Behind the Scenes of Thinkific: A User’s Honest Review
Published on 9 August 2023
If you are thinking of creating your online courses with Thinkific make sure you read this honest review of the platform first, before you do anything else!
When it comes to choosing the most appropriate Learning Management System (LMS), there is not a one-size-fits-all solution, so it’s important that you make the right decision for your particular situation.
Want to know whether Thinkific is the best choice of LMS for your business?
Are you worried about making a mistake, and wasting a lot of time and money on the wrong platform?
Don’t worry, I’ve got your back with this review! In this article, I am going to give you my unvarnished opinion of Thinkific and who it’s right for.
This is going to be a ‘warts-and-all’ review based on my experience of using the platform for my own online course business for several years. I am not going to do a full feature run-down here, but instead give you the highlights of where I think Thinkific is really good, as well as where there is definite room for improvement.
My aim is that by the end of this article, you’ll have a pretty good idea of whether Thinkific would be a good fit for you.
What is Thinkific?
Before I dive into my likes and dislikes about platform, I want to make sure that we are all on the same page, so I want to briefly explain what Thinkific (sponsored link) actually is and what it can be used for.
Thinkific is an online learning platform that makes it easy for anyone to create, market, and sell their own online courses or membership programmes. It’s a great option for entrepreneurs and business owners who want to generate an additional income stream by packaging their knowledge and expertise, into online courses.
Thinkific offers a wide range of features that make it easy to create and manage online courses, including:
- A drag-and-drop course builder
- A built-in quiz and assignment creator
- A marketing toolkit
- A payment processor, Thinkific Payments (also integrates with Stripe & PayPal)
- Customer support
If you’d like to see a Thinkific course example, feel free to check out my Quick-Start Mini-training.
Pros of Thinkific
Thinkific is a robust online course platform that offers a range of benefits for both content creators and learners. Whether you’re an individual looking to share your expertise or a business aiming to create passive income by selling your online courses, Thinkific’s features can help you create a seamless and engaging learning experience.
Here are the notable pros of using Thinkific:
1. Creator On-boarding:
Having used a number of other LMS platforms over the years, I have to say that Thinkific’s creator on-boarding is the best I’ve ever come across!
What is on-boarding and why is it important?
On-boarding is simply how new users are guided through the account set-up process and shown how to navigate the essential features of the platform, so that they can start creating courses as quickly as possible.
Now, if you are new to the world of Learning Management Systems, there is going to be a learning curve with any LMS, while you grasp how it all works; and I am not suggesting that it will all be plain sailing, but Thinkific makes this process as painless as possible.
There is an easy-to-follow checklist to keep you on track to get everything set up correctly, and there are a lot of support resources if you get stuck.
This all means that, even as a complete newbie, it is possible to get up and running with Thinkific quickly, with a minimal amount of stress. And believe me, this will make a huge difference to your journey as a course creator.
It will help you take fast action, and that is really important when it comes to creating your first online course, because there can be a lot of mindset barriers as well as tech barriers that you need to overcome, so having a tool that allows you to get off the starting blocks quickly is really important to help you gain momentum.
I once paid for a whole year to use another LMS system and created absolutely nothing during that time. A large part of that was down to how difficult it was to get set up and create my first course, so don’t underestimate how powerful this pro is!
If you’d like to get set up in Thinkific even faster, I’ve created a free Thinkific tutorial that you can get access to here.
2. Affordable Pricing:
Thinkific pricing is very affordable, with plans starting at just $42 per month (if paid monthly), making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.
They also have a free plan (sponsored link) which is where I recommend you start if this is your first time creating an online course, because there are no limits to the number of students you can enrol on your first course, meaning that you can be making money straight off the bat, with no up-front financial outlay.
Personally I don’t mind paying for software if I know it is going to give me a return on that investment! Well, with the Thinkific free plan, you can absolutely test this for yourself without risk.
Start making money from your first online course, before you need to even think about upgrading to a paid plan!
The only thing you would need to pay is a small credit card processing fee, which you would only pay when you make a sale. Then, when you are ready to create your next course, or you want access to additional features, you can always upgrade to the ‘Basic Plan’, which is the first tier of paid plan.
The ‘Basic Plan’ gives you the ability to create unlimited courses with unlimited students and offers a significant upgrade in features from the free plan, and it is likely to be all you will need for the first 1 – 2 years of building your online course business.
2. User-friendly Course Creation:
Thinkific’s intuitive course creation interface, also known as the Course Builder, makes it really easy for creators to design and structure their online courses. With drag-and-drop functionality, you can effortlessly arrange modules, lessons, quizzes, and multimedia elements to build a visually appealing and well-organised course curriculum.
You can also upload lots of different file types, meaning that you don’t need to scour the internet for various file converters —an invaluable time-saving feature. This inclusiveness enables you to seamlessly integrate different media formats, fostering an engaging and dynamic learning experience for your students.
Thinkific also makes it easy to bulk upload your videos, which will save you a lot of time, although I still prefer to upload my videos individually, but that’s just my preferred workflow.
3. Constant Inovation:
Just like any good LMS, Thinkific is constantly adding additional features and improving the functionality of existing features, but Thinkific have gone one step further and embedded innovation into their platform, streamlining the innovation process and prioritising features that are the most important to its users.
Within the platform dashboard you can see a roadmap of the innovations that are currently being worked on, suggest new features that you would like to see added to the platform in the future, and vote for features that you think would make the biggest impact to your business and enhance your experience of using the platform.
Some new and exciting features that have recently been rolled out, or are currently being developed, include Thinkific funnels; AI-assisted course creation; branded mobile apps; and order-bumps, to name just a few.
I am currently involved in the Beta testing of the new funnels feature, and from what I’ve seen so far, this is going to be a significant up-grade to the sales and marketing tools available within the platform, which will help creators convert more sales and increase their revenue.
In September 2022, the company rolled out another important innovation called Thinkific Communities, which allowed course creators to build a community around their courses, giving students the chance to interact with fellow students, and creators to engage with their students.
4. Extensive Customer Support:
Thinkific offers live chat on all their paid plans and creators using the free plan can submit a support ticket and expect an email response within a few hours (duration depends on the time of day you submit your support request and how busy they are at the time).
Live chat is fairly responsive during office hours, but if you are based in the UK, you may not be able to chat to a representative in the mornings, due to time zone differences, but this is fairly typical of any LMS that I’ve had experience of using.
While this is all fairly average, where I think Thinkific really stands out is the depth of support that is available.
In addition to the direct support mentioned above, there are extensive ‘How-to’ articles that are accessible, both in-platform and through a simple Google search. These articles are extremely well-written and easy to follow and usually include a video that demonstrates the actions you need to take.
There is also a really good Facebook Group called ‘Thinkific Studio for Online Course Creators‘, with over 33,000 users throughout the world, so no matter what time zone you are in, chances are there will be someone online that can point you in the right direction or share their experiences of using the platform.
Cons of Thinkific
While Thinkific offers a range of benefits for course creators, it’s important to consider some potential drawbacks before making a decision. These cons, though not necessarily deal-breakers, are worth taking into account as you evaluate whether Thinkific is the right platform for your online courses:
1. Clunky Page Builder:
If I were in charge of product development at Thinkific this is the first area I would improve!
Thinkific gives users the ability to build a website using their platform, or create landing pages for each individual course. If you already have a website you don’t need to use Thinkific as your website, instead you could use your own website and then connect to a Thinkific landing page for individual courses (which is what I do on this website), but either way you would be using the Page Builder to create your pages.
The Page Builder is clunky, difficult to navigate, and confusing once you have added a number of different elements to your page.
The Page Builder consists of a central area of the screen which shows what your page will look like, then you add individual elements called ‘sections’ from a side-bar on the left-hand side of the screen, to build out your page as you want it; which you can then edit, again within the side-bar.
As you add text, images etc to each section in the side-bar, the central area of the screen is updated to reflect the changes you just made.
This all sounds fine in theory, but in practice the section titles (the behind-the-scenes naming conventions for what each element does) are often confusing and the navigation on the side-bar editor is not intuitive.
You can’t rename the section titles, so if you add a few sections of the same type, it becomes confusing as to which element you need to edit or move around, depending on what you are trying to do on the page.
Also because of the way the Page Builder works, there is not a lot of flexibility for how each section can be positioned on the page or customised, meaning that Thinkific landing pages are often not as attractive-looking as pages built with other platforms or page builders.
With a bit of patience though you do get used to the clunky navigation, and there are some work-arounds with the pages, such as linking Thinkific with ClickFunnels, or another page builder; or building your pages on your website and linking straight to your Thinkific check-out thereby by-passing the landing page altogether, but that just ads additional cost, that wouldn’t be unnecessary if the page builder was better.
If you’d like to see some Thinkific landing page examples, you can check out my online courses here. Just click on the ‘Learn More’ button to be re-directed to the Thinkific landing page for a particular course.
All the courses on that page are created using Thinkific’s Page Builder!
2. Poor Marketing Analytics:
Thinkific has pretty good analytics when it comes to student performance. You can see how much of your course a student has completed, which particular content they have consumed etc, which is really good information that will help you improve the student experience of going through your course.
Thinkific does this aspect well, but where I feel it really does not do well, is in the analytics that it provides relating to the performance of your marketing.
Having meaningful marketing analytics is vital to help you improve the performance of your marketing and ultimately increase course sales.
For example, knowing what your conversion rate is between people who viewed your landing page and then went on to purchase your course would be invaluable in helping you improve the performance of your landing page, but this data is missing from the platform.
Whilst you can integrate Google Analytics with your Thinkific account which will give you additional data, if you are not particularly techie this is another hurdle you need to get over; never mind trying to decipher the data within the latest version of Google Analytics (GA4), which in my opinion is not very intuitive.
And to my mind it should be completely unnecessary to have to integrate Thinkific with another 3rd party app in order to get this vital information, which should be available in-platform.
Another thing that irks me is that even on the ‘Start Plan’, which is their mid-tier paid plan, Thinkific are still trying to encourage users to upgrade to the next level of paid plan, in order to unlock additional insights.
I did have access to these ‘Premium insights’ at one time, and although the information is nicely presented, it still lacks the vital marketing data that would make a real difference, and it really annoys me that they limit full analytics to their top tier plan.
I personally think full analytics should be available on all paid plans!
3. No Separate Sales Tax Calculation and Itemisation:
Unlike some other learning management platforms, Thinkific currently lacks the capability to calculate and itemise sales tax separately during the course purchasing process, with the exception of sales from the US and Canada.
For creators who need to incorporate sales tax, such as VAT, into their course pricing, this limitation can mean that they need to bundle the tax amount into the overall course fee, which is not ideal.
This can cause problems for accurately reflecting and managing sales tax compliance and may also mean that you need to provide a separate VAT invoice if a client needs one for their own records, which would be additional admin.
Thinkific recently announced that they can now automatically calculate, collect, and remit taxes on all qualifying student purchases made in the United States and Canada and are working on rolling this out to other areas, but at the moment I don’t have a date for when this will be available in the UK.
If you do need to collect sales taxes and you want to streamline the process, there is a work-around with a 3rd party integration with Quaderno, but that would involve an additional monthly fee, starting at €49 per month. A free trial is available if you’d like to try it out.
If you don’t need to collect sales taxes, maybe you’ve not reached the VAT threshold yet, then this is not going to be an issue for you.
4. Infective Student Notifications
Feedback is a vital part of the learning process which can be lacking in a self-paced online learning environment, so it’s important to incorporate feedback mechanisms such as quizzes and assignments into your courses.
Thinkific offers a number of different feedback options including quizzes, assignments, surveys and even exams (if you are on the top tier plan), and students can discuss each individual lesson, if you enable that functionality within your course; but keeping tabs on student submissions can be challenging.
To access results from quizzes and surveys, you need to actually log into your Thinkific dashboard and visit the relevant tab before you see that you have submissions. You are not actually notified that a student has completed an activity!
As for the lesson discussions and assignments; site owners and admins are meant to receive email notifications when a new discussion is added, but I’ve never had an email notification (at least none that I noticed anyway), alerting me to a new discussion, despite having had students leave comments on some of my videos and having notifications turned on.
Again there are work-arounds and you can use 3rd party tools such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms or Typeform; or you could use tools like ClassMarker for your quizzes, but that’s an additional expense that would be unnecessary if the platform had a more robust system for notifications.
Who is Thinkific Ideal For?
Of course anyone can use Thinkific and make it work for them, but what type of business is the platform ideally suited for?
In my opinion Thinkific is ideal for you if you already have an established business, perhaps you are working with clients on a 1-2-1 basis, or in some other in-person capacity, and you want to add online courses or a membership programme to your product/service mix, to increase your revenue and free up your time.
Maybe you are a coach, consultant, therapist, trainer, or other service-based business owner. You already have a website and maybe you are also doing some email marketing, such as sending out a regular email newsletter.
You have been trading for a few years but you are still under the VAT threshold, so you don’t need to charge your clients a sales tax, and you are new to the world of online course creation.
If you identify with the above scenario, Thinkific is ideal for you because you can take advantage of all the pros that the platform has to offer, meanwhile eliminating, or at least mitigating, the majority of the cons.
The key considerations are:
- You already have a website
- You are new to online course creation
- You don’t need to charge sales tax
Who is Thinkific Not Ideal For?
Now that we know who the platform would be ideal for, let’s look at who the platform would not be a good fit for, and why.
If you are completely new in business you are going to need to build an online presence and marketing pipeline. You don’t need to have everything in place straight off the bat, but ultimately you are likely to need things like a website and an email marketing system and potentially a tool for live broadcasting.
You can send emails with Thinkific, but their email marketing tool is very basic, and they don’t have an integrated tool for live broadcasting, so you’d need to sign up for a 3rd party email marketing software like MailerLite or ConvertKit. (sponsored links), and you’d need to sign up for Zoom for live broadcasting.
If you recognise yourself in this situation, you might be better choosing an all-in-one Learning Management System that allows you to create a more professional looking website and has all the tools you need built into the platform.
The website that you can create with Thinkific is fairly basic and won’t likely give you the flexibility you need, and whist the platform does have some of the marketing tools you need, they are very basic, so you’d also likely need to pay for 3rd party tools and integrate them with Thinkific.
If you are in this situation, feel free to check out my blog article, ‘The Ultimate Guide to Choosing The Right Online Course Platform‘.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve found this article helpful and that you now feel able to make a more informed decision about whether or not Thinkific is right for your business. I just wanted to conclude by saying that despite some of the frustrations I have with the platform, I love using Thinkific and have no plans to move to another LMS any time soon.
I think Thinkific is an excellent platform for newbie course creators, and if that’s you Thinkific will help you get your first online course off the ground as quickly as possible, with a minimum amount of stress. The cost of Thinkific is also more-or-less negligible, because you can start on the free plan and only upgrade once you are already making money.
Thinkific does have it’s issues and there are definitely areas of the platform I would like to see improved (maybe someone from Thinkific will read this article), but in my experience of using various different LMS platforms and looking over my client’s shoulders on the platforms that they are using, I have to say that even the most expensive LMS platforms will have some aspect that you don’t like, is missing altogether, or could be improved; but as business owners we need to figure out what are the essential features that we need from whatever platform we choose, and what are the deal-breakers.
I personally feel that the pros of the platform outweigh the cons, and I know that with their commitment to innovation and openness to feedback, that the areas for improvement will likely be resolved over time, but in the meantime there are work-arounds for all the cons.
Not Sure If Thinkfic is Right for Your Business?
If you would like specific advice relating to whether or not Thinkific would be the best solution for your business, I’d like to invite you to book a FREE Course Roadmap Strategy Session with me!
During the 60-minute session I’ll help you decide on the most appropriate Learning Management System, and we’ll create a custom roadmap that outlines exactly what needs to happen to get you from where you are now to launching your online course and bringing in money, as fast as possible.
To book a Course Roadmap Strategy Session with me, CLICK HERE to access my online calendar.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)
Q1: Should I use Thinkific?
Whether or not you should use Thinkific really depends on your specific business needs, goals, and preferences. Consider factors such as content type, existing tech set-up, budget, and desired features when evaluating Thinkific as a suitable platform for your online courses.
Q2: How long can you use Thinkific for free?
There are no time limitations with the free plan.
Q3: Can you use YouTube videos in Thinkific?
Yes, you can easily integrate YouTube videos into your Thinkific courses. Embedding YouTube videos can enhance your course content and engage learners effectively.
Q4: Can I use Thinkific as my website?
While Thinkific offers the ability to create web pages, it is primarily designed as a platform for hosting online courses. For a comprehensive website, you may want to consider integrating Thinkific with your existing website if you have one, or exploring all-in-one learning management platforms such as Kajabi as an alternative.
Q5: Can I use my own domain with Thinkific?
Yes, Thinkific allows you to use your own custom domain for a more branded and professional online course experience. This feature is available on paid plans.
Q6: How many courses can you make with Thinkific?
Thinkific offers flexibility in creating multiple courses based on your needs. The free plan lets you create one course, but all paid plans allow you to create unlimited courses.
Q7: Can you sell downloads such as ebooks on Thinkific?
Although you could in theory set something up to allow you to sell digital downloads on Thinkific, the platform is really not ideal for this and the process would be a bit convoluted to anyone trying to buy, and then access their download.
Instead I would recommend that you investigate other solutions such as gumroad, or utilise a WordPress plugin like EasyDigitalDownloads. It might also be possible to sell digital downloads through your email marketing system, depending on which platform you are using.
Q8: How long can videos be on Thinkific?
Thinkific supports a variety of video lengths, allowing you to upload and share instructional videos of different durations to enhance your courses.
Having said that, there is a 2GB file size limit per video, so if your video file is larger than that you would need to compress it first, using something like HandBreak, which is an open-source video compressor.
Q9: Can you host live classes on Thinkific?
While Thinkific primarily focuses on self-paced courses, it does offer integration options for hosting live classes using third-party tools such as Zoom. This integration provides learners with interactive real-time sessions.
Q10: How do I create an online course on Thinkific?
That’s not a quick question to answer here, but I’ve got a free Thinkific training that will show you everything you need to know, to get set up on the platform and create your first online course.
I’ve also created 12 weeks of helpful emails to help you get your course published as quickly as possible, whist avoiding the most common mistakes and roadblocks that can easily derail your progress if you are not careful. You can get access to both of these through the above link.