Thinkific Reviews

This is where I have my courses

Comments: Anytime I have a problem their tech support is great. And I haven't had any tech problems with the platform - my students are happy and use it easily.

Pros:

When I was researching all the different software for course hosting, I liked that this had a place to upload documents in the discussions. That might be really important for people teaching code or other products. Then I'm glad I choose this one because others take a % of income AND you have to wait longer for money.

Cons:

The layout isn't as clean and modern as others - I'm hoping that will be updated at some point. It's a little ugly.

Alternatives Considered: Teachable

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific: Thinkific had the ability to upload docs in the discussion area of courses. And doesn't charge a transaction fee.

Suitable For All Levels

Comments: Thinkific has been perfect as a solution for my starting an online training product that also has spreadsheet tools included. My experience has been great. I have only once had to contact support and it turns out it was my error that was causing a visual issue, which was soon easily corrected, once I saw my error. They were quick to spot what I'd done and let me know.

Pros:

That it's really comprehensive, yet still has a free to low-cost entry-level option. It's easy to use and looks visually great too with its customisable interface options. Oh and I love that you can i-frame other websites and URL's into your courses (this is great for spreadsheets and websites) - it saves a lot of time and energy, and updating! Oh, and it has / had a low payment processing fee structure.

Cons:

I haven't hit any issues with it yet so to date there's nothing I don't like about it.

Alternatives Considered: Teachable

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific: It's entry-level plans (including the free plan that was / is available at the time I joined) are fully featured. Certainly enough to get started and have to commit to a paid or more expensive plan. It looked great and also (at the time of joining and still I think) had a lower fee structure, etc.

The best online course platform for those who are starting out.

Comments: Excellent, it has helped us get more clients and earn more money without having to set up a website from scratch.

Pros:

The number of options available and the affordable price.

Cons:

Poor HTML editor. I hope they can improve this.

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.

Alternatives Considered: Teachable, TutorBird and Kajabi

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific: I ended up not choosing Thinkific and went with an alternative.

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.

Using Thinkific has helped me grow my business!

Comments: LOVE thinkific!

Pros:

It's so easy to use, has great tutorials and their support is amazing.

Cons:

It's gotten more technical over the years and really now a designer is needed to create beautiful landing pages unless you have time to figure it out.

Alternatives Considered: Udemy Business

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific: Easier to use and no one critiqued my course to allow it to be on the platform

The Best Online Course Creator

Comments: We started with an idea to help colleagues and turned it into a course. Thinkific allowed us to get our idea out of our heads and into reality, and a usable product people could buy & use.

Pros:

Thinkific made it easy to create & host our digital course for financial advisors. With any platform there is a learning curve at the beginning. Thinkific's support team was always quick to reply and help us learn the ropes.

Cons:

I don't really have any complaints. It would be nice if the WYSIWYG editor were as good as Apple Pages, and turned out prettier text layouts in the templates. But, it's good enough.

Great tool. It would be just better if you build a mobile App for students.

Comments: I'm really enjoying the experience.

Pros:

Having an API that facilitates the integration with our back office.

Cons:

Not having an app for the student experience.

Alternatives Considered: Kartra and Kajabi

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific: Having an API that seamlessly integrated with our backoffice.

Sturdy training platform

Comments: Happy, students seemed to get on wit it fine.

Pros:

The way it structures lessons, with sublessons.

Cons:

Fiddling to put video content in. Can be fiddly to restructure a course if adding a lesson.

Alternatives Considered: Groove

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific: Better more robust platform, though Groove has now taken over and I'm moving to them

A Good Basic Platform for selling online courses

Comments: I have used thinkific for over 3 years. It has been a good basic platform although somewhat frustrating at times due to limited functionality around creating engaging courses, no SCORM support and having to integrate with Thord party email management systems via Zapier (GetResponse)

Pros:

Ease of use and simple to understand user interface

Cons:

Somewhat limited in creating engaging learning, and having to use third party paid plugins for basic gamification. Virtually no customer management functionality built into the platform (such as email management) and limited integration with Third party contact management systems.

With Thinkific as our Platform, we have successfully launched three very different online courses.

Comments: We are at the beginning stages of offering a high quality course to students from around the world.

Pros:

We researched many Platforms before choosing Thinkific. We love that Thinkific is Canadian. We love the journey that students take from first encountering the site landing page, going to the course landing page and then immersing themselves in the course. I appreciate the helpful support from the Thinkific team. They do a great job of answering our many questions. I am fortunate that Thinkific rebuilt their course editing software quite soon after we began developing our course. Their new software is quite easy to use and easy to revise. I really like their flat-rate monthly subscription fee with no hidden costs.

Cons:

I wish students could purchase this course in the currency of their own country. I wish we could pay for our subscription in Canadian funds instead of American. We have had to purchase a separate Discussion Forum because their Disqus Plug In is a social media plug in that is not confidential, and their built in Discussion Forum is very awkward and poorly organized with no ability to search, edit, or even manage posts. Thinkific focuses much more on supporting marketing than on supporting online course development. We were fortunate that we had already taken two excellent courses in online course development that we could apply to the Thinkific Platform. Thinkific is less responsive to good ideas for improvement than I would like them to be. For example, despite many, many requests from many course developers it is still not possible for the course author to copy, paste and edit quizes and so there is a lot of unnecessary labour involved in inputting quizes

My experience with Thinkific

Pros:

I like that it is simple, that they are quite transparant about their pricing and have an extensive help center. The Facebook group is also great for support. Making online courses comes with a lot of questions.

Cons:

Customization of the look & feel of online courses and landing pages is limited, as if payment options. For EU customers who are not accustomed to credit card / Paypal you need to integrate Shopify. This is possible, but connecting Shopify & Thinkific is not that great. Affiliate links don't work anymore and tracking sales becomes quite a bit harder.

Alternatives Considered: Teachable

Good for small, basic needs

Comments: Value for the money, attractive front end with little effort.

Pros:

The way Thinkific presents content, from landing page to course completion page, is beautiful and appealing to the user. There are ample ways to connect with the user through various integrations if desired. It's also useful that you can customize the branding and even your own site theme if you have the available resources to do so! After switching from a sub-par LMS, our users are more engaged and more excited about signing in to consume our courses.

Cons:

Reporting leaves much to be desired - best count on using Zapier to pull data into a 3rd party for analyzing user progress and completion rates. It's also frustrating that I have to wait for some reports to be emailed to me after requesting them. Perhaps the most frustrating part is that the front-end is designed using Liquid, which is difficult for a novice with basic CSS / HTML knowledge to navigate in order to make small text changes across the site.

Easy to use but not as complete as other plattforms

Pros:

Thinkific is very easy to use, I upload two courses in a few hours and learn how to use it very fast.

Cons:

I didn't like the courses landing pages, it would be great to have more flexibility on them.

Alternatives Considered: Teachable

Reasons for Choosing Thinkific: Thinkific has more price options.

Switched From: Kartra

Love it!

Comments: I got leads into students who enjoyed this platform. I really loved setting up courses and I think this is a great product.

Pros:

I really like how easy this system is; they have done a lot to make their platform easy to use. The free plan is good. Pro's: Easy to use & navigate Helpful tutorials Helpful webinars and manuals to help you get the most and market your courses Clean crisp look Responsive for mobile, tablet, and pc's

Cons:

Pricing for me was the only con; I had purchased a lifetime subscription to another course building platform and decided to switch to that otherwise i'd still be using thinkific.

Thinkific is a fantastic online learning platform

Comments: We are growing into an international learning community with the help of Thinkific.

Pros:

Versatile, well organized, easy to learn. Free until you get going.

Cons:

- Terrible discussion forum (we wish they would link up with website tool box). - Their pricing plans have changed in ways that don't work well for us and they have not been responsive to our feedback.

The answer to my prayers! Needed a home for a free flagship course. Thinkific has a free version!

Comments: I was able to easily launch a free flagship course. It enabled me to provide a needed service to students without having to charge them by giving me the option to host the course at no cost.

Pros:

I searched and searched for an affordable way to host my free Fearless Budgeting training program for compulsive spenders. I tried a couple of sites before launching, but they all had problems and were difficult to use. When I found the free plan on Thinkific, I was blown away. It was so easy to set up and everything just flowed. I had one issue with the sort order of multiple download files. Customer service was great and helped me figure out how to sort them properly within a couple of hours. It was incredibly easy to set up the two courses (total of 50 lessons) and two additional products. My products and courses look professional. Oh, and I love the student discussion forum, which I've used to let students know about an update to one of the courses and an upcoming Q&A call. Plus, I was able to easily integrate my mailing list into the program. I couldn't be happier with the service and support. I heartily recommend Thinkific. For me, it blows away the competition!

Cons:

Nothing. Not one thing. It's perfect for my needs. The fact is, I'm amazed at all the features I get with the free option. It's working out great for me and my students.

It's not my favourite platform for courses

Comments: I used it with one client and I can see high-end sellers using this program, but it's still not my favourite.

Pros:

I like that it has a lot of features, but the way the arranged them is not easy to use The homepage is more customizable than other programs

Cons:

I don't like Thinkific for some reason the design is not appealing to me what so ever... I wish it was because some of my clients prefer this program over others.

Thinkific is easy to use, the interface is friendly both for the administrator and for the users.

Comments: I get to sell my courses to students directly and receive a hire percentage than I would on Udemy and Skillshare.

Pros:

I needed to create online courses to sell directly to students rather than putting all my eggs in one basket... in this case 2 baskets; Udemy and Skillshare. I began looking for cheap or free LMS system, and after vetting my options I was down to two choices Thinkific and Teachable. Thinkific isn't as popular as Teachable so I was already partial, expecting less from it than Teachable. I was surprised that Thinkific was the better option. Thinkific is easy to use, intuitive and very user-friendly, they have lots of resources on how to create courses. I hit a snag in the video production phase of my courses and I was surprised when they reached out to me, I explained that I hadn't been online as I was still creating my course and they sent links to resources that would help. That was a biggy for me, as I really needed that. The staff and the software itself has been amazing.

Cons:

Non really, at least for now. I'm on the free plan which has limited features, I'd need to upgrade to fully explore its capabilities but for now, I'm content

Any school or academy will fit right into Thinkific

Comments: I love the team behind thinkific as well, the weekly information to use the software, to hint out what is working at the time. Designs tutorials on any of the tasks needed to launch a successful online course.

Pros:

I love the drag and drop options. The ease of use and bulk importers. I have such a great contact to my students and abundant options to get my teachings across. The editors are functional and best of all: The designs are professional and looks like a Tesla ;) I have room for up to 2gb videos! That is hosting and being serious to support online education. Did I mention it is Per Video!!

Cons:

There is one thing I'd like to see different on Thinkific. My ability to have more sub-modules in each Chapter of my courses. That's it. Otherwise, I have nothing to say.

Thinkific Has A Lot Going For It

Pros:

The look presented to students, and options for directing their learning process is thoughtful and creative. When I have a question that the help file can't answer, the live chat has been helpful a number of times.

Cons:

Some options are "all or nothing", in other words, I can't customize to individuals as much as I might like.

Feel Confident in the Basics

Comments: Thinkific is a strong performer for the price. It covers a lot of ground for course management needs from the all sides: student, teacher and administrative. You get many capabilities for video, text, downloads, discussions that serve different learning styles. The login, registration and payment system works well. Support can get you through even non-standard apps connections though it takes time and back/forth on email and phone.

Pros:

Thinkific covers course the basics very well. It also provides strong administrative functions to support the student and teacher. Payment works well too.

Cons:

The question import and question change functions need to be improved. Currently, they are unwieldy and time consuming. Support could be easier to connect to. But, as seems to be everywhere, you have to start with an email or chat.

Just focus on creating content and leave the rest to Thinkific

Pros:

If you're coming from WordPress ecosystem, you know the pain. Keep on adding plugins-after-plugins and keep paying for them yearly and keep maintaining them, patching security holes that pop up often. If then you get some time, then create content for your members. With Thinkific, you need not worry about the umpteen admin issues of WordPress at all; just focus on content creation and leave the rest to the Thinkific platform. Hassle free piece of LMS.

Cons:

- They may want to look into the pricing structure. - For those educaters who can't accept Stripe for some reason, try to come up with a model whereby you accept payment on our behalf and then send our payments later on.

Think thinkific

Comments: Overall positive but worthwhile investing in customer support in the southern hemisphere

Pros:

It was easy to use and navigate and a popular tool for people to share their knowledge online.

Cons:

The international connect to customer support with time zone differences between Canada and Australia.

Enabled to set up online art courses for 200+ students.

Comments: I've been able to sell multiple learning products to 200+ students. This has enabled them to learn and see their progress as they go. It has also allowed me to create and use quizzes for my students.

Pros:

This software is quite flexible and enabled me to take over 200 students through 15 learning modules. Each module has multiple videos and pictures. Thinkific enabled me to include assignments, which I used Airtable to integrate with. Enrolling students in that course is extremely simple.

Cons:

There are no big cons with Thinkific. That said, the progress bar has been confusing for some of our students. Replaying courses can be slightly confusing for them too.