Thinkific is consistently recommended as the best online learning management system. Thinkific has over 50,000 active members, making it a popular platform. And it’s a leading option for making money off of digital education.
That’s probably why you’re here, too, looking at our Thinkific review. Thinkific is a learning management system (LMS) or course creation platform that allows anybody to build an audience, promote their courses, and monetize their knowledge while maintaining full ownership of their company and brand. The platform is proud of its ability to facilitate the development of high-quality digital learning products for a wide range of consumers and disciplines.
Just how good is it, if at all? If you want to know, you should give it a go. That’s why we developed a training program for this assessment. We shared a Thinkific review in detail, like the benefits, drawbacks, and costs of every available option for you.
Table of Contents
What is Thinkific?
Thinkific was launched in 2012 by a team of entrepreneurs and has since become a leading platform for online education. Its principal objective is to provide professors and students with a resource-filled classroom setting that is also simple.
It’s an excellent tool for organizing and promoting your online courses to potential students. Even better, you don’t need any technical background or expertise to begin using Thinkific. Nothing except producing quality content is required with Thinkific. Since it is web-based, your data never leaves their servers. Because of this, you won’t have to worry about organizing your various audio and video lectures across many apps.
Above all else, the platform excels in providing a non-technical course builder so that digital courses may be made without the need for any knowledge of coding or programming. You don’t need any specialized knowledge to create and sell courses on Thinkific, but the platform still provides you complete control over the look and feel of your course’s user interface.
Digital learning products may be quickly and easily created thanks to hundreds of readily available templates across various subject areas. One of the things people want to know from Thinkific reviews before choosing a course development platform is what kinds of lessons can be made using the service.
As a bonus, it can host your website for you. To sum up Thinkific review, there are zero barriers to entry here; even if you are starting, there is no expense. You only need to create an account on Thinkific, and you’ll be all set to begin!
What Kinds of Courses Can Be Made on Thinkific?
When designing Thinkific, its founders cast their nets far and broad. Because of this, they’ve developed a unified LMS where you can build a wide variety of lessons to maintain student interest in your courses.
Examples of lessons that may be made on the site are:
The interactivity of video courses compared to text-only textbooks makes them a powerful tool for fostering better comprehension and conversation among students. Thinkific hosts video content on Wistia servers and is compatible with various video file types.
Although people’s short attention spans have diminished the popularity of text classes, they remain just as effective as ever. The good news is that Thinkific lets you include non-text material like movies and photos in your classes to make learning more engaging and less repetitive. The inability to auto-format or color-code coding blocks is why Thinkific isn’t suitable for coding courses.
Interactive learning may be greatly enhanced via the use of quizzes. With Thinkific’s quiz maker, you can design engaging learning modules that include multiple-choice and short-answer questions, with or without detailed explanations.
You can’t have a successful learning product without first collecting survey data. Thinkific’s built-in surveys mean you don’t have to use a separate application, like Google forms, to conduct student surveys. With Thinkific’s surveys, you may gauge your students’ understanding or get their thoughts on improving your lectures. You may create a survey with multiple-choice questions, Likert scales, or rating options using Thinkific.
Once in a while, instructors will wish to provide their students with downloaded materials. Sometimes, you have lessons that don’t lend themselves to being imported as content on an LMS. Thinkific facilitates the upload of downloaded material such as films, Zip files, music, PDFs, and more in such situations.
Adobe PDFs: Some classes require students to have supplementary materials, including workbooks or downloads. This is doable with PDF courses, albeit Thinkific sets a limit of 25MB per PDF.
Some lectures work far better as presentations, with PDF or graphic information supplemented by audio. If you like to organize your work in presentations, you may do so with Thinkific.
While most Thinkific plans include the aforementioned common kinds of lessons, the Pro plans also include the following two additional formats:
Using Brillium’s integration, you may create unique questions for each student.
Projects and reports may be assigned and handed in as contributions to your course.
Thinkific Features
When deciding on a content management system, one of the most crucial factors to think about is the tools it offers. How, then, does Thinkific differentiate itself from its competitors?
1. Made-to-Order Lectures
With Thinkific, you can design engaging courses that will keep your students coming back for more. Creators of courses may create live courses of self-paced lessons depending on their availability and student desire using the platform’s selection of custom templates and lesson diversity. Most significantly, you may use the site to present your accumulated knowledge as a course formally.
2. Establish Your Name in the Market
Building a name for yourself is crucial to your success. While it’s possible to create a website from scratch, doing it well requires time, energy, and technical know-how. Constructing a name for yourself need not be difficult using a platform like Thinkific.
Use the website you create on Thinkific as the front door to your online school’s many courses. You may choose from various marketing page templates already built into the platform or create your own. You may also utilize a custom domain and various pages to make your LMS uniquely yours.
Having access to an app store means you can improve your chances of success by installing a variety of Thinkific integrations. With these applications, you can enhance your Thinkific-based course website with functions like a chatbot, banners, blogs, and more.
3. Payments
Payments add another layer of complexity to course management. If you’re selling online courses, Thinkific can help you streamline the sales and delivery process so you can focus on what matters most: making money.
Thinkific’s primary purpose is to let people monetize their knowledge and skills by creating online courses and selling them to others. Because of this, the platform has integrated payment processing, optimized checkout, and automatic cross-selling features, all of which contribute to increased course sales.
With these options, you can devote more time to designing, improving, and promoting your courses without sacrificing efficiency in other areas.
4. Community engagement
The success you have as a course designer will rely on how well you can attract and keep a dedicated following. Because of this need, Thinkific has developed features that facilitate communication between educators and their students.
You can link a face with a name with the help of a technology like this one that lets students establish profiles. Similarly, Thinkific lets you start discussions that anybody in your network may join by leaving comments on your posts.
On the other hand, live events and adaptable rooms let you organize focused conversations with your group.
5. Scalable
The great majority of course developers have more than one course, necessitating a flexible platform tailored to each offering without diluting the overall brand. Thinkific facilitates this by letting you create and manage distinct settings for each course without disrupting your overall platform’s continuity.
The PROS and CONS of Thinkific
Pros
- Thinkific’s pricing plans provide the most value for money compared to its rivals.
- There will be no processing fees.
- Excellent choices for online payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal
- Numerous Courses to Choose From
- Superior compatibility with Zappier triggers for automated tasks.
- Designed to go fast
Cons
While there are benefits to using Thinkific, there are also some drawbacks, as discussed below.
- It’s not great for programming/coding classes since it doesn’t allow code snippets.
- Lacks universal capability for real-time communication through chat
- It doesn’t come cheap to get the finest plans.
Thinkific Pricing
Thinkific has a free plan as the foundation of its pricing system. The most popular Grow Plan is just $149 a month, while the more basic Start and Expand plans cost $74 and $299, respectively.
Wrapping It Up
So we have shared the full Thinkific review above. While it’s true that Thinkific isn’t the most feature-rich LMS available, it is one of the most cost-effective options. Few learning management systems (LMSs) give as much value as Thinkific if you’re just starting as a course maker or if you want to sell courses and not numerous digital items.
Thinkific’s pricing levels are flexible enough to let any course developer get their feet wet. Considering its user-friendly interface, adaptive design, and pre-made course templates, it’s clear that this is a great place to begin your course creation efforts.
One limitation is that it is not ideal for creating programming classes; in that case, you may want to consider Kajabi instead. If this is your first time utilizing a learning management system, Thinkific may be the ideal solution for you.
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