Thinkific Vs Teachable Comparison (2023): Which is The Best Online Course Creation Platform?

Teachable and Thinkific are among some of the leading learning platforms designed for teachers and instructors.

And to be honest, both of these platforms provide users with robust tools to create course websites, handle marketing, control branding, reach out to students and explore student data, all from an easy-to-use interface.

Today’s review will highlight some of the remarkable features available on these learning platforms.

Not just that, we will also take things further by looking at pricing plans, design, support, and other essential metrics available on each platform.

After reading today’s detailed comparison, you should be able to determine which platform works best for you.

Before we begin, you can use the following links below to get a one month free trial of both tools:

Thinkific vs Teachable: A brief overview

Teachable is one of the most unique learning management systems you’ll ever come across. This software allows teachers and instructors to create online courses and coaching services without sweating it.

Thanks to Teachable, you can teach a number of things, including cooking, coding, chess play, drone flying, and more.

And in case you don’t plan to teach, you can register on the platform as a member and communicate with other students and instructors.

On the flip side, Thinkific is pretty similar to Teachable. The platform allows teachers and instructors to create and host their courses online.

Also, the platform has remarkable tools that can be deployed for marketing and selling online courses.

If you’re looking for a platform that lets you monetize and market your knowledge and skills, you’ll love Thinkific. And just like Teachable, the platform allows you to teach just about anything.

If you plan to market your knowledge on this platform, you’ll need to register as a course instructor. And for others interested in learning, you can sign up as a student.

Both Thinkific and Teachable offer a variety of tools and online courses for users looking to improve their knowledge. Nevertheless, these two platforms stand out in a variety of ways.

Read on as we compare both platforms and highlight their significant differences.

Thinkific: What is it?

Thinkific is a robust online course creation tool that packs some of the best marketing tools for creating and selling online courses.

If you’re an instructor or creator looking for a platform that lets you turn your brilliant ideas into online courses, you’ll be hard-picked to find a platform that’s better than Thinkific right now.

Thanks to the intuitive course-building tools provided by Thinkific, instructors have all the requisite tools needed to create brilliant online courses that students will love.

The icing on the cake is that Thinkific also provides users access to sophisticated marketing tools to sell their online courses.

Above all, the platform also helps with payment portals and everything needed to set up a successful online course selling business from the ground up.

As of right now, Thinkific is home to nearly 40,000-course creators. And yes, the platform has been used to host over 30 million online courses.

If you’re looking to sell online courses while hosting a unique membership site, you’ll love Thinkific as it provides you with everything you need.

Teachable: What is it?

Teachable was launched in 2014. The platform currently boasts of having over 100,000 instructors along with 23 million students. Teachable is presently the second-largest eLearning platform out there.

Some of the brilliant features available on Teachable include an easy-to-use drag and drop editor, which can be seamlessly deployed for building an online course site.

Also, the platform provides access to some of the best analytic tools. These analytical tools are excellent for gauging the performance of your courses and calculating ROI.

Teachable also provides tools for designing high-converting landing pages.

When it comes to marketing, Teachable has sophisticated marketing tools designed to help you convert visitors into members.

Note: The significant difference between these platforms is that Teachable provides access to better marketing tools while Thinkific is lauded for offering impressive site design. But with so many other exciting features, we need to explore further before deciding which of these platforms comes top. Let’s get started, shall we?

Thinkific vs teachable: Which Platform Stands Out?

With both of these platforms offering unique propositions to users, we are taking our comparison a little further by highlighting areas where each of these learning platforms stands out.

To start with, here are a couple of things we will be talking about:

• Ease Of Use
• Pricing Plans
• Marketing Potentials
• Customer Support
• Data Analytics
• Unique Customization
• Payment Integration
• Security Measures

Thinkific vs Teachable: Ease Of Use for Course Creation

One of the things users always look out for when shopping for an online course platform is its intuitive and user-friendly design.

To be honest, there is no point in having a reliable online course platform with a complex interface that users can’t easily navigate.

That said, here are some of the unique features that make Thinkific a reliable and easy to use course online platform:

• The platform provides access to a robust drag and drop editor. This makes content upload and positioning easier. It also means creators can put out courses faster.
• Thinkific doesn’t require coding for customization.
• The platform supports a variety of multimedia content, including surveys, quizzes, videos, discussions, downloadable digital materials, and more.
• With Thinkific, creators can take advantage of various pre-built themes to build and launch their online learning platform.
• Thinkific offers free hosting, so you won’t have to pay extra to host your online content platform.
• With Thinkific, creators can seamlessly integrate email marketing tools like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. These tools are essential for kickstarting drip content and marketing emails.

Like Thinkific, Teachable also offers impressive features that make the platform incredibly functional and easy to use.

Here, check out some of the prominent features that make Teachable an intuitive and easy-to-use platform:

• Thanks to supporting cloud services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox, Teachable makes it easy for creators to add text, video, PDF, images, and audio files directly from cloud storage services.
• The platform has a drag and drop builder that makes it easy for users to build functional online course platforms.
• Websites built on Teachable are highly responsive, whether accessed via desktop, smartphones, or tablets.
• Team members can deploy Teachable’s powerful editors to implement highly customised features.
• With the Teachable page editor, teachers and creators can seamlessly launch new pages with some of their latest course offerings.
• The platform allows online course owners to easily modify language options to cater to international students.
• There are loads of conversion-optimized sales templates to boost sales.

Thinkific vs Teachable: Pricing plans

One of the things creators consider when searching for a reliable online course platform is their pricing plans.

Besides that, they also consider transaction fees for these plans. Read on to find each platform’s unique pricing plans and transaction fees.

Thinkific Pricing Plan

When it comes to pricing plans, Thinkific offers five different plans you can choose from.

Even though they have an enterprise plan designed for fortune 500 level entrepreneurs, we will focus on four of their main packages.

Thinkific Free plan

As its name suggests, this plan is offered free of charge. The only caveat with opting for this plan is that Thinkific will always try to upsell their paid plans to you. But since you aren’t paying anything, you can’t really complain.

Also, with this plan, you don’t get a custom domain. That said, if you’re looking to test how the platform works without paying, the free plan is a way to get things started.

Thinkific Basic Plan

This plan starts at $49 per month. But if you opt for the annual plan, you can reduce that to $39 per month.

With this plan, you have seamless access to robust features, including a custom domain, affiliate benefits, email integration, SEO tools, etc.

Thinkific Pro Package Plan

This package starts at $99 per month or $79 per month if you opt for the annual package.

With this plan, users get access to 24-hour customer support, zoom meeting integration, a community-building tool, multiple course admin options, a custom domain, email integration, and more.

Thinkific Premier plan

This plan costs $499 per month or $399 for those who opt for the annual package. It gives users access to some of the best onboarding features.

Additionally, users get unlimited access to customer support, up to 50-course admin options, group analyst, etc.

Note: Pricing is something you don’t want to ignore while searching for a reliable online course platform. While you may easily notice that many of the features and benefits of these tools differ, their pricing is also different. To this end, you want to weigh the pricing against the benefits and features. This way, you can easily decide what’s best for you.

Teachable pricing plan

One area Teachable stands out from other online learning platforms is how they package their plans.

To start with, their pricing plans are more moderately packaged when you compare them to their competitors.

Even though some of their features are somewhat restricted, opting for their highest plan could see you grow your business to incredible heights.

Here are the pricing plans available on Teachable.

Teachable Basic Plan

This plan costs $39 per month. But you can get it cheaper if you opt for the annual package that costs $29 per month.

It grants you access to course products, unlimited students, custom domain support, membership community features, and coaching products.

Teachable Pro Plan

Thinkific’s Pro Plan costs $119 per month or $99 per month if you opt for the annual package.

With this plan, creators don’t have to pay transaction fees. The plan also gives access to unlimited students, five admin options, priority product support, graded quiz, and more.

Teachable Business plan

The business plan starts at $299 per month or $249 for the annual package.

Opting for this plan will give you access to unlimited students, instant payouts, zero transaction fees, manual import, email marketing support, a bulk student enrollment package, and more.

Thinkific vs Teachable Marketing potentials

Marketing is unarguably one of the most essential ingredients when launching a successful online course platform.

Access to a powerful marketing tool will ramp up sales and increase the number of students signing up for your courses.

Even though platforms like Skillshare and Udemy are already swamped with students, teachers and instructors earn way less than they would have made selling their courses independently.

The only caveat with platforms like Thinkific and Teachable is that you have to handle marketing yourself.

So while on the lookout for an online course platform that ticks all your boxes, you want to pay keen attention to platforms that provide access to sophisticated tools you’ll need to run a successful marketing campaign.

With Thinkific and Teachable, you’ll enjoy seamless access to robust marketing tools.

Thinkific marketing overview

When it comes to marketing, here is what Thinkific has to offer its teeming users:

• Thinkific has a brilliant affiliate proposal users can deploy to ramp up sales. While this goes a long way to boost your business, it also allows affiliates to earn passive income. With Thinkific’s affiliate proposal, it’s easy to track course sales and incentivize your business by offering decent commission fees to your affiliates

• Thinkific’s unique platform has made it easy for creators to connect with email providers almost seamlessly. This makes it easy to execute high-converting campaigns for your courses.

• With Thinkific, you have all the right tools needed to integrate your website with over 1000 marketing tools. Thanks to this, you can run successful marketing campaigns more efficiently.

• Thinkific offers users access to advanced tracking tools. This is important for optimizing campaigns in real-time.

• The platform also provides users access to ad tracking and analytics tools via Google Adwords, Facebook, and remarketing campaigns.

Teachable marketing overview

Teachable has some of the most intuitive and powerful marketing tools we have come across. Here is what users get with Teachable’s marketing tools.

• With Teachable’s affiliate feature, it’s easy to track your affiliate programs. This built-in feature lets you effortlessly track sales and make affiliates payouts without sweating it.

• Teachable provides you with tools to launch high converting offers, including creating coupon codes to incentivize new users who join your platform. It is also a brilliant way of ensuring that old users promote your business.

• This platform makes it easy to offer customized pricing plans to your students. Whether you want to provide one-time fee pricing plans or recurrent payment type plans, Teachable has you covered.

• Their landing page builder feature is a fantastic tool to boost sales, so use it smartly.

• Teachable has put together some of the most seamless payment options available out there. Thanks to this, you can receive payments in over 130 international currencies.

• That platform makes it easy to integrate some of the best marketing tools, including Infusionsoft, MailChimp, Mixpanel, etc.

• With Teachable, adding conversion pixels to your website is a stroll in the park. This makes it possible for creators to gauge the performance of their marketing campaigns.

Thinkific vs Teachable: Customer support

The importance of customer support to your online course business cannot be overemphasized.

From the very onset, when you start designing your online course business to when you need to resolve operational issues, you’ll need to have access to robust customer support available round the clock to resolve whatever problems you may be having.

When you run an online course business, you must be able to get help when you encounter an issue. Without access to responsive and efficient customer support, it will become almost impossible to deliver a flawless experience to your students.

Thankfully, both Teachable and Thinkfic provide users with an extensive repository of online tutorials and access to some of the most professional customer support teams the space has got to offer.

The response time for support tickets across these platforms is 24 hours or less. And yes, both of these platforms have a teeming community across social media platforms. You can visit these communities to get help anytime you have an issue.

Here is how both platforms offer robust support to their teeming users:

• Onboarding emails
• Support tickets
• Well laid out tutorial
• Community support via Facebook and other social media platforms
• Online tutorials
• Knowledge base.

Similarly, Thinkific offers live call support from Monday to Friday. So you can reach their customer support team via calls from 9 A.M to 5 P.M pst.

On the flip side, Teachable offers real-time live chat customer support. You can use this option to resolve all queries. Also, Teachable has a very fast email support, which you can take advantage of to resolve whatever issues you may be having.

Thinkific vs Teachable: Data analytics

When you run an online course platform, you must be able to make sense of all the user data your business generates through visitors and marketing campaigns.

With access to the right analytics tools, you can get a detailed insight into your business and make more informed business decisions from available data.

According to available stats, the global business intelligence market is predicted to reach a whopping $29.48 billion by 2020. Considering that more businesses are starting to embrace digital transformation, it is more important than ever for companies to take advantage of data more efficiently to stay ahead of the competition.

To this end, we always recommend that users opt for an online course platform that has put together robust data analytics solutions.

Read on to see how Teachable and Thinkific stack up when providing data analytics features.

Thinkific data analytics offering

• Thinkific offers hassle-free integration with data analytics tools like Google Adwords, Facebook and other leading remarketing tools.
• The platform provides access to powerful tools that make it easy to know the status of each student via specific filters.
• Thinkific makes it possible to send email broadcasts to a specific group.
• With Thinkific’s suite of intelligent analytics, you can run personalized and targeted campaigns for specific groups.

Teachable data analytics offering

• Teachable has a comprehensive and sophisticated dashboard you can use to track students’ signup and revenue within a specified period easily.

• With Teachable, you can easily define the average completion rate for each course. Also, you can sort this information through student account types.

• Teachable makes it a seamless process to export course revenue data. You can also do this for student information.

• Teachable’s brilliant collection of data analytics tools makes it easy to integrate powerful tools like Zapier. Thanks to this, you can send customized course-related events to your students anytime.

• Teachable has something called first and last touch attribution. This brilliant tool is excellent for finding out which of your campaigns converted a student into a user.

To be honest, both of these tools perform superbly with respect to data analytics, so we can’t say for sure which of them stands out in this regard. But one thing is sure, any of these tools should do a remarkable job when it comes to making sense of users’ data.

Thinkfic vs Teachable: Customization

With most businesses focusing mainly on efficiency and improving customer experience, companies more than ever before are beginning to deploy compelling and customized features aimed at making their services unique and, above all, immersive for users.

If you plan to own an online thriving learning service, you must make improving customers’ experience the focus of your business. To this end, you’ll need to have access to robust customization tools.

Here, check out the unique customization options provided by Teachable and Thinkific. We urge you to take a minute to look through our list to decide which of these platforms stands out easily.

Thinkific’s customization option:

• Thinkific has a brilliant prerequisite lesson feature. You can deploy this to allow students to request a course in advance.

• Thinkific’s unique customisation option makes it possible for creators to leverage the services of other course instructors in real-time. This way, they can cater to students’ needs. This is also great for revenue generation as you can deliver services to multiple students simultaneously.

• The drip schedule feature available on this platform makes it possible to put out your courses quickly.

• Thinkific makes integration with membership sites easy. This ensures your business attracts more students and converts them into loyal customers.

• Thinkific offers customisation tools that make it easy to categorise your courses into private or hidden lessons. You can leverage this customisation option for your pricing plans.

• Take advantage of multiple themes to showcase your courses the way you want them to display.

• With Thinkific’s unique customisation options, you can issue certificates to students after course completion.

Teachable’s customization options:

• With Teachable, you can quickly and easily create multiple intuitive pages. And guess what? You don’t need to be tech-savvy to do this.

• You can set up an account on this platform using your email address and your school’s name. It’s that easy.

• Create engaging quizzes, surveys as well as animated discussions effortlessly.

• You can make high-level customisations with Teachable. And the best part is that you don’t need to have coding knowledge to do this.

• Teachable provides you with customisation options to design your website according to your branding guidelines.

• Thanks to providing access to ready to go comment and email features, online learning platforms can leverage this feature to build a vibrant community. This community can be deployed to provide extra support to users.

• With access to thousands of instructors online, the platform allows you to leverage this pool to provide high-quality courses on your platform.

Thinkific vs Teachable payment integration

Every time there is a comparison between online course platforms like Thnikific and Teachable, what most users like to consider is the payment integration. And to be honest, both Thinkific and Teachable offer a robust and reliable payment integration. At the moment, both platforms offer Stripe and Paypal integration.

But guess what, that isn’t the only thing you want to focus on when choosing a reputable online learning platform.

For instance, a platform like Thinkific comes equipped with Stunning. With Stunning, you don’t have to worry about failed payments as Stunning helps deal with that.

Not just that, Stunning also ensures that you can recover funds from either lost or missed payments from students who enroll for your courses.

Similarly, Teachable also helps you effortlessly handle EU VAT and other related taxes. This is a brilliant option if you plan to have a course sales page to cater to international students.

While it’s hard to choose a clear winner in this category outrightly, we would like to give the winner’s trophy to Thinkific here.

Even though both of these platforms claim to offer a secure and safe payment integration, we like Thinkific because it appears to be more user-friendly.

Without a doubt, your online learning business deserves to have a seamless and secure payment integration, and both Thinkific and Teachable ensure you have a payment integration you can trust.

More importantly, these platforms also support third-party integrations, making it possible for users to handle taxes without sweating it.

Thinkific vs Teachable: Security Measures

When running an online learning platform, one area you don’t want to take for granted is the security of the platform. From uploading courses to accepting payments, you want to ensure that your platform is fortified against any threat or malicious actors.

So when deciding which of these platforms to opt for, an important area you should focus on is their security offerings.

Let’s delve into more details, shall we?

Thinkific’s security offering

With Thinkfic, users get a fantastic tool that takes their security pretty seriously. For instance, Thinkific has been lauded for its secure cloud hosting.

Thanks to this, users have peace of mind knowing that their data and courses are protected at all times.

More so, the platform ensures that users’ data are regularly backed up. This way, they are confident that should anything go wrong, their courses are securely backed, and they can retrieve them when they want.

Another thing we are excited about is that Thinkific comes with a built-in SSL certificate. With this, you’re sure that both payments and course content are stored securely.

The best part is that you have complete ownership of course data, which isn’t something you get with many online course platforms.

Teachable’s security offerings

One thing that makes Teachable appealing to many people looking to start their own online course business is the robust security features it offers.

To begin with, Teachable is reputed to have the most sophisticated and secure online payment solution. To beef up security even further, Teachable has a 2048-bit SSL certificate.

They stand out from other online learning platforms because they provide users with regular security updates. This way, you’re sure that your business is fortified against any imminent security threat. And just like Thinkifc, Teachable grants you full ownership of your data and courses.

Even though Thinkific and Teachable come close in terms of their security features, Thinkific stands out primarily because of the extra security features they offer for each course.

Thinkific vs Teachable: Dedicated mobile app

Unfortunately, since Thinkific doesn’t currently have a dedicated mobile app yet, you’ll agree that Teachable takes the cake in this regard.

But guess what? Thinkific has a sleek, intuitive, and responsive website, whether accessed via a desktop computer or a mobile device. The only thing it is currently missing is a dedicated mobile app, and we hope the company can deliver this to its users in the coming years.

Notwithstanding, you’ll be able to surf through the platform using your smartphone and your favorite browser.

On the other hand, Teachable has a solid mobile app that makes it easy to navigate the platform.

Although Teachable’s dedicated mobile app lets users build their courses via the mobile application, there are some things you can’t do using the app. That said, we love that Teachable’s mobile app has a great UI, is well laid out, and is highly responsive.

Nevertheless, we always encourage users to use the web versions of these platforms to design their courses. While the app allows users to build their courses seamlessly, we recommend you use the web versions to prevent any type of interference if you want to maintain the quality of courses you put out.

We like to think of the mobile app as a tool designed to let creators check-in with students or push out notifications.

Thinkific vs Teachable: Pros and cons

Before you decide which of these platforms thick all your boxes and is perfect for your business, let’s take you through the pros and cons of each platform.

Let’s start with Thinkific.

PROs of Thinkific

• Supports multiple payment options: Thinkific stays ahead of other online learning platforms because of the number of supported payment options they offer. Thanks to supporting Stripes and Paypal, students can make payments from different parts of the world without sweating it.
• Voice-over PowerPoint: This feature is incredible for improving students’ learning experience. Creators using teachable can leverage this superb feature to deliver their courses better. It is an underrated feature we think every creator should take advantage of.
• Robust customisation option: With Teachable, you can easily customise how students see your site, thanks to the abundance of customisation tools available on the platform. Using the customisation tools available on this platform, you don’t have to always rely on templates to make your website stand out.
• Powerful marketing tools: Thinkific has put together some of the most sophisticated marketing tools you’ll ever need to scale your business to the next level. And the cool part is that these marketing tools are easy to use. From coupons to membership perks to email marketing tools and more, there is no shortage of marketing tools you can deploy to push your business to the next level.
• Drag and drop editor: Using drag and drop editor, creators can quickly build their sites without prior knowledge or web design skills.
• Teachable supports a variety of multimedia content
• Creators enjoy free hosting for courses, websites, and video content
• The platform makes it easy to integrate email marketing tools
• Users have access to a nice collection of templates

CONs of Thinkific

• No chat support: Despite having some of the most incredible features among other online learning platforms, it is a shame that Thinkific doesn’t have chat support. This means that you have no access to live chat support or even phone support. So if you ever have an issue, you’d have to either figure it out yourself or wait for days for your email to be responded to, which can be pretty annoying.
• Limited sales page: Sure, you can create landing pages if you explore your creativity, but guess what? Building a sales funnel with Teachable is almost impossible. Yes, you can create sales funnels on different pages, but we expected more from a reputable all-in-one service like Teachable. We hope they can do something about this in the future.

PROs of Teachable

• User-friendly design: If you have never designed a website of your own or an online learning platform, we are thrilled to inform you that Teachable makes it easy for anyone to go about website design without any prior knowledge or skills.
• Supports multiple product sales: If you don’t want to use your platform to sell online courses, you’ll love Teachable, as the tool is practical and versatile. For instance, you can leverage the platform to sell printouts, spreadsheets, PDFs, lesson plans, and other educational materials.
• Automatic affiliate sales: This option allows creators to get affiliates to promote their courses. And when it comes to compensating affiliates, Teachable makes the process seamless, saving you the extra time you’d have spent on bookkeeping.
• Affordable than the competition: In terms of pricing, Teachable is a lot cheaper than the competition. Plus, they offer the most competitive package we have come across. So if you’re looking for an LMS system that is a tad affordable but doesn’t compromise on quality, you’ll love Teachable. With Teachable, you can save more than $2000 per year compared to other tools.
• Its highly responsive drag and drop editor ensures you can easily upload courses and files.
• Teachable allows users to create and launch websites and sales pages quickly.
• It has the most responsive editing compared to other platforms.
• Teachable makes adding media from cloud storage services easy
• The platform can be easily accessed via smartphones, desktops or tablets.
• Users get access to conversion optimized templates.

CONs of Teachable:

• No support for live video: If you intend to host live videos for some of your classes, we are afraid that Teachable isn’t the right platform as the platform only allows creators to use pre-recorded videos. This is a shame, especially if you plan to offer a webinar-exclusive learning experience to your students.
• Limited third-party integration: No doubt being able to integrate third-party apps can make your business easy to run. Unfortunately, with Teachable, you have limited options for third-party app integration. We hope the platform can work on this and make it easier for users to do this in the future.

Thinkific Vs Teachable: Frequently asked questions

Is Thinkific better than Teachable?

To be honest, we can’t say for sure because each of these platforms offers unique propositions. In terms of marketing features, Teachable comes top. On the flip side, Thinkific offers a better site design.

Which is cheaper, Thinkific or Teachable?

If you’re looking for an affordable platform, you’d like teachable as they have more affordable packages than Thinkific. Nonetheless, you get more out of Thinkific’s pricing plans.

Is Thinkific free?

Even though Thinkific has a free plan, we are afraid three is very little you can do with their free plan. That said, their free plan is a great way to test the performance of the platform.

In a nutshell

Thinkific and Teachable stand out in various areas. These platforms offer teachers and instructors access to excellent course creation features designed to improve students’ learning experience. Nonetheless, Thinkific’s growth package is one feature that will push your business to the next level.

Both Thinkific and Teachable have an exciting collection of course templates you can deploy to create highly engaging courses for your students. In terms of customization options, both platforms aren’t doing so badly.

But if I had to choose just one tool for designing courses, Thinkific would be my choice.

This was a very difficult decision to make.

I don’t see how you could possibly go wrong with either of these tools. But if you’re on a tight budget, Teachable’s basic plan beats out Thinkific hands down.

Thinkific, on the other hand, comes out on top in terms of features, value, UI, updates, and bugs.

Having read to this point, we urge you to take a minute and go through everything we have highlighted thus far. This will help you make a more informed decision regarding which platform you should opt for.

Now it’s your turn.

And now it’s time to hear what you have to say.

Which tool do you prefer in the Thinkific vs. Teachable battle?

Are you 100% Thinkific?

Or do you prefer Teachable?

Please let us know by writing a comment below right now.