Thinkific Review: Our Top All-Around Pick

If you’re in the market for a platform to create and sell online courses, chances are you’ve stumbled upon Thinkific. With over 50,000 course creators and more than 25 million students served, it’s one of the most popular e-learning platforms.

Thinkific offers a wide range of features, from course creation tools to marketing and sales integrations. 

But with so many options on the market, is Thinkific really the best choice for your online course business? 

In this detailed Thinkific review, we’ll take an in-depth look at the platform’s pros and cons, as well as its pricing, features, and customer support, to help you make an informed decision.

Thinkific Overview: 

Thinkific is a powerful online course platform that allows creators, educators, and entrepreneurs to create and sell online courses. 

It’s especially helpful for creators looking to create both courses and community on a single platform. 

The best part? It’s super user-friendly (no Ph.D. in tech required!).

For instance, it comes with a drag-and-drop builder and built-in, pre-designed themes that are also customizable at every point. This negates the need for any coding or technical skills. 

Here’s a quick overview of everything Thinkific allows you to do: 

• Create courses with videos, text, quizzes, assignments, and certificates.
• Build communities with posts, comments, live lessons, and notifications.
• Offer memberships with exclusive access to courses and communities for paying subscribers.
• Bundle, cross-sell, and upsell your courses and communities to increase your revenue.
• Customize your branding, design, and domain for your courses and communities.
• Integrate with tools for email marketing, analytics, payment processing, and more.

It’s like having a Swiss Army knife for online learning. 

Thinkific doesn’t skimp on analytics, either. They provide comprehensive analytics and reporting features to help you monitor your student’s progress and engagement. This means you can easily track how well your courses are performing and make data-driven decisions to improve their learning experience.

Next up, we’ll take a closer look at Thinkific’s features individually, including how to create courses, the ins and outs of community building, its powerful marketing tools, and more. 

Thinkific Key Features

When you search for “best online course platforms,” Thinkific is often one of the few options that appear in all the major lists. But is it worth the hype? 

Let’s find out in this in-depth review of its key features. 

1. Course creation tools

Thinkific’s user-friendly course builder helps you create and organize your course content using a simple drag-and-drop interface. 

To begin, you can choose from different course templates that suit your needs and goals, such as a pre-sell course, mini-course, flagship course, webinar replay, membership resource library, and more.

If you want to start from scratch, just go with a blank course. 

Here’s how the blank course will appear – like a blank canvas. You can upload your files, add quizzes and surveys, and make your course your own. It’s like you’re the captain of your own course-creation ship! 

You can add videos, audio files, images, text, and other multimedia elements to make your courses engaging and interactive. To make them more effective, there are options to add student assessment options, including quizzes, surveys, assignments, and exams. 

And if you want to level up your course creation game, Thinkific’s got you covered with their built-in app store. 

The app store lets you integrate third-party email marketing and analytics like Shopify, Mailchimp, Zoom, and Google Analytics to enhance your students’ experience and grow your business. 

Plus, you can embed external content from other tools like YouTube, Vimeo, and Google Docs and even use Thinkific’s bulk importer to upload multiple files at once.

If you want to sell multiple courses in a single package, Thinkific allows you to sell various courses bundled together. This can be a great way to offer your students more value while increasing your revenue.

On top of all that, Thinkific gives you all sorts of settings to play around with when it comes to your course. You can set up a drip schedule, decide on pricing, choose what happens after someone buys your course, hand out completion certificates, and even track student progress.

2. Community creation tools 

Thinkific comes powered with a community builder that lets you create, customize, and monetize your learning community. You can run a community along with your course or even use Thinkific as a standalone community creation platform. 

Think of it as an online space where your students can interact with you and each other through posts, comments, discussion forums, and live events. And the community will be under your brand’s name – free of third-party ads or distractions.

Here are the key things you can do with Thinkific’s community capabilities:

• Create community spaces for specific courses and topics within a subject.
• Schedule, organize, and manage live events to host webinars, Q&As, and more. 
• Download your event calendar file and set a custom event duration.
• RSVP for live events and get notifications for upcoming events.
• Assign moderator roles and permissions to manage your community.

And it’s up to you how you want to offer your community. You can either add value to your courses by offering a community as an add-on, a higher-tiered offering, or a standalone product.

After naming your community, you’ll get redirected to your community homepage. From there, you can edit your community settings, such as name, image, description, pricing, and publish status.

Aside from the appearance, you can configure the default access option, visibility, SEO settings, manage affiliate partners, and more.

Some of the other benefits of creating a learning community with Thinkific are:

• Increase student engagement and retention by providing a supportive and interactive learning environment.
• Build your brand and authority by fostering relationships with your students and showcasing your expertise.
• Generate recurring revenue by selling communities as subscriptions, bundles, or order bumps.

Moreover, you can set various pricing options, including one-time payments, recurring monthly fees, or even offering the community for free. 

Additionally, you can offer payment plans that split the total community price into several monthly payments, making it more accessible for students who may not have the means to pay for the community in one go. 

And if you don’t like the pre-defined pricing structure, you can add as many custom pricing options as you want. 

This level of flexibility makes it easy for you to monetize your online community and ensure that it remains sustainable in the long run.

Once your community is up and running, you can use the “After Purchase Flow” feature to customize the experience for your new students. It allows you to choose what your students see after sign-up – it could be a custom thank you page, an upsell offer, or immediate access to your product.

3. Course pricing options  

Thinkific allows course creators to offer different payment options to their students, providing flexibility and convenience.

You can sell your courses through:

• One-time payments: This is the simplest way to charge your students for your courses and products. You can set a fixed price for your course or product, and your students will pay it once to access it. You can also offer coupons and discounts to your students to reduce the price.

• Payment plans: Here, you can set a price per payment and a total number of payments, and the students will pay it in monthly installments until they complete the payment plan. You can also set an enrollment duration for your course or product to limit the access time for your students. 

• Recurring subscriptions: This way, you can charge students on a recurring basis. You can set a monthly or annual price, and they’ll pay it every month or year to gain access. You can also offer free trials or previews to your students to let them try your course or product before paying. 

To offer payment plans to your students on Thinkific, you’ll need T-Commerce or Stripe connected to your Thinkific site as your payment processor. You can also use Thinkific’s own payment gateway that offers multiple payment options with digital wallets like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. 

4. Course site and customization options

With Thinkific’s branding and white-labeling options, you can fully customize your course, community, and even course site to match your brand. 

This includes adding your logo and branding elements to the course platform and removing any references to Thinkific, making it appear as if you built it entirely in-house.

Look at this Thinkific course website, for example: 

Here’s their course enrollment page: 

You won’t find even a single trace of Thinkific! 

The Course Builder has a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to create a course. You can add text, images, video, and audio files directly to the editor. There are also tools available to help you create quizzes and assessments, add multimedia content, or even embed interactive elements on your page.

In addition to the Course Builder, Thinkific offers free templates to start building your course. These templates come with pre-built lessons and resources that you can customize to fit your needs. Each template is different to fit any type of learning experience.

Additionally, you can customize your course’s name, image, description, colors, and fonts. That said, you’ll only be able to apply the theme settings to your entire site. Thinkific doesn’t allow you to customize the colors and fonts of your site pages individually. 

Coming to the community builder, Thinkific offers a range of customization options to help you create a community that fits your brand and your student’s needs. There are options to customize the colors, fonts, images, and community features you want to offer, including private messaging, discussion forums, and chat rooms.

And not just your course and the community, Thinkific also lets you build and customize a course site to display, market, and promote your course and community. 

You’ll get access to three pre-designed themes and the ability to customize their appearance the way you like. You can also upload your own custom theme, but this option is only available with the paid plans (you are limited to only three built-in themes with the free plan). 

Once you pick the theme you like, you can customize the site layout, and add new content, communication types, pop-ups, rewards, banners, and more. 

Despite your chosen theme, you can add as many sections as you want. 

These sections can help you display: 

• Pricing options 
• Specific products 
• Product categories 
• Bonus material 
• Call to action 
• Checklist 
• Course/community overview 
• Countdown timer
• FAQs
• Videos 
• Upsells
• Social proof (logos, reviews, testimonials)
• Lead capture form (ideal for pre-launch)
• Icons and text (highlighting key points)

Want to rearrange the sections in your course? No problem! You can move them around wherever you want them to be. Simply click and hold on a section, drag it to the new location, and drop it in place. 

You can also add custom pages to showcase additional information about your course, such as an About page, a FAQ page, or a page highlighting testimonials from past students. Again, pages are customizable to align with your brand and match the rest of your course.

You can also add custom CSS or JavaScript code to further customize the look and feel of the site and your course player. For example, if you want to add an image slider or video player to your site, you can do that with custom CSS or JavaScript code.

If you need help customizing your site, check out Thinkific’s support articles or contact their support team.

That said, Thinkific doesn’t provide support for editing the HTML/CSS code of your site theme. You’ll need to hire a professional to make significant changes to your theme.

5. Marketing and sales tools

In addition to course creation and community building, Thinkific offers many marketing and sales tools. 

One such feature is the ability to offer free trials to potential students, giving them a chance to sample your courses before making a purchase.

You can also create landing pages ​​to collect emails from prospective students and start selling your course. These landing pages will also come in handy for remarketing purposes so that you can continue to market to people who have visited your page but haven’t signed up yet.

Plus, you can add images, videos, testimonials, and other content to highlight the benefits of your course and convince potential students to sign up.

And while Thinkific doesn’t have built-in email marketing features, it integrates with leading email marketing tools like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and Constant Contact. When used in tandem with opt-in forms, you can build email lists, send newsletters, and run targeted campaigns to promote your courses.

Thinkific also lets you create membership sites. For the uninitiated, member sites help you with recurring revenue streams by offering access to your courses, content, and community for a monthly or annual fee.

With your membership site, you’ll have the option to create: 

• Custom pages for your paying members
• Organize private communities visible to only paying members
• Link to your social media communities
• Create a drip schedule (schedule course content for automated delivery over time)
• Multi-level subscription tiers

Then you have customized coupons and promotions to incentivize students to enroll in your courses. 

Thinkific provides a range of coupon options, including:

• Percentage or dollar discounts
• Limited-time offers
• Free trials
• Specific duration 

However, note that many promotional features, like membership sites and coupons, are only available with paid plans. 

That’s not it. 

Other promotional features include:

• Affiliate Marketing: Thinkific’s built-in affiliate marketing feature lets you run commission-based partnerships with other course creators or influencers who can promote your courses to their audience. This will help you reach new audiences and generate more sales.

• Bundles: You can bundle multiple courses and offer them at a discounted price to increase your sales and revenue.

• Upsells: You can offer additional courses or products to your students after they purchase or complete a course, including coaching sessions, ebooks, or merchandise.

• Sales Widgets: These are small, customizable buttons or product cards you can place on another website or blog, allowing your audience to buy your product from anywhere.

• Share Revenue: Share revenue with course contributors for your courses and bundles.

6. Reporting and analytics

Thinkific provides detailed metrics on student engagement, course completion rates, enrolments, orders, and revenue, allowing course creators to track their progress and identify areas for improvement.

But before diving into the detailed metrics, you can get a quick overview of your revenue, new accounts, and enrollments by scrolling down your dashboard. These metrics can be filtered by a specific date and viewed in both graphical and list formats.

Moving on to the advanced reporting options – accessible from the left-hand side of your dashboard.

Firstly, you have the “Revenue” reports showing your revenue over time and the sources, products, and payment methods that generate your income.

Secondly, you have “Orders” reports to show you the details of each order placed on your site, such as the date, amount, product, customer, and payment method. You can also see the status of each order, such as paid, refunded, or canceled.

Next, “Enrollments” reports give you a glimpse into the number of enrollments in your courses over time and the sources, products, and customers that drive your enrollments. You can also see the completion rates and progress of your students.

Finally, Thinkific’s student engagement reports help you understand how your students interact with your courses and content. You can see metrics such as visits, time spent, lessons completed, quiz scores, and more. You can also see the engagement data for each student and each course and compare different courses or cohorts of students.

You can also filter and export your data sets to get more specific answers or share them with your team or stakeholders. 

What I liked the best about Thinkific’s analytics is how their reports are easy to comprehend and act upon. The way they present all the analytics using visually appealing, color-coded graphs is especially for people who shy away from numbers. 

7. Student recognition and engagement tools

Thinkific offers a bunch of nifty student recognition and engagement features to create a community-like atmosphere and give learners that extra push to crush their learning goals.

For starters, completion certificates are a great way to give your students a tangible reward for completing their courses. You even get to choose from seven different templates. 

You can further customize them with your name, logo, colors, and other information. 

Thinkific also allows you to automatically issue certificates each time a student completes a course.

Another engagement tool is the community feature that lets your students interact with each other, share ideas, get feedback, and ask questions. Course creators can also use the community feature to provide additional resources and support, creating a more interactive and personalized learning experience.

Other features include:

• Quizzes & Exams: Thinkific lets you create multiple-choice questions with more than one correct answer and add embedded images, videos, or audio files to make quizzes more engaging.

• Assignments: You can accept and give feedback on student submissions and control student progress.

• Drip Schedule Content: Thinkific’s drip content feature allows you to create a series of lessons that will be released over time. This helps students stay motivated, engaged, and inspired while they are working through your course.

While they’re great features, I was hoping to see something more from a learning management system as popular as Thinkific. For example, why not jazz it up by offering a reward point system or a way for students to earn badges or points for completing tasks, such as quizzes and assignments? 

8. Integrations with third-party apps

Thinkific provides native integration with multiple third-party apps to help you streamline your course creation and management process. You can integrate with tools like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Zapier, and many more to automate email marketing, lead generation, and other tasks. 

It also lets you integrate with payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe to accept payments from your students.

Integrating these apps with your dashboard is also quick, thanks to Thinkific’s built-in app store, where you can find and install apps with a few clicks. You can browse apps by category, such as email & marketing, selling & conversion, learning experience, site design, etc. 

Thinkific also offers an API that helps you to build custom integrations with your own tools and applications.

Thinkific Pricing Plans 

Thinkific offers a range of pricing plans to align with the needs of different course creators. 

It has six pricing plans, each with different features and benefits. Here’s a quick summary of all the pricing plans:

• Free Plan: This plan costs $0 per month and has no transaction fees. 

The free plan allows you to create one course and one community with up to two spaces. You can have unlimited students and one administrator. You also get access to some core features, such as drag-and-drop course builder, integrated e-commerce, course quizzes and surveys, etc.

• Basic Plan: This plan costs $49 per month or $36 per month when paid annually. 

It also has no transaction fees. It allows you to create unlimited courses and one community with up to five spaces. You can have unlimited students and one administrator. You also get access to some additional features, such as custom domains, coupons and discounts, affiliate selling, etc.

• Start Plan: This plan costs $99 per month or $74 per month when paid annually. 

It also has no transaction fees. It allows you to create unlimited courses and one community with up to 10 spaces. You can have unlimited students and one administrator. You also get access to some more features, such as assignments, bundles and add-on packages, memberships and payment plans, live lessons, etc.

• Grow Plan: This plan costs $199 per month or $149 per month when paid annually. 

Again, no transaction fees. Plus, the Grow plan lets you create unlimited courses and three communities with up to 20 spaces. You can have unlimited students and two administrators. You also get access to some advanced features, such as removing Thinkific branding, bulk student emailer, bulk enrollments, API access, etc.

• Expand Plan: This plan costs $499 per month or $374 per month when paid annually. 

It allows you to create unlimited courses and products with unlimited communities and spaces. You can have unlimited students and administrators. You also get access to some premium features, such as a dedicated customer success team, multiple seats and tiered pricing checkout, email white-labeling, single sign-on (SSO), bulk selling app, enterprise API access, etc.

• Plus Plan: This is a custom plan that requires you to contact Thinkific for a quote. 

The Plus plan is for large enterprises that need more scalability and security. It includes all the features from the Expand plan plus some exclusive features, such as a 99.9% service level agreement (SLA), 3+ separate Thinkific sites, multiple instructors per course, etc.

Eventually, the Thinkific pricing plan you opt for will depend on your requirements and whether it’s worth it for you at the moment or not. 

Thinkific Ease of Use

User interface and navigation

Thinkific is easy to use for both the instructor and students. 

The interface is intuitive, sleek, and user-friendly, making it easy for students to navigate through their courses. For instructors, it’s simple to manage assignments and track student progress.

When you sign in to Thinkific, you are greeted by a checklist that guides you through the course creation process step by step – a helpful feature for novices. 

This makes it easy for beginners to navigate the platform and ensures that you don’t miss any important steps in the course creation process. 

Aside from this checklist, you can easily find what you’re looking for using the navigation menu on the left-hand side. So, you’re never scurrying here and there to discover a feature – everything is readily accessible from the navigation bar. 

Coming to the actual course creation or community creation process, Thinkific has pre-built themes and a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to easily create your course content and structure. No coding required! You can also reorder, duplicate, or delete your lessons with a few clicks. 

Thinkific User Testimonial:

As Simon Bacher, Co-Founder of the Ling App, says, 

“I love the easy-to-use, intuitive user interface and powerful features with customizable themes. This course building doesn’t need coding skills because templates are available, enabling drag-and-drop editing. There’s no limit to the number of lessons or chapters you can include in a Thinkific course. The only limitation is you can’t create or add multiple video lessons unless you upload them.” 

Customer support

Thinkific provides various customer support options to help you with any issues you may encounter. The platform offers a searchable knowledge base that contains articles, tutorials, and frequently asked questions on various topics related to course creation, marketing, and management.

If you need more immediate help, you can use the Live chat option – available on paid plans from 6 am – 5 pm PT, Monday to Friday. 

For creators with the Grow plan or higher, you can even book a call directly with their Support Team. This option is available Mon to Fri 6 am – 5 pm PT.

Thinkific User Testimonial:

Lisa Richards, CEO and Creator of the Candida Diet, who has used Thinkific to create a few of their Candida courses, shares her experience with Thinkific’s customer support, 

“When it comes to customer support, Thinkific is quite robust, offering comprehensive self-service options like a knowledge base, a help center, and user forums. We’ve also found the customer support representatives highly knowledgeable, empathetic, and helpful. 

However, there have been times when the response time for our support requests has been slow, causing a lot of frustration on our end. There are also countable times when we’ve received generic responses from the support staff that didn’t quite address our concerns. With that being said, we’d still give Thinkific a 7/10 for providing satisfactory customer support.” 

Pros and Cons

When it comes to choosing an online course platform, there are a lot of factors to consider. To help you decide whether Thinkific is the right choice, let’s take a closer look at its pros and cons.

Advantages of using Thinkific

• There’s a free plan that allows you to create one course and one community with unlimited students and no transaction fees. 

• The course builder is user-friendly and intuitive and lets you create your course content and structure with drag-and-drop features. 

• It has a fully integrated ecommerce system that lets you accept payments in over 100 currencies and offers different payment options like credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.

• It has an app store where you can find and install apps that can extend your Thinkific experience, including Google Analytics, Accredible, Motrain, Invirtu, etc.

• It has API access that lets you access and manipulate data from Thinkific to create custom integrations or features. 

• Thinkific’s Zapier integration lets you connect it with thousands of other apps without any coding. 

Potential drawbacks and limitations of using Thinkific

• Thinkific doesn’t offer gamification elements like badges, leaderboards, levels, challenges, etc. You have to use external apps or creative solutions to add gamification features. I was expecting something along these lines from a tool of Thinkific’s caliber. 

• No built-in feature to reward your students with points for completing activities, lessons, or courses either. You have to use external apps or creative solutions to create a reward point system.

• It does not have its own email marketing tools and only offers native integrations with a few third-party services, such as Mailchimp, Keap, ConvertKit, Constant Contact, Aweber, and ActiveCampaign. 

Thinkific Review – Final Verdict

All in all, Thinkific is a robust and user-friendly platform for creating and selling online courses. Its drag-and-drop course builder, built-in marketing tools, and easy-to-use analytics make it a great choice for both novice and experienced course creators. 

Thinkific’s integrations with third-party apps and ability to offer flexible payment plans further enhance its appeal. 

However, its limited student engagement and recognition features and the lack of a built-in email marketing tool may be a drawback for some users. If email marketing and more advanced marketing features are non-negotiable, you might want to go for Thinkific’s competitor Kajabi. 

Despite these minor limitations, Thinkific is often a top choice for those looking to create and sell online courses.

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Learning Revolution founder Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business.