When it comes to 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 5+ 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.

Quick decision

👍 What do I like about Teachable over Thinkific?

• Better interface: Teachable has better UI and UX compared to Thinkific which feels pretty rough and outdated. And also the options are nested in a logical way.
• Coaching features: Teachable comes with integrated coaching features that include: Calendar scheduling, Forms, Progress tracking, all within the platform.
• Granular content dripping: With Teachable, you can drip content chapter-wise vs. only module-wise. It helps a lot for say 30-day challenge like courses!
• Marketing tools: To sell products at discounted rates for increased conversion, Teachable offers bulk coupon generator.

Explore Teachable

👍 What do I like about Thinkific over Teachable?

• Cost-effective: No transaction fees (unlike Teachable which charges 5% even on their paid plans) and no limits on courses on all plans. The basic plan starts at $49/month.
• Course bundling: Thinkific offers more flexibility for bundling courses, for creative pricing strategies such as selling individual courses or upselling bundled solutions.
• Better assessments: Native surveys, randomized question banks, graded and non‑graded quizzes, and stricter compliance controls for prerequisites and progression.
• Mobile: Thinkific offers iOS and Android apps for access on the go. Teachable only has iOS app!
• Better specialist lesson formats: Live sessions, assignments, and presentations out of the box, plus course‑linked community spaces and revenue‑partner collaborations for co‑created courses.
• Better integrations: Stronger native integrations across the app ecosystem (including popular email tools), reducing reliance on Zapier for basics. Teachable often needs Zapier for even common email marketing connections.

Explore Thinkific

Upfront bottomline

If you’re deciding between these two platforms in 2025, here’s my honest take:

• Choose Thinkific if you’re cost-conscious, need NO transaction fee, and need academic features like advanced assessments and quizzes.
• Go with Teachable if you value refined UI/UX and coaching capabilities.

However, Teachable has changed since its2020 Hotmart acquisition.

Since Hotmart’s 2020 acquisition, Teachable has faced significant challenges. Development velocity slowed dramatically, many people were held rfor ansom, surprise pricing changes, etc.

But in short, after the acquisition.

Many long-time users felt held ransom, forced to migrate despite losing comments and analytics. Meanwhile, key founding team members shifted focus to Circle, leaving Teachable stagnant while competitors innovated.

For the full story, see my detailed Teachable review.

This has led many people seek Teachable alternatives.

Pricing – Thinkific gets it right!

Thinkific offers flexible pricing plans to suit your needs.

You can have unlimited courses under each plan and THERE ARE NO TRANSACTION FEES

Teachable hits you with a HUGE 7.5% transaction fee on their Starter plan ($39/mo).

Want to get rid of that fee? You’ll need to upgrade to their pricier plans.

And also with Teachable you have huge product creation limitations:

• Starter plan, even at $39/m, allows you to publish only 1 product.
• Builder plan at $89/month allows you to publish only 5 products.

Earlier (before Teachable’s Hotmart acquisition), they used to have a plan where you could publish multiple products. Those plan holders were forced to pay a ransom or move out of the platform.

When you compare the two, Thinkific provides more value for your money as it supports unlimited courses even in their most basic plan with 0% transaction fee.

User interface – Teachable has a bit of edge

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

On the other hand, Thinkific’s interface is also very refined and intuitive to navigate.

Traditionally, it had a difficult interface to easily wrap your head around, but things have improved a lot recently.

However, when it comes to overall experience and speed, I have to give the edge to Teachable.

🏆 Winner: Teachable.

Course creation – Teachable has a slight edge (for most)

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.

ONE LESSON = MULTIPLE TYPES OF CONTENT

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.

But.

Here are the 3 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 inside lessons!: You can include upsells within lesson content to increase revenue. This is my most favorite feature!

Apart from this, let’s talk about course compliance.

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.

Both platforms auto-track course completion, so certificates can be issued without requiring students to manually mark lessons complete.

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

Assessments – Thinkific crushes Teachable here

Thinkific has these features when it comes to assessments.

• Randomized question banks for fair retakes
• Native surveys and assignments alongside quizzes
• Passing grade, retake limits, and prerequisite controls

In practice, Thinkific lets you build graded or ungraded quizzes, pull from question pools, and gate progression with a required passing score.

I like setting a passing grade and limiting attempts to keep learners accountable.

You can also add surveys to capture qualitative feedback after a module.

Now, Teachable.

It covers the basics well for simple courses: multiple‑choice quizzes, graded or ungraded, and basic completion rules.

But it lacks native surveys and open‑ended question types. If you want forms, you’ll need to embed Typeform or similar via custom code.

There’s no question bank randomization either, so retakes can feel repetitive.

🏆 Winner: If assessments matter, Thinkific is stronger. You get deeper control, native surveys, and bank‑based quizzes with passing grade rules. Teachable is fine for light checks, but you’ll outgrow it fast if you run cohort programs or care about rigorous evaluation.

Communities – Both of them are limited

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 it based on different spaces.

👎 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

Here are the screenshots of “video retention” of both platforms:

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

Design and customization – Thinkific is better

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.

Checkout mechanism – Teachable had an edge

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.

Affiliate management – Thinkific kills your time

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.

👎 Thinkific’s affiliate system requires significant manual work. You cannot bulk import affiliates, commission payouts need individual manual approval, and the tracking dashboard lacks depth. These limitations caused engagement drops and reduced affiliate-driven revenue for many course creators who scaled their programs.

🏆 Winner: Teachable

Integrations – Teachable sucks big time!

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

When it comes with email marketing 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.

On the other hand, Thinkific integrates with a wide range of platforms with their app store and also they have a lot of email marketing integrations as well.

👍 One good thing here with Thinkific is you can send custom email notifications to your students, not to be considered as a full alternative to email broadcasts though!

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

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 apretty good appbut 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!

🏆 Winner: Teachable. But only iOS!

Final verdict

Teachable and Thinkific are both solid course platforms with different strengths.

Thinkific excels with academic features like advanced assessments. Teachable shines in marketing with in-course upsells and a strong checkout builder.

Both need work on mobile apps though. Teachable’s iOS app works well but there’s no Android version. Thinkific has both iOS and Android apps but they need improvement.

After analyzing both, I’d recommendThinkific.

Why?

You get unlimited courses and zero transaction fees even on their $49/month basic plan. That’s hard to beat for course creators at any level.

Teachable has changed a lot since Hotmart acquired them.

They removed the unlimited courses feature and ramped up the transaction fee, which upset many users.

One more thing:

If community engagement matters to you, check out community-focused platforms like Kajabi or Circle (fun fact: Circle was founded by Teachable’s original creators).

Your best choice depends on your specific needs, budget, and long-term course goals.