Thinkific Review: Best Online Course Platform in 2025?

Want to build and sell online courses? Choosing the right platform can be challenging. 

There are so many options! It’s hard to know which one is best for you.

You don’t want to waste time and money on the wrong platform.

Thinkific is a popular choice. But is it the best?

Does it have all the features you need? Is it easy to use? What about the pricing?

In this Thinkific review, we’ll explain everything you need to know. We’ll look at the pros, cons, pricing, and features.

By the end, you’ll know if Thinkific fits your online course business in 2025.

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What is Thinkific?

Thinkific is a platform that helps course creators like you create and sell online courses.

If you’re an expert in something, you can share your knowledge with the world.

Thinkific makes it easy to build your online school. They have different plans, starting with a basic plan.

You can try it out with a free trial or maybe even a free plan before you pay. 

Want even more features? Check out Thinkific Plus for bigger businesses and membership options.

Thinkific helps with everything from course creation to getting students to sign up.

Who Created Thinkific?

Thinkific was started by Greg Smith and his brothers.

They wanted to make it easier for people to share their knowledge.

They saw that lots of people wanted to learn online. Thinkific is a platform for creating & selling courses.

They wanted to build something better than other platforms like Teachable or Kajabi.

Thinkific offers different plans, including the Thinkific basic plan and other paid plan options.

They also help with things like email marketing.

They allow entrepreneurs to sell courses quickly without a hefty transaction fee, and Thinkific branding is even available. 

They wanted to help anyone build an online business.

Top Benefits of Thinkific

• You have complete control. You own your content and data. Thinkific lets you brand your courses and school the way you want. You are in charge.
• Marketing tools: Thinkific provides built-in marketing tools to help you reach more students. It also offers features for affiliate marketing, which can grow your audience.
• Learning experience: Thinkific focuses on creating a great learning experience for your students. They have tools to make courses engaging.
• Customer support: Thinkific has a helpful customer support and support team that is ready to assist you with any problems. They’ll answer your questions.
• Online education: Thinkific is designed specifically for online education, making teaching and learning easy and effective.
• Academy: They have their academy with resources and training. This helps you learn how to use Thinkific even better.

Best Features

Thinkific is an online platform that helps people create and sell their own courses.

It has many features that make it easy to build a great course without a lot of technical skill.

It gives you the tools to create, market, and manage your courses all in one place.

You can focus on your content and let Thinkific handle the rest.

1. Thinkific Courses

Thinkific makes it simple to build your courses.

You can upload videos, create quizzes, and organize your lessons.

It’s like setting up your online classroom. 

They have different templates to make your course look professional.

You can even offer certificates when students finish.

2. AI Landing Page Builder

Want to create a great-looking page to sell your course?

Thinkific has an AI Landing Page Builder.

Just answer a few questions, & the AI will help you design a page.

No coding is needed! This makes it super easy to get your course out there.

3. Email Automation

Thinkific can help you with email marketing.

You can easily set up automated emails to welcome new students or remind them about upcoming lessons.

This saves you time and keeps your students engaged.

It’s like having your email assistant.

4. Coaching and Webinars

Want to interact with your students live? Thinkific lets you offer coaching and webinars.

You can connect with students in real-time.

This is a great way to build a community around your courses and offer more support.

5. Sales Tools

Thinkific has tools to help you sell more courses. They have different pricing options.

You can offer coupons and discounts.

They also handle payments, so you don’t have to worry about that.

These sales tools make it easier to make money from your courses.

6. Drag and Drop Course Builder

You don’t need to know how to code to use Thinkific.

You can simply drag and drop different types of content to build your course.

You can upload videos, quizzes, text, and other files easily.

This makes it simple to structure your lessons and chapters exactly how you want them.

The builder lets you see your course come to life as you add content.

7. Manage Communities

Thinkific lets you build a community right on your platform.

This means your students can talk to each other, ask questions, and share ideas.

This helps people feel connected and can improve their learning experience.

You can create different groups or “spaces” for specific topics. Building a community helps with student engagement and retention.

8. Student Progress and Analytics

Thinkific has tools that let you see how your students are doing.

You can track how much of a course they have completed and how they are engaging with the content.

This helps you figure out which parts of your course are working well and which parts might need to be improved.

You can use this data to make your course even better over time.

9. Customizable Course Player

You can make the learning area look just like your own brand.

You can change colors & fonts to match your business.

This helps your students feel like they are in a special place that you created just for them.

It gives you control over the look and feel of your course. You can also add your own logo for a professional touch.

Pricing

Thinkific offers 14 days of free trial with different pricing plans to fit your needs.

Here’s a breakdown of what each plan includes:

Pros and Cons

Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of Thinkific is crucial before making a decision.

Let’s explore them:

Alternatives to Thinkific

Thinkific Compared

Personal Experience with Thinkific

Here’s how my team used Thinkific to create our own online courses.

We wanted to sell courses successfully and get a lot of people to sign up.

The platform helped us a lot because we didn’t have to deal with the technical stuff.

We could focus on content creation and building a great course and we started with our first course and built it out using the site builder.

This gave us full control over the course pages and course website.

The best part was we didn’t need any coding skills to make it look professional looking.

As our business growth continued, we decided to offer unlimited courses to our students.

The user friendliness of the platform was a key feature. We could manage everything with just a few clicks from the left hand side of the dashboard.

This gave us more control and helped us build a great sales strategy.

The Thinkific pricing plans were perfect for us.

We were able to create promotions to boost sales. The payment options made it easy for students to easily pay, and we could set up payment plans and sell digital downloads.

We even had live sessions (interactive lessons) to connect with our students and used Thinkific analytics and advanced analytics to track progress and get deeper insights into course performance.

The community feature with discussion forums was also a huge help for student management.

We could remove Thinkific branding on our site, which made our course website look very professional. We also used a custom domain.

These core features made it easy for most course creators.

Thinkific Features and Benefits:

• Easy to use: The platform has great user friendliness, even for a first course.
• Website building: We could build a professional looking course website with the site builder.
• Full control: We had more control over our course content and learning content.
• Flexible payments: It was easy to set up different payment options, including payment plans.
• Analytics: We could use advanced analytics to track progress and get deeper insights into course performance.
• Community tools: The community feature with discussion forums helped us with student management and offer students a place to talk.
• Promotions: It was simple to create promotions to boost sales.
• Branding: We could remove Thinkific branding and use our own custom domain.

Final Thoughts

Thinkific is a solid platform for creating & selling online courses.

It’s easy to use, has good course creation tools, and offers helpful marketing features.

It might be pricier than some options, and design customization could be better.

However, if you prioritize ease of use and robust course building, Thinkific is a great choice.

If you’re serious about building an online course business, we recommend trying Thinkific.

Start your free trial today and see if it fits you right!

Frequently Asked Questions

More Facts about Thinkific

• What it does: Thinkific helps you build, share, and sell online classes, memberships, and digital files.
• Easy to use: You do not need to know how to code or be a computer expert to use it.
• Building courses: It has a simple “drag-and-drop” builder. This means you can easily move videos and lessons around to make your course look good.
• AI help: As of 2026, a tool called “Thinker AI” helps you quickly write course outlines, quiz questions, and words for your website.
• Student groups: You can create special groups (communities) inside the platform where students can talk to each other and join live events.
• Marketing emails: It includes tools to send emails automatically to your students to help sell your courses.
• Business training: It works with special files called SCORM. This is important for companies that need to do official employee training.
• Selling extras: Besides courses, you can also sell things like PDF downloads to give your students more value.
• Payment tools: Thinkific has a feature called “TCommerce.” This helps you accept payments, set up payment plans, and easily sell course bundles.
• Zero transaction fees: On the paid plans, Thinkific does not take a cut of the money you earn. You only pay the standard bank processing fees.
• Tracking success: There are tools to help you see how many students are enrolled, how much money you made, and if students are finishing their lessons.
• Custom look: You can pick different themes to make your course website look professional and match your brand.
• Big business features: If you pay for the most expensive plans, you can remove the Thinkific name and use your own logo everywhere.
• Pricing plans: There are four main plans: Basic, Start, Grow, and Thinkific Plus (for very big companies).
• Basic Plan: This costs about $49 a month. It is great for one person who is ready to start selling unlimited courses.
• Start Plan: This costs about $99 a month. It is good for businesses that need student memberships and certificates.
• Grow Plan: This costs about $199 a month. It is best for experts who need advanced reports and more control over their brand.
• Free option: Unlike some reports, there is usually a limited Free plan available to test the system, along with a 14-day free trial for the paid features.
• Who it is for: It is great for coaches, teachers, and creators who want to make money by teaching what they know.
• Good support: Many users say the customer service team is fast and helpful.
• Some downsides: Some users feel the video player is a bit old-fashioned and does not automatically generate captions. You have to upload caption files yourself.
• Marketing limitations: While it offers email tools, some people think its marketing features are not as advanced as those of other specialized software.
• Enrollment speed: If you need to add hundreds of students at once, the system can sometimes be slow.
• Affiliate issues: Some users find the tools for managing partners (affiliates) are a bit hard to use and lack detail.
• Design limits: If you want to make major changes to your site, you might need to know some code or use additional tools.
• 2026 Focus: In 2026, Thinkific is focusing heavily on its payment tools (TCommerce) and using AI to help people create courses faster.