An all-in-one platform for course creators, Thinkific helps you build and sell your courses, memberships, and digital products. The platform offers outstanding tools for online learning, from on-demand lessons and live cohorts to communities and quizzes.
Who is it for?
Thinkific is for people who are serious about selling their course, membership, coaching, or digital product as a major part of their business. The platform includes all the tools to build, promote, and sell your course.
If you have a Shopify store, Thinkific is a great choice to add a course or membership to your business. Thinkific integrates with Shopify to make the process smooth for you and your customers.
Who is it not for?
If you don’t sell online courses, memberships, or coaching, Thinkific is not your platform.
And although you can figure it out as a beginning course creator, Thinkific may be one notch higher than Teachable on the difficulty scale. It’s still pretty easy, but having more options means more complexity. And that means it’s a bit more to figure out. (If you’re looking for the easiest platform, you can read more about Teachable in this blog post.)
I will point out, though, that different brains find different user interfaces easier than others, so Thinkific could fit the way you think and be your platform. You can try the free plan if you aren’t sure.
Features
Have you noticed the online learning trend back to live lessons or workshops and actual cohorts of students moving through courses simultaneously? Thinkific offers these features for its online course platform.
You can offer memberships and build communities for your students. You can track their progress and provide assignments, quizzes, exams, and surveys to ensure they learn the material you are teaching.
There are no transaction fees on the Thinkific platform, and you can offer course bundles, digital downloads, or subscription-based pricing.
You can build a sales page and even use it as your website by adding your custom domain using the platform. In addition, Thinkific provides themes as a place to start your design.
Integrations with other online tools via the Thinkific App Store round out the Thinkific platform.
Plans and cost
While Thinkific offers a free plan, you can’t add your custom domain to it. So the paid plans are what we’ll consider here. They range from $39 to $499 per month depending on your plan level and whether you pay monthly or annually. There are also other subscriptions you can buy for extra course administration functionality, CRM (customer relationship management) integration, and website tools at the highest levels. The highest levels also allow you to build more than one community, if you’d like to separate your members into more than one.
The plans vary based on admin accounts, pricing and design customization, memberships, bundles, certificates, and communities.
Positives
Thinkific makes it easy to offer your online courses to your audience with all the tools necessary to do that in one place. From a drag & drop website builder, flexible pricing, ability to build communities, and a robust App Store, Thinkific is a stand-out all-in-one course platform option.
Watch out for
The Thinkific platform does not offer a blog or website features other than a sales page and an online course, membership, and communities platform. For this reason if you want to add a blog or portfolio or other advanced features to your website, you may need to set those features up on another platform and integrate the two.
If you plan on using Thinkific to build communities, make sure to investigate the features available. Also, please note that only the highest-level plan allows you to build more than one community.
Summary
Thinkific is an amazing platform for creating online courses. As a specialized platform, it provides premium features for courses and memberships. So if you want to grow your business using online courses, Thinkific may be the right choice for your platform.
Here’s the link to the Thinkific platform, if you’d like to explore it.
Is there something I can help you with? Please get in touch with me via the form or check my calendar to schedule a call!
