Thinkific Review: My Honest Review!

When you're looking to create an online course, Thinkific is a name that keeps popping up.

With over 50,000 users, Thinkific has earned a reputation as one of the top online course platforms.

That's likely why you're here reading this Thinkific review. I took an in-depth look at Thinkific's features, pricing plans, and overall suitability for building and selling courses online.

I'll take you through everything I learned in this in-depth Thinkific review. 

By the end, you'll know if Thinkific is the right online course platform for your needs.

The best way to decide is to try it out yourself. Sign up for Thinkific's forever free plan here to test drive the key features.

Let’s proceed…!

Thinkific Summary Review

Thinkific can be the ideal starting point for building your first online course. From my testing, and reviews of other gurus, here is an overview of the key pros and cons:

👍Pros

• Intuitive drag-and-drop course builder to create multimedia lessons
• No technical skills are required. Easy for beginners
• Packed marketing tools to sell courses including email and affiliate tools
• Free training materials that explain how to use the platform
• Forever free version to test drive
• Affordable paid pricing starts at just $36/month

👎Cons

• Navigation can be confusing initially
• Limited customization options for course lesson layouts
• Must upgrade for some advanced features

Who should use Thinkific?

Based on my experience, Thinkific is a great fit for:

• Coaches and consultants looking to turn their expertise into an online course business.
• Entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to diversify revenue with online education products.
• Bloggers that want to monetize their audience with premium training content.
• Beginners with no prior experience who want an easy yet powerful course hosting platform.

PRO Tip: For larger enterprises with big budgets, some competitors may offer more advanced customization. But for most solopreneurs who are new to online courses, Thinkific hits the sweet spot with a perfect mix of ease of use and pro features for growth.

Next steps

If you like what you've read so far, don't just take my word for it. Experience Thinkific yourself with a risk-free trial:

Get started with Thinkific's forever-free plan here

Their free version gives full access to the key tools including:

• Building unlimited online courses
• Creating professional course websites
• Selling your courses

That will allow you to determine if their course creator and website builder are a fit before spending a dime.

In the next sections of this review, I'll dive deeper into Thinkific's specific features for online course creation, custom websites, marketing capabilities, analytics, and more.

Key Features

Thinkific offers a robust set of tools for building and selling online courses.

Here are some of the key capabilities that stood out to me:

Easy-to-use course creator

• Intuitive drag-and-drop builder to create lessons with videos, PDFs, audio, presentations, and text
• Pre-made templates for courses, memberships, and webinars
• Multimedia integration - Upload any file type
• Quizzes and assessments to engage students
• Drip content capabilities for memberships

Customizable course websites

• Drag and drop website builder with 10 templates
• Custom domains to publish under your own URL
• Create full online academies with multiple landing pages
• Sell one-off courses or membership sites

Marketing and monetization

• Coupons and bundles to increase average order value
• Affiliate marketing to leverage influencers
• Email marketing integrations with major providers
• Powerful analytics to assess performance
• No platform commissions - you keep 100% of sales

Bottom Line: With a packed feature set -optimized specifically for selling online courses, Thinkific aims to be your "all-in-one" platform to create, market and sell training content while saving on third-party tool costs.

Thinkific's Course Builder

How to Build Course in Thinkific

Thinkific makes it damn easy to create and launch your course or even courses in a matter of minutes. Just follow the intuitive drag-and-drop builder, and keep tapping the button till you are done.

Even without prior experience, you can get your course up and running by simply following these 4 steps:

1. Click the Learning Products menu in the left bar, and click the Courses submenu

2. Click the NEW COURSE button to create your course (on the next page)

3. Fill up the course fields including the pricing and other tabs

4. Preview and publish your course

And.. Voila! You are done!

You can also prepare certification for your students, so as to further strengthen your course and increase sales overall. 👇

For online course entrepreneurs who have no web development resources, Thinkific's bundled Course and Site Builder solutions offer an end-to-end package from course creation to sales website under one platform.

Monetization Tools

Creating an online course is one thing. But making money from all your hard work is just as important!

Thinkific aims to support that side of the business as well with in-depth monetization capabilities, such as:

Marketing Features

Effective marketing is required to attract students once you've built your online training program. Some of the tools provided include:

Coupons	Create discount codes and timed offers to incentivize enrollments and upsells.
Bundles	Offer packages of multiple courses at a bundled price point.
Affiliate tools	Reward partners for promoting your training and driving new sales.

These built-in marketing features will help you turn one-time course buyers into repeat customers who spend more over time.

Payment Options

Monetizing your online education business starts with having the right payment solutions.

Thinkific leverages Stripe and PayPal to support flexible monetization models including:

• One-time course payments
• Monthly memberships
• Usage or consumption-based plans
• Bundles/Packages

Great: This allows you to easily and instantly tap into these global payment platforms without having to integrate separately.

Sales and Analytics Reporting

Understanding student engagement and course financial performance is crucial. To support that, Thinkific provides:

• Enrollment tracking
• Revenue monitoring
• Refund analysis
• Lesson engagement metrics
• Customer lifetime value reporting

With Thinkific's actionable analytics, course creators can refine their training, marketing and sales processes for better commercial outcomes.

Having tools that cover online course creation, integrated payment processing, and in-depth analytics means solo course entrepreneurs can manage their entire business in one place... That's damn awesome!

Supporting Students

For online student success, Thinkific incorporates:

Communication	Email notifications, in-course discussions, and private messaging keep students engaged and supported.
Student tracking	Assess individual progress, spot struggling learners, and automatically grant certificates upon completion.

Additionally, Thinkific allows monitoring cohorts to gauge collective progress. Course authors can use these insights to refine their training for optimal outcomes.

For one-on-one interactions, you as a creator, can conduct lessons directly with learners through:

• Video conferencing
• Screen sharing
• Annotating course materials together

This virtual face-to-face learning dynamic brings online education closer to an in-person experience.

Sign up for a free Thinkific account now to explore student communication and tracking tools hands-on... You will love it!

Thinkific Training

Creating an online course is a new skillset in itself. Recognizing that, Thinkific offers free training to get course creators up to speed quickly.

Here are the available program elements:

Fast Track Course

You have access to 37 step-by-step video tutorials walking through the course creation process from start to finish.

The modular videos cover core aspects like:

• How to structure course curriculum
• Uploading multimedia lessons
• Customizing the course theme
• Configuring quizzes
• Processing payments

Each segment is only a few minutes long making it easy to learn at your own pace.

Completion certificates for demonstrating understanding.
You'll be certified after the completion of the training course, which will dramatically provide you with needed motivation while honing your skills.

Additional paid specialty courses are also available.
Beyond the free core training, Thinkific offers paid premium courses which dive deeper into topics like:

• Advanced course creation best practices
• Crafting effective sales pages
• Calculating pricing models
• Automating webinar replays
  While the free Fast Track content covers the basics, there is certainly no shortage of continuing education options.

For first-time users, Thinkific's bundled training delivers structured lessons which mirror the actual platform experience.

Thinkific Experts

Thinkific's Expert marketplace connects course creators with specialists skilled in areas like:

• Technical troubleshooting.
  For less tech savvy users, access to one-on-one support solving platform questions or debugging issues can be invaluable.
• Design and branding.
  Creating professional, polished course materials that reinforce brand identity will lend credibility.
• Marketing launch strategy.
  Determining optimal go-to-market fit, early adopter targeting, and building momentum.
• Flexible consulting sessions can be booked based on need and budget.
  Generalized needs assessment and road mapping sessions can provide directional clarity upfront.

For newcomers, identifying knowledge gaps objectively can be difficult. But with the packed access to specialists across critical area, you can get yourself producing like a pro in a matter of days.

Integrations and App Store

Beyond the array of built-in capabilities, Thinkific also offers an App Store to connect with popular third-party systems - leveraging:

• 45+ direct integrations are already available.
  You already have access to household category leaders across use cases like:
  • Email marketing - MailChimp
  • Payments - Paypal
  • Sales tracking - Shopify
  • Analytics - Google Analytics, Segment
  • Surveys - Typeform
  • And more
• Zapier integration to access a library of over 1,000 additional services.
  For less common applications, Zapier's pre-configured triggers support automations with niche tools that cover areas like:
  • Document signing - HelloSign
  • Appointment scheduling - Calendly
  • Video conferencing - GoToMeeting
  • HR software - Greenhouse
• Webhooks and APIs to build proprietary capabilities.
  For advanced technical users with specialized needs, Thinkific provides developer access to integrate at the data layer itself.

With a blended approach encompassing pre-packaged integrations, supplemented by flexible customization options, Thinkific aims to offer user-friendly connectivity while still accommodating diverse use cases.

Thinkific Pricing

Thinkific offers multiple plan tiers that are scaled to needs of course creators at different stages - ranging from free to advanced paid plans.

Covering pricing details:

Let's dive deeper on what's included with each of these packages.

Free Plan

The forever free plan allows you to evaluate the core elements of Thinkific with no financial commitment, such as:

• Building unlimited courses
• Selling courses to up to 100 students
• Basic course and website builder capabilities
• Some marketing widgets
• Access to free course creation training

For early stage entrepreneurs, the free tier enablesthem to test the concept viability and gaining customer traction before incurring monthly costs.

Basic Plan

Starting at $36 per month if billed annually, or $49 if billed monthly. The Basic plan unlocks additional functionalities like:

• Remove Thinkific branding
• Advanced marketing tools
  • Coupons
  • Bundles
  • Drip content
• Affiliate marketing
• Priority email support
• Access to premium niche apps

With boosted marketing resources plus perpetual rights to developed IP, creators retain full control over their business beyond reliance on any single platform vendor.

Start Plan

With all Basic plan features plus:

• Multi-admin logins
• Additional custom branding
• Priority live chat support
• Group management tools
• Bulk course upload

The Start Plan starts at $74 per month if billed annually, or $99 per month if billed monthly. This plan allows you to have acess to more advanced functionalities.

Thinkific's other advanced plans are Grow and Expand. These two tiers allow you to have more powerful control over your course business.

The Plus Plan

For major institutions with large online training programs, Thinkific also offers fully customized plans tailored to unique needs like:

• Dedicated account management
• API access and single sign-on capabilities
• Brand color palette customization
• Custom integrations
• Priority onboarding and launch planning
• Scalable server capacity

With deep platform connectivity spanning tools, branding, infrastructure, and services, Thinkific’s bespoke enterprise packages cater to specialized requirements that are common in institutional environments.

Thinkific Discounts

To incentivize annual contracts, Thinkific offers 25% savings when paying upfront for 12 months rather than going month-to-month.

Over a year, this means potential savings of:

• $156 on the Basic plan
• $300 on the Start plan
• $600 on the Grow plan
• $1,500 on the Expans Plan

Pros and Cons

Based on my hands-on testing and research, here is my assessment of Thinkific's main advantages and limitations:

👍Pros

✅Easy-to-use course builder
Even for total beginners, the drag-and-drop Course Builder makes putting together multimedia lessons intuitive.

✅Packed marketing tools
Integrations with major email providers, affiliate management, coupons support selling courses.

✅Bundled website builder
The drag-and-drop Site Builder allows you to customize both the course curriculum and the marketing pages.

✅Scales up from free plan
Thinkific lets early stage creators start without financial commitment while allowing serious entrepreneurs room to expand.

✅No platform commissions
You keep 100% of your course sale revenue. This is a huge value over competitors.

Thinkific aims specifically to support online course entrepreneurs rather than just provide generalized self-serve software.

👎Cons

❌Page template limitations
Fewer templates compared to standalone website builders. Also inability to extensively customize course lesson formats.

❌Steep learning curve initially
Upfront effort navigating extensive configuration menus across tools.

❌Can't toggle course visibility
No way to easily hide/show courses from students' view without deleting.

Fit Assessment

Let's map The pros and cons against common user personas.

Consultants	Toolset optimized for packaging expertise into sellable education content.
Beginners	Intuitive interface but initial learning investment to master extensive configuration options across tools.
Tech-savvy users	Custom code integrations supported but some limitations on customizing certain templates relative to traditional CMS.

For the target audience of subject matter experts who want to productize knowledge via online education, Thinkific hits the mark with the right blend of power and simplicity.

Competitor Comparison

How does Thinkific stack up against rival online course platforms?

Let's take a quick look at how Thinkific compares with other notable competitors.

Teachable	Top competitor also focused on empowering subject matter experts to create online courses
Podia	All-in-one platform covering online courses, memberships, digital downloads beyond just education
LearnWorlds	Enterprise-oriented platform catering more to large organizations

While all of these platforms share similarities around online course tooling, strategic differences also emerge based on target customer and product vision.

Teachable

Teachable most closely competes with Thinkific; given comparable features and singular focus facilitating online education specifically.

When contrasting core platform elements:

• Course building - Nearly identical drag and drop builders and multimedia options
• Website pages - Both provide templates to customize marketing sites.
• Payments - Thinkific provides one-click integration to PayPal and Stripe while Teachable has proprietary payment processing.
• Commissions - A key differentiation - Teachable takes a percentage of course sales unlike Thinkific.

For new course creators, choosing between the two leading specialists boils down to either saving on commissions with Thinkific or accessing Teachable's branded payment system.

Podia

Rather than solely focusing on online course functionality, Podia also provides an all-in-one platform covering:

• Online courses
• Memberships
• Digital downloads
• Webinars

With broader e-commerce capabilities, Podia suits solopreneurs who are monetizing expertise across varied commercial avenues from one-off sales to recurring subscriptions.

Comparing core common components of Podia to Thinkific:

• Course building - Podia has simpler creation features and lacks advanced options around drip content, assessments, etc.
• Website pages - Podia provides themes but less control over layouts and blocks.
• Payments - Podia also integrates with Stripe which equally allow it to avoide commissions.
• Support - Podia positions around ease of use minimizing need for customer support.

With streamlined simplicity suiting beginner solopreneurs, Podia contrasts Thinkific's more expansive functionality which targets sophisticated online academies.

LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds focuses more on catering to needs of larger enterprises and universities with advanced functionality; supporting organizational use cases.

LearnWorlds vs Thinkific:

• Customization - LearnWorlds gives more ability to white label and modify course player themes.
• Scalability - LearnWorlds supports larger content volumes and catalogues overall.
• Learner management - LearnWorlds provides more sophisticated tracking of participation across cohorts
• Pricing - LearnWorlds is significantly more expensive and lacks low-end tiers that are friendly to solopreneurs.

Thinkific fills a niche targeting entrepreneurs who are getting started when LearnWorlds caters to established businesses with complex operational requirements around managing learning programs at scale.

Key Takeaway

The biggest differentiator comes down to strategic intent:

• Thinkific - Empowers solo experts to successfully monetize knowledge
• Teachable - Provides specialized course platform to build online academies
• Podia - Simplified sales platform for digital goods including courses
• LearnWorlds - Enterprise-grade solution for large training institutions

Understanding positioning will help you to align individual use case needs to pick the optimal technology.

Now that you've seen the full details of Thinkific along with alternatives, visit Thinkific to experience the key benefits yourself via the forever free plan.

Conclusion and Recommendation

In my extensive evaluation, here are the key takeaways that can inform your decision-making:

From self-paced onboarding through bundled native growth features, each element of Thinkific aims to proactively accelerate progress to grow sustainable creator-driven businesses.

While positioning caters particularly well for solopreneurs, personalized packages combined with custom API extensibility also support larger institutional use at the enterprise scale.

Thinkific offers unified infrastructure intelligently designed to simplify complex orchestration otherwise delaying meaningful traction - allowing creators to instead remain focused on content authority and community-building imperatives ultimately determining success.

With generous free education and tiered packages lowering initial risk, modern suppliers would benefit from embracing Thinkific's vested partnership ethos placing power back into the hands of those producing real innovation rather than financial gatekeepers and legacy middlemen.

So in summary, I give Thinkific a strong recommendation as an enabler well-positioned to democratize access for aspiring subject matter experts who want to transform knowledge into income.

Ideal Users

Based on my evaluation, ideal use cases fitting Thinkific's capabilities include:

• Consultants and freelancers who are productizing services into online courses
• Entrepreneurs and small business owners who are diversifying into education products
• Bloggers with niche audiences monetizing through premium content
• Coaches packaging specialized programs around topics like health, finance, productivity
• Schools and bootcamps formalizing certification training

For online education publishers across categories, Thinkific provides an onramp path to translate ambitions into profitable ventures.

Start your journey creating, marketing, and selling online courses successfully with Thinkific.

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