What is Thinkific?
Thinkific is a top online course platform that allows you to create, sell, and maintain your courses online. You can create sales pages as well as course pages with Thinkific. This tool also helps you manage your users and sell your course offering coupons and an affiliate program to help you get more sales.
Why Use Thinkific?
Thinkific is a good choice if you want to keep your tech headaches down to a minimum. By decreasing your tech responsibilities, you can free up more of your time to market your course and create more content (or just relax!).
Thinkific is a good option if you don't want to use WordPress LMS plugins which require more tech work up-front during the installation process as well as more ongoing maintenance work.
Who is Thinkific Best For?
Those with little to no experience running an online business should consider Thinkific.
You do not need anything else other than an email marketing automation tool. Registering a domain name is also recommended.
Advanced users will set up their own domain names with hosting and build out most of the pages of their website on their own. Beginner users can build every page on their site with Thinkific.
If you decide to take advantage of this, it's recommended that you direct your Thinkific site to your own domain name. Otherwise, your entire site will be built on a Thinkific subdomain like yoursite.thinkific.com. This will confuse your users, especially when you decide to use your own domain later.
You don’t have to use all the Thinkific features, but they have set themselves up to offer everything you need to get your online course up and running quickly and easily.
Key Features
Ease of Thinkific Course Builder
It was very easy to upload and organize my learning content from within the Thinkific admin.
If you have a complete course, you’ll be able to upload the entire course and organize it just the way you want in a couple of hours (depending on how big it is).
You simply add content from the menu on the course page and then add the content into the form that pops up on the main part of the page. Here's an example of how to add in a PDF:
All I did was come up with a ‘Name' for this page and then upload the PDF file. Thinkific created the course page for me.
You can also add in videos very easily as well as quizzes, surveys, and nearly any type of content you may have. The course player for video content is very professional. Here are all the choices for content you can add with just a few clicks of your mouse:
Pros: Here’s what I like about Thinkific
- Only course platform with a free option and no transaction fees. Thinkific’s free option is really good. The main limitation I see is that you are limited to 3 courses.
- Phone support. Thinkific is the only platform to offer phone support. They also offer priority phone support on higher plans.
- Ability to customize. You can match the look and feel of your business or website
- Custom domain. While Thinkific will host your course, you can set the domain to make it appear as part of your website.
- Voice over PowerPoint presentation tool that makes video production easy.
- You can offer students payment options like a monthly payment plan for more expensive courses.
- You can offer a monthly recurring subscription for ongoing access to a course through a membership model.
Cons: Here are the only things I don’t like about Thinkific
- No course marketplace to market your course.
- No integrated email marketing, however, you can easily tie into 3rd party email providers like MailChimp and Aweber
- No integrated sales funnel builder, however, you can easily tie into 3rd party sales funnel builders like Clickfunnels and LeadPages
- There is no chat support, although they are only platform to offer phone support.
Price Plans
Thinkific is one of the more popular online course platforms that you can use to create and sell courses and membership sites. It allows you to build a course with videos, rich text and images, and downloadable files.
You can publish a sales page with all your own branding to collect payments and grant access to the course. And on the backend you can publish a curriculum (a drag and drop Table of Contents like the image on the right) for students to navigate between course sections, take quizzes, and obtain certificates for completing courses.
Thinkific has 4 price plans: Free, $49, $99, and $499. The free plan is a great starter option for new course instructors that have 3 courses or less. The premium plans offer unlimited courses and additional flexibility to customize your course.
