Thinkific is a popular online course selling platform allowing users to create and sell membership sites and courses. It offers multiple things, including:
- A free plan with no additional or hidden costs
- A customizable and flexible course platform
- An all-in-one platform allowing you to organize your learning content with the drag and drop builder
Our personal experience allowed us to comprehensively explore the platform and guide others on fully taking advantage of it.
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About Thinkific
Thinkific facilitates building, selling, and marketing online courses and comes equipped with multiple features that simplify the entire process.
It offers the following benefits:
- Ability to create multimedia courses from any kind of content
- Handle all types of courses
- No previous design experience required to use the platform
- Access to the students’ basic information, including details like name, email address, and phone number
- Excellent technical support to resolve any queries and issues
- Everything you need to create and deliver courses
It’s an excellent choice for a wide variety of users, including authors, consultants, speakers, trainers, experts, universities, enterprises, and membership organizations. These users can take advantage of Thinkific in several ways, such as engaging their audience, educating their customers, growing their brands, and selling courses to earn revenues.
Thinkific at a Glance
Thinkific has a lot to offer to course creators. Here’s what you need to know:
Affordability & Pricing
Thinkific offers a wide range of pricing plans. It’s an affordable option since it provides a starter package free of cost, providing the basic features you’ll need. This plan doesn’t have any transaction costs or any other hidden fees. Next up is the Basic plan priced at $49 per month, which is also affordable. It also has a Pro plan with all of the available features, which is $99 per month. Lastly, For enterprises, Thinkific has a plan for $499 per month.
User Experience & Ease of Use
One of the best things about Thinkific is that you don’t need any prior coding or design experience to build a full-fledged course. All you need to do is use the drag and drop builder to rearrange items and create a compelling course quickly. These features make the platform extremely user-friendly and easy-to-use. It’s also easy to navigate, ensuring you can move from one function to another quickly.
Sales & Marketing
Fundamentally, Thinkific helps you build and sell courses, which is why it offers a full range of sales and marketing features to help you do that. It offers excellent landing page designs with custom branding features. While Thinkific doesn’t offer integrated email marketing and sales funnel, you can get these with over 1,000 marketing integrations available. These can help you scale your marketing efforts in multiple ways, including affiliate marketing, email marketing, etc.
Course Creation & Engagement
The Thinkific course builder gives you access to multiple features, including the course curriculum, drip schedule, quizzes, pricing, and publishing the course. The builder also offers a Bulk Importer feature that lets you quickly add audio, video, and PDF files altogether. The only downside is that several engagement features such as certificates, bundles, assignments, and live lessons with Zoom are only available with the Pro plan ($79 per month).
Design & Customizability
Thinkific offers unlimited design and customization options. You can easily build the kind of courses you want with its drag and drop course builder and customize aspects, such as the domain and themes. The platform also offers a custom branding feature and various design solutions. You have to opt for the paid plan for custom branding and other advanced customization features, such as members-only pages and a customized student experience.
Customer Support & Training
Thinkific training center offers comprehensive step-by-step guides for all of its features, ensuring you don’t need to contact a representative if you don’t understand anything. The knowledge base also includes numerous guides on how you can create, market, and price your courses, helping you make the most of the platform. Apart from this, Thinkific uses an email ticketing system for its customer support inquiries.
Who Uses Thinkific?
Thinkific caters to a wide range of individuals and businesses through its extensive course building platform. To date, it’s used by customers in 170 countries and has served over 770,000 students. Companies such as Samsung, Hootsuite, Intel, and Brit + Co have used Thinkific to drive additional revenue through direct course sales, skyrocket their customer success metrics, create unique employee experiences, and attract new loyal customers. Hootsuite, for instance, uses Thinkific to provide product education through its online courses and, till now, has integrated 800 universities, offered 72,000 social media certifications, and catered to 450,000 students.
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Is Thinkific Worth It? Pros & Cons
Using Thinkific first-hand helped us explore the various features it had to offer, allowing us to experience its user-friendly interface and features fully. However, we found some aspects challenging to use and that Thinkific could improve to provide a better experience to its users.
Pros
Thinkific has a lot to offer its users, including:
No Transaction Fees
No fees on payment made by students
Phone Support
On any issues you may encounter
Free Plan
With all core features
Voice-Over PowerPoints
Automatically plays the audio when students flip through slides
Variety Of Payment Options
Payment options for courses, such as monthly and one-time payments
Subscriptions
Subscriptions to courses allowing you to take recurring payments through Stripe
Cons
Thinkific falls behind in some areas, such as:
No Marketplace
No marketplace to sell your courses
No Integrated Email Marketing
No integrated email marketing with the platform, but you can opt for 3rd party integrations.
No Sales Funnel Builder
No integrated sales funnel builder with the platform, but you can opt for 3rd party integrations.
Who is Thinkific Best For?
Thinkific is the best option for numerous kinds of users. These users can build and sell courses through the platform and share their knowledge or add education as an extension of their current operations.
Experts, consultants, corporations, and educators, can teach all kinds of content on the platform, from baking a cake or playing the piano to raising your digital marketing game. Here are a few examples of how different users can benefit from Thinkific:
- Enterprises can offer valuable online courses to train customers on their products and services.
- Thought leaders with YouTube channels and blogs, speakers, authors, and experts can use Thinkific to monetize their expertise and scale their offline operations.
- Business owners and consultants can create courses to get some free time.
- Educators can offer their knowledge online to solidify their brand.
Technical Requirements For Thinkific
Luckily for most users, you don’t need any previous coding or tech knowledge to take advantage of Thinkific’s various features. However, it does come with an extensive range of features, which could be overwhelming for someone with no experience at all.
In this case, you can benefit from Thinkific’s knowledge base, which provides detailed guides for anything you want to do with the platforms.
Even if you’re stuck somewhere or are confused about a feature, chances are you’ll find the solution in the knowledge base.
It offers comprehensive lessons on building your courses from scratch and market and profit them to earn revenue.
Supported Browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge
Course Creation Process on Thinkific
You can use the Thinkific course builder to create courses on the platform. It features a user-friendly drag and drop builder, which you can use to design and create content. Here’s what you need to do to start building courses on Thinkific:
- Go to Manage Learning Content on the dashboard.
- Select the Courses tab
- Select + New Course option on the upper right
- Select your course template
- Add content, chapters, and lessons.
- Update a Landing Page
- Set your pricing
- Set up a payment integration
- Customize the home page, site name, and URL
- Publish your course
Key Thinkific Benefits
Course Creation
With Thinkific, we can create an endless variety of courses full of engaging content. The drag and drop builder is exceptionally straightforward to use.
We also found it effortless to navigate the course builder, from landing pages to selecting from multiple courses. The following features particularly stood out to improve the experience:
- The Bulk Importer allowed us to add multiple multimedia files, such as audio, video, and PDFs, to the course and rearranging them after uploading.
- Customizable course templates for when we struggled with ideas
- Course previews allowing us to see how the course looks and flows from one lesson to the other for students
- Customized home page allowing us to integrate our brand guidelines and make the course genuinely look and feel like our own
You can create your course through the following steps:
- Go to Manage Learning Content on the dashboard.
- Select the Courses tab
- Select + New Course option on the upper right
Marketing & Selling
You can build the best course on the planet, but your effort will go to waste if you don’t know how to market and sell. Luckily, Thinkific provides multiple features that helped us get a kickstart on generating revenue on our courses by providing a full suite of business tools. For starters, it allowed us to cater to multiple audiences with different pricing options and boost our sales with promotional coupons, payment plans, upsells, etc. Additionally, it also allowed us to improve our course campaigns with data tracking, providing valuable insights into how our courses are doing and how we can improve.
Integrations
Naturally, Thinkific does fall behind in some areas, such as the lack of email marketing and an integrated sales funnel builder, amongst other things. Fortunately, it’s compatible with thousands of eCommerce, growth, analytics, marketing, and automation tools that helped us maximize our course’s impact. We integrated it with various 3rd party solutions to create an excellent course ecosystem. Apart from essential integrations, we also explored advanced integrations to expand our offerings. Some of the most popular tools it’s compatible with are:
- Stripe
- Shopify
- Mailchimp
- Zapier
- WordPress
- Salesforce
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Pixel
- eWebinar
- ActiveCampaign
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Customization Possibilities
We customized our Thinkific site to match our branding, which was easy to do with the site builder. We were also able to set up a custom domain and site name, making it easy for our students to find our website. The site builder also allowed us to explore our creativity and choose a theme that would bring our courses to life. Thinkific has refined these themes to suit all kinds of content and create impeccable courses without a designer. We also customized other areas, such as the default site text on our landing pages and the coupon text on the checkout page.
Student Management
Of course, a crucial aspect of creating courses is ensuring your students have a positive experience. Thinkific offers various student management features that allowed us to support our students by increasing student engagement and providing support. For instance, we manually enrolled students into a course or bundle when needed and also imported students from a file to add students to our account from another database. We also enrolled and unenrolled students in bulk, eliminating the need to do it one by one and allowing us to save time.
Multiple Languages
Thinkific allowed us to cater to a diverse range of students since it supports a multi-language experience. It enables students to choose their site language and choose their language preference. Once students do this, the key site messages, such as menus and buttons, will switch to their preferred language. It currently supports 39 languages, which are:
- Afrikaans
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French
- Georgian
- German
- Greek
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Mandarin (Simplified)
- Mandarin (Traditional)
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish (European)
- Spanish (Mexican)
- Swedish
- Thai
- Turkish
- Vietnamese
Tracking and Reporting
Thinkific offers various reporting features that allow us to track how we’re doing and improve our students’ experience. Firstly, the progress report features provided us with insights from the student activity on our courses and helped us measure completion rates. This way, we can see when every student started the course, completed it, and signed in last. Apart from this, the orders report feature allowed us to track our site’s revenue and view the overall purchase history. By monitoring sales and subscriptions and determining purchase sources, we identified potential areas of improvement.
Thinkific Costs
Thinkific offers four pricing plans with varying features so businesses and individuals with small and large operations can benefit from it. All plans come with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, are risk-free, and have no transaction fees. You can also purchase any of these plans at a discount of 20% if you select the annual payment option.
These plans are:
- Thinkific Free Plan – $0 with no transaction fees
- A Plan – $49 if paid monthly, $39 per month if paid annually (20% off)
- B Plan – $99 if paid monthly, $79 per month if paid annually (20% off)
- C Plan – $499 if paid monthly, $399 per month if paid annually (20% off)
Thinkific Substitutes
Finding the right platform to build and sell courses can be tricky, and there could be many reasons why Thinkific doesn’t suit your needs. In this case, you can explore Thinkific alternatives, such as Kajabi, Podia, Simplero, Kartra, and CourseCraft. All of these platforms have varying features but offer you the ability to hold online courses. You should look into different options to determine which one suits your business model the most.
Recommendations With Thinkific
Thinkific offers many features for users to build a full-fledged online school. However, for an improved user experience, there are some recommendations you can implement. First, you should get a custom domain for more consistent branding, although a Thinkific subdomain is available with a free plan. This recognizable domain will help your users find your site quickly. Additionally, you should also ensure the course is in demand and make a trial course in your niche before investing money and time building a course. Lastly, to get a feel of the platform, you should try out the free plan to ensure it has everything you need.
Thinkific FAQ
Is Thinkific Legit?
Thinkific is a legitimate company and began in 2012. It currently has over a hundred employees and serves over 35,000 course creators. If you’re still worried, you can always try out the free plan and upgrade from there.
Can You Make Money On Thinkific?
Yes, you can sell online courses on Thinkific and make money. It offers multiple pricing options so you can flexibly charge your students based on membership or subscriptions. You can also boost your sales further with coupons and various other promotional features.
Is Thinkific Mobile Friendly?
Currently, the platform doesn’t offer an app to allow you to build courses on the go. However, the platform is fully responsive on mobile, so your students can still take the courses on the go from any computer, phone, or tablet.
Does Thinkific Charge Transaction Fees?
Thinkific is one of the only platforms that offer a free plan and come with no transaction fees. Its free version provides plenty of features that you can use to kickstart course creation.
Is Thinkific a LMS?
Yes, Thinkific is a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) that allows you to create and sell courses online with an easy-to-use drag and drop builder.
How Many Languages Are Supported By Thinkific?
As of September 2020, Thinkific supports 39 languages. These languages are:
- Afrikaans
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French
- Georgian
- German
- Greek
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Mandarin (Simplified)
- Mandarin (Traditional)
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish (European)
- Spanish (Mexican)
- Swedish
- Thai
- Turkish
- Vietnamese
Final Thoughts
If you’re in search of a full-fledged platform that offers a variety of features to help you build and sell online courses, then Thinkific might just be what you need. It allows you to build your brand and have complete control of what you’re offering your students. It doesn’t matter if you’re an independent educator or a growing enterprise; you’ll find that Thinkific has plenty to offer.
While there are certainly areas where Thinkific can improve, such as the absence of an online marketplace, you can still improve your experience and enhance your offerings through 3rd party integrations.
All in all, Thinkific is worth exploring, which is especially easy to do with its free plan. While the platform may be a bit complex at first, you’ll find your way around confidently once you familiarize yourself with it.
