Thinkific Review 2024: Is It the Best Course Platform?

Thinkific has been a leader in the course platform space for many years. So naturally, it’s one of your first choices if you want to teach online courses.

But is it the best option for you? What features does it offer, and how do they perform? How does it compare to its competitors?

To answer these questions, we created this in-depth Thinkific review. Our assessment involved rigorous testing of the platform and evaluating it based on key factors such as user-friendliness, features, and pricing.

Below, we’ll break down everything you need to know about Thinkific, including its pros and cons, and also compare it to other top course platforms so you can make an informed decision.

What Is Thinkific?

Thinkific is a hosted online course platform that allows you to sell online courses from your own website, even if you have little or no tech skills.

The platform has been in the market for almost a decade now. And 50,000+ creators use it to run their online education business, making it one of the most established options out there.

With Thinkific, you can host your content, deliver it professionally, create quizzes, do live sessions, build a community, and manage your learners. On top of this, you can build your website, create sales pages, and accept payments.

Hosted platforms like Thinkific are popular because you don’t need dozens of plugins to build a learning management system. Unlike WordPress, there’s no need to manage plugins, hosting, or coding. The platform handles all the technical aspects for you.

Also, Thinkific isn’t a course marketplace like Udemy. Therefore, you have complete control over courses, pricing, and policies. But then, you’re solely responsible for marketing your courses.

Now, let’s explore the Thinkific platform in detail.

Ease of Use

With Thinkific, learning and using the platform is very smooth. There’s a small learning curve, and it won’t take much time to get familiar with all the tools.

The user interface is clean, and the individual tools are smartly divided into different sections, making it easier to find them. For instance, courses, memberships, and communities are placed in the Products section.

Besides that, creating a course on Thinkific is straightforward. You need to create your curriculum and set a price, and the platform handles the rest.

It automatically creates the landing, checkout pages, and course area. Plus, everything is dynamically linked, so no manual linking or extra settings are needed.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s admin interface

Other than that, tools like course builder and page builder are user-friendly and use drag-and-drop functionality, so you can learn in no time.

Overall, Thinkific is one of the easiest course creation software to learn and use.

Course Creation and Engagement

An online course platform should offer all the features to let you create an online course with ease and deliver an excellent learning experience. Let’s see how Thinkific performs in this regard.

Course Builder

Thinkific offers an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop course builder to upload your content and create course structure quickly.

It breaks course structure into chapters and lessons. A lesson is where you add the actual content, while a chapter is an organizational unit containing multiple lessons.

While creating a new course, you start from scratch or use Thinkific’s AI outline generator to create a course structure based on your course topic.

After that, you can start adding the lessons. Thinkific supports different content types, such as videos, text, PDFs, audio files, live lessons, and HTML5. You even get a multimedia option for embedding externally hosted files as your lessons.

Plus, you don’t need to worry about content hosting, as Thinkific provides unlimited hosting for all content types, including videos.

When adding content to a lesson, besides the primary lesson type, you can also include text content and downloadable attachments. The text editor is pretty flexible, allowing you to add videos, audio files, and even embeds.

Here you can also do some settings for your lesson. You can set a lesson as a free preview, make it a prerequisite, enable lesson comments, and make videos downloadable.

The most useful feature of the course builder is the Bulk Importer, which greatly speeds up course creation. You can bulk upload your content, and Thinkific will automatically turn them into lessons. You can then reorganize them with drag-and-drop.

How the bulk uploader works in Thinkific

Lastly, Thinkific’s video library feature lets you easily manage and reuse videos across your courses. The platform also has the option to import content from another lesson in an existing course.

Overall, Thinkific’s course builder is pretty easy to use and gives you the flexibility to create all types of online courses.

Learning and Engagement

Even if your course content is amazing, you need learning tools to make your course interactive and engage your students. Let’s explore the learning tools Thinkific offers.

Quizzes and Certificates

Thinkific has powerful features for creating course quizzes. It allows you to create graded quizzes and set a passing score.

Regarding question types, it supports multiple-choice or multiple-select questions. Plus, Thinkific adds a rich text editor for writing the questions and answers, allowing you to add text, images, and videos and format them as you like.

For instance, if you want to have the question as a video + text and the answer as the text, you can do that.

Thinkific has also incorporated an AI quiz generator, which automatically generates quiz questions based on the text lessons in the chapter.

Moreover, Thinkific also offers a few other quiz features that make it more powerful:

• ability to add explanations
• randomized question banks
• importing questions

The only features missing are timed quizzes and advanced question types like matching and sorting. But it compensates for these by offering a native integration with a full-blown exam solution called Brillium.

Talking about assignments, Thinkific offers a separate lesson type for the same. When you add one to your course, your students get the ability to upload their answer files to the platform. You can then approve or reject each assignment.

Finally, you can Thinkific lets you create and send certificates. You get seven certificate templates, and you can easily customize the content and add custom fields.

It’s also possible to change the font, text color, and background image. In short, it gives the power to create a completely custom certificate.

Also, Thinkific automatically issues course completion certificates after students finish their respective courses.

Content Dripping and Locking

Normally, when students enroll in a course, they get immediate access to the entire course. But you may want to drip-feed your lessons and release one module at a time.

Thinkific allows you to release lessons as per the drip schedule in three ways:

• After a student enrolls in a course
• After a student accesses a course for the first time
• After a specific date

However, one important feature missing is the ability to send automated emails to students when lessons become available. You’ll need to rely on your email marketing platform for this.

Regarding course compliance, you can set any lesson in Thinkific as a prerequisite. When you do that, a student can’t go to the next chapter unless they complete the lesson.

We like that the prerequisite lesson feature works with all the lesson types. For example, if you add a quiz or an assignment to a lesson, the user can’t complete it unless they pass the quiz or their assignment submission is approved.

You can also set a completion % required for video lessons so that your students can’t mark a lesson complete unless they reach that point in the video.

Online Community

Thinkific lets you create a community for your course or membership site. Thinkific communities have a clean, modern look out of the box. You can also customize its appearance by choosing colors and fonts and adding a banner image.

Within a community, you can have Spaces to keep discussions organized. For example, you can create a space for different discussion topics or have one for each batch of students in your course.

For discussions, both you and your members can create posts by adding text, images, downloadable files, and embeds. Members can also follow posts and get notified whenever someone comments.

You can also create events inside your community, even though it doesn’t support native livestreaming.

The great thing is that the communities are accessible on Thinkific’s mobile apps as well, making it easy for students to stay engaged and participate in discussions on the go.

Lastly, you can bundle a community with your courses, or you can sell it as a standalone product.

While Thinkific Communities is decent, there are some important features missing:

• No option to add polls, quizzes, or articles
• No livestreaming feature
• Members can’t communicate privately

Having said that, the community feature is good for building a support community for your online courses.

Live Classes

Live classes are great for making your courses interactive and connecting with the students in real time.

Thinkific incorporates live sessions inside your course curriculum. It has direct integration with Zoom, so you can add the session details (e.g., duration) and schedule it from inside Thinkific itself.

Your students can join the live session directly through the course area or from the automated reminder email with the Zoom link.

The only downside is that you need a paid Zoom account to use this feature. Otherwise, if you plan to use Thinkific as a cohort course platform, you’ll find this feature very useful.

Content Delivery

Thinkific’s course player has a modern and well-designed interface from an end-user perspective.

Your videos, quizzes, and other content types appear on the right in the course player. And there’s a navigation bar showing all sections and lessons on the left.

Learners can also find a progress bar and a search box for searching the required lesson. So, it’s undoubtedly easy to navigate. Moreover, it has a full-screen functionality that hides the sidebar, enabling distraction-free learning.

There’s also a discussion tab for each lesson where you and your students can add posts with the title, descriptions, links, and even images.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s course player

You can customize the look and feel of the course player to some extent by choosing between light mode and dark mode. You can decide on the color and font as well.

While the course player is mobile responsive, Thinkific also offers free mobile apps for your users. Thinkific’s mobile app is straightforward to navigate and makes it easier for students to access your courses and community on mobile devices.

You can also get branded mobile apps for your education platform, fully built and maintained by Thinkific. The branded app supports both courses and communities, in addition to enabling in-app purchases.

There’s an additional cost for it, but we love the fact that you get multiple options here.

Another feature that improves the content delivery in Thinkific is the ability to create custom pages, add content to them, and restrict access to the page based on students’ purchases.

This feature is useful for delivering standalone content and member-only resource pages, enhancing Thinkific’s appeal as a membership site platform.

Site Design and Customization

All modern online course platforms include features for building a brand website. In this section, we’ll evaluate Thinkific’s site-building tools.

Talking about the essential things, Thinkific offers:

• Unlimited hosting and free SSL certificate
• Free subdomain, plus the ability to use a custom domain
• Modify default site text as well as change the site language in a single click
• The ability to remove Thinkific’s branding and white-label your course platform

Now, let’s jump into specific site-building tools.

Website Themes

Thinkific’s theme library has three well-designed and modern themes. Further, each has multiple presets called styles.

All the theme presets have pretty different designs, so you actually get nine different theme styles to choose from.

After choosing a theme, you can also customize certain elements at the site level, like the color of different elements, button style, and font.

Moreover, if you’re an advanced user, Thinkific lets you customize the backend code of your themes. You can even create a custom theme and put it on your website.

Page Builder

Installing a theme is only the first step in the process. Next, you need to create your website pages, and Thinkific offers a drag-and-drop page builder for the same.

When you open the Website menu in Thinkific, you’ll find a list of all the pages, including your course sales pages. Here you can create a new page or edit an existing one.

The page builder interface is simple; you’ll see the page sections and other options on the left, and on the right, it shows the page content.

The builder has 20+ page sections for creating a hero section, showing the curriculum, adding CTA buttons, and more. After adding a section, you can manage the settings from the left panel.

Even though there are enough sections, you get limited editing options for each. In fact, each one has its unique settings, and you can’t customize the layout much.

For instance, adding the banner section shows a background image, the course headings, and the product pricing button. You can also add a video to it, but then you can’t move the video above or below the text. Plus, you can’t add new elements to the sections.

Modifying a page section in Thinkific

Moreover, the pages you create are mobile responsive, and there is an option to check the mobile view from the site builder itself. However, you can’t show/hide specific elements from the mobile website.

What’s great about Thinkific is that you can use the page builder to customize even the default site pages, such as the course library, login page, and more.

Overall, the Thinkific page builder is pretty straightforward to use, and you can quickly build a good-looking course landing page. However, it won’t be suitable for creating completely custom page designs.

If you want to see the possibilities for your website design, you can check out this ultimate list of Thinkific examples.

Sales and Marketing

Thinkific provides the essential sales and marketing features you need to grow your online course business. Let’s explore them in more detail.

Product Pricing Options

With Thinkific, you get the flexibility to price and sell your products in whatever way you want.

You can either sell a standalone course or bundle multiple courses and communities together. If you want to offer multiple tiers, you can create multiple bundles and assign different products.

Then, you can price the products in different ways:

• Free plan
• One-time payment
• Subscription model
• Monthly payment plan

Talking about subscriptions, you can charge monthly or yearly. Plus, you can charge a custom first payment and offer a free trial.

For one-time pricing, you can set an enrollment duration for which students will have access to the course.

Moreover, you can have multiple pricing options for the same course/bundle. For example, you can have one-time pricing and a payment plan for your course. Similarly, you can have a monthly and a yearly subscription for your membership site.

Thinkific also allows you to create coupons. You can offer a fixed or a percentage-based discount on courses or bundles. It’s also possible to assign an expiry date and the number of coupons you want to sell.

The only thing missing is the inability to set the currency at the product level. So the platform lets you have a sitewide currency only.

Otherwise, you can price your products the way you want. You can sell regular courses as well as membership sites on Thinkific.

Payments and Checkouts

Thinkific’s default payment gateway is Thinkific Payments. It’s a managed service powered by Stripe in the backend, and it has several benefits.

Apart from credit card payments, it also supports digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay and buy now pay later (BNPL) options.

Additionally, the platform collects and remits sales taxes on your behalf, making it easier for you to comply with tax laws.

There is no additional transaction fee beyond the standard payment processing charges for using the service. It is currently available in the US, UK, Canada, EU, Singapore, and other regions.

Thinkific also supports using Stripe and PayPal for payments. But there’s an additional fee of 0.5% to 5% on transactions made through these gateways. The fee is waived if Thinkific Payments isn’t available in your region.

Regarding the checkout process, Thinkific’s default checkout is a well-optimized, one-step process where users first complete the payment before being prompted to create an account.

Thinkific automatically some branding elements such as logo and brand colors and the checkout page looks sleek out of the box. It’s even possible to add testimonials, even though you can’t customize the checkout page beyond that.

Moreover, Thinkific allows users to purchase multiple seats for the same product or gift your course to someone else. Finally, you can add order bumps and 1-click upsells to your checkout process.

Affiliate Marketing

Thinkific has built-in features for running and managing your affiliate program. It lets you add an existing or a new user as an affiliate. You can add affiliates one by one or bulk import them.

While setting up the program, you can set the commission percentage and choose the courses/bundles that you want the affiliate to promote.

Once added, the affiliate gets access to a private dashboard, where they can grab the affiliate links and track commissions and payouts.

Inside your admin dashboard, you can see your affiliates’ performance and quickly pull a report for paying them out.

However, a few things are missing from Thinkific’s affiliate system:

• There’s no public registration page for affiliates; you must manually add them to the platform.
• You can set separate commission percentages at the affiliate level but can’t do the same at the course level.
• You can’t change the default 30-day cookie tracking period.

Otherwise, Thinkific’s affiliate marketing tools are solid and will work well for most course creators.

Other Marketing Tools

Thinkific has recently introduced a feature for creating funnels. The idea is to enable course creators to quickly put together a series of landing pages to guide potential students toward purchasing a course.

It currently supports three funnel types, including Free Lesson, Free Download, and Sales Page funnels. When you select a funnel type, Thinkific generates the necessary landing pages, and you can then customize them with your own branding and content.

However, the feature has some major limitations, making it not very useful in its current state:

• It’s not possible to add, remove, or even reorder pages in your funnel, so you’re limited to just the available funnel types.
• There’s just one default template, and the page editor for modifying the funnel pages is very basic, limiting your design options.

Apart from funnels, Thinkific offers a couple of other notable sales and marketing tools:

• Email tools: Thinkific handles default transactional emails like order receipts and course completions and also lets you send broadcast messages to students. While not a replacement for an email marketing provider, they are useful for student communication.
• Sales widgets: It lets you create a sales widget for your products, which can be embedded on any website and will direct your users to the course landing page to complete enrollment.

Reporting and Administration

Reporting tools help you know how your business is performing and identify where there’s room for improvement, while administration tools let you manage students, instructors, and other people associated with your business.

Let’s see how Thinkific performs in terms of these.

Reporting and Analytics

Thinkific has a dedicated reporting section where you have multiple reports available:

• Marketing
• Revenue
• Orders
• Enrollments
• Engagement

Each report allows you to select a custom period and view the data at hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly levels. In addition, you can filter the report based on parameters like product type, product name, new vs. returning students, and affiliates.

For instance, the revenue report shows the earnings for the selected period. You can also view the details of each transaction here if you want.

Thinkific also has a subscriptions section in this report, where you can track active subscriptions, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), average revenue per user (ARPU), and churn rate.

If you want to track student enrollments and progress, you can do that from the Enrollments report. Here you can see the progress for each student and filter based on courses, groups, or completion %.

On the other hand, the Engagement report lets you track overall student engagement, their interactions with your courses, quiz performance, video analytics, and more. You can view this data for a specific course or a group of courses.

What we like the most about these reports is the visual representation. All reports include a variety of charts and graphs for getting insights quickly.

Hands down, Thinkific has best-in-class reporting features, and we hope they keep adding new reports.

People Management

Thinkific has a separate section called All Users under the Users tab, where you can see a list of all the students in your school.

There are advanced filters that allow you to segment users precisely. And you can even bookmark the filter for future use.

For managing students, there are bulk actions available. After selecting all or filtered users, it lets you take any of the following actions:

• Sending messages
• Adding or removing them from a group
• Adding or removing them from a course/bundle
• Exporting user list

Moreover, you can individually check the lifecycle of every user, the user details, enrollments, activities, groups, and quiz, and survey information.

For adding new users, you have two options: either add them one by one or bulk import by uploading a CSV file.

Groups

Groups is an exclusive Thinkific feature that lets you organize students into cohorts and sell courses in bulk to organizations.

When you create a new group, you can generate a sharing link. Anyone who enrolls using that link will be added to the group automatically. You can also bulk-import users and add them manually.

We like how Thinkific offers separate group progress reports. You can also add Group Analysts who can manage the students and pull these reports.

Whether you want a group at the organizational or team level, you can do that. This makes Thinkific a standout option for selling courses to businesses and organizations.

User Roles

Assigning user roles is quite simple in Thinkific. While adding a new user, you can choose one of the three types of admin roles mentioned below:

• Site Admins have access to everything but can’t transfer account ownership, view revenue reports, or modify payment integrations.
• Course Admins can create new courses and add instructors. They can also edit, track student progress, and moderate discussions for assigned courses.
• Group Analysts can manage students and track progress in assigned groups.
• Revenue Partners can get a share of your course revenue. This is useful if you’re selling other people’s courses on your school.

Overall, Thinkific has extraordinary reporting and administration tools, and there’s nothing to complain about anything here.

Thinkific App Store

Thinkific is the only hosted course platform to offer an extensive app store. We’ve talked about it a couple of times in this Thinkific review already, but we will explain it in more detail here.

While the app store has apps for integrating standard tools like Zapier, Google Analytics, and email marketing providers, it isn’t just another name for its integrations. Rather third-party developers can build custom apps, which is their main focus.

The main idea behind this is to allow creators to extend the functionality without waiting for Thinkific to release new features or hiring developers to build a custom solution.

Thinkific app store currently has 90+ free and paid apps that you can use to improve the student experience, automate your marketing, and much more.

Let’s give you a few examples of apps and how they can extend your platform’s functionality:

• Omnisearch allows students to search inside videos, PDFs, and other lesson content.
• Circle SSO lets you integrate Thinkific with Circle and add a more powerful community feature.
• Shopify lets you sell courses using its eCommerce tools while hosting them on Thinkific.
• Flix lets you turn your student dashboard into a Netflix-style streaming experience.

There are many more apps like these, and if you need something that’s not natively supported, you can probably achieve that through a Thinkific app. No other course platform has built this kind of ecosystem around their product, and this is simply a game-changer.

Customer Support

There are multiple ways an online course platform supports its users, and in this section, we’ll evaluate what’s available with Thinkific.

To start with, Thinkific has a help center with 800+ articles covering each aspect of the platform.

If you don’t find a solution through the help center, you can contact the support via email, phone, or live chat. The live chat is available 6 am – 5 pm, Monday-Friday, PST.

Thinkific customer support is friendly and responsive, and our experience with them has been nothing but great.

Another way to get support is Thinkific’s Facebook group, where you can ask questions and engage with other users.

Besides that, there’s Thinkific Academy, where paid users can find free courses for building and growing their online course businesses.

Lastly, Thinkific has an expert marketplace from where you can hire experts having specializations in different areas.

Pricing Plans

Thinkific’s pricing is pretty flexible and affordable. It also has a free plan, making it one of the few free course hosting platforms.

The free plan lets you create one course, even though there’s no limit on content hosting or the number of students.

Apart from the free plan, Thinkific has four paid plans:

• The Basic plan ($49/month) supports custom domain and basic course creation tools (quizzes and drip content) and is best for beginners on a tight budget.
• The Start plan ($99/month) includes all the important course creation tools (e.g. certificates, assignments, live lessons, and mobile apps) and is the most popular plan.
• The Grow plan ($199/month) supports advanced features (e.g., API access and removing Thinkific branding) and is ideal for growing businesses.
• The Expand plan ($499/month) provides more admin users and is suitable for bigger businesses.

Thinkific doesn’t charge any transaction fee when using the default payment gateway. But if you use your own Stripe/PayPal, there’s a 5% fee on the Basic plan, 2% on the Start plan, and 1% on the Grow plan.

Otherwise, you can have unlimited students and courses on all paid plans, making it suitable for starting a full-fledged online school.

Additionally, Thinkific has an add-on for branded apps that costs $199/month on top of your plan.

Thinkific has pricing plans for all business stages. So whether you are a beginner or an established business, you’ll find a plan that suits your needs.

Thinkific vs the Competition

Before concluding this Thinkific review, you need to know where the platform stands in regard to the competitors.

Thinkific’s top competitor is Teachable. While both platforms are similar in scope, Thinkific offers more for course creation and engagement. It provides better assessment tools, live lessons, and mobile apps.

Even for website creation and administration tools, Thinkific is the clear winner. Plus, it’s more affordable across all plans. Read our Thinkific vs Teachable guide for more details.

Next comes Kajabi, which is an all-in-one online course platform. While Kajabi has impressive course creation features, it stands out with a strong suite of sales and marketing tools for blogging, podcasts, sales funnels, email marketing, and automations.

So, creators normally go for Kajabi over Thinkific when they want to keep their entire online course business on one platform. Read our Thinkific vs Kajabi guide for more information.

Thinkific Review: Final Thoughts

Thinkific is the best standalone online course platform, without a doubt!

It has excellent course creation features, including a flexible course builder, a well-designed course player, mobile apps, live Zoom classes, quizzes and assignments, and a community builder.

Moreover, it offers powerful features for building your course landing pages, handling checkouts and payments, and running your affiliate program.

It also has a dedicated app store, which allows it to offer the best of both worlds. It gives you the ease of use of a hosted course platform and the extendability of WordPress.

Overall, Thinkific is our top choice for anyone looking to create and sell engaging online courses, and we definitely recommend giving it a try.

We hope you liked this Thinkific review. You can leave a comment and let us know if you have any questions.

Frequently Asked Questions