Thinkific Reviews

Pros

The number of options available and the affordable price.

Cons

Poor HTML editor. I hope they can improve this.

Pros

A renowned platform built to deliver online courses, sell digital product and market personal expertise through webinars and conferencing facilities. Its robust features as website builder, landing pages creator and the bunch of add-ons to integrate for third party uses as blog posts, make Thinkific stand away from the crowd. Though a beginner, and in few clicks, you can customize your course, enrol students, create and sell e-books, start conferencing and many other unlimited features at low costs. Uploading data can go up to 2G, which is not found with other rivals.

Cons

Actually, so many users speak about bulk enrolment problems and some outdated features, particularly video players. honestly, I also did not like their support help and updates, everything is just general.

Pros

My experience getting onboarded onto the product looked great and was easy. I am getting ready to sell a digital course and Thinkific checked all the boxes.

Setting up a course and landing page was simple enough on the free trial. Eventually, I upgraded to the paid version so that I could offer coupon codes as well.

Cons

I had everything ready to go on my course. All my content was uploaded and the landing page was set. I got ready to offer pre-sales for my course to gauge interest and check my pricing (which is a standard practice in the course world). I sent an email to my mailing list with the link to the course landing page and things started off well. A few people started to pre-order then... after an hour it just stopped.

I started getting emails from people that the link to my course was broken. I tried to login into the site and I could not. Trying to recover my password didn't work. It was as if my site had been deleted with no notice. I tried to chat with support, but was directed to an AI bot that was useless and even though I was a paying customer, the phone support refused to help me because I could not login to my account.

I had to send an email to someone which took several days to respond that apparently my account was suspended for "risk" whatever that means and that I would no longer be able to use the site. They could not explain what that meant and didn't seem to care.

Alternatives Considered

Teachable, Podia and Payhip

Pros

This was the first site I used when I first started my coaching business. I was able to create landing pages for my first lead magnets with ease despite not having a clue what I was doing!

Cons

At the time, there were minimal options for designs I liked and I eventually grew out of it.

Alternatives Considered

Coursera for Business and Kajabi

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific

As I was just starting my business at the time I found Thinkific, I was able to do so much on the free version. That, to me, speaks to the culture of a company that knows if you give first - you have a loyal, lifelong customer.

Pros

So easy to get started. Adding creator content is simple and the designing aspect is also very intuitive.

Cons

The limitations to customize the course player. There are types of lessons, but other than that you are stuck using their templates.

Pros

Easy login process for members and easier to upgrade into other courses, easier to use coupon codes, etc
Single dashboard for partners, users and affiliates. This is the main issue we are trying to solve in the best way possible.
Easier to display the courses on the site like an education company. Less design needed which is good for our VA's.
A mobile app included, but it's super basic and not at all impressive

Cons

We had to manually import every student and bulk enroll them into every course individually. The bulk enroll will only run 1 import at a time. So it took about 2-days to import them for every course
We had to individually add every single affiliate because they don't have bulk enroll. It's taken my VA 3 days to do since we have over 300 affiliates. We're also going to have to manually pay them each month.
The only way Thinkific is useful is if you buy a bunch of plugins so you can build a proper website. That then causes caching issues.
The video player is old an outdated. We have to now go back and manually add every SRT file. It doesn't auto-generate like most players do these days. This will take a VA about a week to do.
They also don't have an inbuilt API that when a subscription member cancels to remove a tag from your CRM. This blows my mind. It's simple, standard practice for any membership platform. So we have to use Zapier instead which adds another unneccesary cost.
Support team is fairly unhelpful. All they do is send you to a document. They don't every help in any other way. For example, we just wanted to change the font size for the header menu. It had to be done in code. Would have taken someone on their team with develper knowledge 30 seconds to do or point us in the right direction. They wouldn't do it.

Alternatives Considered

Kajabi

Reasons for Choosing Thinkific

Looking for a better user experience for our members

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific

Thinkific looked like the better one of the lot.

Pros

Interface is modern and is easy to navigate. Easy to remove and add content. No lagging with video and other features which provide an excellent end user experience.

Is a proven learning system used by millions globally.

It is easy to move away from Thinkific.

Cons

Have to use a lot of 3rd party vendors due to product limitations. So you can not add a blog page, have to use Thinkifics recommended providers, they are very expensive.

Recently Thinkific announced Stripe and other payment terminals can not be used, again you have you their providers.

Setting up meta tags for social media marketing was easy, and support couldnt help. So I had pay someone to sort this out.

They need more custom options building website, currently too basic.

Alternatives Considered

Teachable

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific

Price and end user experience

Pros

A wonderful product that allows for easy course design with a wide variety of features that can help to support engagement for those taking courses.

Cons

The interface could be more simple and visually appealing. At times feels a little clunky to interact with.

Pros

A very user-friendly tool to create learning content

Cons

It was missing some key features to report on learner progress

Alternatives Considered

Kajabi

Reasons for Switching to Thinkific

Ease of use and possibility to start free

Pros

The price for the quality of performance.

Cons

Wasn;t able to do everything that I needed out of a software.

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.

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

Pros

Authoring and course creation is easy. The interface is simple to use. Courses are available on the mobile making it easy for learners to access the material.

Cons

Would be great if the tool could generate the Quiz based on the course content. Perhaps a consideration for future development on the platform

Pros

We thought Thinkific would be a great solution for internal and client LMS for onboarding. We invested a lot into a high plan.

Cons

It had some poor features, poor UI and UX, and customer experience. Once we went down to a lower plan, service went from average to absolutely terrible. We had multiple accounts and were unable to cancel one, it kept billing us and they would neither assist us to remove the subscription nor refund us. They also over-billed several of the clients we introduced to the software and those clients had similar terrible customer service issues.

Pros

It has all the features I really need to teach and sell my courses online

Cons

Not very easy to customize the way your landing pages, course gallery and course itself looks. What Thinkific has available looks good but sometimes you want to make it more your own and that is not that easy.

Pros

Easy to deploy, you can add quizzes to test for knowledge acquisition

Cons

Free plan doesn't include a custom domain

Pros

I had no experience with Thinkific prior to jumping in to help my client with her account. However, I had some experience with other landing-page builders, and it was not too difficult to get the hang of using the Thinkific Site Builder. Also, I quickly found some YouTube videos that helped me out as well.

My client already had a published Thinkific site. Thinkific has the option to create an offline copy so we can experiment with a new design and not worry about messing up the live site or causing disruptions for students. As a newbie, I was relieved not to have to worry about messing anything up.

The Theme Library has a decent selection of templates - just enough to find a good starting point but not too many to be overwhelming. The sample landing pages are great inspiration as well.

I love the "smart" blocks that pull content from elsewhere in your account. For example, the instructor's bio or course curriculum or student reviews.

Cons

I encountered a few limitations:
- The Site Builder includes about a dozen or so recognized fonts, but I did not see a way to add custom fonts. Maybe this is comes with a higher plan.
- For the instructor's bio, I didn't like the default design of the "Instructors" block, so I just used a "Text & Media" block. That would have seemed fine, except the text and photo are too close together. I couldn't see a way to increase the space.
- You can get a pretty good preview of the page using Fullscreen mode inside the Site Builder - but the links and buttons are not clickable. I didn't find a way to preview the course landing page with live links/buttons so I can make sure they are working properly. If I'm working with an offline copy, I would like to be able to check links and buttons BEFORE publishing and overriding our existing live page.

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

Pros

A very easy to use application that projects your career as an instructor and educator, you can sell the courses to students or companies, allowing you to take better advantage as it allows you to enlarge your professional profile, showing the courses you have done and who and how many have seen, making you notice in the professional area, it is quite complete and easy to use, with an attractive cost for the market.

Cons

I think they should improve a little the visual and design area, to make it more pleasing to the eye, allowing you to customize more each course and let your imagination fly to catch a larger audience, doing this would improve even more this excellent application.

Pros

I liked most that there was a free option to get started and that there is a front end option that shows all courses owned by an account native to the program. Thinkific is easy to use and now that it has added a community feature it's almost perfect.

Cons

At the time I switched from Thinkific, I did so to get a native community feature so my students wouldn't have to go to Facebook for community. Now that Thinkific has added it, there's only one complaint I have, and that is that I need another layer of complexity for my courses. Unfortunately, I haven't found an LMS that has that, so Thinkific is no worse in that regard than any other LMS I've explored.

I do have an issue with the pricing model, which is too complex and confusing. That makes it hard to compare with other options.

Pros

I deploy Thinkific to my clients who need to an online course, but don't have the expertise or resources to recruit someone with technology skills. It's really easy with a short learning curve. If building a website with drag/drop tools is easy to you - this is even easier.
Their support is fantastic! Their response time is quick, their team is helpful, and their reply is always clear and coherent. I've spoken to them as both a user, and a developer - and they were always willing to find a way to help me solve things.

Cons

For the scenario of building a training program - Thinkific is great - no issues. If I had to say something, like anything - the only thing I can think of is, as a developer - I wish I can build add-ons to extend Thinkific's features. I'm probably in the 1% who wants it, which shows how much Thinkific really thought things

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

Pros

Relatively easy to set up - as long as you don't want to have helpers.

Cons

HORRID for anyone working with a few helpers... they want to rape you on fees for additional admins.
Can't remove/archive past offerings
Customer service SUCKS.

Pros

The different type of quizzes that I can offer

Cons

The growth package monthly payment per student

Pros

Branded and look profesional, easy to use for startup

Cons

All the suscribtion not allowed another admin , I can’t invite freelancer to do the job. And the suscription exeoensive to allow another admin, compare to other platform thinkific is expensive with less feature