When it comes to self-hosting your online courses, you have two of the most popular choices – Teachable and Thinkific.

As someone who has been using both of these platforms for over five years, as a course and instructional designer, I can tell you that they are both good platforms.

But.

It’s the details that really matter in this case!

Because Teachable is not like it used to be before.

In this post, I’ll compare Thinkific and Teachable.

Overview

Teachable, the most popular online course platform, was founded in 2014 by Ankur Nagpal.

Instead of being a jack of all trades and master of none, Teachable focused on excelling as an online course platform.

On the other hand, Greg Smith founded Thinkific in 2012.

Initially, he wanted to take his LSAT course online.

But due to a lack of a suitable platform, he built one to enable himself to sell!

So, how do these two platforms stack up against each other?

Here’s a quick glance.

Quick decision

👍 What do I like about Teachable over Thinkific?

• Better UI and UX: Teachable has better UI and UX compared to Thinkific which feels pretty rough and outdated.
• Granular drip content: With Teachable, you can drip content chapter-wise vs. only module-wise. It helps a lot for say 30-day challenge like courses!
• Coding lessons: You can provide live coding lessons by using the coding course template. Many of my programming friends find this tool highly usable in this aspect.
• Bulk coupon generator: To sell products at discounted rates for increased conversion.

Explore Teachable

👍 What do I like about Thinkific over Teachable?

• Affordable: No transaction fees and no limits on courses on all plans. The basic plan starts at $39/month. On the other hand, Teachable recently limited the number of courses you can publish, causing backlash from users.
• Academic-centric features: Supports many lesson formats like exams, quizzes, and assessments. It supports even live presentations.
• Surveys: Provides the option to create surveys and gather rich information and insights from your students. You don’t need SurveyMonkey or Typeform.
• Mobile apps: Thinkific has both iOS and Android apps, although they are very limited in features. Teachable only has an iOS app, but it is fairly refined.

Explore Thinkific

Similarities

• Inbuilt payment processing: Proprietary checkout systems for 1-click checkout and reduced back-office work.
• Video tracking and analytics: Detailed reports on student progress and video engagement for enhanced accountability.
• Basic community features: Built-in community creation, but less robust than specialized platforms like Kajabi, Skool, or Circle.

Upfront bottomline

Teachable and Thinkific are both advanced course creation platforms, but with different strengths.

Teachable excels in marketing, while Thinkific shines in academic features like exams and surveys.

Thinkific is more creator-friendly, offering unlimited courses on its $49/month basic plan.

However, Teachable has changed since its2020 Hotmart acquisition. They’ve slowed down on new features, customer service quality has dipped, and they’ve limited their $59/month plan to just 5 courses with a 5% transaction fee.

This has led many people seek Teachable alternatives.

User interface

When it comes to the interface, both of these platforms have a sidebar-centric interface where you can access all features.

In my opinion, Teachable has a more refined UI/UX, whereas Thinkific’s design is quite outdated and not as intuitive to navigate.

When I first started using Thinkific, I found it somewhat difficult to intuitively understand its sidebar organization.

👎 The category names in Thinkific are quite vague. For example, it says “manage learning products,” which takes a bit of time to process.

🏆 Winner: Teachable

Course creation

When it comes to each of these platforms, you have all the basic functionalities, like courses, modules, lessons, and also drip features.

With Teachable, things are pretty straightforward.

And also inside any lesson, you can add various content formats.

But with Thinkific, you get different lesson types.

You have the ability to add various types of lessons that are not supported by Teachable, such as:

• Audio lessons
• Presentations
• Live sessions
• Assignments
• Surveys
• Exams

After all, Thinkific was started with academic use cases in mind.

Along with this, the three main advantages of Teachable 👍:

• Cloud storage: Directly upload content from storage platforms like say Google Drive or Dropbox to Teachable.
• Coaching and live classes: Provide personal coaching and live classes alongside training courses.
• Upsells: You can include upsells within lesson content to increase revenue. This is my most favorite feature!

🏆 Winner: Both are a tie. If you need more academic-centric features, then Thinkific. If you need more features overall, then Teachable.

Assessments

Both Thinkific and Teachable support graded and non-graded quizzes.

Thinkific offers more flexibility in quizzes, as it supports randomized question banks and direct imports of .xslx files.

When it comes to surveys, Thinkific offers it natively!

On the other hand, Teachable comes with the ability to include multiple choice questions.

And that’s it!

You can also enforce quiz completion, requiring people to pass the quiz with a specific percentage grade to proceed in the course.

This is my favorite feature!

However, Teachable lacks native support for open-ended questions and surveys.

To work around this limitation, you can leverage Teachable’s custom code feature to embed forms from third-party tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform within your lessons.

🏆 Winner: Thinkific. Supports different question types and also surveying.

Course compliance

With both platforms, you have comprehensive course compliance capabilities, and also you have advanced video watch tracking capabilities.

Both of them come with the ability to:

• Enforce lecture order: Sequential access only; random access shows content-locked 🔏 message.
• Enforce video watching: Set required watch duration (e.g., 70% or 100%) before proceeding.
• Enforce quiz completion: Set passing grade and retake limit; failures beyond limit require instructor reset.

I personally appreciate the ability to enforce video viewing, where I require my students to watch at least 70% of my videos before they can proceed to the next lessons.

Also these platforms have “Automatic course completion tracking” functionality.

So you don’t need to rely on students marking “mark as completed” to issue them the certificates.

🏆 Winner: Tie.

Communities

Thinkific has had a communities feature for a really long time.

You can either create a community that people will be automatically added to after checkout, or you can create course-specific communities.

When it comes to the actual community, you can organize your community based on different spaces, and you can also create different discussion areas and associate them with specific courses.

When you do this, these discussion areas will be available to students as they go through the course content, further encouraging them to become more proactively involved in the community!

👎 But. Thinkific community’s UI and UX deserves a lot of love. It’s similar to how Facebook used to be in 2010s.

Now over to Teachable:

Conventionally, Teachable lacked a community feature.

However, they recently rolled out a community feature where you can create a community and potentially restrict access to only certain students enrolled in a specific training course.

You can create various categories and tags for your community to categorize the content. Beyond this, there is nothing more. Their community feature is quite basic, without any advanced or gamification features.

🏆 Winner: Both of these platforms come with really limited community features, but Teachable’s community feels quite modern as it’s a new rollout. But, None of these can replace a dedicated community platform.

Reporting and analytics

Both Teachable and Thinkific offer advanced reporting capabilities, enabling high-level student accountability. These platforms provide comprehensive tracking features, including:

• Video watch tracking: Monitor how much of each video students have watched
• Individual progress reports: Track each student’s course progression
• Analytics reports: Get insights into overall course performance
• Video retention graphs: Visualize where students tend to drop off in videos
• Heat maps: Identify which parts of your content are most engaging

With these tools, you can easily keep tabs on student engagement and optimize your course content for better learning outcomes.

Checkout and payment processing

Both Thinkific and Teachable come with a one-step checkout and also support adding custom checkout buttons.

Here’s Thinkific:

And, Teachable:

Also, you can upsell and bump orders on both platforms.

A differentiator is that Teachable provides guarantee badges (conversion boosters) to add to the checkout pages. This element is lacking in Thinkific.

🏆 Winner: Both platforms are equal, though Teachable is marginally better because of the guarantee badges.

Design and customization

When it comes to website customization, Thinkific has three built-in themes – Vision, Empire, and Vogue, each with 3-to 4 styles.

And on the other hand:

Teachable comes with only a single theme to design your site.

But, when it comes to course page design layouts, Teachable comes with three of them:

1. Teachable Classic
2. Colossal
3. Simple

Both Teachable and Thinkific include a page builder to design your course, sales, and site pages. They also allow you to set up a custom domain.

Also, in terms of white labeling, both platforms offer it in their higher plans.

👎 However, Teachable is not truly white-labeled as it still places its logo in various locations and includes the term “myteachable” in the login URL of your course website.

🏆 Winner: Thinkific offers 3 website themes, more conversion elements, and is a completely white-labeled solution. Conversely, Teachable has only one website theme (same ol’ experience), fewer design elements, and is not truly whitelabel.

Affiliate management

Having affiliates to drive new sales and increase your fan base is very crucial.

Both Thinkific and Teachable support affiliate features, and provide comprehensive control and visibility into the performance of your affiliates.

On top of affiliate features, Thinkific offers what’s known as revenue partners. Where if you’re co-creating a course with someone, you can split the revenue with them.

Now, you might ask, “Can’t I just use the affiliate feature and set the commission to 50%?”

Yes, but the key difference is that revenue partners receive payment regardless of whether a cookie is set or a specific course link is used.

Plus, from a compliance and accounting perspective, revenue partnership and affiliate commissions are handled differently.

🏆 Winner: Tie

Mobile apps

Thinkific comes with mobile apps for both iOS and Android but it’s reported as buggy, slow, and quite unintuitive.

On the other hand, Teachable comes with a pretty good app but it’s only for iOS.

One really good feature of Teachable’s iOS app is the ability to pick up where you left off on another device!

Using the Teachable app, students can:

• Pick up where they left off on another device.
• Stream course videos.
• View lecture text and attachments.
• Take lecture quizzes and view their scores.
• Complete lectures and sync their progress with other devices.

🏆 Winner: Teachable. But only iOS!

Email marketing

Both Teachable and Thinkific doesn’t come with any email marketing ability.

But they have built-in notifications that help you send admin and student notifications.

You can customize these transactional emails.

With both of these, you can send automated notifications for every new signup, new order, new lead, subscription cancellation, and so on.

With Teachable, you can send automated notifications to owners and authors in the following events:

• Student details change
• New student signup
• New comment awaiting moderation
• New enrollment

With Thinkific, admins can get notifications when there’s a:

• New sign up
• New order
• New lead
• Subscription cancelation.

When it comes with email marekting integrations:

Teachable natively integrates with only MailChimp and ConvertKit. That’s it!

So, with these limited integrations, you will be forced to rely on Zapier.

Whereas, Thinkific integrates with:

• MailChimp
• ConvertKit
• Constant Contact
• AWeber
• ActiveCampaign
• EngageBay

This is pretty good!

🏆 Winner: Thinkific. It comes with the ability to send custom email notifications and has better integrations with other email platforms compared to Teachable.

Pricing

Thinkific offers flexible pricing plans to suit your needs.

You can have unlimited courses under each plan and there are no transaction fees.

Teachable’s plan is a lot more complex to understand.

Teachable’s Basic plan has 5 course limitation and a 5% transaction fee.

Teachable initially offered unlimited courses even in beginner plans, but later restricted this to the highest plan, leading some users to consider leaving the platform and risking data loss.

When you compare the two, Thinkific provides more value for your money as it supports unlimited courses even in their most basic plan.

Final verdict

Teachable and Thinkific are both excellent course creation platforms, each with unique strengths.

Thinkific shines in academic settings with its advanced assessment tools, while Teachable excels in marketing with features like in-course upsells and a robust checkout page builder.

However, both platforms have room for improvement, particularly in their mobile app offerings. Teachable’s iOS app is polished but lacks an Android version, while Thinkific’s apps for both platforms need work.

And.

After careful analysis, I lean towards recommending Thinkific. The platform’s unlimited course offering and absence of transaction fees on its basic $49/month plan make it a compelling choice for course creators at any level.

It’s worth noting that Teachable has undergone significant changes since its acquisition by Hotmart, including the removal of its unlimited courses feature. This was not well received by the community.

On the sidenote:

With the growing importance of community engagement in online learning, you might want to consider platforms that prioritize this aspect. Community-centric course platforms like Kajabi or Circle (interestingly founded by Teachable’s original creators) could be worth exploring if if you are interested in going community-centric route

Ultimately, the best choice depends on your specific needs, budget, and long-term goals for your online courses.