A Thinkific Review: Does This Course Creation Tool Deliver?

Thinkific is an online course platform and web-based Learning Management System (LMS) that allows you to create, market, and sell online courses and membership sites.

With a Capterra rating of 4.6/5 and more than 50,000 course creators, it’s no surprise that they’re popular with brands like Samsung, Hootsuite, and HBO.

Tools like Thinkific allow you to provide training and educational course material in PDF presentations (with text or voice-overs) and video formats.

Thinkific’s software is easy enough to use for users with no coding experience or those who aren’t very tech-savvy.

Their multimedia content supports all formats, including video, text, and audio formats, plus:

Thinkific knows that you can’t have a product without a brand behind it, which is why they’ve also turned their attention to web design.

Thinkific has 7 main components in their online course creation software to help users create a well-structured landing page, these include:

The customization features are very easy to understand, and if you’re more tech-savvy, you can modify the HTML and CSS code.

This means you can change the URL and cover image of your courses for added personalization.

Thinkific also lets you use a personal domain name. This means that you can create a new Thinkific website or link your existing website without hassle!

Thinkific allows you to set custom pricing options per course.

Courses can either be free, or you can offer once-off or subscription-based payment models.

Thinkific also helps you attract a wider audience through:

Additionally, you can:

For any features that aren’t built-in, you can take advantage of the many integrations that Thinkific offers — with platforms like Mailchimp, Shopify, Stripe, and Keap (to name a few).

If a 3rd party isn’t already integrated, Thinkific has also teamed up with Zapier for any additional tools that you may need.

Unfortunately, Thinkific doesn’t have a marketplace to help you market and sell your courses. This can make marketing more difficult if you don’t have the experience.

They do offer an Expert Marketplace, but this is only to get professional advice from experts to improve your courses.

They also feature different completion certificate templates to add more value to your courses by giving your students a sense of accomplishment.

Thinkific’s Free plan only allows you to create 1 course with 1 site admin account.

There are no integration options on this plan, but you are given the space for unlimited students.

No credit card information is required, and there are no hidden transaction fees.

Thinkific’s paid plans are billed annually (save 20%) or monthly (except the Enterprise plan) and come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Each plan (including the Free plan) comes with these core features:

Let’s take a closer look at what each plan has to offer.

Thinkific’s Basic plan is billed at $49/month or $39/month annually and includes all the core features, as well as:

And more.

The Basic plan also gives you access to the Thinkific App Store (integrated through Zapier).

With this feature, you can send your Thinkific data to other tools to improve your business’ automation.

Unfortunately, Thinkific’s email marketing features are like a double-edged sword:

The Pro plan is Thinkific’s most popular option, and it costs $99/month or $79/month annually.

This plan is aimed at course creators who want to build a successful online course business, with a complete suite of tools.

The Pro plan offers everything from the Basic plan, plus:

And more.

Lastly, you can also build unlimited communities which help improve communication with your students.

You can build a community around your content to add more value to your online courses or create a Community as a higher-tiered offering.

This allows you to drive engagement, build trust, connect globally, and keep your students around longer!

Thinkific offers a Premier plan with no limitations.

This plan is priced at $499/month or $399/month annually and includes all the Pro plan features plus:

And more.

To get more admins or group analysts for your website and courses, you’ll need to contact Thinkific’s sales team.

This plan also offers the option to remove Thinkific branding on your emails, website, and course-player (if you decide not to use the Growth add-on).

Thinkific’s recently added Plus plan focuses on providing the necessary infrastructure to manage more students.

Because this plan is aimed at larger enterprises, you’ll need to contact Thinkific’s sales team on their website for a custom quote.

The Plus plan aims to cover your business from every angle, using features like 24/7 monitoring and a Launch Preparedness Review (LPR).

The LPR is a review of your Thinkific website and course settings, followed by a 30-minute call to recap the results of the review.

The Plus plan includes all of the Premier plan features, as well as:

And more.

Thinkific isn’t afraid to raise the stakes when it comes to their security, and your website’s safety is a top priority with their Plus plan.

The Plus plan also lets you secure your online course and traffic with Google’s reCAPTCHA software to get more advanced and secure passwords.

Thinkific has a lot to offer course creators, but it comes with a hefty price tag — let's weigh up its pros and cons to see if it’s worth it.

We recommend Thinkific if you’re:

We don’t recommend Thinkific if you:

Systeme.io also offers some additional features that include:

Because our interface is so simple to use, you can do all of this with little to no tech knowledge!

We also offer 24/7 online support that has a turnaround time of under 2 hours — if you’d like to read about our features in detail, click here.

Each paid plan can be billed monthly or yearly, with the latter saving you 30% a month.

All of systeme.io’s plans come with unlimited emailing, file storage space, membership site members or students, and blog posts.

Our Freemium plan supports up to 2,000 contacts, and it includes:

Our Freemium plan doesn’t require any card information when you subscribe, and it’s also free forever!

It’ll provide you with everything you need to launch your online business.

If you’re looking for more to power and scale your business, we’ve got you covered — click here for a detailed look at our pricing plans.

Thinkific is a good tool for online course creators to build and sell courses.

But if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that’ll take care of all your business needs (including selling courses at one central place), then systeme.io is the tool for you.

Not only are we more affordable, but we also offer far more features (our most expensive plan is only $97/month and offers unlimited everything).

Our superior built-in email marketing and automation features let us do most of the work so that you can focus on growing your business.

What are you waiting for? Sign up today! It’ll literally cost you nothing.