Thinkific Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
We researched many Platforms before choosing Thinkific. We love that Thinkific is Canadian. We love the journey that students take from first encountering the site landing page, going to the course landing page and then immersing themselves in the course. I appreciate the helpful support from the Thinkific team. They do a great job of answering our many questions. I am fortunate that Thinkific rebuilt their course editing software quite soon after we began developing our course. Their new software is quite easy to use and easy to revise. I really like their flat-rate monthly subscription fee with no hidden costs.

Cons
I wish students could purchase this course in the currency of their own country. I wish we could pay for our subscription in Canadian funds instead of American. We have had to purchase a separate Discussion Forum because their Disqus Plug In is a social media plug in that is not confidential, and their built in Discussion Forum is very awkward and poorly organized with no ability to search, edit, or even manage posts. Thinkific focuses much more on supporting marketing than on supporting online course development. We were fortunate that we had already taken two excellent courses in online course development that we could apply to the Thinkific Platform. Thinkific is less responsive to good ideas for improvement than I would like them to be. For example, despite many, many requests from many course developers it is still not possible for the course author to copy, paste and edit quizes and so there is a lot of unnecessary labour involved in inputting quizes

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I like that it is customizable. I like that Thinkific offers lots of webinars and help with all aspects of publishing online courses. It allows a couple ways to collect money for your courses. They spell out exactly what to do! For a newbie like me, I began setting things up months ago while I was working on my course. As I completed it, I began uploading the lectures and made some changes to my text and landing page and other info. Easy to make it your own. I am happy with how professional it all looks. Now I will get busy with the marketing end and Thinkific can help with info about that too! Customer service is awesome and they reach out frequently to see what they can do to guide you! I highly recommend this solution for getting an online course published. I am at the entry level, but am testing the waters until I need to go further and unlock more features.

Cons
As expected the free version is basic, so in order to get to some of the good stuff, you have to upgrade. Not a big deal really, since I am producing my first course and need to go slowly.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The way Thinkific presents content, from landing page to course completion page, is beautiful and appealing to the user. There are ample ways to connect with the user through various integrations if desired. It's also useful that you can customize the branding and even your own site theme if you have the available resources to do so! After switching from a sub-par LMS, our users are more engaged and more excited about signing in to consume our courses.

Cons
Reporting leaves much to be desired - best count on using Zapier to pull data into a 3rd party for analyzing user progress and completion rates. It's also frustrating that I have to wait for some reports to be emailed to me after requesting them. Perhaps the most frustrating part is that the front-end is designed using Liquid, which is difficult for a novice with basic CSS / HTML knowledge to navigate in order to make small text changes across the site.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
It's mobile friendly for my students. It's a very simple to use a system which means even if you're, not super tech you can make it work. I get awesome student feedback on how easy Thinkific is to use, especially on the go. It's got great reporting and you get paid right away instead of having your money held up. Even on the free account which is awesome to better manage cash flow needs. I also love that you can see how your students are progressing and where people might be getting stuck on your content.

Cons
Probably the only big negative for me is that is I want to include writing below my video training it doesn't show the student how long the video is or even that there's a video there at all. So sometimes people have missed training parts because of the formatting of their system. Not the biggest deal, but I like to streamline my lesson by putting a small blurb under the video and the easiest way to do this means it doesn't show up as a video on the sidebar for the student.

Rating breakdown

Pros
I really like how easy this system is; they have done a lot to make their platform easy to use. The free plan is good. Pro's: Easy to use & navigate Helpful tutorials Helpful webinars and manuals to help you get the most and market your courses Clean crisp look Responsive for mobile, tablet, and pc's

Cons
Pricing for me was the only con; I had purchased a lifetime subscription to another course building platform and decided to switch to that otherwise i'd still be using thinkific.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10