Thinkific is a legitimate content creation platform that has been operating since 2012. There are more than 100 employees that work with close to 40,000 course creators around the world.

How Does Thinkific Make a Profit?

Thinkific makes all its profit from the paid subscription plans offered on the website. They don’t take any percentage or commission fees from your course sales, which is excellent news for course creators.

Is Thinkific Better Than Udemy?

Both Thinkific and Udemy are robust course-creating platforms. Udemy certainly takes the lead when it comes to the audience because there are millions of learners already registered on the website. However, with Udemy, you don’t get to communicate with your audience outside of the platform, nor do you have access to their emails. So, if you’re in for a long-term course creation career, Thinkific is a better option.

What Is the Difference Between Kajabi and Thinkific?

The main difference between Kajabi and Thinkific is that the former is a full-scale platform for making and selling digital products, including online courses. Thinkific has excellent course-building software but lacks the advanced marketing and sales features offered by Kajabi. If you want to approach course creation from a more entrepreneurial perspective, you should consider Kajabi instead.

Does Thinkific Work With Shopify?

Yes, Thinkific integrates with Shopify. You can integrate all your courses into Shopify and sell them as Shopify products. All you have to do is install a Shopify app and manage the orders and transactions there.

Thinkific Review: Calling All Industry Experts

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TLDR: Thinkific Review

Looking to pass your knowledge onto others looking to enter your industry? Thinkific could be just the platform you’re looking for.

Some of Thinkific’s most noteable benefits include its different pricing tiers (one of which is free), an easy-to-use drag-and-drop content builder, plenty of premade templates, and no transaction fees. This means you won’t be charged a fee for every course you sell.

Unfortunately, Thinkific lacks some advanced marketing and sales options you can find on Kajabi and other competitor sites, making it harder to sell courses to potential students. However, integrations are available, which makes up for the lack of marketing features to some extent.

Overall, Thinkific offers a good opportunity to sell your knowledge but you should be prepared to do a lot of the marketing yourself on other platforms.

For more details, keep reading our in-depth review of Thinkific.

Thinkific Pros & Cons

Thinkific Review

Pros

There’s a free plan. Thinkific is one of the rare platforms that offer a completely free plan. You can only build a limited number of courses, but this is still a great option for anyone who wants to try the platform.
No transaction fees. Most online course creation platforms take transaction fees for every course you sell, but this isn’t the case with Thinkific.
Custom domain. Thinkific can host your course and you can select the domain you want to use.
Recurring subscription options. You can create membership-model courses and offer a monthly recurring plan for your students.
Easy video production. The platform supports the Voice over PowerPoint tool for simple and fast video production.
Phone support. Hardly any platform of this kind offers phone support. Thinkific users can benefit from this feature when they run into issues or have a question.
Plenty of integrations. Thinkific makes up for its lack of built-in development tools with generous integration capabilities.

Thinkific Cons

Lack of marketing features. Thinkific doesn’t have a proper course marketplace. Nor does it have built-in email marketing features for promoting your courses.
Lack of sales features. There’s no sales funnel builder. However, there are third-party integrations with LeadPages and Clickfunnels.
Lack of chat support. Some users may prefer chat support over phone support, but with Thinkific, they must settle for the latter.

Who Is Thinkific For?

Thinkific is an excellent platform for anyone who’s considering entering the world of online course creation. The one-month free trial and the free plan offer users just enough capabilities to create a fully functioning online course and earn money from it.

If you’re looking to create an online educational program to share knowledge, then Thinkific is certainly worth trying. However, if profit, sales, and marketing are your main goals, you may prefer more advanced course creation platforms.

What Thinkific Offers

Thinkific is a unique online course creation site that offers experts the chance to earn money by passing on their knowledge.

Thinkific Features

Creators can brand their courses to match their website (if they have one), include surveys, quizzes, student discussions, add completion certificates, and more. The customization features are relatively straightforward to use, but there’s also room for HTML and CSS manipulation.

The platform integrates with plenty of third-party software like MailChimp, Brillium Exams, Infusionsoft, Shopify, Zapier, and others. They have six key integration areas.

E-commerce – Stripe, PayPal, Quaderno, and others
Analytics – Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Segment, and others
Automation Tools – Zapier, Infusionsoft, etc.
E-Mail Marketing – MailChimp, ConvertKit, AWeber, Active Campaign, and more
Student Success – Accredible, Brillium, Disqus, etc.
Growth Tools – Sumo

Thinkific Apps

The type of integrations you can use depends on the plan you’ve selected. The free plan comes with plenty of options including PayPal, Stripe, SocialSign.in, Stunning, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Facebook Pixel, MailChimp, ConvertKit, and others.

It’s worth noting that Thinkific also offers SSL certificates, which are best practice for just about any website today, especially ones where users are requested to enter payment details. Google will also like that your course is secured with an SSL.

As far as communication with students is concerned, course creators can connect with their learners in a number of ways. There are student discussions for every course, as well as the community feature at more advanced levels. This lowers the need for having to turn to social media for communication. You can choose to send notifications to learners when they join the site, enroll in a course, complete an assignment, etc. There’s also a weekly reminder option.

The platform also has robust reporting and tracking features that allow course creators to monitor variables like:

Course completion percentage
Course viewed percentage
Student emails
Student names
Course start dates
Date of course completion
Date of last sign in
Company name

This functionality is enough for most course creators to have an overview of how fast or slow the students progress with their content. You can see the course reporting stats on screen, while the quiz and survey reports can be downloaded as a .CSV file or sent via email.

How Thinkific Works

Creating a course on Thinkific is simple enough.

Create an Account. You can do so by following this link and hitting the Get Started Free button in the upper right-hand corner. Once the account is ready, you can enter basic information about your online school.
Design Your Site. From the menu on the left, users can design their own Thinkific site. Choose from existing themes and templates or create your own. The drag-and-drop builder is easy to use.
Start Creating Courses. Choose from a pre-made template or create your courses from scratch. Video, text, audio, and multimedia lessons can be created. You can also create surveys and exams or upload PDFs and downloadable lessons for offline convenience. To manage your courses going forward, you will use the Manage Learning Content section.
Market & Sell. The Market and Sell section is where you will find some marketing functionality, coupons, and your available apps.

Thinkific Pricing

Thinkific has yearly and monthly payment plans and each consists of four options.

Free: Offers access to the platform’s core features like limited courses, unlimited students, a simple course builder, e-commerce, website templates, app version, e-mail and phone support, and onsite admin.
Basic: This version costs $39 per month when billed annually or $49 for monthly payments. This plan comes with all the features included in the free one, plus unlimited content, live chat support, a custom domain, coupons and promotions, drip content, basic courses from Thinkific Academy, and one-on-one student communication via email.
Pro: Expect to pay $79 per month when billed annually or $99 per month for monthly payments. This solution is the best for creators who wish to build a serious online course program with a complete set of tools for an exceptional user experience. The plan supports all features from the previous categories, as well as two site admin accounts, priority support, hidden courses, flexible pricing options, completion certificates, live lessons, single communities, and advanced course building options.
Premier: This plan is $399 per month when billed annually or $499 per month for monthly payments. This is the perfect solution for course creators who wish to deliver online education at scale. The plan includes five site admin accounts, all features from the previous plans, groups, 15 group analysts, an onboarding package, unlimited communities, exam integration, white labeling, and API access.

Users can upgrade or downgrade their Thinkific plan at any time from the dashboard on the website. If you cancel your subscription, your account will be moved to the free plan. Users who had a custom domain will no longer be able to access it upon downgrading.

Thinkific doesn’t currently offer refunds, so users are advised to cancel their subscriptions before their next billing date to avoid additional payment.

Thinkific Alternatives

Kajabi. One area where this leading course-creating platform stands out is its advanced marketing and business tools. If you plan on leading sophisticated marketing campaigns, sending weekly updates, creating optimized marketing landing pages, and investing more time in marketing in general, then Kajabi is certainly worth exploring. Unfortunately, Kajabi is more on the expensive side.
Udemy. If you want to reach more students, Udemy is a top choice. Feature-wise, Udemy has all the basic tools you need to create a well-structured online course.
Teachable. If you’re into affiliate marketing and want to create an online course that others can sell for you, you should consider Teachable. While Thinkific and Teachable share most of the same tools when it comes to content creation, Teachable lacks integrated email options and comprehensive community-building opportunities. Still, Teachable remains a viable alternative to Thinkific.

Verdict

Thinkific is a great platform for course creation for anyone who wishes to explore this path. The overall experience with the software is relatively straightforward, so you can start creating online courses even if you aren’t tech-savvy.

The amount of features available in the free version makes this site a fantastic opportunity for anyone who wants to try their hand at course creation.

The lack of more advanced marketing and sales funnel functionality does make this platform a bit limited compared to some competitors, but still a good choice.