I have hosted digital courses via Thinkific. The company provided me with a platform that allowed a smooth process for students - and fantastic portals to host accompanying PDF's and learning materials.
Pros
Support has been superb. Every advisor provided brilliant time and attention
Highly accessible - with easy to navigate dashboard
Smooth learning process for students.
Cons
I would suggest some additional features for the free and basic plan - or, a review of the basic plan cost, to make hosting multiple courses, more feasible for new creators.
A more varied range of landing page templates
A link with platforms like Substack - for social media post management.
Likelihood to Recommend
very well suited to modern economy. I would suggest creators to use your platform to host their content.
We are using Thinkific today to power our academy and knowledge center. Customers can access the academy directly from our app to view courses and best practices as they get started with the platform. We are committed to providing our customers with the best learning experience possible and Thinkific makes this possible.
Pros
Course management
Course analytics
User enrollment
Cons
Initial onboarding
Deeper integrations
Real time alerting
Likelihood to Recommend
Thinkific has been a great platform for our initial Academy launch. The Thinkific platform is easy to set up, build new courses, and track user enrollment and engagement analytics. It is well suited for our use case of scaled learning to drive user adoption. Thinkific also offers built-in analytics, so we can closely monitor course engagement.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Product Management (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)
I evaluated Thinkific as an online course platform for one of my clients to host their meditations and healing courses.
Pros
The software is relatively easy to use.
It is fairly restricted when it comes to site development but that is no different from similar competitive offerings.
More pricing options are provided vis-a-vis competing offerings but only available with higher (and more expensive) plans.
Cons
Most options are available with higher priced plans.
The biggest negative with the platform is that [in my experience] it offers ZERO SECURITY. A paid subscriber can access the content URL using a simple "View HTML" that can then be shared with anyone. Absolutely anyone.
Likelihood to Recommend
[In my experience] with no security, the platform is a NO GO for all except those who are fine with their content being pirated.
[I feel] discussions with support were more worrying. Instead of suggesting a way to fix through product development, the suggestions ranged from "most of our subscribers do not have a piracy mindset", "use script to disable right-click" (which isn't a solution since the user can easily view the page source), and such useless options. They admitted that this was an issue but neither had a timeframe to resolve nor a direction/commitment to sort this immediately.
Despite notifying the company that their documentation states the exact opposite and is intended to mislead customers, the support team agreed but the documentation (https://support.thinkific.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030721673) still remains unchanged as of date.
We use Thinkific to house our bestselling courses which have over 200,000 students. Thinkific is one of the key tools we use to both sell and host our courses. We believe online courses are one of the most scalable businesses out there and Thinkific helps us to streamline our course sales. We actually currently have Thinkific integrated with our main WordPress website at superhumanacademy.com, so it really touches every aspect of our business.
Pros
Ease of use: getting started with the software is really easy
The product team is world-class: they listen to feedback and regularly implement suggestions that we provide them.
Our students love the course experience
We also love how easy it is to integrate with our existing tech stack—Zapier, Active Campaign, etc.
Cons
Upsells are tough. We have to do lots of custom stuff.
The checkout process is also not very customizable.
A/B testing options are very limited. We have to do lots of work arounds to effectively test things.
Likelihood to Recommend
Anyone looking to scale their business by leveraging online courses should be using Thinkific. We also use it for onboarding new team members, and for our new coaching program. Really anywhere where you'd want to distribute knowledge in a professional setting, I'd use Thinkific. It's not really appropriate for uses outside of video, because the page builders they have aren't the best in my opinion.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Marketing (Internet company, 1-10 employees)
