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Thinkific Review (2024): The Best Online Platform! But WHY?

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According to analysts, A rapid growth trend is sweeping across the online learning sector. eLearning will contribute $325 billion to the global economy by 2025,

Thinkific is one of the first names that come to mind when talking about online course platforms.

I’m not the only one who thinks this, look at the reviews from around the world as well. Thinkific has been used by more than 75 million people.

You will never need any more motivation to get started as an educator. Let’s take a closer look at Thinkific’s features and why it ranks among the best platforms for creating courses.

Don’t have time to read the whole article? Here is the real customer review on Trustpilot-

Thinkific Trustpilot review

Most of the users had a great experience with the Thinkific course builder.

So what are you waiting for?

Try Thinkific 30-day free trial Right Now! Explore the Thinkific Pro without spending any money!


Table of Content
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What is Thinkific?

What is Thinkific?

Exactly what Thinkific is all about is described by its tagline, Power Your Education Empire.

Thinkific is an online course platform targeted at educators, business coaches, and entrepreneurs.

It supports many formats of content, including videos, texts, PDFs, quizzes, discussions, and more.

Thinkific stands out because it combines all the tools educators need to sell online courses in one place.

There is a drag-and-drop builder available for building websites. Your online coaching business site doesn’t need to be coded or HTML-savvy.

Thinkific makes it easy for course creators to promote their businesses. It’s easy to integrate Thinkific with a variety of third-party apps and platforms. This article will explore its unique marketing features in the following sections.

Last but not least, it features robust student management tools that allow educators to monitor the progress of students using automated emails and reminders.


Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links (not every link). If you purchase anything using the affiliate links. I will get a small commission that helps to keep this website running. Don’t worry! You won’t be charged any extra money for that. So happy purchasing! ❤️❤️

How Many People Use Thinkific?

You don’t have to take my word for it when I say Thinkific is a leading platform for course creators. The reason is as follows.

  • Thinkific has been used by more than 75 million people.
  • Over 50,000 creators are part of the Thinkific community.
  • Thinkific is used by people in 190 countries.
  • Thinkific has helped educators sell online courses worth over $650 million.

Since Thinkific’s inception, it has only grown stronger. It will only get better from here as the number of online learners grows around the world.


Thinkific is for who?

Thinkific is a platform for creating online coaching courses, so anyone can use it to start a business.

Thinkific is used by a variety of companies, including:

  • Business coaches
  • Entrepreneurs
  • Online educators
  • Academic institutions
  • Digital marketing platforms

It’s true that you don’t need technical skills to launch your online course on Thinkific, but there’s a myth about online courses that need to be dispelled.

A built-in progress tracking system and robust marketing tools help you promote your online courses using Thinkific.

Here are some of Thinkific’s top features and things to keep in mind when creating an online course.


Thinkific Review: How Thinkific Works?

We created a review account for ourselves to provide hands-on experience.

The Thinkific platform features a simple user interface, a step-by-step course creation process, and training videos. Thinkific doesn’t require any technical skills to create a course.

Thinkific provides excellent training materials for users with limited online experience.

Thinkific Dashboard Review

1. Thinkific Course Builder Module

Its content versatility, ability to create different membership levels, and drip content features make Thinkific an excellent platform for creating online courses.

Content Support

Thinkific Content formats

For most educators, keeping online courses interesting can be a challenge.

A total of 12 different content formats are supported by Thinkific for online courses.

Thinkific Content format
  1. Video
  2. Quiz
  3. Multimedia
  4. Text
  5. Survey
  6. PDF
  7. Audio
  8. Downloads
  9. Presentations
  10. Brillium exams
  11. Assignments
  12. Live feed (beta)

Thinkific offers its ‘Bulk Importer’ to help content creators migrate from other platforms or import existing content.

Course Appearance Customization

Course descriptions and images can be customized by Thinkific educators.

There are higher levels of customization available with Thinkific paid plans. The course player logo and lesson labels (the types of lessons) can be added, and you can choose different colour themes (light or dark).

These white-labelling options help you showcase your personal brand effectively if you’re a business coach or influencer.

Membership Levels

You must have a revenue strategy in place before providing access to your online courses.

A variety of membership levels can be created by educators on Thinkific. The following are the levels of membership we discovered during our research.

  • Free membership plan
  • One-time payment
  • Subscription membership
  • Monthly payment plan
  • Custom pricing options

You will, however, need Thinkific’s Pro membership plan to access these features.

Thinkific membership levels setup

Drip Content

You can offer drip content in your course by using Thinkific. Coaches may require their students to review previous lessons before implementing new ideas.

You can schedule drip content releases in accordance with user milestones, such as student enrollment dates, course start dates, and custom calendar days.

Thinkific Course Completion Certificates

It is possible for the online learning experience to become stale without proper motivation. In order to keep your students motivated, you need to be an online educator.

Thinkific offers educators the option of creating professional certificates of completion to help with this.

Thinkific course certificate

Pre-loaded certificate templates can be customized with your brand image or you can choose from pre-loaded certificate templates.

A single certificate can be assigned to multiple courses, and a brand or school logo can be added.

2. Thinkific Website Builder

The success of your online coaching business depends on the quality of your website.

When it comes to creating a website for your online school, Thinkific ranks highly. It was a pleasure to review multiple options across multiple learning management systems (LMS) and we could not be happier.

Thinkific’s website provides the following functionality.

Drag-and-Drop Page Builder

It can be a challenge for someone who isn’t familiar with technology to create a web page, handle HTML, or edit CSS.

It’s easy to create a page for your course or any other page of your website with Thinkific.

There are a wide variety of sections to choose from, including banners, call-to-actions, checklists, countdown timers, image galleries, reviews, videos, etc. You can add new sections by dragging the element to its desired position.

Your website can be designed in a variety of ways, either by choosing from default templates or by creating an entirely new design.

Thinkific site builder review

Theme Library

Thinkific’s pre-built theme library is another exciting feature.

The course creator can choose a template instead of building a website from scratch. Thinkific offers multiple themes and an easy-to-use customization interface.

Thinkific Theme Library

There are currently three different themes with ten variations available to course creators.

Add Custom Domain

With Thinkific’s paid plans, course creators can create custom site URLs for their course websites.

Thinkific offers a free subdomain for members under their FREE subscription plan if you’re just starting out.

SSL Certificate

All websites should be SSL-encrypted today. It secures any information your students share on your site, and it prevents Chrome from warning you that your site isn’t secure.

Thinkfic offers a basic SSL certificate with all plans. The ‘Premier’ plan is required if you want to use your custom SSL.

White Labeling Solutions

For course, creators’ websites, Thinkific offers an option to remove its branding, such as ‘Powered by Thinkific’.

You will need the Pro plan with the Growth package if you are a business coach or want to use your branding.

3. Thinkific Payment Options

The ability to accept a variety of payment methods is another critical aspect of selling online courses.

The payment method your students choose should be one they feel comfortable with.

You can use Stripe as well as PayPal with Thinkific.

Card payments can be made through Stripe, either with a credit card or a debit card.

Your students will probably be familiar with PayPal since it is available in over 200 countries.

A second important feature of Thinkific is that it pays directly into the seller’s PayPal or Stripe account.

There is no holding period or waiting time for payments. You will be able to access your payments right away.

The Thinkific checkout page editor allows course creators to include custom conversion elements, such as reviews, videos, and upselling capabilities. Your ‘Thanks for enrolling’ page can include one-click upsells.

4. Thinkific Marketing Tools

The cornerstone of your marketing strategy should be promoting your online course.

Your online courses can benefit from Thinkific’s amazing marketing integrations and tools.

Coupons

You can motivate prospects for sale by offering a discount. The Thinkific platform allows course producers to create instant discount coupons.

There are two types of discounts you can offer: percentage discounts and fixed discounts. There is the possibility of generating multiple coupon codes for each course.

You can allow students to apply coupons during checkout, though there is an option to auto-apply coupons when buyers land on the checkout page directly.

Sales Widgets

You can also boost your sales by promoting your content on partner networks or websites.

Sales widgets are available from Thinkific for easy marketing. You can use these code snippets to drive sales to your courses on network websites.

It is possible to use different variations, such as buttons or course cards.

Third-Party Integrations

Thinkific allows you to integrate your existing email marketing platforms, such as Mailchimp, Aweber, or any other marketing platform, with your Thinkific account.

Thinkific Third-Party Integrations

The following categories have third-party integrations:

  • E-commerce: Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, Stunning
  • Automation: Zapier, Infusionsoft
  • Analytics: Google Analytics, Facebook, Segment.io
  • Email marketing: Mailchimp, ConstantContact, ConvertKit, Aweber
  • Student success: Zoom, Accredible, Disqus
  • Growth tools: Sumo

Affiliate Program

The best and most popular way to promote your courses is to work with affiliates.

Your courses can be affiliated with Thinkific. Affiliate offers can be promoted to third-party users or enrolled to your existing or new students.

Your affiliate program can be tracked and commissions can be approved with Thinkific.

It is still necessary to make payments outside the Thinkific platform to your affiliates. There is no direct payment support at the moment.

5. Thinkific Reporting Capabilities

There are a number of systems needed to set up an online coaching business. It is critical to be able to track your sales, as well as student engagement, throughout the.

Reporting is one of the strongest features of Thinkific. It’s easy to gain real-time insights into your business with Thinkific’s matrices.

Thinkific Review

As Thinkific experiments with advanced reporting capabilities (Beta), we are already impressed.

Advanced reporting allows course creators to track:

Revenue:

It is possible to track your overall revenue using this segment. You can identify which courses and channels are driving the most sales with Thinkific’s multiple filters.

There are several filters available, including courses, course types, payment providers, payment types, customer types (new or returning), and similar categories.

Orders:

You can review completed orders for different periods of time in this section. There are different filters you can use to segregate orders, such as coupons, payment methods, and student types.

Enrollments:

You can track free and paid enrollments over time in the enrollment section. You can use it to boost your course sales by offering a promo course or a free course to your students.

Student engagement:

By understanding student behaviour, Thinkific helps you create content that ensures student learning and satisfaction.

It is possible to monitor students’ interactions with different types of media, their progress in a course, their quiz scores, and similar information.

6. Thinkific Student Management

The core of any LMS is its student management module. Thinkific indeed is one of the best student management systems when it comes to user-friendliness.

New enrollments can participate in relevant communities and receive emails and notifications from Thinkific as part of their seamless onboarding process.

With Thinkific, you can create comprehensive learning ecosystems with segments, filters, and other features.

Note: For all plans (including its free plan), Thinkific allows you to enroll unlimited students.

User Groups, Communities, Discussions

The ability to drive user interaction is an important factor to consider when creating a new course.

Thinkific provides multiple features to promote student activity in your course. You can create groups, communities, and discussions related to course content.

Groups:

Thinkific allows you to divide your students into different cohorts using groups, although the basic plan does not include this feature.

You can easily sort these users into different groups if you’re offering a free course in order to drive sales for high-value courses.

Communities:

The creation of communities can improve the course-building process and overall user experience. Your students can engage in lively, meaningful discussions in these communities.

Discussions:

Getting a feel for community discussions on membership sites is a popular practice among potential buyers. It is possible to add discussions to your online coaching website with Thinkific.

You can check the complete storyline and see how your previous students are progressing. This is a great way to promote course upsells.

Student Progress Reports, Reviews, Certificates

It is important to understand how students feel about your courses before you create unlimited courses within your online academy.

There is a steep learning curve involved in this process for most new educators.

There are multiple features in Thinkific that allow you to track student progress and feedback, including progress reports, reviews, and certificates.

Student Progress Reports:

You can analyze the progress of your enrolled students using progress reports. Student progress, completion rates, and sign-in activity can be tracked across different courses.

Reviews:

You can solicit feedback from your students through reviews. You can also use reviews to boost your sales.

You can embed reviews on your course’s landing page using Thinkific’s feature to edit reviews.

To boost customer confidence, use reviews on your sales page or throughout your website.

Certificates: 

The ease of use of Thinkific is another reason why it is a popular course creation tool.

The templates are available to help you create course completion certificates. Certificates can be customized with custom image backgrounds in Thinkific.

Quizzes, assignments, and surveys

It is essential that any course creation platform be capable of gauging student progress.

In order to ensure that your students are taking the course properly, Thinkific offers multiple testing methods.

Thinkific allows you to create assignment lessons. You can upload a sample file or template file for students in Thinkific.

Students can submit worksheets up to 100MB in size, which is sufficient for most worksheet tests.

Your Thinkific course can also contain multiple quizzes. A quiz can contain multiple-answer questions or one-answer questions. Your quizzes can be easily customized using Thinkific’s WYSIWYG editor.

Thinkific Quiz

Each quiz can be customized with a question bank created by educators using Thinkific. Using the platform, you can create quizzes that are unique to each student.

You may want to consider adding surveys to your live classes or webinars to identify student learning outcomes. Surveys can also be embedded within your course to gather critical student insights.

7. Thinkific Data Security

The number of instances of identity theft is on the rise. Based on a careful analysis of Federal Trade Commission data, data theft cases have been consistently growing.

When you use plugins to run your courses (WordPress), these stats can be worrying, especially if you’re an online educator.

Thinkific Data Security is very strong

You don’t have to worry about security with Thinkific. Even the free membership plan includes free SSL encryption with the course creation tool.

Using secure cloud hosting, Thinkific protects your data as well as your students. The automatic backups offered by Thinkific are a huge relief if you usually take daily backups of your previous website or courses.

Each time a change is made to a website, Thinkific automatically applies it to all of them. If you’re using Thinkific’s API for a private course, its API documentation may be helpful.

8. Thinkific Pricing Plans

After discussing in detail why Thinkific is one of the best course creation tools out there, let’s examine its pricing.

Thinkific offers educators a FREE plan that allows them to create up to three courses, enroll unlimited students, and receive instant funding.

It’s a good enough plan for educators to test the waters, but educators get limited content types.

Thinkific’s plans and pricing can be found here.

Thinkific Pricing Plans
Thinkific Pricing
Thinkific Pricing
Thinkific Features

Thinkific Free plan:

The free plan is ideal for those who wish to try online coaching or course creation for the first time. Your first course can be started with some basic features.

Basic plan: 

If you’re ready to take your online coaching to the next level, the Basic plan gives you access to all the features you need to create a good course.

Pro plan: 

Professionals and business coaches looking to take their coaching business to the next level can benefit from the Thinkific Pro plan.

You can run a full-fledged course with Thinkific thanks to its rich features. You can add up to 5-course administrators or authors, plus live lessons with Zoom, certificates, and priority support.

Premier plan: 

If you have a successful online coaching business and want to expand into an enterprise, the Premier plan is for you.

Designed for maximum automation and growth, the premier plan offers maximum flexibility.

The system allows you to create five administrator accounts, add up to 50-course administrators, and create an onboarding package to quickly train authors.

For small and medium-sized businesses seeking learning management platforms, Thinkific offers Plus plans as well.

9. Thinkific Customer Support.

You may need help getting started as a new course creator. In terms of customer support, Thinkific does a good job.

The following options are available for support:

Email support:

Thinkific offers comprehensive email support. There is a 24-hour response time standard or even sooner.

You will receive emails from the platform that will help you get started and keep you motivated throughout the course creation process.

Phone support:

When it comes to phone support, Thinkific excels. Thinkific has an advantage over its competitors in terms of phone support, as none of the other platforms, we reviewed offer it.

Learning Center: 

A vast learning centre has been created by Thinkific. Step-by-step video tutorials are available for course creators to learn how to use Thinkific’s features.

Active Facebook community:

Thinkific also has an active Facebook community, in addition to direct support options.

Other members of the community are likely to respond quickly to your question. Furthermore, Facebook provides you with a platform for connecting with other course creators.

Read also:


Thinkific Reviews: Pros and Cons

In our research, Thinkific has proven to be one of the most useful tools for creating courses.

The review must, however, explain the platform’s shortcomings, so here is what we have to say.

Thinkific Pros

  • Free basic plan:  It is the only course creation platform with a free basic plan that allows you to launch a course. The service is free, to begin with, and you can upgrade when necessary.
  • Nil transaction charges: The good thing about Thinkific is that there are no additional transaction charges.
  • Instant fund access for all plans: No matter which plans you choose, Thinkific offers instant access to your funds. There is no platform like Teachable or Udemy that provides this feature.
  • Custom domain: Thinkific offers custom domains as part of its Basic plan for those who plan to use their own domain.
  • Phone support: Phone support is available on Thinkific only on a limited number of platforms. Thinkific also provides responsive email support.
  • White-labelling solution: You can white-label Thinkific.com’s Growth packages if you’re a business coach or a small business. Thinkific branding can be removed permanently.
  • Robust third-party integrations:  While Thinkific lacks an integrated marketing module and email support, it compensates with third-party integrations. Two of the most popular payment gateways and most popular email marketing platforms are available.

Thinkific Cons

  • Tricky navigation: The navigation of Thinific doesn’t rank high on most parameters. Platform navigation and visual appearance have been upgraded, but sleekness lags behind its competitors.
  • Two-step checkout process: You must create an account before you can purchase a course on the platform. When prompted to create an account, 22% of users abandon their cart. It is necessary for Thinkific to streamline its checkout process.
  • No course marketplace: Free users of Thinkific won’t have access to a course marketplace, which could present a major challenge. Course creators will have difficulty marketing their courses without email integrations or marketing plugins in the free plan.

Read also: Passion.io Review: Is This The Best App Builder?


Thinkific Real Customer Review On TrustPilot

Thinkific Customer review on Trustpilot
How customer reviewed Thinkific on Trustpilot
How customer reviewed Thinkific on Trustpilot
How customers reviewed Thinkific on Trustpilot

Thinkific Case Studies: Success Stories of Thinkific Course Sellers

1. Entrepreneurs on Fire

Entrepreneurs on Fire Case Studies

John and Kate have been providing content for entrepreneurs through podcasts, blogs, and online courses since 2012. 

Their audience’s feedback led them to identify an opportunity to educate their community with an online class: helping entrepreneurs identify which idea to pursue.

The first step in John and Kate’s sales funnel was to position this as a free course meant to generate leads. This would require a new course platform, however. 

Their online training content was delivered using emails, videos, and website content before Thinkific.

It has worked in the past, but they need a platform that is easier to use and provides a great student experience.

They launched their course on Thinkific and generated more than 50k in just two months and more than $ 1,500,000 on Thinkific! 

2. Train 2.0 Hockey academy

Train 2.0 hockey academy

Hockey coach and kinesiologist Jason Yee teaches hockey players how to tend to their potential on the ice.

His transformative online coaching programs help thousands of hockey players around the world improve their game.

The former professional hockey player knows what it takes to succeed in the sport. Using a combination of technology and in-person training, he analyzes the mechanics of techniques used by NHL players.

His popular programs include the Downhill Skating System, the Train 2.0 Free Training Area, and personalized support through a monthly membership.

3. HootSuite Academy

Hootsuite Academy success stories

The Hootsuite social media management platform is one of the most widely used in the world. It equips businesses around the world with the knowledge and tools to succeed on social media with over 16 million users.

With Thinkific Plus, the company hosts its Hootsuite Academy – an online training platform for social media marketing and Hootsuite platform training.

The Hootsuite online Academy contributes to customer success by attracting new customers and nurturing existing ones.

Thinkific Plus enabled Hootsuite to launch its Academy and reduce churn while increasing customer engagement.

4. Later

Later

Later helps companies schedule and plan their Instagram marketing strategy. It is easy to plan out an entire visual content calendar and optimize workflow with Later.

The #1 visual marketing platform for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, Later launched in 2014 as a simple Instagram tool.

It is a member of the Instagram Partner Program and a Pinterest Marketing Partner with more than 2 million users worldwide.

Later wanted to improve the product training and onboarding experience for their growing number of users.

In the first few months after launching the course, they saw 320% greater retention, 467% greater adoption of the features, and 368% greater purchases.

5. Dr. Po-Shen Loh, Math Professor

Success Story of a Math Teacher

It is Dr. Po-Shen Loh’s interest to be a mathematician, a social entrepreneur, and a Carnegie Mellon University professor.

He is also the national coach of the USA International Mathematical Olympiad team, an improv comedian, and a professional speaker who developed NOVID, an anonymous coronavirus tracking app.

The most important thing about him is that he is a teacher. As a teacher and mathematician, he uses a variety of skills to help people think differently about mathematics and to think differently about mathematics as a subject.

Instead of merely teaching rote methods, Dr Loh teaches how to approach mathematics with a fresh perspective.

The Daily Challenge math courses are designed for students in the top 10% of sixth through eighth grades.

With the Daily Challenge, Dr. Loh created an engaging and fun way to teach advanced mathematics to young people.

Over 2500 students have been taught how to think differently about mathematics since Dr. Loh launched the Daily Challenge in 2019.

Choosing Thinkific to help him achieve his goal was a perfect choice for Dr. Loh.

6. Coastal Drone Co.

Coastal Drone Co. case study

Kate Klassen is the co-founder of Coastal Drone Co, a company that provides drone training in Canada. They train thousands of students using Thinkific to become knowledgeable and certified drone pilots.

Kate devoted her knowledge of aviation to the drone industry after retiring as an aeroplane pilot. She developed online courses for drone certifications at different levels in Canada.

As an instructor, Kate is able to reach more students, earn more income, and enjoy more location and time freedom by teaching online.

There are two popular programs offered by Coastal Drone: Basic Pilot Certification for hobbyists and Advanced Pilot Certification for professionals.


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FAQs⮕ Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the maximum number of free courses I can have on Thinkific?

You can create as many courses as you like on your Thinkific site if you have a Thinkific Basic Plan or above (the Free Plan allows for only one course).

This is perfect for many course creators, but some might run multiple types of courses, or cater to different types of learners.

2. Does Thinkific take a percentage of sales? 

Thinkific does not take a cut from the sales of your courses. They make all of their money through paid plans, which are detailed on their pricing page.

3. How Much Thinkific Does Cost?

If you know how to use the Thinkific platform and want to build your online course business, the Thinkific Basic plan is a great option.

It costs just $39 per month when paid annually, so it offers everything an evolving course creator needs.

4. How long is the Thinkific free trial?

You can get your money back within 30 days. Thinkific has complete confidence in the value it provides its customers and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

5. Is Thinkific compatible with WordPress?

The Zapier app lets you automate information exchange between Thinkific and WordPress. When a user completes a course, this event is triggered. This will be done automatically! This function creates a new post.

6. Does Thinkific work with Shopify?

You can now connect your Thinkific education products directly to your Shopify store thanks to Thinkific’s Shopify app! 

Thinkific courses can now be added directly to Shopify stores, which enables students to enrol automatically when they buy them  


Read also:

The Thinkific course creation tool is one of the best on the market. In terms of features, pricing, and design, Thinkific stands out from the competition.

A course creator’s business strategy must include understanding what features they need from a platform.

Your online education empire is ready once you have a plan in place and the features to match your needs.

Thinkific is a well-rounded platform with all the tools you need to create highly profitable online courses and earn money online.

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