with SSO, custom solutions, and integrations.
How to Create a Course with Thinkific?
There are not too many steps involved.
All you need is to visit the Thinkific course creator page (one month free trial for pro plans).
Enter your email address and follow the instructions.
Once you are done with the registration, you will have to create a school. You can use ready-made templates to create and customize schools as per your needs. Every template, except the blank one, comes with detailed animated instructions on how to use that.
Once you have chosen your template you can add your content by using Thinkific’s bulk importer or you can create your own content with the tools provided by Thinkific.
Who uses Thinkific?
Thinkific is used by 50,000+ solopreneurs, businesses, and educators. The list includes the greats of Hootsuite, Wishpond, Breakthrough Academy, Influitive, Market Campus, Lewis Howes (The School of Greatness), Mimi G (Sewing Academy), Jonathan Levi (Become a SuperLearner), Dana Malstaff (Boss Mom Academy) and more. You can explore their online courses to understand what kind of websites you can create with Thinkific.
Thinkific Review
Thinkific
Thinkific is designed to host your website and make your life easier by having easy-to-follow templates for course design and built-in tools to help keep your website running and growing. I recommend this to solopreneurs and businesses looking to create online courses and also to online education startups that are willing to score big.
Product SKU: THINKIFIC3
Product Brand: Thinkific
5
Pros
- Intuitive and user friendly
- Free to start
- Best onboarding experience online
- Ideal for all types of courses
- Effective high tier pricing
- Unlimited students
- Unlimited courses on paid plans
- Quizzes & surveys
- Content hosting
- Instant access to your funds
Cons
- API access is available only on the premier plan
Disclaimer: This site is reader-supported. If you buy through some links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I trust and would use myself. Your support helps keep gauravtiwari.org free and focused on real-world advice. Thanks. - Gaurav Tiwari
I think the review undersells the limitations on the free tier. Most users will hit the limits within a week and be forced to upgrade. Worth being more upfront about that.
Yaar finally a review thats not paid promotion. Subscribed.
Been using Thinkific for about 4 months now. Mostly agree with this review but the support is slower than i expected. Otherwise solid product, doing what it promises.
Long-time reader of your blog and finally getting around to commenting on this one. Thinkific has been on my radar for nearly a year now, and your review was the deciding factor for me actually pulling the trigger. I run a small consultancy focused on helping early-stage SaaS founders with their content and SEO setup, and i’ve evaluated probably 15-20 different tools in this category over the past three years. The way you broke down the actual feature differences from the marketing claims is exactly the kind of analysis thats missing from most review blogs these days, which all read like thinly-disguised affiliate content.
What surprised me most after switching was how much the dashboard architecture matters in day-to-day use. The competitors i tried before all had cluttered interfaces that made the learning curve unnecessarily steep, and Thinkific feels noticeably cleaner once you spend a few hours with it. The keyboard shortcuts are also genuinely useful — i didnt expect that to matter as much as it does, but when youre running through 30+ tasks a day it adds up. Three months in, no regrets — and i’ve recommended it to half a dozen clients already.
I came across your blog while researching Thinkific for my online business. Your review is by far the most thorough one i’ve found – and ive read at least 8 different reviews before this. The pros and cons section was particularly useful because most other reviewers seem to gloss over the limitations.
My own experience after 3 months of usage matches yours pretty closely. The customer support has actually improved since you wrote this review. I had a billing issue last month and they resolved it within 24 hours which was impressive.
One thing i’d add for other readers – if you’re outside India, double check the pricing because it shows in INR by default and the conversion to USD wasnt obvious initially.
While the review is well written, i feel youre being too generous with the rating. Used Thinkific for 2 months and the bugs were a constant headache. Maybe newer versions are better but my experience wasnt great.