17 years helping Canadian businesses
choose better software
Local product
What Is Thinkific?
Thinkific: The ultimate all-in-one online course platform, designed to empower any type of creator - from consultants and experts to authors and speakers. Effortlessly create and deliver captivating courses on your personalized, branded site. Whether your aim is to educate customers, monetize your knowledge, or expand your brand's reach, Thinkific simplifies your journey. With its intuitive tools and user-friendly interface, crafting and selling courses becomes a seamless experience.
A distinct highlight is the platform's strong focus on community engagement, offering dedicated spaces and interactive notifications to foster vibrant learner communities.
Join over 800,000 creator educators, including trainers, teachers, coaches, professional associations, and businesses, who have all thrived on Thinkific. Begin your journey today and transform your expertise into engaging, profitable online courses with Thinkific.
Who Uses Thinkific?
Everyone from small businesses, creatives, consultants, coaches, authors, speakers, and trainers to professional associations, larger companies and universities use Thinkific today.
Not sure about Thinkific?
Compare with a popular alternative
Thinkific
Other great alternatives to Thinkific
Reviews of Thinkific
Outstanding course-hosting platform that makes your life easy
Comments: Overall the experience has been excellent over the past four years. I have to add that the Thinkific Helpdesk is genuinely helpful, and their response time is lightning fast. They have an option for "how urgent is your issue?" when you submit your help ticket, and if you select "urgent," they actually get back to you very quickly, as in, within a few hours. This is essential when your income comes from your course website and you need help updating or fixing something!
Pros:
I love that Thinkific is comprehensive so I get to focus on content creation and student outreach. Thinkific manages the payment portal and moves students smoothly through the course experience. In a lot of ways, it's set-it-and-forget-it, meaning - once you have a course set up the way you want inside Thinkific, students move through it beautifully and all you have to worry about is getting new students!
Cons:
My only suggestion for Thinkific would be to provide a few more options for testimonials layouts on the sales/landing pages. I'd like more flexibility and options to showcase or emphasize certain student experiences... but otherwise, I wouldn't change anything.
Alternatives Considered:
Beautiful Course Platform for Online Education
Comments: A stunning product which I would have been happy to use (even with all the workarounds for certificates, email and quizzes). The support is quick with responses and the tutorials provided really are next-level amazing. A consistent and impressive LMS.
Pros:
This is an absolutely beautiful platform. Thinkific has been in the elearning industry for years and it shows - the portal is easy to navigate and set up courses. The tutorials section is robust and detailed, giving step-by-step information on how to set up various course features and troubleshoot any issues that may come up. There is the ability to issue certificates of completion, add an assignment section for students to upload their work, basic quiz functionality, drip-scheduling as well as compulsory lessons which need to be completed before the student can move on. The lessons can consist of videos, text, PDF's (which can be downloadable or not), or quizzes. You can embed videos and links from other sites too. The course analytics allow you to see how much of a course/lesson was completed before a student drops off, giving valuable insight which enables the course creator to edit and adapt the courses to make them more engaging for the students. There is also a 'community' feature which gives students the chance to chat and give/feedback away from an external site (like a Facebook group). Thinkific does not take any of the course fees and allows the course creator to keep 100% of the profits earned. There is also a free version which has a lot of features included.
Cons:
The certificates are quite basic and it's necessary to be design-savvy and tech-savvy to create a certificate which would be accepted in the upload process. The quizzes are very basic and do not support time-limits, limited retries or anything more robust than true/false or multiple choice. Should you want to integrate with a more robust quiz software, their native integrative party is quite pricey! There is no built-in email functionality aside from the notifications that can be sent to existing students. As email is becoming more popular among other learning management systems this is quite a big negative point against them. The option to whitelabel the site completely is only available on the 'Growth' plan which over and above the 'Pro' plan which is already $99.
Alternatives Considered:
Good overall with critical limitations for teaching online live
Comments: Good. They have excellent customer support and they responded to me quickly even during busy times. I actually recommended them for a company that has recorded videos and could benefit from using a modern LMS to share their recorded lessons.
Pros:
I think I like the idea of the software. There are alternatives. I think I picked Thinkific first because they have clear description about their software, seemed reputable and seemed like they have good customer service and responsiveness. Their website is nicely responsive for different screen sizes. Although the theme itself is limited, and you are on your own to customize it, I felt that the drag and drop choices for the editor covered everything I need.
Cons:
There were critical limitations that I felt decreased the value of the software for my business. The first thing that made me feel uncomfortable is that the website you build for your business through their LMS software would publish to the public immediately as you save the changes. I look thoroughly through the website theme settings, but there was no way to keep the website as "password protected" or "private" before it is published. As a result, I felt I should hold on about sharing important details until I write the entire content of the website, then drag and drop the content for the layout, and then put the content. After that first issue, I felt less excited. There were other limitations that resulted in me losing interest. I didn't feel like I want to pay to customize my website with HTML and CSS. importing your own website website was not a convenient option. My courses were live online but their website had no way of sharing the time on the website based on the user local or system time. I would have to pay for their Pro plan and do it myself with javascript. I could look up and learn how to do it, but I didn't want to. I felt like the software was good for only recorded content. The price they were asking for was not convincing anymore. Slowly and slowly I lost interest. Finally, I saw that they charge a flat fee for each student plus their monthly fee, for any student after the 100th student. I decided not to move forward with them.
Easy, Wholesome LMS for beginners and experts alike
Comments: Positive primarily due to fantastic customer support and ease of use.
Pros:
I loved how versatile it was and their customer support was second to none. Also there was plenty of templates and training modules for absolute novices to set up their school easily. Integrations with other relevant apps and softwares made this very efficient LMS.
Cons:
The price increases. I eventually couldn't continue as there was alternatives for better prices
Great Course Platform
Comments: Thinkific is much better than trying to remember to share Google Drive links with people to watch courses. It also looks much more professional.
Pros:
Thinkfic integrates well with CRM systems which is so important to manage leads and data. It works well with Zapier as well which gives numerous possibilities.
Cons:
I wish some things were a bit more clear. It provides the ability to have courses that renew or memberships but doesn't do great on the backend of highlighting pros and cons of each.
