Thinkific vs Teachable

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Learning Management System: Thinkific

Thinkific is an all-in-one online course/class platform/website or learning management system which enables anyone to quickly set up an online course or a set of online classes that are branded as their own website with own domain name.

With Thinkific, your goal may be to educate your customers, sell courses to earn revenue, grow your brand, or engage your audience.

Individuals with expertise in their industry including consultants, experts, authors, speakers, trainers, teachers, coaches, etc without technical skills in website development may quickly launch/publish online classes for existing students and to acquire new students.

Professional associations, membership organizations, enterprises/companies, universities, and more may start selling courses on Thinkific immediately.

Thinkific reviews has mostly been positive. Let’s go through Thinkific step-by-step.

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Sign up Thinkific for Free

Go to the Thinkific official website and sign up for a new free account:

https://www.thinkific.com/

With a free account, you can test the core features of Thinkific before committing to use the paid version.

With the free plan, you may:

  • Launch up to 3 courses.
  • Get unlimited number of students to sign up your courses.
  • Publish quizzes and surveys.
  • Host your content on Thinkific (in formats including video, audio, or PDF).
  • Get your payments almost instantly (after your students have paid you).

Thinkifc Paid Plans

Thinkific offers 3 different paid plans: Basic, Pro + Growth, and Premier

Basic plan (Price: US$ 49 per month)

  • The Basic plan includes all features from the Free plan.
  • It allows to publish unlimited courses and lets unlimited students to sign up.
  • Coupons may be used in promotions to grow sales and increase member base.
  • You may email your students one by one.
  • You may launch your scheduled drip content to people who have signed up.
  • You get to see the reports from affiliate.
  • You may use your own custom domain name for your website.
  • You may integrate Thinkific with email programs including Aweber, ConvertKit, ConstantContact, and Mailchimp.
  • You may integrate Thinkific with Zapier triggers to send Thinkific data to other tools.
  • You can manually enroll students and export information of your students for later use.

Pro + Growth plan (Price: US$ 99 per month)

  • The Pro + Growth plan includes all features from the Basic plan, and allows to publish unlimited courses and lets unlimited students to sign up.
  • It has 2 site admin accounts and 5 course authors available.
  • You can create private only courses and hidden courses.
  • Pricing is flexible. You can price your courses with advanced course pricing options including free, one-time, subscription, or custom pricing.
  • Memberships and bundles allow you to generate recurring revenue and upsell customers (with bundled packages).
  • It lets you issue course certificates to students.
  • You may apply custom themes on your website, edit the HTML/CSS, create custom members-only pages, and more.
  • You may create a community for your students.

Premier plan (Price: US$ 499 per month)

  • The Premier plan includes all features from the Pro + Growth plan, and allows to publish unlimited courses and lets unlimited students to sign up.
  • The plan allows 5 site admin accounts, 15 group analysts, and 50 course authors.
  • It enables single sign on (SSO).
  • The plan includes an onboarding package with an onboarding call, training, and a launch preparation review.

Thinkific Core Features

All the plans get the core features below:

  • Instant access to your funds
  • Student notifications
  • Full eCommerce
  • Upsell offers
  • Easy drag-and-drop course builder
  • Discussion forums
  • A full website
  • Secure cloud hosting
  • Multiple instructor profiles
  • Site language option
  • Built-in SSL certificates
  • Email and phone support

When using Thinkific, you own the data of your students and your content.

Your website is fully hosted by Thinkific with secure eCommerce functions (i.e. product checkout and payment options for your students). You won’t have to manage website hosting.

Thinkific vs. Teachable

Teachable and Udemy were compared. This time, let’s look at Thinkific vs. Teachable.

Thinkific lets you start with a free plan which includes unlimited students and up to 3 free or paid courses.

Teachable offers a free trial that caps at 10 students.

Content Locking

Thinkific lets you prevent students from skipping ahead by setting one or more lessions as prerequisites in a course, enforcing the completion of all the lessons.

Teachable does not offer this feature.

Quizzes and Exams

With Thinkific, quizzes may include multimedia, and be graded. Quizzes may allow multiple tracked attempts, and may include explanations of the correct answers. The quizzes may be drawn from a randomized question bank. Uploading of questions is easy. The integration of third-party exam providers, creation of long form with survey tool, teacher-graded style exams are additional features.

Teachable provides limited quizzes which allow short text questions and answers only, with optional grading (i.e. one-attempt only). No upload feature is available.

Slideshows / Presentations

You can create voice-over-slide presentations directly within Thinkific by recording audio for each page of your uploaded slide deck.

Teachable does not offer this feature.

Copy Lessons and Videos

With Thinkific, you can duplicate lessons within and between courses, and reuse videos between courses without having to re-upload.

This is not possible with Teachable.

Start a New Course with Templates

To start a course in Thinkific, start from a blank page, or select from one of six custom course templates.

This is not possible with Teachable.

User Reviews on Courses

Thinkific automatically collects reviews from your students and optionally displays them on your landing pages to improve your social proof. Also, the star ratings (from the reviews) will appear in Google SERP to leverage from SEO traffic and visibility.

Not available with Teachable.

Blog

A blog is not available with Thinkific. It is best to integrate WordPress with Thinkific. How to install WordPress on Siteground?

Teachable offers basic blog functionality with limited SEO features (such as non standard page URLs).

You may create custom pages with Thinkific and specify who has access to the pages i.e. whether the pages are available to the public, or your members only.

Not available with Teachable.

Integration with Third-party Tools

Directly integrate with Infusionsoft, Active Campaign, Mixpanel, or Aweber in Thinkific.

Not available with Teachable.

Time Limited Course Access and Course Expiration

In Thinkific, you may specify how many days a student will have access to your course, or offer different access periods for different prices.

Not available with Teachable.

Courses Bundling

In Thinkific, you are free to bundle any combination of courses for your students.

With Teachable, you are not allowed to bundle a course if it is already the primary course in another bundle.

Auto Payments to Time Limited Free Trials

When you sell courses with recurring billing or as a membership, in Thinkific you can set up to collect a credit card upfront from students with payment to happen after the trial period.

Not available with Teachable.

Countdown Timer

Add a countdown timer to your landing page or checkout pages to increase the urgency of your offer to students in Thinkific.

Not available with Teachable.

Setting Online Course Prices

You may be competing with many experts all over the Internet when offering online courses on similar/same subjects/topics. From time to time you may give discount prices to your loyal customers, or set lower prices only to get more new members to sign up. There are always risks to price your online courses too low.

Below are the reasons for you not to set the price of your online course way below average (or too low).

When your course has been selling on a relatively lower prices than most of your competitors, you will soon start to lose capacity to promote through online advertising programs such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. When your major competitors have the budget to buy online advertising, this causes you to lose potential new business to your direct competitors.

A lower than average price makes it more difficult for you to attract the best affiliate marketers to work with you to sell your courses. You are only going to afford to pay your big affiliate marketers lower, which probably is not ideal for your affiliate partnership.

Maintaining a store that offers the lowest prices is exactly a race to the bottom deck. Every year there is always someone else who is willing to go for the lowest prices and lose profit margins.

Your experience of your expertise should increase over time. You should not only reduce your prices in order to maintain competitiveness. Each year you may add values to your courses by updating them with the latest information (if available). You could also add more of your own insights to your updated courses, and this demonstrates you are indeed one of the best experts in your industry.

A lower than average price gives new customers a false impression that your course does not provide as much value as the course of your major competitor’s.

Conclusions

When you will have to pick one reason to use Thinkific over Teachable, it must be that Thinkific allows you to launch 3 courses to test your market.

It is important to test whether your courses can suit the needs of your target audience (or students) before creating more courses.

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