Thinkific Review (I Built 2 Courses with It) | Pros & Cons
Thinkific is an online course platform. You can create, launch, market, and sell courses with it.
Instead of sharing your course in a Google Drive folder with a passphrase, Thinkific allows you to create a full-on course environment that is accessible to anyone.
This platform handles everything technical. They also make the courses as accessible and enjoyable as possible.
I’ve used it to launch and sell 2 courses and thought it would be a good time to write a review of it.
This is a comprehensive review of Thinkific.
Disclaimer: This post has affiliate links at no cost to you.
Features
Before I show you my experience and how I use the tool, here’s a sneak peek at the core features of Thinkific:
- Course Creation Tools: Create courses with videos, quizzes, and interactive lessons.
- Customizable Website: Build a fully-branded, professional-looking website to host your courses.
- Marketing and Sales Tools: Includes options for coupons, promotions, affiliate programs, and email marketing integration to help boost sales.
- Membership and Subscription Options: Offer courses as part of a membership or subscription model, providing flexibility in how you monetize content.
- Advanced Quizzing and Surveys: Create quizzes and surveys to engage students and collect feedback.
- Drip Content: Allows for the scheduled release of course content over time to keep students coming back.
- Secure Cloud Hosting: Ensures your course content is securely hosted and accessible around the clock.
- Analytics and Reporting: Offers detailed insights into course performance, student engagement, and revenue.
- Integrations: Supports integration with third-party tools such as Zoom, Stripe, PayPal, and email marketing services to enhance functionality.
- Student Management and Support: Provides tools to manage student enrollments, track progress, and offer support through discussion forums and direct messaging.
My Experience
I’ve used Thinkific for the better part of a year and I’ve launched (and sold) two different courses there.
I will now show you the ins and outs of the platform from the perspective of a course creator.
To give it a try, find the best deal here.
Thinkific Course Creation Tools
Once you’ve signed up, you can start creating a course from the “+ New Course” button.
As the very first thing, it asks you to choose a course template. This is already where the platform shines. It offers you a bunch of different options to choose from and to build on top of.
I’m going with the “Blank” for this example, though:
Then you can start creating Chapters for your courses.
On Thinkific, you have:
- Courses that consist of Chapters.
- Chapters that consist of Lessons.
For example, your first Chapter can be an introduction to the course. Then you can add short lessons, such as introduction, who you are, prerequisites, expectations, etc.
Then once you start adding lessons to your chapters, it’s time to choose the learning content type.
Instead of having just video, text, or quizzes, you have a lot more to choose from.
At least I was surprised by how many different learning content types there are. When I started my first course, I thought it’d just be one long video.
One thing I also love about Thinkific is that you can add additional material to your lessons.
For example, if you have added a video lesson, you can scroll down to add additional materials.
These can be notes, thoughts, or even some corrections for the video if you slipped in something you didn’t have time to edit out.
Also, you can add downloadable materials here. For example, in my blogging course, I have left some templates for the downloadable items.
Speaking of video materials, one thing that annoys me a little is the fact that there’s a limit on the video size and it also takes a while to preview the videos.
This kind of makes sense because the platform has to process each video and prepare it for display. But this sometimes confuses me. It might take 30–60 minutes for a video to be visible!
Thinkific encourages you to compress videos with a tool like Handbrake to upload faster and longer videos.
(I can’t remember the limit off the top of my head, but there is a limit, and I think a video that’s longer than 30 minutes in my case has had struggles to upload. But that’s not a big one, you can just split it down to smaller lessons.)
Another thing I always love to do on Thinkific is test my students with a little quiz. You can add these quizzes as separate lessons.
Then just type the question, add answers, and choose the right one.
Oh, and one super convenient thing is that you can drag and drop lessons and chapters around in the course content editor. So you don’t need to work in any particular order. :)
One thing that’s cool and worthwhile experimenting with is the Thinkific Apps or Integrations as they call it. These are developed by third parties (I believe) and they can enhance your Thinkific environment.
For example, if there are missing features, you can use an App to bridge the gap.
The only thing I don’t love about this is that these apps are super expensive. Most of them cost about the same amount as the Thinkific Standard plan. That’s a bit too much to just add one feature on top of all the 100s that we already have… But if it’s necessary, then surely, go for it! :)
Customizable Website
Now how about a website for your course? Well, Thinkific has got your back.
There’s a landing page builder you can use to create a highly converting page for your course.
The best part about this is that the ready-made one is already a good starting point.
Let’s try this for my sample course:
Here’s the ready-made course page for the sample course I just created.
As you can see, it already looks decent and does its job. Of course, adding some personality to it makes sense.
But the structure is already good. There’s the name of the course and then an immediate CTA to enroll in the course.
Then if you scroll down, you will find more relevant course promotional elements.
If you want to, you can switch the theme of your course pages by clicking the “Theme Settings” on the left-hand side. This changes your colors, fonts, images, and whatnot.
The only issue I had with this was that I didn’t know it changed them for all my courses… So as I tested this feature, I accidentally changed the outlook of all my 3 courses—not just the test one.
Anyways, these site-building features are so easy to experiment with that I just recommend going out there and starting to mess around.
If you want to, you can add new sections to your page with the “+ Add Section” button. It’s this simple to build the website for your course.
For example, let’s add a little scarcity time counter to the bottom of the page to increase sales.
To do this, I can just choose “Add Section” and search for “Counter”.
Then I can add the counter by clicking it and there it goes:
To change the duration and show something on the counter, I can just set the expiry date on the left-hand side after clicking the counter.
This highlights the workflow with the site builder. Hover over an element, click on “Edit”, and make the necessary changes.
This makes it very simple to use. Just choose an element and edit it with intuitive edits and controls.
The only thing that’s missing is customizability. Once again, this is mostly not a make-or-break issue, but something you will quickly stumble across.
For example, I would have liked to have a strikethrough on the original price next to the reduced price like this:
But this was not possible on Thinkific by default.
Marketing and Sales Tools
After you’ve built your course and landing page, then it’s time to market the course.
Nobody will just head over to a landing page and buy. Instead, you need to subtly but firmly push the course in front of your audience with offers, funneling, and whatnot.
This might not be a surprise, but Thinkific helps you with this too!
For example, you can create a free preview lesson and put the rest of the content behind the paywall.
Or you can create sale coupons for your course.
These are useful! You can even limit the number of discounts to e.g. the first 10 sign-ups to make the offer even more tempting.
Analytics and Reporting
Then once you have a lot of students and content, you can use analytics to track metrics like transactions, revenue per user, total revenue, etc.
Some of these you can already see with a Standard plan, but to access more comprehensive analytics, you need to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
I’m not sure if I’m a huge fan of this. On the other hand, I just have 2 courses and I can access all the important analytics information without this, so there’s nothing to complain about yet.
Student Management and Support
Last but not least, you can also support your students.
This is handy when you have a bunch of them. It’s also something you wouldn’t be able to do without a platform like this.
For example, you can track the progress of your students.
- Who’s struggling?
- Who hasn’t even started?
- Who has completed it?
And more.
Of course, you can also reward your students with a certification once they’ve taken your course. This can take their motivation to the next level and also make your offer more tempting and professional.
Preview the Student View
Once your course is ready to be published, you can enroll in the course as a student to see how it works.
This is what I love about Thinkific. The platform takes care of all the technical hassle of arranging, completing, and viewing the lectures. It shows the progress, lecture numbers, chapter numbers, and such.
This makes it convenient for students. It’s not just a random drive folder but a user-friendly service.
That’s something you get when you use Thinkific! If it wasn’t up to Thinkific, you’d have a hard time coding all these features to your course.
Of course, I’m not saying you cannot host a course by just sharing a private link to a long private video. But to track progress, handle payments, build a landing page, and such, you need a platform like Thinkific.
Pros
- Comprehensive overall platform. As I showed you, there are all the features you need for a user-friendly and enjoyable course
- Progress tracking and analytics. The course platform shows you how people interact with your content, how much they’ve progressed, and more.
- Payments. Thinkific handles payments, refunds, sales, coupons, and all that technical stuff.
- Quick support. I’ve sent quite a few questions to the support, and it never takes long for them to answer—even though I’m in a completely different timezone.
These are just a couple of good things I have to say about Thinkific. You can for sure host a course without a platform like this, but everything becomes infeasibly inconvenient.
Cons
- Limited customization. The platform has all the basics, but anything more specific or tailored is pretty limited. For example, I couldn’t go through the original price on my landing page.
- Apps are expensive. When Thinkific doesn’t do something, there’s a chance to find an Integration app that does it. But those are usually really expensive.
- Occasional downtime. When I started, the platform went silently down for days. I hadn’t provided some tax documents, and my students asked me what was going on… I would have liked to see a warning on Thinkific’s UI instead of having my customers wait.
Pricing
There are quite a few plans on Thinkific:
- Free plan — $0
- Basic plan — $49 per month
- Start plan — $99 per month
- Grow — $199 per month
To Take Home
Thinkific is awesome. Try it if you’re planning to host an online course!
You can even give it a try for free.
You can use it to create different learning content, track progress, create sales, market your courses, and much more.
It’s much better than just creating a random Google Drive folder and sharing a link to there.
The one thing I don’t like about it is that it lacks some marketing features and sometimes the landing page builder is a bit too rigid to my liking. But those are micro details you don’t have to worry about before you have 100s of students :)
