LearnWorlds vs Thinkific 2024: Which Is Better?

You’re looking for that ideal platform to create and sell your courses. And you’ve narrowed your choices down to Thinkific and LearnWorlds.

When you consider overall, both platforms provide similar features. They are hosted platforms with a strong focus on course creation and engagement. So, how do you decide which platform is better for you?

That’s where this detailed LearnWorlds vs Thinkific comparison comes in! We’ve tested and evaluated both platforms’ usability, features, pricing, and support. Below, you can find a detailed breakdown of each platform, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.

What Are LearnWorlds and Thinkific?

LearnWorlds and Thinkfic are cloud-based online course platforms that allow you to create, market, and sell online courses. Both platforms take care of hosting, maintenance, and updates.

Feature-wise, both platforms have the tools you need to upload and structure your content, deliver your course, and assess students’ knowledge.

Moreover, both platforms have tools to build your website and monetize your products, even though they aren’t all-in-one solutions.

At a high level, both LearnWorlds and Thinkific are similar, with a few differences here and there. This comparison review will discuss each of them in detail.

We’ll start with the user interface, which is one of the deciding factors when choosing between Thinkific vs LearnWorlds.

Ease of Use

We’ve tested both LearnWorlds and Thinkific extensively.

Based on our experience, Thinkific is super easy to use. Its clean interface and intuitive navigation make it fairly simple to access all the platform’s settings and start building a course.

You can easily access and manage your learning products, add and design site pages, and more from the left-side menu.

Moreover, individual tools are user-friendly. Take the course builder, for example. The drag-and-drop editor is intuitive and supports features like bulk uploading that make course creation on the platform a breeze.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s admin interface

Our experience with LearnWorlds is on the other side of the spectrum. To begin with, the user interface is cluttered. Whether on the main dashboard or within the course builder, the UI is busy with options and settings.

For example, when you hover over any lesson in the course builder, a series of icons appear on the right, and it’s unclear what they represent.

Similarly, you can’t add a video directly to your lesson in the course builder. You must upload it to the video library before adding it to your lesson.

There are other user experience issues like this. For instance, when you work in the page editor and select an element, its settings appear on top of the page elements instead of on the side, making it challenging to work with.

A walkthrough of LearnWorlds’ admin interface

Overall, Thinkific wins in terms of ease of use with a more intuitive interface and user-friendly tools.

Course Creation and Engagement

Your course platform must provide you with robust tools to build your course and interact with students. Let’s see how LearnWorlds and Thinkific perform in this regard.

Course Builder

Both Thinkific and LearnWorlds have drag-and-drop course builders that support a range of content formats, including video, audio, PDFs, text, quizzes, live lessons, and even SCORM/HTML5 files. Both platforms also provide unlimited hosting for your content, including videos.

Regarding course structure, both platforms let you add chapters and lessons, allowing for easy organization of your course material.

However, the similarities end here, and Thinkific takes the lead in terms of flexibility and ease of use.

Firstly, Thinkific’s course builder is more user-friendly. It has a cleaner user interface but is also easier to work with.

For example, when you create a video lesson in Thinkific, you can upload a video file directly to the course builder or choose one already uploaded to the video library.

On the other hand, in LearnWorlds, there’s no option to upload the file directly while creating a video lesson. You must first add it to the video library and then use it in your lesson, which is an extra step.

There are several such instances where LearnWorlds makes things more complicated than they need to be.

Secondly, Thinkific’s course builder supports bulk uploading so that you can upload multiple files in one go, and the platform will automatically turn them into lessons.

LearnWorlds doesn’t have a similar feature. While you can add multiple videos to the video library, you’ll need to add them to lessons one-by-one, which is much more time-consuming.

Thinkific’s bulk lesson uploader in action

Lastly, Thinkific gives you more flexibility in adding multiple content types to the same lesson. For example, you can add multiple videos to one lesson or add text to a video lesson, which isn’t possible with LearnWorlds.

So, Thinkific is a clear winner regarding the course creation process.

Learning and Engagement

This section will discuss how Thinkific and LearnWorlds approach learning and engagement within their course platforms.

Quizzes and Certificates

Both Thinkific and LearnWorlds have flexible assessment tools. You can:

• create a quiz with multiple-choice and multiple-response questions
• create question banks and randomize questions
• import questions in bulk
• create assignments to enable students to upload a file
• set automatic grading or evaluate manually

However, LearnWorlds has a slight edge here with its additional options.

It supports more question types, including match and sort and fill-in-the-blanks. You can also create timed exams and limit retakes.

Now, both platforms also have tools for creating certificates.

With LearnWorlds, you have a default certificate template, and you can customize the fields to include the student’s name, course name, and completion date.

There’s no easy way to customize the certificate design. If you want a more personalized look, you’ll have to create a PDF template outside the platform and upload it.

Meanwhile, Thinkific has a proper certificate builder that comes with pre-built templates. It further lets you customize the design and choose the fields to include.

The process of creating a certificate is more streamlined in Thinkific. You can create and assign a certificate design to one or more courses.

So, Thinkific’s certificate creation tool is more flexible and easier to use.

Content Dripping and Locking

Whether you create a course with Thinkific, you can make the entire course available to your students immediately. You can also create a drip schedule and release your content after a specific number of days or on a particular date.

LearnWorlds also offers similar options for content dripping. The only difference is that LearnWorlds lets you send email notifications to students when new content is available, while Thinkific doesn’t have this feature.

Regarding course compliance, both platforms allow you to make a lesson prerequisite, meaning your students can’t move forward without completing a particular lesson first.

Moreover, you can force students to watch a certain % of video content or pass a quiz before they can move forward.

Overall, both platforms offer similar features for content dripping and locking.

Online Community

Both LearnWorlds and Thinkific let you create a community within the platform where you and your students can create discussion posts and interact. You can also create spaces inside your community to keep it organized.

However, there are some notable differences between the two. Let’s first talk about what Thinkific Communities does better:

• You can create live events inside your community.
• You can restrict access to communities based on specific courses or membership levels, which isn’t possible in LearnWorlds.
• You can create multiple communities.

On the other hand, LearnWorlds has several features that Thinkific doesn’t:

• You can create posts with native videos and polls.
• It automatically creates spaces for every course. The spaces are also available inside the course player, which is convenient for students.
• It also supports direct messaging between members.

So, LearnWorlds has the upper hand in communities, even though both platforms can’t fully replace a dedicated community builder. They miss out on important features, such as livestreaming, group chats, and personalized notifications.

Live Classes

This round has no winner, as both platforms have a Zoom integration for adding live lessons to your courses. You can set it up inside the course builder, which is convenient. This is especially useful for hosting cohort programs.

However, neither platform has native livestreaming capabilities.

Interactive Video and eBooks

Interactive videos are one of LearnWorlds’ key features. It lets you add text, images, quizzes, and other interactions to your videos, making it useful to keep your learners engaged.

You can also create interactive eBooks in LearnWorlds. You can use this feature to make a well-formatted ebook in LearnWorlds and let students take personalized notes and highlight text passages.

Meanwhile, Thinkific doesn’t support these features out of the box, even though you can add them and more via its app store. For example, you can use:

• ThingLink for creating interactive videos
• Wobo for creating workbooks and enabling note-taking
• Pointagram for course gamification

Thinkific is the only hosted course platform that supports this kind of extensibility. The app store has dozens of apps to extend your learning platform.

Content Delivery

Both LearnWorlds and Thinkific have a similar course player layout, with the navigation tab on the left and the content area on the right side. Students can also see their progress, add comments, and even go full-screen.

The difference is that LearnWorlds has more course player skins and allows you to remove the side navigation menu altogether. You can even hide the Next and Previous buttons.

Conversely, LearnWorld’s course player doesn’t look very polished. The fonts are small, the design seems outdated, and the layout isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as Thinkific’s.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s course player

A walkthrough of LearnWorlds’ course player

Regarding mobile experience, both course players are mobile responsive.

Additionally, Thinkific has a free mobile app that allows students to access courses and communities on the go.

LearnWorlds, on the other hand, doesn’t offer a free mobile app for the end-users.

Both platforms allow you to get branded mobile apps for extra fees. However, unlike Thinkific, LearnWorlds doesn’t have a fully managed service for mobile apps.

Instead, you must use its app builder to design and customize your app. Plus, you’ll need to handle things like creating app store developer accounts and ensuring your app settings meet submission criteria.

With Thinkific, you only need to submit your requirements and let the team work on the app.

Now, LearnWorlds has more features for copyright protection. Thinkific covers some basic features, such as preventing students from copying texts and downloading videos, while LearnWorlds also lets you add watermarks to your videos and PDFs with users’ details.

Finally, Thinkific has a unique feature where you can create custom pages, add content, and restrict access based on purchase plans, making it handy for delivering membership sites.

Overall, Thinkific does better in the content delivery and mobile learning experience.

Site Design and Customization

As you’d expect from hosted course builders, Thinkific and LearnWorlds take care of the technical side of things. Both platforms provide an SSL certificate, website hosting, and a free subdomain.

They also allow you to white-label the platforms and use them as your own. That includes a custom domain, no platform branding, branded mobile apps, and even white-label email notifications.

Additionally, you can change the site language and also modify the default site text.

Now, let’s explore the tools you get for creating website pages and customizing the look and feel of your website.

Website Themes

Regarding site themes, Thinkific and LearnWorlds have ready-made templates you can install and customize to your liking.

Although featuring three well-designed templates, Thinkfic’s theme library is modest compared to the nearly 50 site themes LearnWorlds offers.

These Site Flavors are essentially templates created for sites from different industries. Once you select a flavor, you can customize it by changing the default color palette, font, and layout.

Meanwhile, Thinkific has three website themes, each supporting different theme styles.

You can further customize the themes by changing colors and fonts, but you can’t customize the theme layouts.

However, Thinkific allows you to edit the theme code directly if you have coding knowledge. This allows for more customization options.

Page Builder

Once you pick a theme for your website, you need a page builder to design your pages.

And since both platforms have a page builder, the question is not whether you can add pages but how intuitive that process is.

We’ll start with Thinkific, which has a section-based page builder.

You can easily add pages to your Thinkific website by adding pre-built sections. The platform lets you add texts, images, videos, countdown timers, course curriculum, and pricing details.

You can then easily reorder them thanks to the drag-and-drop functionality. Customization-wise, you can make small changes, such as setting each element’s focal point, alignment, and background image. But that’s pretty much all you can do.

As far as LearnWorlds’ page builder goes, it’s much more flexible, and, except for occasional bugs during the page creation and editing process, it allows you to create a page quickly.

First, you have a library of page templates you can customize and build upon.

Like Thinkific, the page builder has pre-built page sections, but it also has dozens of templates for these sections that make customization even easier.

Additionally, everything you see on a page, from image dimensions to margins, paddings, and scrolling effects, can be customized.

However, the page builder has several user experience issues. For example, the editing area can quickly become overcrowded, and you might need to close several modal windows to see the page you’re editing.

Moreover, it isn’t fully drag-and-drop, and you can’t move entire sections by clicking and dragging. There’s no sidebar menu for managing sections either, so you must scroll up and down the page frequently.

Nonetheless, LearnWorlds has a more flexible page builder and offers more customization options than Thinkific.

Blogging Tools

With LearnWorlds, you can create a blog on your course website. All you have to do is enable the blogging functionality, and you can share your expertise, insights, and updates with your students.

The blog editor looks similar to the page builder, providing great flexibility to create visually appealing blog posts. Apart from text and media elements, you can add lists, forms, buttons, accordions, and more to make your blog posts interactive.

Moreover, the platform allows you to add blog categories, customize the blog appearance, and optimize posts for search engines.

Thinkific doesn’t come with built-in blogging tools. You can connect Thinkific with WordPress to build your blog or install the DropInBlog app from Thinkific’s App Store.

Sales and Marketing

Your job doesn’t end once you publish your courses; you need to promote and sell them. We’ll now compare the sales and marketing features of Thinkific and LearnWorlds.

Product Pricing Options

Both platforms let you set different course pricing options, including one-time fees, recurring subscriptions, and payment plans.

For subscriptions, you can charge monthly and yearly and offer a free trial.

However, there are a couple of differences in subscription pricing options.

Thinkific lets you charge a custom initial payment for subscriptions, a feature not available in LearnWorlds. In contrast, LearnWorlds allows you to set subscription durations in days and weeks.

Moreover, both platforms let you create bundles. In Thinkific, you can combine courses and communities, while LearnWorlds only allows bundling courses.

Lastly, you can create coupons and offer your courses at discounted prices on both platforms.

Payments and Checkouts

Regarding payment gateways, it’s straightforward in LearWorlds. You connect your Stripe/PayPal account to receive student payments.

Conversely, Thinkific’s default payment gateway is Thinkific Payments, a Stripe-powered service. It allows you to accept payments via credit cards and digital wallets and buy-now, pay-later options. The fees match those of Stripe, and there are no additional charges.

Thinkific also allows you to use your own Stripe or PayPal accounts. However, a 0.5% to 5% fee applies when using a custom payment gateway.

Lastly, both platforms also have a deep integration with Shopify, allowing you to sell your courses through a Shopify storefront.

Regarding checkouts, both platforms have a single-step checkout designed to boost conversions. Your students can complete the payment without first creating an account.

Customization-wise, Thinkific’s one-step checkout supports light changes, such as adding student testimonials, while LearnWorlds lets you pick a template and add various elements.

However, neither platform lets you create unique checkout pages for different courses. All the customizations you do apply to all of your courses.

However, Thinkific has a few advantages over LearnWorlds:

• It supports 1-click upsells and order bumps.
• You can handle sales taxes natively with Thinkific Payments.
• You can allow users to buy your courses as gifts for others.
• You can let users purchase multiple quantities of your courses at once.

So, Thinkific does better in checkout and conversion tools, while LearnWorlds is less restrictive in using your own payment gateways.

Affiliate Marketing

Both Thinkific and LearnWorlds have built-in tools for affiliate management. Both platforms let you:

• add affiliate users
• set their commission rate
• select the products you want to promote
• track their performance

The affiliates can also access their own dashboard to track referral link clicks, commissions, and payouts.

However, neither platform lets you set different commission rates for different products, upload creative assets, or automate payouts, making them pretty even in this category.

Other Marketing Tools

Apart from the tools we’ve covered, LearnWorlds and Thinkific support a few more marketing features.

LearnWorlds offers a helpful feature called Funnels for creating a sequence of landing pages to promote your products.

When setting up a funnel, you pick from ready-made templates, and the platform creates the required pages. These templates cover areas like lead magnet signups, webinar registrations, and course sales.

Thinkific also has a feature called Funnels that works similarly. It currently supports three funnel types: Free Lesson, Free Download, and Sales Page funnels.

However, it’s more limited compared to LearnWorlds:

• Each funnel type has a default template, so you can’t pick the design.
• You can’t add new pages to your funnel, so you’re limited to what Thinkific provides.
• There’s a separate page builder for editing the funnel landing pages. It is rudimentary and doesn’t offer much customization.

Honestly, we’re not fans of even LearnWorlds’ funnel builder. It’s more of a way to group your landing pages and won’t work for creating end-to-end funnels.

For instance, when you create a webinar funnel, a registration page is created, but there’s no event in the background to register users, meaning you’ll still need a webinar tool.

Apart from funnels, LearnWorlds lets you create popups to collect leads and display offers.

As for email tools, both platforms take care of transactional emails like course enrollment confirmations. Both allow you to send broadcast emails to students, while LearnWorlds lets you send one-off automated emails based on user actions.

However, neither supports automated email sequences or subscriber tracking, and you’ll need an email marketing tool.

Lastly, Thinkific has a feature for embedding widgets that link to your courses on external websites. It provides a snippet of code that you can paste on any website.

Reporting and Administration

Reporting and administration tools are essential for any online course platform. They allow you to monitor your performance and manage your students effectively.

Reporting and Analytics

Both LearnWorlds and Thinkific do a great job of providing detailed reporting and analytics. They provide reports for tracking revenue, enrollments, course progress, student performance, video engagement, and more.

All the reports can be filtered in multiple ways, allowing you to focus on specific products, courses, user groups, and date ranges.

Let’s take course progress, for example. Both platforms provide statistics on average course completion rates. You can filter this data based on enrollment date, group name, or product bundles.

You can also drill down to see completion rates for individual lessons or see the progress of individual students.

Both platforms have similar reporting capabilities. They do things differently, with minor differences in functionality, but overall, they provide comprehensive and valuable reports.

People Management

When managing your students’ profiles, Thinkific and LearnWorlds are similar in that they provide a list of your students and let you manage them in bulk or individually.

You can easily see a student’s purchases, course progress, quiz scores, and other activities. You can modify users’ profiles, manage their purchases, and manually add or remove them from courses.

Additionally, you can select multiple students and perform specific bulk actions, like enrolling them in a course or emailing them.

Now, both platforms provide a feature for creating user groups. You can create separate groups for organizations, internal teams, or program cohorts.

You can assign group managers who monitor and manage the group members’ progress, enroll them in courses, and track their activity. This is especially useful for those selling courses to organizations or for internal training.

Finally, LearnWorlds has a unique feature called User Automations that’s not available in Thinkific.

This feature allows you to set up rules based on triggers and actions and helps drive engagement, perform admin tasks, and manage user behavior.

For example, you can automatically reset a student’s course progress when they submit a request. Or, if a student has been inactive, you can automatically send them a reminder email.

Both platforms offer similar user management capabilities, but LearnWorlds has the added benefit of user automations, giving it a slight edge in this category.

User Roles

Both platforms let you assign specific user roles, including site admins, course admins, revenue partners, community moderators, and group managers.

However, LearnWorlds takes this further with custom user roles, where you can create and assign specific roles with custom permissions. This allows for more control over user access and can be helpful in larger organizations with different departments or teams.

LearnWorlds has even created a few pre-made custom roles, such as developers or mobile managers, for added convenience.

Third-Party Integrations

Thinkific is a clear winner regarding the number of supported third-party integrations. It has a dedicated app store where you can find 90+ third-party apps.

These include not just the standard integrations for email marketing and payment gateways but also apps for enhancing student experience, adding new learning features, or managing your operations. In fact, you even have apps explicitly built for Thinkific.

For example, an app called Omnisearch allows students to search inside videos, PDFs, and other lesson content. Another one, Flix, turns your student dashboard into a Netflix-style streaming experience.

Meanwhile, LearnWorlds has a smaller selection of integrations, primarily email marketing and analytics solutions.

Additionally, both LearnWorlds and Thinkific have Zapier integration. They also allow access to their APIs, allowing you to build custom integrations.

And thanks to SSO support on both platforms, you can create a seamless login experience for your students and connect with your existing systems.

Customer Support

We evaluated the two platforms’ support options, and Thinkific scores a point here.

It offers live chat on all its paid plans. The live chat is available on weekdays from 6 AM to 5 PM PT. Outside of these hours, you can email the support team.

Thinkific also offers priority phone support on its Grow plan.

Meanwhile, LearnWorlds offers only email support on all its plans. There’s no live chat support; phone support is available only on the Corporate plan (custom pricing).

Apart from this, both platforms have extensive knowledge bases and resources for self-help and guidance. They have also integrated the knowledge base into their help widgets, allowing users to find and access relevant articles quickly.

Additionally, Thinkific has an engaged Facebook group for its customers, while LearnWorlds doesn’t have a user community.

Pricing Plans

Thinkific and LearnWorlds follow a subscription-based pricing model. Both offer multiple plans and different features on each plan.

Their best value-for-money plans cost $99/month each, with no transaction fee. You also get access to most of the platform features.

However, Thinkific pricing has several advantages over LearnWorlds pricing.

Firstly, Thinkific has a free plan to create one online course with unlimited students. On the other hand, LearnWorlds doesn’t have a free plan.

Secondly, LearnWorlds’ entry-level paid plan is more limited. It doesn’t support free courses and the website builder, while Thinkific’s Basic plan includes both features. Pricing-wise, Thinkific has a higher monthly cost but doesn’t charge a transaction fee.

Finally, Thinkific supports unlimited students on all plans, while LearnWorlds limits the number of active learners to 1,000 on the Starter plan and 2,000 on the Pro Trainer and Learning Center plans.

Another issue with LearnWorlds is that its standout features, like interactive videos and user automations, are available only on the Learning Center plan ($299/month), which is expensive for most users.

Overall, Thinkific offers better value for money across plans but is also more budget-friendly for beginners.

Thinkific vs LearnWorlds: Final Thoughts

So, which is better – Thinkific or LearnWorlds? We have examined both platforms’ features, pricing plans, and customer support options.

Thinkific is a superior platform in this comparison, primarily because it’s more user-friendly for both creators and end-users. It also has a slight edge in course creation with a more flexible course builder and free mobile apps.

Additionally, it has an app store that opens endless possibilities to enhance your courses and website. Lastly, it has a free plan and supports unlimited students on all its plans, making it more affordable.

LearnWorlds, on the other hand, offers unique features, like interactive videos and copyright protection. The platform also boasts better assessment tools, a more flexible website builder, built-in blogging tools, and user automations.

While the standout features come at a higher price, LearnWorlds is still a good option for creators who value those features and are willing to invest in them.

We hope this LearnWorlds vs Thinkific comparison helped you decide which platform suits your business and courses the best. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

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