Teachable vs Thinkific: The Ultimate (No Fluff) Comparison

Thinkific and Teachable are two of the best hosted course platforms available today. They are both robust solutions, offer great features for creating and selling online courses, and are similar in many ways.

So, which is the better choice for you? In this Thinkific vs Teachable comparison, we’ll break down the key differences between the two platforms to help you make an informed decision.

We’ll cover everything from features and ease of use to pricing and customer support, including their strengths and weaknesses. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of which platform is best suited for your needs.

We have followed this Teachable vs Thinkific battle for years and used both platforms extensively, so we know what we’re talking about. Let’s dive in!

What are Teachable and Thinkific?

Teachable and Thinkific are cloud-based platforms that allow you to sell online courses from your website.

You can upload all types of content, including videos and quizzes, structure your courses, protect course content, accept payment online, deliver content professionally, and further engage your students.

Most importantly, you don’t need technical skills to do this. Their teams handle the techy stuff like hosting, security, updates, and maintenance.

The basic idea behind both solutions is to provide an easy-to-use platform that lets you start quickly and focus on your core job of creating and selling courses.

Another important thing you need to know is that Teachable and Thinkific aren’t course marketplaces like Udemy or SkillShare. So, you’ll have complete control over pricing, student data, and your policies (e.g., refunds and discounts).

While the two platforms are broadly similar in terms of their capabilities, they differ quite a bit in terms of specific features, and that’s what the focus of the discussion will be in the subsequent sections.

Let’s start with features for course creation first.

Ease of Use

When it comes to usability, the two platforms perform pretty well.

Both Teachable and Thinkific have clean, well-organized interfaces that are intuitive. The menu options appear in the left sidebar, where features and tools are logically organized.

The course builders are also drag-and-drop, so you can quickly upload content and structure your course. Both platforms automatically generate the sales page, checkout page, and course area, all dynamically linked, so there’s no need for manual linking or extra settings.

Moreover, the page builders are also drag-and-drop, making it easy to customize the look and feel of your site without any coding knowledge.

Thinkific’s user interface walkthrough

Teachable’s user interface walkthrough

Having said that, we like Teachable’s user interface and organization a bit better.

Even within individual sections, the main menu icons remain visible on the left, allowing quick navigation.

Similarly, for each product, you can manage all its settings, including certificates, comments, coupons, and reports, in one place.

Thinkific has these options in separate sections, making it a bit more tedious to access, even though it’s not that big of a deal.

Overall, both platforms are user-friendly and have intuitive interfaces that make creating and managing your courses easy.

Course Creation and Engagement

Both Teachable and Thinkific provide a range of course creation tools, which we’ll discuss in this chapter. Let’s start with the course builder.

Course Builder

Both platforms provide drag-and-drop course builders that allow you to upload and structure your course content easily.

Regarding supported content types, both platforms let you add videos, PDFs, text, quizzes, live classes, and more. You also get unlimited hosting for all your content.

Additionally, Thinkific lets you import Captivate and Storyline files. While most course creators won’t need this feature, having the option is nice.

When it comes to actual course creation, both platforms let you add modules and lessons to your course. You can then add content to your lessons by clicking on it.

Both course builders offer much flexibility in adding multiple content types to the same lesson. For example, you can have multiple videos in the same lecture or have videos + text + PDF all in the same lecture.

You can also bulk upload your content onto the platform to create lessons automatically. This is especially useful if you have a large amount of content to upload.

That being said, Teachable’s course builder makes managing course lessons easier.

​For example, you can select multiple lessons and change the settings for preview, publishing, and downloads from the curriculum page without going into individual lessons.

With Thinkific, you’ll need to go to individual lessons and then modify these settings, which can be a pain if you have a lot of content in your course.

One thing that we like about Thinkific is the video library feature, which allows you to reuse videos in multiple courses. You can also copy lessons from one course to another.

While Teachable lacks a video library, you can import content from existing course lessons, allowing you to reuse it without re-uploading.

Overall, both course builders are excellent and strike a perfect balance between ease of use and flexibility.

Learning and Engagement

As online course creators, it’s essential to have a platform that keeps your students engaged. Let’s explore the features offered by both platforms in this regard.

Quizzes and Certificates

While both platforms allow you to create graded quizzes that support multiple-choice and multi-select questions, Thinkific has an edge over Teachable.

Thinkific offers advanced quiz features like randomized question banks, add explanations, and the ability to import questions, which are currently not supported on Teachable.

Moreover, Thinkific has a full-fledged text editor that allows you to format your questions and answer choices to your preference. In contrast, Teachable only supports plain text and images for questions and limits answer choices to text, which is somewhat restrictive.

Finally, Thinkific has native integration with a full-blown exam solution called Brillium, which offers more advanced options for learner evaluation.

Now, both platforms let you create assignments so your students can upload their work for you to review.

However, Thinkific goes a step further, allowing you to share your feedback with the student and manually approve or reject the assignment.

​Finally, Thinkific allows you to create surveys to collect student feedback. With Teachable, you’ll need to use a solution like Google Forms.

Talking about certificates, both Teachable and Thinkific allow you to create and send certificates of completion natively on the platform.

With Teachable, you have three predesigned templates that you can choose from, or you can also code a template from scratch.

By default, a Teachable certificate is linked to a course and automatically sent to students upon completion.

With Thinkific, the certificates feature works in a similar fashion. You can choose from a library of seven templates and modify the content and design as you wish.

When students reach 100% completion in a course, they’re automatically awarded a certificate that they can download as a PDF.

What we like about the certificate feature in Thinkific is that it allows you to apply a certificate design to multiple courses easily. In contrast, it can be applied only to one course at a time in Teachable.

However, both platforms’ certificate features are pretty good and will be more than sufficient for most creators.

Content Dripping and Locking

Both platforms allow you to drip your content either based on student enrollment or by course start date, and dripping works similarly on both platforms.

The main difference between the two platforms regarding dripping is that Teachable can automatically send drip emails to students, while Thinkific cannot send automated emails for new content releases.

Another important feature is content locking (or course compliance).

Both Teachable and Thinkific let you restrict your students’ progress unless they complete the previous lesson or pass a graded quiz.

However, Thinkific’s course compliance feature is more flexible. While Teachable enforces compliance at the course level, Thinkific enforces it at the lesson level.

For example, enforcing quiz completion compliance on Teachable also enforces lecture order compliance, requiring students to watch all lessons in a specific order, which is too restrictive for most creators.

When you set a quiz lesson as a prerequisite in Thinkific, students must pass it to unlock subsequent chapters. However, they can watch the lessons in the same or an earlier chapter in any order.

Another handy course compliance feature that both platforms offer is video-watching compliance.

So unless students watch a certain % of the video, they can’t progress to the next lesson. With Thinkific, you can set a video completion %, while Teachable automatically sets it at 90%.

This is useful to ensure that your students consume the content and not just mark the lessons complete.

Online Community

If you want to create a community for your students, Teachable and Thinkific have built-in community builders. The communities look good out of the box and are a great way to facilitate discussions.

Both let you organize your community into spaces and create discussion posts. Your members can participate in these discussions, and they can also post their own threads.

You can also make your community private and restrict access based on their purchase.

However, there are a few differences between the two.

Thinkific also lets you create events inside your community, while Teachable supports awarding badges to members based on their activity levels.

Similarly, Thinkific communities are accessible through mobile apps, while Teachable communities aren’t.

However, the two community builders are basic and can’t replace specialized community builders yet. They don’t support important features, such as native video uploading, quizzes, polls, direct messaging, and livestreaming.

But they can still work to create simpler support groups for your online courses.

Live Classes

Live classes are a great way to add a personal touch to your online courses and are especially useful for hosting cohort courses.

The good thing is that both platforms integrate with Zoom to facilitate live classes. This integration integration lets you schedule live classes directly from your course platform. However, a paid Zoom account is necessary to utilize this feature.

Your students will see the option to join the meeting inside the course player, making it easy for them to attend the class.

The only difference between the two platforms is that Thinkific also lets you create recurring live classes, while Teachable only allows one-off classes.

Content Delivery

When a student clicks on a course, Teachable first takes them to the curriculum overview page before entering the course player. It offers three themes for the curriculum page, and you can customize the design.

Meanwhile, Thinkific takes students directly to the course player, where they can see all the modules and lessons.

The course players in Teachable and Thinkific look modern and professional and are very well designed from a user experience perspective.

Users can easily navigate between lessons and see their progress on the left.

They can watch videos, take quizzes, complete assignments, and participate in discussions on the right side. They can easily mark a lesson complete and move to the next by clicking the sticky complete button.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s course player

A walkthrough of Teachable’s course player

However, both course players have some unique features to enhance the student experience.

Thinkific’s course player lets students hide the sidebar to enable a learning environment with less distraction. It also has a lesson title search bar.

On the other hand, Teachable allows students to take private notes in the video player, making it easier to keep track of important points in the lesson.

Regarding customization options, both platforms let you modify the course player’s color and fonts, but that’s it. No course player themes are available, and you can’t change the layout or design much.

Otherwise, both course players are mobile responsive, so your students can easily watch your content in any mobile browser.

Thinkific also provides free iOS and Android apps for your students to access your courses and communities on the go. Moreover, you can get white-label mobile apps for your courses for an additional cost.

On the other hand, Teachable just has an iOS app for now. There’s no Android app or the option to get a white-label app.

Finally, Thinkific has a feature that lets you create custom pages and restrict access based on your student’s progress. This allows you to create standalone content for your course or membership site.

Site Design and Customization

A good-looking website is crucial for selling courses online, and both Teachable and Thinkific let you build one on their platforms.

Let’s start by discussing the essential things both platforms offer:

• They offer unlimited hosting and an SSL certificate for your website. Their team also takes care of security, maintenance, and updates.
• You get a free subdomain for your website (e.g., xxxx.teachable.com or xxxx.thinkific.com). You can also use a custom domain if you want. However, Teachable’s login, signup, and checkout pages don’t support custom domains.
• You can completely customize the site text on both platforms. Moreover, Thinkific lets you change your site language in a single click.
• You can remove the platform branding from your website and course player, allowing you to white-label your course platform.

Now, let’s deep dive into the site-building capabilities of the two platforms and see how they compare.

​Website Themes

What we like the most about Thinkific’s site design capabilities is its site themes feature.

Thinkific has a theme library, and it currently has three beautiful site themes available.

Moreover, each theme offers multiple styles, and once you select a style, it is instantly applied to your website.

So, you can choose from a total of ten theme styles, which allows you to get started quickly.

Now, Teachable doesn’t have a real site theme feature. It has a default template, and all the websites built on Teachable use it.

It does have a theme area where you can upload your logo and define font style and color for your website. However, the style of other elements, like the header, footer, and buttons, can’t be changed from the theme settings, which makes it pretty limited.

The default theme in Teachable is well-designed and looks sleek and modern. The only problem is that there aren’t enough choices in terms of site themes.

Finally, if you’re an advanced user, Thinkific allows you to modify the theme code in the backend. You even have the ability to import custom themes into Thinkific.

On the other hand, Teachable doesn’t allow you to import any custom themes. It has something called the Power Editor that allows you to modify the code of the default site template.

So, site themes are a weakness of the Teachable platform, and Thinkific has an edge in this department.

Page Builder

Both Teachable and Thinkific have a drag-and-drop page builder, which you can use to create the homepage, course sales pages, and other website pages.

Both page builders have live editors where you’ll see the changes you make on your website in real time.

However, there are some significant differences between the two builders, and the most crucial difference is the number of page elements available for use.

In Thinkific, these page elements are called sections, and there are 20+ section types you can add to your page.

Whether you want to add a hero section, display testimonials, show pricing details or FAQs, or even add some text with images, you can do that in Thinkific.

You can even display a countdown timer and add a lead capture form to your page, which is awesome.

On the other hand, Techable’s page builder has a limited number of sections (page blocks). For example, you don’t have a page block for testimonials or author bios.

Finally, Thinkific’s page builder gives you more options for customizing these pre-built sections.

For example, when creating a hero section, you can modify the background image, add a video or featured image, move it to the left or right, add additional buttons, and more.

In contrast, Teachable lets you modify the background image and the text itself, leaving little room for customization and often resulting in a generic-looking page.

Modifying the banner section in Teachable

So, Thinkific has better page building capabilities overall than Teachable.

However, one thing Teachable does better is allowing you to create multiple sales pages for the same course, which helps create campaign-specific pages and do basic A/B testing.

Regarding blogging tools, neither platform offers built-in blogging capabilities.

However, both integrate with DropInBlog, a cloud-based blogging platform that lets you embed a blog on your Thinkific or Teachable site. And you can always use WordPress for your blog and then link to it from your course platform.

Sales and Marketing

Teachable and Thinkific offer handy sales and marketing tools to help you promote and sell your courses more effectively. Let’s start with the supported pricing options.

Product Pricing Options

Teachable and Thinkific allow you to create a one-time price, a recurring subscription, or a payment plan. You can also bundle multiple products and sell them together.

Regarding subscriptions, both platforms allow you to set specific billing periods, such as monthly, quarterly, or annually. Additionally, Teachable allows you to charge weekly and biweekly as well.

Both also let you create a free trial, but the ability to charge a custom first payment is only available on Thinkific.

Additionally, you can have multiple pricing options for your courses and bundles. For example, you can offer monthly and yearly plans for the same product.

However, one membership feature exclusive to Teachable allows users to switch between monthly and yearly plans or upgrade and downgrade their tier. This is currently not available on Thinkific.

Similarly, Thinkific lets users purchase multiple seats for the same product in one transaction, which is not yet possible on Teachable.

Finally, both platforms support promotion tools like discount coupons and course gifting.

Payments and Checkouts

The default gateway on the two platforms are called Teachable Pay and Thinkific Payments. Both are managed gateways powered by Stripe in the backend and charge processing fees similar to Stripe.

Both are available in the US, UK, Canada, EU, Australia, and more. In addition to enabling card payments, they offer several additional benefits:

• They also support digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• You can also enable buy now pay later.
• They collect and remit sales taxes on your behalf.

Both platforms also support processing payments directly through your Stripe and PayPal gateways. However, there are a couple of riders.

On Teachable, you can’t use your own Stripe if Teachable Pay is available in your country. You can use PayPal, but you have to pay an additional 2.8% fee.

Thinkific, on the other hand, lets you use your own Stripe/PayPal by paying an additional fee of between 5% and 0.5%. The fee is waived if Thinkific Payments isn’t available in your country.

Apart from payment gateways, Teachable also offers a suite of services called BackOffice, whereby it automatically pays out to your affiliates and authors. It even collects W-8/W9s and files 1099 tax forms for your authors and affiliates.

There’s an additional 2.8% fee for BackOffice, but it can save you a lot of admin work if you have a lot of affiliates or authors on your online school.

Regarding checkouts, both platforms have an optimized one-step checkout process where users enter their personal information and pay on the same page.

Once the payment is successful, the users can create an account. There is minimal friction in the process, which is excellent from a conversion point of view.

You can also add testimonials to your checkout pages, but it’s not possible to customize them beyond that.

One feature that’s exclusive to Teachable is abandoned checkouts. You can send an email to people who didn’t complete the checkout, reminding them to complete their purchase.

Otherwise, you can add order bumps and 1-click upsells to your checkout process on both platforms, which is a great way to increase your average order value.

So, both platforms have well-designed checkout pages and flexible payment options, though they are somewhat restrictive when using your own gateways.

Affiliate Marketing

Both Teachable and Thinkific allow you to add affiliates to your school so that they can promote your courses.

They allow you to set a custom commission % for your affiliates and select which courses you want them to promote. However, you can’t define the commission % at the course level.

Moreover, each affiliate has a private dashboard to get their affiliate share links and track their performances.

However, Teachable’s affiliate marketing features are more powerful and customizable:

• You can create an application form for affiliates to apply to your program.
• You can set a custom cookie period for affiliate tracking.
• Affiliates can point to pages built outside Teachable.
• With BackOffice, Teachable can automatically pay out to your affiliates.

Apart from affiliate marketing, Teachable also lets you create a student referral program. You can incentivize your students to refer their friends and family to your courses by offering discounts.

Thinkific doesn’t have this feature, and you’ll need to use a third-party app to add this functionality.

Other Marketing Tools

Both platforms’ email features are limited to sending the default transactional emails, such as purchase receipts and course welcome emails. Additionally, you can send one-off broadcasts to your students.

However, neither platform offers advanced email marketing features, such as email sequences and automation, and you’ll need to use a third-party email marketing tool for that.

Thinkific has introduced a feature for creating funnels on the platform. The idea is to guide students through a series of landing pages to promote your courses.

It currently supports three funnel types: Free Lesson, Free Download, and Sales Page funnels. Thinkific generates the landing pages for each funnel type, which you can customize with your branding and content.

While it’s a good addition, the feature is still in its early stages and has some serious limitations:

• You can’t add, remove, or reorder pages in your funnel, limiting you to the available funnel types.
• There’s only one default template, and the funnel page editor is very basic, limiting your design options.

Teachable doesn’t have a funnel feature at the moment.

Reporting and Administration

Thinkific and Teachable provide comprehensive reporting and administrative tools to help you manage your online course business. This section’ll explore the key features they offer and how they compare.

Reporting and Analytics

Regarding course reporting capabilities, both platforms let you track student progress, completion rates, quiz scores, and video engagement. You can also pull specific reports based on groups in Thinkific and tags in Teachable.

However, Thinkific has more extensive course reporting capabilities. While Teachable’s reports are all at the course level, Thinkific’s go deeper, allowing you to analyze each student’s performance.

You can drill down to see how individual students progress through the course, which lessons they’ve completed and when, how much time they’ve spent on each lesson, and more.

This granularity can help identify areas where students struggle and improve your course content accordingly.

Additionally, Thinkific has separate reports to track student enrollments and community engagement; both aren’t available in Teachable.

When it comes to sales reporting, Thinkific does a better job once more. While Teachable just provides a list of transactions and overall revenue numbers, Thinkific also lets you track sales by products and view revenue trends over time.

Apart from revenue analytics, Thinkific offers several reports to monitor your sales performance:

• You get detailed analytics for product orders, including total orders and top products by orders.
• It has a subscription report to track key metrics like churn rate and MRR (monthly recurring revenue). This is useful if you use Thinkific as a membership platform.
• It has a marketing report where you can track website visitors and checkout conversions.

Moreover, Thinkific’s reports are all available in a single location, while Teachable’s course reports are available in individual course dashboards, and the sales report is in a separate section.

All of these combined give Thinkific a significant edge in terms of reporting and analytics.

People Management

Both platforms have dedicated sections for managing your students. By default, you’ll see a list of all your students, but you can filter this list by criteria like enrollments, progress, coupons, and more.

You can then perform bulk actions on these students, such as sending an email, granting access to a new course, or removing their access to a course.

Moreover, you can also view and manage individual student profiles, including their contact information, purchases, course enrollments, and more.

Finally, you can add new users manually or through a CSV file upload.

However, there are a couple of differences here as well.

Thinkific has a Groups feature that lets you sell your courses to cohorts or organizations.

With Groups, you can bulk sell your courses, enroll several students at once, better organize them, track their progress, and generate reports. This feature is handy if you sell your courses to organizations.

Now, Teachable doesn’t have a similar feature. Instead, it lets you tag your students for better categorization. You can then filter the student list and progress reports using the tags.

User Roles

Both Teachable and Thinkific let you add site admins who can manage everything on your site except account ownership and payment integrations.

You can also add revenue partners in Thinkific and course authors in Teachable and share revenue with them.

However, Thinkific supports a couple of user roles that Teachable doesn’t support out of the box:

• You can add course admins to create and manage courses and instructor profiles.
• You can add group analysts to manage students and track progress in assigned groups.

However, Teachable supports custom user roles on the higher tiers, so you can assign users specific permissions.

Third-Party Integrations

Thinkific refers to its collection of third-party integrations as the app store, while Teachable calls it the app hub. Both have the essential integrations like:

• Analytics and tracking tools like Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, Segment, and more
• Email marketing tools like ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign
• Zapier for connecting with 2,000+ apps

However, Thinkific’s app store is more extensive, with 90+ integrations, compared to Teachable’s 20+ integrations. You can extend your platform in different ways:

• There are dozens of apps to enhance the learning experience, such as ThingLink for interactive media content and Motrain for creating a rewards program.
• You can add selling tools like Shopify for full-fledged eCommerce features and Multi Currency Converter to show prices in different currencies.
• You can find several apps exclusively created for Thinkific, like Sections Kit for additional page builder sections and Flix for creating a Netflix-style member dashboard.

Teachable, on the other hand, just has a couple of apps to extend the functionality of the core platform. You can use Wobo to create interactive workbooks and DropInBlog to add a blog to your site (both are also available on Thinkific).

However, there are no exclusive third-party apps for Teachable, and most of the apps are standard integrations found on most online course platforms.

Finally, both platforms provide public API access and support single sign-on integrations.

Customer Support

Both Thinkific and Teachable offer good customer service, even though Thinkific has a better reputation with faster response times and more personalized support.

You can reach out to their support teams via email or live chat during US business hours. While Thinkific makes the live chat available on all paid plans, Teachable limits this feature to the Pro plan and above.

Additionally, Thinkific offers phone support on their Grow plan and above, while Teachable does not offer this option at all.

Both platforms also have an extensive knowledge base, where you can find how-to articles about doing various things on the platforms.

Finally, both have active user communities where you can engage with other members, ask questions, and get advice on anything related to selling online courses.

Pricing Plans

Teachable and Thinkific offer multiple pricing plans to their users. Both also have free plans that let you create one course, making them among the few free online course builders.

However, Thinkific’s free plan is more useful. It lets you create a course with unlimited videos and unlimited students, while Teachable lets you add just ten videos to your course and enroll ten students.

The entry-level paid plan costs $49/month on Thinkific, and there’s no transaction fee. Teachable charges $59/month and has a 5% transaction fee.

The most popular Thinkific plan costs $99/month, while the comparable Teachable plan costs $159/month.

While these two plans will meet the needs of most course creators, they also have additional plans. The highest plan costs $499/month on Thinkific and $665/month on Teachable.

Besides being less expensive, Thinkific’s paid plans also don’t limit the number of courses. On the other hand, Teachable pricing limits the number of courses to 5 on its Basic plan and 50 on the Pro plan.

However, there can be a few scenarios where Teachable can be cheaper. For example, white-labeling and public API are available on Teachable’s $159 plan, while they are only available on Thinkific’s $199 plan.

Otherwise, Thinkific is more reasonably priced than Teachable. The pricing is better suited for beginners as well as advanced course creators and eLearning businesses.

Thinkific vs Teachable: Final Thoughts

Both platforms have a lot to offer, even though Thinkific has a clear edge over Teachable.

Thinkific offers better assessment tools, flexible mobile app options, powerful reporting tools, and a more extensive app store. Thinkific also has much better site-building features than Teachable.

However, the biggest advantage is its pricing. The platform has a more useful free plan, doesn’t charge a transaction fee, and the paid plans aren’t just cheaper, but they also support unlimited courses and students.

So, Thinkific is a better platform overall. In fact, it’s the highest-rated platform in our research. You can start a free trial to test the platform yourself.

On the other hand, Teachable is more user-friendly, has a more flexible course builder, and offers better AI tools for course creation. Additionally, it lets you create one-on-one coaching programs.

Teachable is also a great platform; if it meets your needs, you should go for it. You can create a free account to test the platform.

We hope this guide helped you answer the Teachable vs Thinkific question and choose the right platform for your online courses. Do you have any questions? Which platform did you end up choosing? Let us know in the comments below!

Frequently Asked Questions