The internet is filled with multiple online platforms that let you create an online course, market, and sell them. Thinkific and Teachable are two of the most popular online platforms known for their excellent course creation abilities.
Since both platforms offer cutthroat similarities and features, understanding which platform is ideal for you can be a challenging task. Most users often waste hours or days to understand the differences and choose the wrong platform for them.
So, to avoid your research and wasting time on reading biased reviews online, we have made an in-depth comparison on Thinkific vs Teachable, focusing more on the differences in terms of features, marketing and sales, course creation, ease of use, site administration, customer support, pricing, and more.
After going through the complete comparison, you will decide what each platform offers and make a decision based on your needs.
With that, let’s dive into our detailed comparison between Teachable vs Thinkific below.
Thinkific vs Teachable: The Key Takeaway
Thinkific and Teachable are popular and robust platforms that allow you to create online courses. However, before we dive into our detailed review below, let us go through a quick overview of both the software that will help you get a brief idea about what exactly they offer.
Thinkfic: In a Nutshell
Thinkific is a known and powerful hosted platform that lets content creators create robust courses without learning technical aspects or skills. You can create, market, and sell various online courses by keeping your learner’s perspective in mind.
Thinkific has many users, primarily entrepreneurs, coaches, teachers, experts, or businesses looking to educate their visitors through perfect learning courses.
Want to know more? read our in-depth review of Thinkific.
Teachable: In a Nutshell
On the other hand, Teachable is yet another powerful platform enabling users to create stunning courses, market them, and sell to different learners across the globe through its perfect features. They go by their slogan, ‘everything is teachable,’ making it easier for non-technical users to create courses.
Their customers include teachers, coaches, entrepreneurs, and recently they have added a new category of individuals who do not own any business but are looking forward to creating money online.
Want to know more? read our in-depth review of Teachable.
What’s the Verdict:
One of the significant aspects to keep in mind is that Teachable and Thinkific are not course marketplace, unlike Skillshare or Udemy. This means you get total control over your student’s data, course pricing, and other aspects.
The platform’s core aim is to give you a straightforward and quick solution to create an online course and sell them to your learners.
Both platforms allow you to upload any type of content including quizzes, videos, photos, protect your course’s content, deliver professional content, accept online payments, and more.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Ease of Use
Irrespective of your experience with online course platforms, you still need to look for the one that offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface. As a beginner, you want to spend less time understanding the interface and getting started.
Similarly, even experienced users are looking for easy-to-use platforms. This helps in spending less time with the content creation platform and results in better productivity.
Thinkific and Teachable both have easy-to-use interfaces and offer features that will help you get started immediately. You do not need any coding to get started or create your online course.
Let’s talk only about the ease of use offered by Thinkific here. You can use its drag and drop functionality for uploading and positioning to launch your content quickly. Additionally, it comes with pre-built themes that help you get started quickly without creating your design (you can do that too, by the way).
Similarly, with Teachable, you can create content within a few minutes. It offers a drag and drop builder, responsive courses, and an interface that works seamlessly on all the devices, provides conversion-optimized sales templates to increase your sales and even lets you modify the languages for international students.
All this without needing a single line of code!
Whether you are a beginner with zero knowledge of how the platforms work or you are a technical person with immense knowledge of online course platforms, you will find the platforms’ interface easy to use and understand the basic settings and functionalities.
Winner: Deciding and picking one a winner in terms of ease of use will be unfair to the other because both platforms offer an intuitive yet powerful enough interface that will let you create online courses within minutes without technical experience.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Content creation and engagement
Teachable and Thinkific let you create online courses and break them down into various chapters or lessons, or even sections. With both platforms, you can create lessons in multiple pieces of content or one piece. You can add unlimited texts, PDFs, and videos to your content.
Now that you are aware of the similarities between the course creation features let’s look at the differences in content creation and engagement by Teachable and Thinkific.
With Teachable, you can add basic quizzes into your lessons to add short texts, questions, and answers, with optional one-attempt upgrading. Whereas, Thinkific offers advanced quizzes feature to add an explanation to the correct answers, upload multimedia, and enable multiple tracked attempts.
Additionally, Thinkific, on the other hand, takes content creation to a new level with its features. Thinkific lets you lock content from students.
This means they cannot skip the content unless they complete the required chapter. You can also easily use a third-party exam provider or Thinkific exam tool.
If you have already created one content and you need to upload the same on multiple courses, you can easily duplicate it with Thinkific’s new feature of duplication of content.
In addition, Thinkific provides six various custom course templates, or you can start from the blank page to speed up the process of creating courses.
Furthermore, it comes with a robust video library where you can manage all your videos and resources in one place. You can also reuse videos anytime you need without the need to re-uploading the video.
Thinkific reduces the burden of handling technical aspects by its one-click media feature. You can add multimedia content into your course with a click of a button for your content for Google Docs, webinar links, appointment bookings, and more. Besides, you can also export students data for a personalized experience to third-party tools.
To take your course to a new level of engagement and understanding, you can create slideshows and presentations with a voice-over with your audio recording explaining every content of your slide.
Winner: Although you can create engaging courses with Teachable, Thinkific offers immense features to create extra-engaging courses for your students. So, the winner of this round is easily Thinkific.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Site Administration & Management
When you create online courses and sell them to users, you need top-notch marketing, selling, and site administration features.
Both platforms allow you to export your student’s data, comprehensive tracking easily and progressing reports, email customers, deeply segment customers, give completion certificates, enrol unlimited students for your course, and analytics.
Although both provide excellent teaching and site administration features, few significant differences differ Thinkific from Teachable.
Thinkific provides group reporting and sales features where you can sell, track and organize customers in groups. You can easily pull customer reporting, sell to organizations, and more with Thinkific, whereas Teachable does not offer this feature.
Users on your website belong to Teachable and MyTeachable login needs students to agree with Teachable’s terms and conditions. You do not get any ability to update passwords, usernames, or emails if needed.
On the other hand, Thinkific users on your site belong to you, and they can be administered only by you. You can update students’ names and passwords or even set reset passwords if needed. In addition, you can allow students to do this manually.
Thinkific also comes with a payee feature that lets you track payments and lets you take complete control over the payment structure. Thinkific keeps track of the payment received and pending through affiliates or payees, which course creators can directly pay through Thinkific.
Unless someone is a course creator, Teachable does not provide a feature to pay business partners on the sale of the course. In addition, teachable automatically collects and pays your affiliates and authors for 2% of your course sales. Once you hit a specific threshold, it also automatically collects US tax forms.
Additional features that Thinkific comes with are custom signup fields where you can request more data from students during signup. Moreover, it also includes bookmark presets to create bookmarks that let you quickly see and contact your users segregated through particular criteria.
With these bookmarks, you can quickly contact students who have dropped out of the course before purchasing or encouraging those who are falling behind. Teachable lacks all these features.
While Thinkific offers basic user permissions and levels, Teachable offers advanced user permission and levels on their top-tier plans. With both platforms, you can administer your growing website easily without any trouble.
Winner: Thinkific offers additional features of site administration, leading it one step ahead of Teachable.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Marketing and sales
Once you have created an online course, you need students to enroll in your course and purchase it. The platform you have selected must offer ultimate marketing and sales features, making it easier to sell your curated courses online.
Primarily, both platforms offer marketing and sales features. You can integrate it with various third-party tools, including Zapier, MailChimp, Google Analytics, and more. In addition, both provide easy release of drip content, emails, affiliates, and coupons to attract users to purchase your course.
A minor difference in this feature by both platforms is that Teachable offers configurable drip emails, whereas, with Thinkific, you will need Zapier for the configuration of drip emails. Both the platforms come with seamless integration with various payment gateways to accept international payments, tracking affiliate programs, creating coupons and discounts, and more.
Now focusing on the difference, let’s check out what makes each other stand apart.
Thinkific provides a feature where you can easily collect reviews from your students based on their experience and manually decide which review you want to place on your landing page.
Additionally, Thinkific lets you decide how many days the user will have access to the course or even set options as per the prices.
Moreover, Thinkific lets you create custom landing pages and decide who has access to them. You can use custom pages for booking a consultation with you, giving access to the community, library of resources, or any type of non-course content.
Another incredible feature offered by Thinkific is that it lets you collect credit card information from students that allow the payment to be collected automatically after the trial period ends.
To ensure that your website is SEO-ready and SEO-friendly, Thinkific automatically generates sitemaps and updates them regularly.
Besides, to increase the encouragement or create a FOMO effect for your users, you can embed an easy one-click countdown timer that displays the time remaining for a particular offer to expire.
You can also add social login options that allow your students to log in using their social media profiles, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and more. Additionally, you also get a WordPress plugin that lets you turn your blog post into your course content with checkout links.
While both the platforms let you create easily flexible payment options, Thinkific takes the lead with its advanced custom payment options and lets you set free trials. It also gives you advanced coupon embedding options, whereas Teachable offers basic coupon options.
One of the additional features that Teachable offers and Thinkific doesn’t is the blog post feature. Teachable offers all the basic blog functionality with SEO features, whereas this feature is not available in Thinkific. Teachable also offers an excellent landing page feature to boost your course sales.
Another feature that leans us a bit towards Teachable is its marketing suite. It is a robust and powerful tool that facilitates easy marketing and selling of your courses. Even though the features of Thinkific in terms of marketing may look more, it falls behind in handling the load of influential marketing.
Teachable, on the other hand, offers all the basic features of marketing and sales along with the capability to give your course robust marketing with your affiliate program, creation of custom sales page, advanced pricing options, and more.
Winner: While both offer extensive marketing and sales features but Thinkific offers extra marketing features, we still believe Teachable’s marketing and sales features are built for growth and offer better value. So, Teachable takes the win in this round.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Customization and Website Design
Having a website that looks attractive enough will attract users and encourage them to purchase your course. A dull website look will often make your course look ‘boring’ or make customers lose interest in checking out the course ahead.
Both, Teachable and Thinkific offer building of websites on their platforms, and both provide free SSL certificates and hosting on their plans. Additionally, they take care of all the technical aspects of your site, including backups, security, updates, maintenance, and more, so that you can relax and focus on building excellent courses.
While you can use a custom domain for your site, they also provide a free subdomain. Another convenient feature that is common between both platforms is that you can customize the languages as per your needs and students and even customize the entire design of your site to match your brand.
Thinkific comes with three free site designs in its theme library, which are built for performance. As soon as you click on the theme of your choice, the changes will be applied instantly. You can then customize or change the designs or texts you want to.
Teachable, on the other hand, comes with limited features for customization. It doesn’t offer themes, but it provides users with basic templates which all Teachable users use. It doesn’t even let you customize other aspects of your site like the footer, header, and more.
However, it gives you a default theme with a modern look. If you are a technical user, you can customize plenty of aspects in modifying theme code in the backend. You can also import themes of your choice with Thinkific.
Coming to the page builder, both of them provide drag and drop page builders. However, with Thinkific, you can customize the pre-built sections much better than Teachable. While you can do a lot more with Teachable, Thinkifc’s page builder is one step ahead of it in terms of customization options.
Winner: It is pretty clear that Thinkific is the winner of this round with its excellent customization and site-building features.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Customer support
Support is one of the most critical aspects to consider when you are picking the right platform. Having reliable customer support by your side whenever you get stuck is essential.
This is because no matter how easy the platform is, you may encounter various problems, or you may need help to get started. With that, let’s take a look at the customer support of Thinkific and Teachable.
Both the platforms have immense customer support for their users. They provide an in-depth knowledgebase with various blog posts, tutorials, and more. They also have private Facebook community pages to ask your doubts, and other users who might know the solution can answer.
Thinkific offers direct customer support through email and phone. Whereas, Teachable offers email support and chat support on selective plans only. Additional support of Thinkific includes migration support, 1v1 boarding support, launch preparedness calls, and even account managers on specific plans.
Teachable, on the other hand, does not give any additional support offer. Furthermore, Teachable offers support throughout the week whereas, Thinkific’s customer support is only available from Monday to Friday.
Both the platforms believe in raising their customers and provide immense training. Teachable provides online training known as TeachableU, where you get training to get started with Teachable from scratch.
Similarly, Thinkific offers a premium online learning school known as Online Business Masterclass, which is available for free with all the plans.
In addition, many users have complained about the lack of support by Teachable, making it fall short behind Thinkific in terms of customer support.
Winner: even though both the platforms offer extensive support and prioritize their customers, Teachable takes the lead with additional support features.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Pricing Battle
Now that we have reached the end of the comparison let’s take at the final comparison between Thinkific and Teachable in terms of pricing.
Thinkific Pricing:
Thinkific provides a free plan with a test drive to all their core features for free. Besides, it offers three pricing plans given below.
- Basic – $39/month: If you are a beginner, the basic plan is ideal for you. The plan offers all the basic features of Thinkific to help you launch your first course easily. You get features such as email and live chat support, coupons, drip content, custom domain, affiliate reporting, and more.
- Pro – $79/month: The pro plan is one of the most popular Thinkific plans, including all the features of essential plus assignments, live lessons on Zoom, private and hidden courses, certificates, and more. The plan is perfect for course creators looking to build perfect courses for a successful online business.
- Premiere – $399/month: The premiere plan is ideal for advanced customers who want to build an education empire with their complete courses. The plan offers the ultimate Thinkific features without any limitations. You also get an exclusive Growth package to boost your site at a flat fee.
Teachable Pricing:
Teachable also offer free plan. Let’s compare Teachable’s pricing plans with Thinkific.
- Basic – $29/month: The basic plan is suitable for users who want to create their first course with all the basic yet powerful Teachable features. The plan charges a 5% transaction fee and offers basic functionalities such as drip content, support, coupon codes, third-party integrations, and more.
- Pro – $99/month: Pro is one of the most popular plans by Teachable, ideal for users who want to create courses and run their online business smoothly. You get all the features of the basic plan plus zero transaction fees, group coaching calls, graded quizzes, and more.
- Business – $249/month: If you want to experience the best of Teachable and you want to convert your already running business into a powerful education empire, the business plan will cater to all your needs with its powerful functionalities.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Which One Should You Pick?
We have finally reached the end of our comparison, and as of now, you are aware of the differences between Thinkific and Teachable.
It would be unfair to say one platform is ‘better than the other. However, there are additional features offered by both platforms in different aspects.
To summarize, we can easily say that Thinkific is the best option for users looking for robust and easy-to-use content creation options. Whereas, Teachable offers better marketing and sales features than Thinkific.
However, in the overall battle, Thinkific takes the crown. We recommend laying down your needs and then pick the one that meets your need. Either way, you can always count on Thinkific, no matter your experience with online course platforms.
We hope our article helped you in understanding the similarities and differences between Thinkific and Teachable. Which platform are you picking? Let us know in the comments section below.
