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The online education industry is experiencing rapid expansion. The global eLearning market is projected to reach a combined value of up to $325 billion by 2025. When discussing online course platforms, Thinkific often comes up as a top choice.
This popularity isn’t just anecdotal; data shows over 75 million learners worldwide have enrolled in courses on Thinkific. For educators, this widespread use provides strong motivation to start creating courses. We’ll explore all the features that make Thinkific one of the best platforms for coaches, entrepreneurs, and teachers looking to build and sell online courses. Let’s get into the review.
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links. If you choose to purchase a paid plan through these links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. These are the tools I genuinely recommend for launching online courses. You can review my full affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy.
What is Thinkific?
Thinkific’s motto, Power Your Education Empire, perfectly sums up what the platform offers. It is designed for educators, business coaches, and entrepreneurs who want to create, market, and sell online courses. With Thinkific, you can build courses using diverse content formats such as videos, text, PDFs, quizzes, discussions, and more.
However, what truly sets Thinkific apart is its comprehensive suite of tools tailored for online course creators. It features an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder, allowing users to design their sites without any coding knowledge. This makes setting up an online coaching or teaching portal straightforward and accessible. Thinkific also makes marketing easy by enabling integration with various third-party apps and platforms, which we’ll explore further. Moreover, it includes powerful student management options that help instructors monitor progress through automated emails and reminders, simplifying the learning experience.
How Many People Use Thinkific?
As I mentioned earlier, the widespread adoption of Thinkific speaks volumes. Over 75 million courses have been completed on the platform, and its community has grown to over 50,000 course creators. Thinkific is utilized by learners and educators in 190 countries, and educators have collectively sold over $650 million worth of courses through the platform. These impressive figures highlight Thinkific’s prominent position in the online education space, and with the continual rise of e-learning worldwide, its influence and capabilities are only expected to expand.
Who Can Use Thinkific?
Thinkific is a versatile platform suitable for anyone aiming to launch online coaching or educational content. Primary users include business coaches, entrepreneurs, online teachers, academic institutions, and even digital marketing agencies like Hootsuite. One common misconception is that you need technical skills to start creating courses. On Thinkific, that’s not the case—its easy-to-use interface and comprehensive tools allow you to build courses, promote them effectively with built-in marketing features, and track student progress without any coding knowledge. Now, let’s review the top features of Thinkific and what to consider when developing your first online course.
Thinkific Review: 9 Key Features for Creating Your First Online Course
To give a practical perspective, we set up a demo account to explore Thinkific’s functionalities. The platform boasts a user-friendly interface, a clear step-by-step process for course creation, and comprehensive training videos—meaning you don’t need any technical background to develop your course. For those new to online education, Thinkific provides excellent training resources that guide you through the entire process.
1. Thinkific Course Builder Features
As an online course platform, Thinkific excels in offering a wide range of content options, support for multiple membership tiers, customizable course appearance, and drip content capabilities, earning full marks in these areas.
Content Format Flexibility
Thinkific supports at least 12 different formats to keep your courses interesting and engaging for learners. These include video, quizzes, multimedia presentations, text lessons, surveys, PDFs, audio files, downloadable resources, presentation slides, Brillium exams, assignments, and even a beta feature for live feeds. If you’re migrating from another platform or already have existing content, Thinkific’s ‘Bulk Importer’ tool makes it easy to upload multiple files at once, streamlining your content management process.
Customizing Course Look and Feel
Educators can personalize each course by uploading custom images and descriptions, helping to reinforce branding and course identity. Paid plans unlock further customization options, allowing you to choose different color themes, whether light or dark, modify website fonts and colors, add lesson labels (indicating the type of lesson), and incorporate a logo into the course player. For business coaches or influencers, these white-label features provide a professional look that prominently highlights your personal brand.
Managing Membership Tiers
Offering flexible access and revenue streams is crucial for course creators. Thinkific enables educators to set up various membership levels, including free plans, one-time payments, subscription memberships, monthly payment options, and custom pricing structures. These options are available exclusively on the Pro plan, giving you the tools to craft pricing strategies that best suit your audience and business goals.
Implementing Drip Content
One significant advantage of Thinkific is its ability to schedule content releases gradually through drip content. This feature is particularly useful for educators and coaches who want students to master earlier lessons before progressing. You can set up content to be released based on specific milestones, such as the student’s enrollment date, course start date, or a custom calendar schedule, helping to pace learning effectively and maintain engagement over time.Thinkific Course Completion Certificates
Providing motivation is crucial to keep online learners engaged and prevent the experience from becoming dull. As an instructor or course creator, it’s important to find ways to encourage and reward your students. One effective method offered by Thinkific is the ability to generate professional-looking course completion certificates. You can select from ready-made templates or design custom certificates that incorporate your branding elements, such as logos and color schemes. Thinkific also allows you to modify fonts, colors, and assign the same certificate across multiple courses, making it a versatile tool for rewarding student achievements.
2. Thinkific Website Builder
Your online presence plays a vital role in the growth of your coaching or teaching business. Thinkific offers an excellent platform for creating a professional website for your online school. After reviewing various learning management systems (LMS), we found Thinkific to be highly satisfying. The platform provides a range of features designed to make website building straightforward and efficient.
Drag-and-Drop Page Builder
Building a website can seem intimidating if you’re not familiar with web design or coding. Thinkific simplifies this process with its drag-and-drop page builder, allowing you to create customized pages for your courses or other sections of your site easily. You can add different types of content blocks such as banners, call-to-action buttons, checklists, countdown timers, image galleries, reviews, and videos. To include a new element, simply drag it into your preferred position. You can start with pre-designed templates or craft unique layouts that fit your branding and style preferences.
Theme Library
An additional standout feature of Thinkific is its library of pre-designed themes. Instead of starting from scratch, course creators can select a template as a foundation and customize it to match their branding. The platform offers numerous themes combined with an easy-to-use customization interface, enabling you to quickly launch a professional-looking website tailored to your educational offering.
Currently, there are three main themes available for courses, each with ten variations, giving creators a range of design options.
Thinkific enables course creators to link their sites to custom domain names, but this feature is only accessible with paid plans. Beginners just starting their online coaching or course business can utilize a free subdomain provided by Thinkific under the free subscription tier, which is perfect for getting started without extra costs.
SSL certificates are essential for website security and user trust, and Thinkific provides a basic SSL for all plans. For those who want their own custom SSL, an upgrade to the Premier plan is required. This ensures your website remains secure, and visitors see a “Secure” status rather than a warning.
Thinkific also offers white-labeling options that allow you to remove branding like ‘Powered by Thinkific’ from your course website. To fully customize your branding and remove all Thinkific footprints, you’ll need the Pro plan as part of the Growth package, which is ideal for businesses aiming for a branded, professional appearance.
Supporting diverse payment options is vital for maximizing sales. Thinkific supports integrations with Stripe and PayPal. Stripe handles credit and debit card payments directly, while PayPal, available in over 200 countries, provides familiarity and ease for many students worldwide. Payments are transferred instantly to your linked PayPal or Stripe account, without any delays or hold periods. Authors can also customize their checkout pages by adding reviews, videos, or upsell options—like one-click upsells on the enrollment confirmation page—helping to boost conversion rates.
Marketing your online courses effectively is crucial, and Thinkific offers powerful tools and integrations to aid your promotional efforts. You can create discount coupons, offering either a percentage off or a fixed amount, which can be generated in multiple codes for different campaigns. These coupons can be automatically applied when students land on the checkout page or entered manually during checkout, encouraging more sales.
Promoting your courses on partner websites is simplified with Thinkific’s sales widgets, which are ready-to-use code snippets such as buttons or course cards, making it easy to display and link to your courses on external sites. Further, the platform supports integration with well-known email marketing services like Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, and ConvertKit, allowing seamless communication with your student base.
Additional third-party integrations expand your marketing and operational capabilities, including e-commerce solutions like Shopify and Stunning, automation tools such as Zapier and Infusionsoft, analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel, as well as tools for student engagement such as Zoom and Accredible. These integrations help streamline your workflows and enhance your marketing and sales efforts for your online courses.
Finally, Thinkific’s affiliate program allows you to leverage partnerships to expand your reach and boost sales, making it an even more powerful platform for online course creators looking to grow their audience and revenue.Digital marketing strategies often involve collaborating with affiliates to help promote your courses.
Thinkific makes it simple to incorporate affiliates into your course marketing. You can assign current students or new enrollees as affiliates, or promote your affiliate programs to external users.
Using Thinkific, you can monitor your affiliate program and approve commissions. However, payments to affiliates must be handled outside of Thinkific, as the platform currently doesn’t support direct payout options.
Creating a successful online coaching business requires reliable systems in place. Tracking sales figures and student engagement is essential for growth.
Thinkific offers advanced reporting features that provide real-time insights into your business performance through detailed dashboards and metrics. These reports include data on revenue, orders, enrollments, and student engagement, helping you make informed decisions and optimize your courses.
Thinkific is testing out its new Advanced Reporting (Beta), which already shows great potential. This tool enables course creators to analyze:
– Revenue: You can view overall sales and filter data by courses, channels, payment methods, customer types, and more to identify top-performing areas.
– Orders: Review completed transactions over specific periods, with filters for coupons, payment types, and student demographics to better understand purchasing behaviors.
– Enrollments: Track both free and paid sign-ups over time to evaluate the effectiveness of promotional efforts or free offerings designed to increase sales.
– Student engagement: Gain insights into how students interact with course content, including media usage, completion times, quiz scores, and other engagement metrics, allowing you to enhance the learning experience.
The student management system is a core feature of any LMS, and Thinkific excels by offering an intuitive, streamlined process. From onboarding new students via emails and notifications to enabling participation in communities, Thinkific helps foster an engaging learning environment.
You can segment students, apply filters, and utilize various platform features to build a comprehensive educational ecosystem. All plans—including the free tier—allow unlimited students to enroll in your courses.
If promoting student interaction is a priority, Thinkific provides tools to create groups, communities, and discussion boards that stimulate activity around your course content or related topics.
– Groups: Although not available on the basic plan, this feature allows you to categorize students into cohorts or segments, such as free trial users versus premium buyers, facilitating targeted engagement strategies.
– Communities: Build dedicated spaces where students can connect, share ideas, and discuss lessons, enriching the overall course experience.
– Discussions: Potential students often review community discussions before purchasing. Including discussion features on your site lets visitors see the progress and feedback from existing students, which can drive conversions and upsell opportunities.
Understanding student progress and collecting feedback is vital before expanding your course offerings. Thinkific provides several tools to monitor and showcase student achievement:
– Student Progress Reports: Track individual and overall course completion rates, participation levels, and engagement trends to identify areas for improvement.
– Reviews: Gather and display student feedback to build credibility. You can also edit and embed reviews into your sales pages or website to boost trust and convert more visitors into students.
– Certificates: Recognizing students’ achievements with personalized certificates adds value and motivates continued learning. Thinkific makes it easy to generate and distribute these certificates upon course completion.
- Choosing from available templates is straightforward. Thinkific also enables you to customize course certificates with your own image backgrounds.
Assignments, Quizzes, and Surveys
An essential feature of any online course platform is its ability to assess student progress. Thinkific offers a variety of testing tools to help you monitor how well students are advancing through your content.
You can design assignment lessons within Thinkific, allowing you to upload sample or template files for students to work with. The platform supports submissions up to 100MB, which is ample for most worksheet or document-based assessments.
Additionally, you can incorporate multiple quizzes into your courses. Thinkific supports both single-answer and multiple-answer questions. It features a WYSIWYG editor, making it easy to embed images, videos, and other multimedia into your quizzes.
Thinkific also lets you create a question bank for each quiz, with questions drawn randomly for each student to promote personalized assessments. This feature adds variety and fairness to testing experiences.
If your courses include live sessions like webinars or real-time classes, integrating surveys can help gauge student preferences and learning outcomes. You can embed surveys directly into your course content to gather valuable feedback and insights.
7. Ensuring Data Security on Thinkific
Data theft incidents are becoming increasingly common, with reports from the Federal Trade Commission indicating a steady rise in such cases. For online educators, especially those using plugins on platforms like WordPress, this can be a significant concern. Thinkific addresses these issues by providing robust security measures. All memberships benefit from free SSL encryption, securing data exchanges during course access.
The platform employs secure cloud hosting to protect both your data and your students’ information. If you regularly back up your website or course content, you’ll be pleased to know Thinkific offers automatic backups, easing your security management. Updates are applied seamlessly across all sites, minimizing vulnerabilities. If you’re utilizing Thinkific’s API for private courses, it’s advisable to review their API documentation for security best practices.
Overall, you can focus on developing engaging courses without fretting over data security, as Thinkific handles it comprehensively to keep your information safe and your students’ data protected.
8. Thinkific Pricing Plans Overview
Having explored all the features that make Thinkific a top choice for course creators, let’s look at its pricing structure. Thinkific begins with a FREE plan, allowing educators to create up to three courses, enroll unlimited students, and access instant payouts. This plan offers limited content types but is ideal for those just starting out or testing the platform.
Below is an overview of Thinkific’s various plans and their costs:
- Free plan: This option is perfect for newcomers experimenting with online coaching or course development. It provides basic tools to launch your first course without cost.
- Basic plan: If you’re ready to expand your online coaching efforts, the Basic plan grants access to essential features for course creation, including the option to use a personalized domain.
- Pro plan: The Thinkific Pro plan is designed for professional coaches or businesses aiming to elevate their courses. It includes features like live sessions via Zoom, course certificates, priority customer support, and the ability to add up to five course administrators or authors.
- Premier plan: For established online coaching businesses aiming for growth and wider reach, the Premier plan offers extensive automation options, support for creating multiple admin accounts (up to 50 course-admins and 5 site admins), and onboarding assistance to train your authors efficiently.
Beyond these options, Thinkific also offers Plus packages which cater to small and medium-sized organizations seeking comprehensive training and learning management solutions.
9. Thinkific Customer Support
As someone starting out, you may need guidance in setting up your courses. Thinkific excels in customer support, offering various channels to assist users. Its support includes prompt email responses typically within 24 hours, often sooner, with ongoing emails designed to help you get started and stay motivated during course creation. Thinkific also stands out with its phone support—rare among competitors—giving users direct access to assistance. Additionally, there is a comprehensive learning center featuring step-by-step video tutorials on how to utilize different features. The platform’s active Facebook community also provides a platform for quick peer support and connecting with fellow course creators for advice and insights.
Thinkific Reviews: Pros and Cons
Our research identifies Thinkific as a top-tier course creation platform. However, no platform is perfect; it’s important to consider its limitations as well.
Advantages of Thinkific
- Free starter plan: Few platforms offer a free option to launch a course initially, but Thinkific allows this without any upfront costs, giving new creators a low-risk entry point. You can upgrade later as your needs grow.
- No transaction fees: Unlike some competitors, Thinkific does not impose additional charges on sales transactions, which benefits those aiming to maximize revenue.
- Immediate access to funds: Regardless of your subscription level, funds from course sales are available instantly, something that platforms like Teachable and Udemy do not provide.
- Custom domains: You can use your own branded domain from the Basic plan onwards, enhancing your brand identity.
- Responsive support: Thinkific provides both phone support and quick, helpful email responses, ensuring users are well-supported.
- White-label options: For small businesses or coaches, Thinkific offers an option to remove branding and customize the platform’s appearance with its Growth packages.
- Strong third-party integrations: While it doesn’t offer built-in email marketing or advanced marketing tools, Thinkific compensates with seamless third-party integrations, including popular email platforms, analytics tools, and key payment gateways.
Disadvantages of Thinkific
- Difficult navigation: Although it has improved with recent updates, some users find the platform’s interface less sleek or intuitive compared to competitors.
- Two-step checkout process: The requirement for students to create an account before purchasing can lead to cart abandonment, a common issue with as many as 22% of users quitting during checkout. Streamlining this process could improve conversions.
- No marketplace: Without an integrated course marketplace or marketing plugins in the free plan, promoting and selling courses might be challenging for new creators relying solely on organic reach and external marketing.
Summary
Thinkific stands out as one of the top course creation tools available today. Its straightforward design, comprehensive features, and competitive pricing make it a leading choice for many educators. Understanding what features you need from a platform is vital; once you align your goals with the right tools, building a successful online education business becomes much easier. Thinkific provides all the essential functions to generate income through selling high-quality courses. For more in-depth comparisons, explore options like Thinkific versus Kajabi or Teachable, and check out other popular online coaching platforms to find the best fit for your needs. Have you used Thinkific? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.