Last updated on December 23rd, 2021 at 03:27 pm
Do you wish to create and sell online courses in the area that you have mastered to help others?
If yes, then you need a good online course platform.
And both Teachable & Thinkific are definitely two of the most popular online course platforms in the market today.
This comprehensive Teachable vs. Thinkific review is going to help you decide which platform you should choose depending on the course you want to create and sell.
Since it is an unbiased review, it will guide you through the features of both platforms, discuss their pros and cons, point out common features, and answer the FAQs.
Let’s dive in!
Teachable Vs. Thinkific: Pros & Cons.
Before we discuss their features in detail, I thought it might be better to give you a brief overview.
That’s why, I created a list of all the prominent pros and cons of both Thinkific and Teachable.
Thinkific Review:
Pros:
- Thinkific is the only online course platform that offers a free option and zero transaction fees
- It also offers extensive customer support
- Supports rich text to help you make text bold or italicized
- Offers flexible customization options to meet your branding needs
- You can use its custom domain feature to make the URL look like a part of your own website
- Easily produce videos with its voice-over PowerPoint presentation tool
- Leverage membership payment model to provide course access through recurring subscriptions
Cons:
- No chat support
- Absence of course marketplace
- It doesn’t offer any integrated email marketing place. However, you can do it with third-party email providers
Teachable Review:
Pros:
- It hosts summits each year for free where you can interact with industry leaders and keynote speakers
- Easily bundle multiple products and courses into a VIP bundle at offer it at discounted prices
- It also allows you to sell eBooks, services, workshops, and conference tickets
- Teachable is capable of disbursing automated payments to your affiliate partners
- It offers simple funnels to help your boost sales
- Leverage its ‘1 Click Up-Sells’ feature to increase your sale
- Get started for free without the need to add your credit card details
Cons:
- It has some stored payment issues that could lead to failed transactions
- Downtimes are too frequent
- A tad tedious to create sales pages
What are Teachable and Thinkific?
Both Teachable and Thinkific online course platforms that let you create, promote, market, and sell your courses online.
Here’s a brief overview of both Teachable and Thinkific:
Teachable:
Teachable is a powerful yet simple all-in-one platform founded by Ankur Nagpal in 2013. You can use this platform to create online courses or coaching business. At present, it is used by more than 100,000 creators.
Here are some of its most prominent features:
- Drag-and-drop course builder
- Quiz management
- Discussion forums & feedback
- Multiple instructor support
- Affiliate marketing options
- An extensive list of preset sales page templates
- High customization
- Advanced analytics
- Student & revenue dashboard
- And more
Thinkific:
Similarly, Thinkific is an online source platform that allows entrepreneurs like you to create, market, sell, and deliver your own online courses. It was created by Greg Smith with the help of his brother Matt Smith and to date, the platform has delivered more than 200,000 courses.
Here are some of Thinkific’s most prominent features:
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Multimedia course content with video support
- User segmentation
- Bulk email
- Course reviews
- Multiple instructors
- Drip schedule content
- Course monetization
- Completion certificates
- And so forth
Teachable Vs. Thinkific: Overall Key Features
While both the online course platforms are similar to a large extent, there are some key features that make all the difference.
For instance, Teachable focuses more on marketing features, while Thinkific offers a better design for your online course or website.
Let’s look at some of their key features in brief:
Teachable:
1. Extensive Customization.
Having a customizable and user-friendly online course platform is crucial if you want to provide the best experience to your students.
The Teachable platform allows you to offer engaging courses with ease. It offers a power editor to help you create engaging courses, multimedia lectures, videos, and coaching sessions.
You can also link your existing website to the platform under a custom domain, which is a big plus point.
Other than this, Teachable lets you:
- Add media files to your courses, including pDF files, audio, and videos
- Have access to the site code that permits advanced customization
- Make learning easy for your students with quizzes and course completion certificates
- Provide your course in multiple languages
2. Create Attractive Sales Pages & Track Sales.
To begin with, Teachable offers a flexible page editor that lets you create attractive sales pages to generate income.
Once you’re done creating the sales page that aligns with your requirements, the next step is to monitor the sales and take further steps accordingly.
To do that, Teachable provides comprehensive dashboards to track your progress, revenue, and other essential metrics.
You can also invite third-party guests, including:
- Authors
- Team members
- Contributors
These guests can help you enrich your courses. What’s more, you can assign them whatever roles you want, and Teachable will even assist you in paying them for their work.
3. Student Review & Feedback.
Teachable makes it easy for you to review not only your student’s progress, but also receive their feedback.
For instance, it lets you conduct one-on-one or group coaching sessions. This helps you engage your audience and make them your life-long customer.
Teachable also lets you engage your students with:
- Quizzes
- Course completion certification
- Zoom meetings
Moreover, Teachable also makes it decidedly easy to receive student feedback.
From third-party forms to student surveys, you get plenty of options to engage your students and ask them how they feel about your course.
4. Customer Support.
Teachable provides exceptional customer support. It lets you integrate with Zapier to offer the ultimate support with Zendesk, Olark, Intercom, and others.
The Teachable platform also offers 24/7 monitoring so that your website downtime doesn’t affect your business.
5. Flexible Pricing Options.
For the students, you can offer coupons and advanced pricing options, including subscriptions, memberships, one-time payments, bundles, and more. This lets them access your course easily without any hassles.
Other than this, you can also receive international payments in over 130 currencies. You also get the option to get via payment gateways like PayPal and Mobile Pay, which again comes in handy.
6. Marketing Tools.
This is the arena where Teachable has the edge over every other online course platform in the market.
For one, it offers attractive ‘thank you’ pages to help you with upselling your courses via email campaigns. You also get an additional blog page and plenty of SEO features to make your blog rank high in the search engines.
Furthermore, Teachable also offers affiliate marketing tools to help others spread the word about your business. It also makes the affiliate payment process really smooth.
7. Security.
Teachable offers strong security features to safeguard your data as well as your students’ data and protect further payment information.
On the security front, the platform offers seamless hosting experience, 24/7 monitoring, instant upgrades, and a 2048-bit SSL certificate.
Thinkific:
1. Drag-and-Drop Editor.
Not many course platforms can beat teachable when it comes to ease of use – all thanks to its highly flexible drag-and-drop editor.
This even makes it super easy for you to launch your course in a matter of minutes. The good news is that you don’t require any special editing or even coding skills.
You just have to upload, drag, and drop the content as you deem fit. And voila! Your curriculum is created.
You also get the option to link your curriculum to your existing site on any domain or website platform. This not only helps you offer a better student experience but also lets you retain your existing website.
2. Customized Courses.
Thinkific makes it decidedly easy to customize your course.
With just the click of a button, you can select to offer whatever type of course you want. For instance, you can decide whether the course would be private or hidden.
Here are some of the ways you can customize your courses to run them the way you want:
- Decide prerequisite lessons that students need to learn before they sign up for a class
- Offer multiple instructors for better engagement and more options
- Drip schedule content to reveal lessons as students move through your courses
- Turn your course site into a membership site, where only paid members will get access to your courses
Moreover, it supports multimedia content, allowing you to create engaging courses.
It gives you the freedom to create any type of content you want, including video, text, quizzes, and so forth.
3. Attractive In-Built Templates.
Once you are through with course creation, the next step is to sell it to your target audience.
But wait, aren’t you missing an important step?
Naturally, you need an attractive and engaging website to sell your course.
The good news is that Thinkific offers all the necessary tools you need to design an engaging website to sell your courses. What’s more, it comes with numerous attractive in-built templates and themes that you can further customize to meet your needs.
You also get some other features to make it easier for you to sell your courses, including:
- Pre-built instructor
- Curriculum
- Course review sections
- Key learnings
- And more
4. Offer Flexible Pricing.
Once you have made your course online, you might want to make a decent amount of monthly income.
And the best way to do that is by offering excellent customer experience and flexible pricing to your prospects.
For one, you can offer membership sites and subscription courses, allowing students numerous ways to pay. If you want to boost course sales, there are coupons and promotional features.
To attract more students to your course, you can also offer:
- Free trials
- Upsells
- Attractive payment plans
- Custom first-month payments
- And more
5. Advanced Marketing Tools.
Thinkific offers plenty of amazing marketing features.
First and foremost, it offers integration with thousands of third-party marketing tools.
Here are the types of marketing tools it offers integration with:
- Ecommerce tools
- Automation tools
- Analytics tools
- Email marketing
- Student success
- Growth marketing
Naturally, all these integrations allow you to manage everything from a single dashboard. However, this is a standard feature – available with many other course platforms.
On top of that, there are many other marketing features that Thinkific offers to help you reach a wider audience and increase your revenue.
Here are some of them:
- It offers advanced tools to help you reward affiliates for sharing your courses
- Create specifically targeted email campaigns
- Easily connect with your favorite email provider
- Collect reviews from your students and display them on your course page/website
- SEO sitemaps for streamlined navigation
- Discount coupons
- Social login options
- And so forth
6. Track Student’s Progress & Keep Them Motivated.
Once you have acquired students, it’s essential to retain them for a lifetime for steady revenue.
Thus, it’s a great idea to keep track of your students’ progress and assist them in every step.
Keeping this in mind, Thinkific offers plenty of features, such as:
- Make automated check-ins
- Goal-setting
- Use the data to monitor & track progress
- Customized learning environments
- Offer progress indicators
- Reward them with completion certificates
7. Top-Notch Security.
Thinkific also provides top-notch security for your own website as well for your students.
From secure cloud hosting and daily backups to 99.9% uptime and 24/7 monitoring – you never have to worry about the loss of data or letting down your audience.
Moreover, you also get regular automatic updates, built-in security, a free SSL certificate, and phone & email support.
Teachable Vs. Thinkific: Things To Compare.
- Ease of Use
- Course Creation & Engagement
- Site Design & Customization
- Sales & Marketing
- Customer Support
- Pricing
- Higher Savings on Annual Plans
- Payouts
- Teacher Community
Here’s a one-by-one comparison of all these functions:
1. Ease of Use.
A good online course platform is worthy only if the users can leverage its potential wholly. Hence, it’s essential that it provides immense ease of use.
If you consider what makes Thinkific so easy to use, it is the platform’s features that allow users to upload, drag, and drop the content to create their course with ease. The best part is that you don’t need any coding skills or any prior technical know-how.
Plus, they offer pre-built themes that you can further customize to suit your needs. The platform also integrates with several marketing tools to streamline your entire sales and marketing process.
When it comes to Teachable, you can easily link your existing website to the platform under a custom domain. Customization is made easy with their power editor tool that allows you to create engaging multimedia lectures, videos, and coaching sessions. Teachable has dashboards where you can track your sales, and it even makes it easy for you to work with your team seamlessly.
All in all, both platforms are easy to use. You will be able to navigate through with a basic level of understanding of using the computer. Both the platforms have teams that help you with all the technical stuff, including hosting, selling, security, maintenance, and more.
Winner: It’s a Draw!
2. Course Creation & Engagements.
The ability to create courses is the single most important feature to judge the two applications.
And you’d be glad to know that course creation and engaging your target audience is pretty easy with both Thinkific and Teachable. Both are dynamic and have a powerful user interface that makes course creation easy.
Furthermore, both the online course platforms offer some standard features for student engagement and course creation.
First, let’s look at some of their common features:
- Built-in themes and templates
- Create quizzes
- Assign completion certificate
- Track & monitor students’ progress
- Provide drip content
- Categorize your courses into lessons and modules for students
- Add multimedia like videos, audio, PDF files to your courses
- Create a membership site for your course, where only your subscribers can get access to the content
But there are some course creation & engagement features that make both of them stand out amid the competition.
Thinkific:
Thinkific has features designed to help students succeed by setting goals. The students can track their performance with clear progress indicators and receive certificates that keep them motivated. You can also make automated check-ins, and the software’s language control feature also benefits the learners a lot.
Naturally, these functions let you engage your audience and earn their loyalty.
Here are some of the advantages of Thinkific in brief:
- Users don’t need any manual coding experience since courses can be created by navigating with the drag-and-drop interface.
- It supports a variety of multimedia content, including videos, pictures, surveys. This helps you make your courses more interactive and engaging.
- You don’t have to make any extra payment for video content, which helps establish a healthy mentor-student relationship.
- Extensive integrations with applications like Mailchimp and Constant Contact. These apps help you run marketing campaigns and interact with your students in a better manner.
Teachable:
Just like Thinkific, course creators on Teachable engage their students with their multimedia lectures, videos, and one-on-one LIVE coaching sessions. Students can also participate in quizzes and receive course completion certificates to keep them motivated.
For superior engagement, Teachable makes feedback a two-way process. This means that while learners can provide you feedback, at the same time, you can also give feedback to your students. This helps them stay motivated and improve their performance.
Here are some of its unique features in brief:
- Use multimedia files like video, text, image, and audio
- Sync PDF files from cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox
- A robust drag-and-drop editor
- Create highly functional websites compatible on desktop, laptop, mobiles, and tablets
- Comprehensive use of page editors to manipulate the website
- Offers services in multiple languages for maximal outreach
- Offers conversion-optimized sales templates that help boost sales
What’s more, Teachable offers some entirely unique tools that let you track your engagement with students and track their progress.
You can even locate:
- Your course reports
- Lecture completion report
- Percentage breakdown report
- Quiz scores
- And more
These reports let you keep abreast of student progress and provide essential feedback. This further helps you engage them, turning them into loyal customers.
Winner: Teachable!
With very little to separate the two, Teachable wins due to its simpler user interface and unique reporting tools that help you track engagement and student progress.
3. Site Design & Customization.
Both the platforms are attractive, user-friendly, and customizable, as you can see from the above points.
But one feature of the Teachable platform that stands out is the ability to link your existing website to Teachable under a custom domain. So if you already have an existing website and don’t wish to create a new one, you might prefer to go for Teachable.
To increase the sales of your online courses, it is essential to have a good looking and user-friendly website design that drives engagement. Here, both Thinkific and Teachable allow you to build a stunning website.
Before comparing their design and customization features, let us talk about the common points that they offer.
- Free hosting and SSL certificate for your website
- Have a dedicated team that looks after everything related to backup, security, updates, and maintenance
- Offers free subdomain. You can also get a custom domain name as per your branding needs
- You can customize the website text completely or change its language as per your market requirements
Now, let us study their website building capabilities in detail.
Page Builder.
Thinkific and Teachable both allow easy creation of web pages, including homepage, course pages, and sales pages. Laced with drag-and-drop editors, you can easily create highly customized pages.
It’s possible to insert or delete multiple elements. Once edited, these can be placed on any part of the page. Both have live editors to carry out changes on webpages in real-time.
However, both page builders have some distinct differences. The most significant difference is in page elements that are available for use.
Thinkific:
Thinkific calls these page elements as ‘Section.’
To build any webpage or website with Thinkific, you have to make use of these sections. Here, every type of content on your page has to be placed within the section.
A section is made up of:
- Settings
- Contents
- Blocks
The page below is using the Banner, Checklist, and Image & text (with CTA) sections:
Thinkific offers over 20 section types that you can add in your webpage through a single click. You can also add elements like lead capture and countdown timer pretty easily.
When it comes to customization, the page builder by Thinkific offers a greater number of options to customize pre-built sections. For instance, you instantly change the color of a button at the page level, which is not possible with Teachable.
Teachable:
Teachable, on the other hand, offers very few sections. Most common elements like author bio, testimonials, and sections to display a sales video are missing. Its page builder looks incomplete for users who need multiple features on the website, and there are a limited number of things you can do.
Winner: Thinkific!
Clearly, Thinkific offers more advanced page building features than Teachable.
4. Sales & Marketing.
Marketing is a pivotal aspect of any successful business, while sales is the single source of revenue generation. A holistic marketing strategy can easily turn the odds of success in your favor. However, a great marketing campaign isn’t possible without robust third-party integration and efficient marketing tools.
The focus should be on getting an online course platform that doesn’t compromise on its marketing and outreach. Thankfully, both Thinkific and Teachable are great for this purpose.
Thinkific:
With Thinkific, you can:
- Reward affiliate websites for sharing your online courses
- Directly track and incentivize them via different commission rates
- Liaise with email providers efficiently to execute highly personalized campaigns and reach the right people at the right time
- Integrate your website with over 1000 external marketing tools to run campaigns efficiently. Some of them are Aweber, Brillium, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and Early Parrot
- Use advanced data tracking to hone and optimize your marketing campaign
- Track ads and perform analytics through Facebook, Google Ad Words and remarketing campaigns
- Another advantage of Thinkific is its integration with Zapier that allows you to connect to thousands of allied applications
Thinkific also lets you “Bundle” multiple courses to market them more effectively.
These bundles also help students enroll in multiple courses with just one transaction. For one, this enhances customer experience and, at the same time, scales up your sales.
Teachable:
Teachable also offers some similar features. However, unlike Thinkific, it doesn’t always try to generate new customers.
Instead, it focuses on existing ones and tries to rely more on upselling and cross-selling.
It comes with built-in one-click upsells to encourage your students to upgrade their course plan.
Here’s an example:
It also allows users to:
- Easily track affiliate programs through built-in features
- Generate affiliate goodwill via quick payouts
- Incentivize the joining of new users and abets new users
- Create competitive advantage via customer-oriented pricing plans including one time fees, subscription payment plans, or offerings of bundled courses
- Offer robust page builder features to boost sales
- Ensure payment flexibility by accepting more than 130 international currencies, even for a single course
- Get extensive integration with leading marketing tools including MailChimp, Mixpanel, Infusionsoft
- Make use of conversion pixels to your website to analyze the effectiveness of marketing endeavors
Winner: Teachable!
Teachable has the edge over Thinkific because of its ability to deal with convoluted marketing wants and needs of users. It also offers a larger number of integrations.
5. Customer Support.
Both the platforms appear to be putting in maximum effort to provide the best customer support.
Here are some standard customer support features offered by both Thinkific and Teachable:
- Secure cloud hosting
- Built-in security
- Free SSL certificates
- Automatic upgrades
- 24/7 monitoring
- Email support
- Online tutorials
- Support tickets
However, Teachable goes the extra mile with its award-winning customer care team. You can reach them directly.
Thinkific, on the other hand, doesn’t offer any customer support team that you can reach directly. You would be prompted to fill out a form to get in touch with a customer rep, which might feel like a hassle to some.
Winner: Teachable!
6. Pricing.
Both Thinkific and Teachable are industry leaders when it comes to online courses. And both of them offer reasonable pricing plans.
Thinkific:
Thinkific offers four pricing plans, including a freemium plan for basic features that may come in handy for a beginner.
- Free plan for beginners – $0
- Basic plan to launch your first course – $49 per month
- Pro plan to scale up your business – $99 per month
- Premier plan for advanced features to build an education empire – $499 per month
With their free plan, you can enjoy the core features, including content hosting, quizzes, surveys, instant access to your funds, etc. – without paying a single penny. What’s more, the annual payment option lets you save up to 20%.
That’s not all.
They also offer two plans (Growth Package and Thinkific Plus) to help you build up your business.
Teachable:
The Teachable membership plans do not offer a free trial, but they offer you the option to make monthly or annual payments.
Teachable offers three pricing plans:
- Basic plan – $29 per month
- Pro plan – $99 per month
- Business plan – $249 per month
When it comes to pricing, Thinkific’s pricing is more enticing as they offer a free trial. Plus, compared to Teachable monthly plans, Thinkific’s pricing is cheaper. On top of that, Thinkific also offers more varied plans as compared to Teachable. Hence, Thinkific is a clear winner here!
Winner: Thinkific!
7. Higher Savings on Annual Plans.
The last point mentions that Thinkific’s pricing plans are better than Teachable. But if you were to compare higher savings on annual plans, Teachable’s annual plans allow you to save more money.
Winner: Teachable!
8. Payouts.
Both Thinkific and Teachable take special care of your payments and offer numerous payment gateways and options.
Thinkific:
Thinkific allows instant payouts on all their plans. And the money you earn by selling your course will go directly into your Stripe/Paypal account. Also, the platform charges zero transaction fees on all new plans, even if you’re using their freemium plan.
Thinkific also provides varied payment options and lets you accept payment in over 100 international currencies.
Teachable:
Teachable, on the other hand, permits instant payouts on all plans only if you reside in the US or Canada. The rest will get instant payouts only if you avail $119/month and above plans.
However, Teachable makes it possible to accept credit card or PayPal payments in case you can’t use Stripe or Paypal in your country. Mobile checkouts are also made possible as can also accept payments via Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Other than this, Teachable allows you to make instant payouts to your affiliates and authors.
Considering instant payouts on all their plans and zero transaction fees, Thinkific’s payouts are better. But if more payment options are your priority, Teachable can give you that.
Winner: It’s a Draw!
9. Teacher Community.
Thinkific boasts of 51,000+ course creators from over 190 countries. Clearly, their teacher community is exceedingly extensive.
Teachable, on the other hand, has over a hundred thousand course creators – which is almost twice to that of Thinkific.
Winner: Teachable!
Who uses Teachable? Vs. Who uses Thinkific?
The Thinkific platform is used by professional course creators from different walks of life who are passionate about what they do. Some of their course creators include drone pilot experts, health and wellness experts, ice hockey coach, social media management expert, and so on.
Here are some of the professionals listed on Thinkific:
Teachable, on the other hand, is mostly used by individuals who are experts in different areas and are sharing their knowledge to earn money. You can usually find professionals like email marketing experts, cooking experts, and more, in the Teachable format.
Teachable Vs. Thinkific: FAQ:
Is Thinkific better than Teachable?
You can’t exactly say that Thinkific is better than Teachable. If the Thinkific platform works for you, the Teachable platform might work for another. In the end, it all depends on what you are looking for.
For instance, Teachable scores more points when it comes to student engagement, sales & marketing, pricing plans, and more. On the other hand, Thinkific has an edge in site design and customization. It’s also slightly easier to use and more functional.
Is Thinkific free?
Yes, Thinkific offers a free trial that allows you to obtain its core feature set.
Its core features include:
- 3 Courses
- Unlimited students
- Quizzes & surveys
- Content hosting
- Instant access to your funds
- And more
Is Teachable a good platform?
Absolutely! Teachable is a good platform with ease of use, great site design and customization, security, and award-winning customer support.
Is Thinkific mobile friendly?
Thinkific might not offer a mobile app, but it is fully mobile-responsive. Students can take their courses on the go from any smartphone.
Can you make money with Teachable?
Absolutely YES! Altogether, the entire teaching community on Teachable has made over $500 million till now – you can do it too!
That’s a Wrap!
As mentioned at the beginning of the review, this Teachable vs. Thinkific review is unbiased. Make sure to review all the features of both platforms before you join any of them.
To summarize, both platforms have great UI and UX. You don’t need to be a tech pro to be able to use either of these platforms.
Both platforms are customizable, but with Teachable, you can integrate your existing website to the platform.
When it comes to sales and marketing, Teachable brings more marketing tools to the table. However, Thinkific is not far behind! It also lets you integrate your business with external business and marketing apps.
Teachable has award-winning customer support, while Thinkific offers instant payouts on all their plans and zero transaction fees.
When it comes to pricing plans, Thinkific offers better pricing plans. That said, the annual pricing plan of Teachable can help you save more.
It all comes down to the course you are planning to create and sell. The features are all out there. You will have to choose the platform depending on your course and your business goals.
So which platform are you going to use to create and sell your online course? Don’t forget to leave a comment below!.