Thinkific is an LMS or course creation platform that allows anyone to create, market, and sell their expertise while retaining control of their brand and business. The platform prides itself in allowing people to create professional digital learning products for all types of audiences and courses.
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Updated: 24 Sep 2022 1:24 pm
In a world where information is available at the click of a button, more and more people are looking for knowledge online. As a result, the demand for online courses is increasingly growing. As entrepreneurs, course creators, coaches, and business people recognize that they can earn a living from selling their knowledge online, they're looking for tools that make it easy to create, curate, and distribute their courses.
While there are many such tools in the market, few are as robust as Thinkific. This Thinkific review looks at why Thinkific is an industry leader and what you should expect if you're considering using it to create an online course.
According to their website, Thinkific is an LMS or course creation platform that allows anyone to create, market, and sell their expertise while retaining control of their brand and business. The platform prides itself in allowing people to create professional digital learning products for all types of audiences and courses.
Most importantly, the platform thrives in providing a non-technical course builder – which means you don't need any coding or programming expertise to create a digital course. Even though you don't need any technical know-how to build and sell a course on Thinkific, the platform gives you control over every touchpoint of your course interface.
With hundreds of pre-built templates, you only have to choose one that suits your industry, create the course content, review, and publish your digital learning product. Nonetheless, before selecting a course creation platform, one of the things people want to learn from Thinkific reviews is the type of lessons you can create on the platform.
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The creators of Thinkific thought far and wide when developing the platform. Therefore, they've made it a one-stop LMS where you can create different types of lessons to keep your courses engaging and interesting.
Lessons you can create on the platform include:
Video lessons: video lessons are more interactive than text, making them an ideal way to improve communication and learner concentration. Thinkific supports multiple video formats and stores video content on Wistia hosting, ensuring it's always available.
Text lessons: text lessons might not be as popular as before as people have a short attention span, but they're still as efficient as ever. Fortunately, Thinkific allows you to pair text lessons with other multimedia and audio-visual content, such as videos and images, to make them more interactive and less monotonous. However, Thinkific does not support coding courses as the platform can't color-code or auto-format coding blocks.
Quizzes: quizzes are a great way of making a course interactive. Thinkific allows you to create quiz lessons complete with multiple choice answers with explanations to enhance the learning experience for students.
Surveys: conducting surveys is essential for the success of any learning product. Fortunately, with Thinkific's in-built surveys, you don't need an external tool such as Google forms to survey your students. Thinkific's surveys allow you to analyze what students learn or ask for feedback to improve your lessons. Thinkific allows you to create an answer, rating, or scale-based survey.
Downloadables: Once in a while, course creators want to create downloadables for their students. Other times, you have lessons you can't transfer in a content form on an LMS. For those instances, Thinkific allows you to upload videos, Zip files, audio, PDFs, and other types of content in downloadable format.
PDFs: Some lessons require students to have specific material such as workbooks and downloads. PDF lessons make this possible, although Thinkific limits the size of each PDF to 25MB.
Presentations: Some lessons are much more effective as presentions – PDF/visual content accompanied by audio. Thinkific allows you to create tasks in presentation format if that's your style.
While the lesson formats above are the most popular and available across most Thinkific plans, the Pro plans have two extra format types, namely:
Brillium integration: which allows you to add custom questions for different students
Assignments: which allow you to give assignments and receive submissions in the form of reports or projects
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One of the most important considerations when choosing a learning management system is its features. So, what features make Thinkific stand out?
Thinkific allows you to create unique courses that leave your audience wanting more. Due to its range of custom templates and lesson variety, course creators can create live courses of self-paced lessons based on their availability and student preference. Most importantly, the platform allows you to package your expertise into a course and deliver it professionally.
Creating a brand is essential for success. While you can build your website from scratch, maintaining and managing it to build a successful brand needs dedication and technical skills. With a platform like Thinkific, you can build a brand without the hassle.
Thinkific allows you to create a website you can use as your shopfront for all your courses. The platform boasts many customizable themes you can pick and customize into marketing pages. Similarly, it allows you to create multiple pages and even use a custom domain to personalize your LMS.
Most importantly, you'll have access to an app store where you can install multiple Thinkific integrations to increase your success rate. These apps allow you to add features such as a chatbot, banners, blogs, etc., to your Thinkific-based course website.
Managing courses can be time-consuming, especially when payments come into play. With Thinkific, you can sell more and manage less while rest assured that any revenue from a course purchase finds its way into your account.
The goal of Thinkific is to enable course creators to make money by selling their expertise and knowledge. Therefore, the platform boasts integrated payment processing, checkout optimizations, and automated cross-selling functionality, which helps sell more courses.
All these features mean you have more time to create, optimize, and market your courses without worrying about revenue administration.
Your success as a course creator is highly dependent on your ability to build and maintain an engaged community. Thinkific understands this, which is why it provides tools to help teachers and learners stay in touch.
Some of these tools include allowing students to create profiles so you can put faces to the names. Similarly, Thinkific allows you to create conversations your community can follow and contribute using comments.
On the other hand, features such as live events and flexible spaces allow you to host dedicated discussions with your community.
The vast majority of course creators have multiple courses, so they need a scalable platform they can customize to fit each course while maintaining the brand outlook. Thinkific makes this possible by allowing you to customize different environments for specific courses while maintaining them seamlessly under the same umbrella.
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While Thinkific is one of the best tools in the market for creating and selling digital courses, there are other LMSs that do the same, although they all have their pros and cons. Below are some popular Thinkific alternatives to keep in mind.
Podia – an excellent all-in-one platform, podia allows creators to not only sell digital courses but also vend coaching sessions, community memberships, webinars, and downloads. However, the biggest downside is that Podia charges an 8% transaction fee for its Free plan while it's free to sell on Thinkific.
Teachery – another popular course creation tool, Teachery differs from Thinkific because it doesn't offer as many robust features. For instance, it doesn't support community building. Additionally, it needs third-party integrations for features such as audio and video hosting to work.
LearnDash – this LMS also allows creators to sell unlimited courses to multiple students. However, unlike Thinkific and the others on this list, LearnDash is only practical if you already have a WordPress site, which means it's not ideal for beginners or non-technical creators.
Teachable is one of Thnkific's biggest competitors. However, the two have differences that make Thinkific a better alternative. Teachable doesn't support community interactions, so you can't nurture your students or connect with them outside the lessons.
Another downside of Teachable is the platform charges a transaction fee for every course purchase. The free plan attracts a $1 + 10% transaction fee on each sale, while the $39/month basic plan has a 5% transaction fee.
The Pro and Business plans don't charge any transaction fee, but they cost $119 and $299 a month, respectively, despite having fewer features than Thinkific. Thinkific also doesn't charge any transaction fee, making it a better alternative.
Another fierce competitor is Kajabi, an all-in-one course creator platform. Unlike Thinkific, which limits the digital products you can sell, Kajabi allows creators to sell courses, podcasts, coaching sessions, memberships, and digital products.
It also boasts sales funnels that are more robust than anything you'll find on Thinkific. However, all these additional capabilities come at a prohibitive cost for most beginners. While the most affordable paid version on Thinkific costs $74/month, the Basic plan on Kajabi costs $149.
Similarly, while the most expensive Thinkific plan is $299, Kajabi's is $399.
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While Thinkific has upsides, it also has some downsides, as we'll see below.
Affordable – Thinkific pricing plans are the most affordable among its competitors, considering the features you get.
No transaction fee
Excellent payment processor options such as Stripe and PayPal
Extensive lesson options
Great integrations, including Zappier triggers for task automation
Built for speed
It doesn't support coding snippets which means it's not ideal for programming/coding courses
It doesn't have live chat support across the board
The best plans are pricey
The pricing structure for Thinkific starts with a Free plan. The Start and Expand plans cost $74 and $299 a month, while the most popular Grow Plan costs only $149 monthly.
However, other than the three paid plans, Thinkific offers a custom Plus plan for customers who want additional features, including:
Unlimited products and administrators
Over 3 separate Thinkific sites
Service level agreements
Dedicated customer support manager
Email white-labeling
Single Sign On
… among others.
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Does Thinkific have a trial period?
Thinkific has a FREE plan in place of a trial period with enough features to try out and determine if it's the suitable LMS for you.
How many courses can a create on Thinkific?
You can create unlimited courses on the Thinkific Plus plan. However, paid plans are limited to 75, 25, and 10 courses for the Expand, Grow, and Start plans. The FREE plan only allows you to create 1 course.
Are there additional costs for using Thinkific?
Unlike many of its competitors that charge a transaction fee for each course purchase, Thinkific only charges a one-off subscription fee for its plans, meaning you keep more revenue as a creator.
Do I need a web host to use Thinkific?
No. Thinkific is a full-service LMS, so you don't need to worry about secure hosting or payment processing as they come with the plans.
Thinkific might not be the most robust LMS in the market, but it's one of the most affordable when you compare the features you get for the price. If you're just starting as a course creator or intend to only sell courses and not multiple digital products, few LMSs offer as much bang for your buck as Thinkific.
The plans Thinkific offers are decent enough for any course creator to start earning. Couple that with its intuitive course-building templates, excellent user interface, and responsiveness across devices, and you have a winning platform to start your course creator journey.
The only limitation is if you intend to create programming courses, we recommend looking at alternatives such as Kajabi. Still, Thinkific is no slouch and might be your best option if it's your first time using an LMS.
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