Thinkific Reviews

Pros

When I was researching all the different software for course hosting, I liked that this had a place to upload documents in the discussions. That might be really important for people teaching code or other products. Then I'm glad I choose this one because others take a % of income AND you have to wait longer for money.

Cons

The layout isn't as clean and modern as others - I'm hoping that will be updated at some point. It's a little ugly.

Pros

I liked that you could design the access portal, the courses, and the payment methods all in 1 interface without any needs for additional products. I particularly enjoy how easy it is to set the courses up if you have your curriculum designed.

Cons

I wish there was an option to be able to have access to all the course features without fees. We are a startup and just are not in a position to charge for courses yet, meaning this would be a huge investment for us that we are not willing to make. It would be great if you could get a 6month burn-in period to test and market before going live.

Pros

I was so excited to find this product and thought it would be ideal for my needs

Cons

The software is not user-friendly. I was hoping that it would be more straightforward and my staff have also commented that is it not user-friendly.

There is nobody to call when you have a query and can only email. It takes them a day to get back to you. And we are based in the UK and with the time difference, we have to wait at least a day for an answer. What makes it even more frustrating is that, after waiting for a reply, they ask for information that was already included in your original email (and then you have to wait another day for a response).

I sent a query on Monday asking how to do something and the reply said 'see instructions below' and there were no instructions there. In the same email, they asked me to confirm the email address (which I had emailed them on and they had clearly not tried this). I responded right away and just got an email asking how they could help me! (They clearly had not read the email chain).

It is now 9pm at night on Tuesday and will be at least Wednesday afternoon with the time difference until I may get a reply and actually proceed.

Pros

Thinkific made it easy to create & host our digital course for financial advisors. With any platform there is a learning curve at the beginning. Thinkific's support team was always quick to reply and help us learn the ropes.

Cons

I don't really have any complaints. It would be nice if the WYSIWYG editor were as good as Apple Pages, and turned out prettier text layouts in the templates. But, it's good enough.

Pros

A very easy to use application that projects your career as an instructor and educator, you can sell the courses to students or companies, allowing you to take better advantage as it allows you to enlarge your professional profile, showing the courses you have done and who and how many have seen, making you notice in the professional area, it is quite complete and easy to use, with an attractive cost for the market.

Cons

I think they should improve a little the visual and design area, to make it more pleasing to the eye, allowing you to customize more each course and let your imagination fly to catch a larger audience, doing this would improve even more this excellent application.

Pros

Very easy to use and has excellent customer support

Cons

For the plan I am on it is a shame there certificate functionality is not available

Pros

There is a free function you can actually set up a whole program completely for free and they only charge a % of the sale. It’s perfect for start ups.

Cons

I found anything I don’t like so far. I am really happy with it.

Pros

This is another of those tools that we began to use only during the Pandemic and it has been a life saver. Classes were more fun, entertaining and easy especially for our older students. Teachers loved using it to create their classes and share their content.

Cons

Some other similar software has been free to use, but Thinkific has a basic package that you have to pay for. The price is not crazy but considering circumstances I think prices should had been lowered.

Pros

User and admin interface are easy to use and very intuitive. I feel like it's much better than Teachable or Kajabi in terms of UI. Also very easy to design your curriculum and draft your courses. You can make a sales page with a countdown timer in minutes, which is great to use for quick launches.

Cons

Page blocks for sales pages are not as customizable as I want it to be, although honestly, it's very clean design-wise.

Pros

The product is good and easy to integrate to our website.

Cons

The customer support team is not responsive at all. We encountered several issues and couldn’t launch the course. When we contacted. The support/ account management team we didn’t hear back from them. It’s very difficult to work with this company. It’s a pity because the product is not bad, however, if you encounter any issues, you cannot rely on their support at all.

Pros

We researched many Platforms before choosing Thinkific.

We love that Thinkific is Canadian.

We love the journey that students take from first encountering the site landing page, going to the course landing page and then immersing themselves in the course.

I appreciate the helpful support from the Thinkific team. They do a great job of answering our many questions.

I am fortunate that Thinkific rebuilt their course editing software quite soon after we began developing our course. Their new software is quite easy to use and easy to revise.

I really like their flat-rate monthly subscription fee with no hidden costs.

Cons

I wish students could purchase this course in the currency of their own country.
I wish we could pay for our subscription in Canadian funds instead of American.
We have had to purchase a separate Discussion Forum because their Disqus Plug In is a social media plug in that is not confidential, and their built in Discussion Forum is very awkward and poorly organized with no ability to search, edit, or even manage posts.
Thinkific focuses much more on supporting marketing than on supporting online course development. We were fortunate that we had already taken two excellent courses in online course development that we could apply to the Thinkific Platform.
Thinkific is less responsive to good ideas for improvement than I would like them to be. For example, despite many, many requests from many course developers it is still not possible for the course author to copy, paste and edit quizes and so there is a lot of unnecessary labour involved in inputting quizes

Pros

Thinkific is easy to use. Add a new Module, one click to add content, module after module. So easy!

Better yet, I LIKE how it looks to the user. I LIKE how the site can look like mine -- not another platform. It does look different, but MY site name is on top, visible, so users know where they are immediately. I've tried others and never quite liked the look as I work with seniors who have retired... and wanted simplicity. This time I found just that. AND YET -- very functional, with every content option I'd like to add.

Thinkific has a great Facebook group too. Very active and helpful, learned how others are doing their classes so gives me new ideas. Some groups were full of people whining about what the software didn't do or needed to be corrected... that didn't work for me either, yeah, picky picky! :)

Cons

I only had to ask Support one question while adding my first course. My only question was: how to add a manual student who paid me privately (or complimentary class) if they didn't purchase through Thinkific itself. I know its there, just chose to ask instead of searching! :)

I didn't even use HELP pages to learn how to use it... it was pretty intuitive for me and I love that! Please don't think that means its not a fully integrated teaching service, it really is. They simply "got it" where the user (me, the instructor) and the other user (student) is concerned. Someone did the work to think about how both users will interact with the software. Kudos!

Pros

I liked most that there was a free option to get started and that there is a front end option that shows all courses owned by an account native to the program. Thinkific is easy to use and now that it has added a community feature it's almost perfect.

Cons

At the time I switched from Thinkific, I did so to get a native community feature so my students wouldn't have to go to Facebook for community. Now that Thinkific has added it, there's only one complaint I have, and that is that I need another layer of complexity for my courses. Unfortunately, I haven't found an LMS that has that, so Thinkific is no worse in that regard than any other LMS I've explored.

I do have an issue with the pricing model, which is too complex and confusing. That makes it hard to compare with other options.

Pros

I like that it is customizable. I like that Thinkific offers lots of webinars and help with all aspects of publishing online courses. It allows a couple ways to collect money for your courses. They spell out exactly what to do! For a newbie like me, I began setting things up months ago while I was working on my course. As I completed it, I began uploading the lectures and made some changes to my text and landing page and other info. Easy to make it your own. I am happy with how professional it all looks. Now I will get busy with the marketing end and Thinkific can help with info about that too! Customer service is awesome and they reach out frequently to see what they can do to guide you! I highly recommend this solution for getting an online course published. I am at the entry level, but am testing the waters until I need to go further and unlock more features.

Cons

As expected the free version is basic, so in order to get to some of the good stuff, you have to upgrade. Not a big deal really, since I am producing my first course and need to go slowly.

Pros

The way Thinkific presents content, from landing page to course completion page, is beautiful and appealing to the user. There are ample ways to connect with the user through various integrations if desired. It's also useful that you can customize the branding and even your own site theme if you have the available resources to do so! After switching from a sub-par LMS, our users are more engaged and more excited about signing in to consume our courses.

Cons

Reporting leaves much to be desired - best count on using Zapier to pull data into a 3rd party for analyzing user progress and completion rates. It's also frustrating that I have to wait for some reports to be emailed to me after requesting them. Perhaps the most frustrating part is that the front-end is designed using Liquid, which is difficult for a novice with basic CSS / HTML knowledge to navigate in order to make small text changes across the site.

Pros

Free to get started
Get paid via Paypal without being charged by thinkific
Perfectly beautiful themes
Add anything you can imagine, quiz, pdf, presentation, text, anything
Support for Rich text e.g. make important words bold or italicized
Available to anyone, not just Oxford or Harvard Professors
boy, i am in love with literally every feature of thinkific

Cons

user statistics are (so far as I understand) not recorded with quizzes. this could have been very great. so that students would know the level of difficulty of the quiz.

Pros

It's mobile friendly for my students. It's a very simple to use a system which means even if you're, not super tech you can make it work.

I get awesome student feedback on how easy Thinkific is to use, especially on the go.

It's got great reporting and you get paid right away instead of having your money held up. Even on the free account which is awesome to better manage cash flow needs.

I also love that you can see how your students are progressing and where people might be getting stuck on your content.

Cons

Probably the only big negative for me is that is I want to include writing below my video training it doesn't show the student how long the video is or even that there's a video there at all.

So sometimes people have missed training parts because of the formatting of their system. Not the biggest deal, but I like to streamline my lesson by putting a small blurb under the video and the easiest way to do this means it doesn't show up as a video on the sidebar for the student.

Pros

I really like how easy this system is; they have done a lot to make their platform easy to use. The free plan is good.
Pro's:
Easy to use & navigate
Helpful tutorials
Helpful webinars and manuals to help you get the most and market your courses
Clean crisp look
Responsive for mobile, tablet, and pc's

Cons

Pricing for me was the only con; I had purchased a lifetime subscription to another course building platform and decided to switch to that otherwise i'd still be using thinkific.

Pros

Thinkific was incredibly easy to use to create a professional course and corresponding website. It was well laid out and actually made the process enjoyable. I was especially pleased with how the website turned out and how seamlessly it integrated with the course.

Cons

There was very little I disliked about the platform. It was difficult to tailor the course quite the way I wanted it at times, but I could always find a workaround.

Pros

Versatile, well organized, easy to learn.
Free until you get going.

Cons

- Terrible discussion forum (we wish they would link up with website tool box).
- Their pricing plans have changed in ways that don't work well for us and they have not been responsive to our feedback.

Pros

I have produced more than 200 online courses and used several platforms. Thinkific is my favorite. I have three schools there. It's easy to use, clean design, and the upgrades are customer-centered.

Cons

I don't like the new admin organization. It's text heavy and not intuitive. I prefer simple headers like courses, users, admin, etc.

Pros

I searched and searched for an affordable way to host my free Fearless Budgeting training program for compulsive spenders. I tried a couple of sites before launching, but they all had problems and were difficult to use.

When I found the free plan on Thinkific, I was blown away. It was so easy to set up and everything just flowed. I had one issue with the sort order of multiple download files. Customer service was great and helped me figure out how to sort them properly within a couple of hours.

It was incredibly easy to set up the two courses (total of 50 lessons) and two additional products. My products and courses look professional. Oh, and I love the student discussion forum, which I've used to let students know about an update to one of the courses and an upcoming Q&A call. Plus, I was able to easily integrate my mailing list into the program.

I couldn't be happier with the service and support. I heartily recommend Thinkific. For me, it blows away the competition!

Cons

Nothing. Not one thing. It's perfect for my needs.

The fact is, I'm amazed at all the features I get with the free option. It's working out great for me and my students.

Pros

I deploy Thinkific to my clients who need to an online course, but don't have the expertise or resources to recruit someone with technology skills. It's really easy with a short learning curve. If building a website with drag/drop tools is easy to you - this is even easier.
Their support is fantastic! Their response time is quick, their team is helpful, and their reply is always clear and coherent. I've spoken to them as both a user, and a developer - and they were always willing to find a way to help me solve things.

Cons

For the scenario of building a training program - Thinkific is great - no issues. If I had to say something, like anything - the only thing I can think of is, as a developer - I wish I can build add-ons to extend Thinkific's features. I'm probably in the 1% who wants it, which shows how much Thinkific really thought things

Pros

I needed to create online courses to sell directly to students rather than putting all my eggs in one basket... in this case 2 baskets; Udemy and Skillshare. I began looking for cheap or free LMS system, and after vetting my options I was down to two choices Thinkific and Teachable. Thinkific isn't as popular as Teachable so I was already partial, expecting less from it than Teachable. I was surprised that Thinkific was the better option.
Thinkific is easy to use, intuitive and very user-friendly, they have lots of resources on how to create courses. I hit a snag in the video production phase of my courses and I was surprised when they reached out to me, I explained that I hadn't been online as I was still creating my course and they sent links to resources that would help. That was a biggy for me, as I really needed that.

The staff and the software itself has been amazing.

Cons

Non really, at least for now. I'm on the free plan which has limited features, I'd need to upgrade to fully explore its capabilities but for now, I'm content

Pros

I LOVE all the features Thinkific has to support my online course. Completion certificates? Check. Achievements? Check. SINGLE SIGN ON FOR WHEN I SELL TO CORPORATE CLIENTS? CHECK!

But really, the feature list is pretty long and extensive. And the price is pretty good compared to other platforms.

Now, Thinkific won't host all your marketing needs, but it will nail your online course, and I'm a big fan of that.

They also offer GREAT webinars and opportunities for professional development, which I really appreciate. I really do feel like they want me to succeed.

Cons

I wish there were more options for how my course pages are laid out. It's pretty much all standardized with the course online on the left of the page and the content on the left. That course outline is ALWAYS there. Now, that might be really handy for students, but I wish I had some options and maybe could make things a little prettier. (It's not ugly or anything, I just would like another option or two to choose from)