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 videos and other content, deliver your content professionally, create quizzes and assignments, do live sessions, build a community, and manage your learners. On top of this, you can build your website, create sales pages, price your course, and process payments.

What makes hosted platforms like Thinkific popular is that you don’t have to integrate dozens of plugins to build a learning management system. Unlike WordPress, you don’t need to manage plugins and hosting and do any coding. The platform takes care of all the technical aspects for you.

Also, Thinkific isn’t a course marketplace like Udemy or Skillshare. Therefore, you have complete control over courses, pricing, and policies. But then, you’ll be the one 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, the theme library and the page builder are placed in the Design Your Site section.

Besides that, creating a course on Thinkific is straightforward. You need to create your curriculum and set a price, and the platform will take care of the rest. It will automatically create the landing and checkout pages and the course area. What we like is that they are 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 first choose one of the six course templates available. These templates offer pre-built curriculum structures for different course types, including a Blank template for creating curriculum from scratch.

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.

After selecting the content type, you have to upload the actual content in the lesson editor. What we like about the Thinkific course builder is that you can add multiple content types in the same lesson (e.g., video + text + pdf), a critical feature for many course creators.

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 that the course builder offers is the Bulk Importer, as it speeds up the whole course creation process significantly. You can bulk upload all your content onto the platform, and Thinkific will automatically turn them into course lessons. You can then reorganize them by dragging and dropping them.

How the bulk uploader works in Thinkific

Thinkific also has a video library feature, so you can easily manage your videos and reuse them in other courses if required.

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 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 here is sending an automated email to your students when the lessons become available. Instead, you’ll have to rely on your email marketing platform to send the emails.

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.

Moreover, you can create events inside your community.

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

While Thinkific Communities is awesome, 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. More importantly, your students can attend the meeting from the course player itself.

If you plan to use Thinkific as a cohort course platform, you’ll find this feature will be 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.

Moreover, you have the option to get branded apps for your education platform. 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 site language and text
• The ability to remove Thinkific’s branding from your website

Now, let’s jump into specific 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 Site Builder section 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.

Available sections in Thinkific’s page builder

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

Finally, the website you create is 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.

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.

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. This way, enrolled students have course access for a certain duration only.

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 integrates with the two most popular payment gateways—Stripe and PayPal. You can integrate the two and start accepting payments in a matter of minutes.

The only limitation is that PayPal currently works just for one-time payments and not payment plans or subscriptions.

Apart from this, Thinkific has launched a new service called Thinkific Payments. This payment service replaces Stripe and supports additional payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay. The platform will also collect and remit sales taxes on your behalf.

However, on other gateways, you’ll need to integrate Thinkific with Quaderno, a specialized tax management solution.

Now, let’s talk about the checkout process in Thinkific.

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

The checkout page looks sleek out of the box. However, it’s not possible to customize the design in a meaningful way. For example, you can’t add testimonials or product benefits, which is a limitation.

Finally, you can add 1-click upsells to your checkout process using the After Purchase Flow feature.

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 marketing: Thinkific lets you send broadcast messages to your students. While this isn’t a substitute for an email marketing provider, it’s 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 four reports available:

• 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, affiliates, etc.

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.

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 Users under the Support Your Students 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 allows you to organize your students into cohorts and sell courses in bulk to organizations.

When you create a new group, you can create a sharing link for the same. So when someone enrolls in a course/bundle using that link, they’ll be added to the group automatically. You can also bulk-import users and add them to a group 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.

So whether you want to have a group at the organizational level or team level within an organization, you can do that. This makes Thinkific a stand-out option for selling courses to businesses and organizations.

Another useful little feature is restricting community access to the students in specific groups, which is useful for delivering cohort courses.

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 or set up 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 a dedicated 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 third-party 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 100+ 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 online course 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 white-labeling) and is ideal for growing businesses.
• The Expand plan ($499/month) provides more admin users and is suitable for bigger businesses.

So that you know, Thinkific lets you have unlimited students and courses on all paid plans, making it suitable for starting a full-fledged online school.

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 kind of similar regarding their scope, Thinkific has much more to offer for course creation and engagement. It supports better assessment tools, live lessons, and mobile apps.

Even when it comes to things like website creation and administration tools, Thinkific is the clear winner. Read our Thinkific vs Teachable guide for a detailed comparison.

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

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.

Some other platforms, such as LearnWorlds, Podia, and New Zenler, are also compared with Thinkific. If you want to do a side-by-side comparison of these, you should use our interactive comparison tool.

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, advanced 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 flexibility and 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.

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