Thinkific vs Teachable: (The Ultimate Comparison In 2024)

Well, Thinkific and Teachable are the two most popular online learning platforms. 

Both platforms enable you to create, market, and sell online courses and memberships. What’s more, both are known in the market for offering — an affordable pricing structure. 

Being an online course creator platform, both have a lot in common. However, there are differences between these two platforms, such as design & customization options, integrations, marketing features, etc. 

To solve the hassle, I have done an in-depth comparison of Thinkific vs. Teachable. While comparing these platforms, I took various important parameters such as — interface, design & customization, marketing modules, integrations, pricing structures, etc. 

Moreover, I have also added a section to help you choose the best among Thinkific and Teachable. So let’s dive in. 

Thinkific vs Teachable: What’s The Key Takeaway?

Thinkific and Teachable are the two self-hosted course creation platforms. In simple words, these platforms help you create and market online courses and memberships. 

Both the platforms aren’t as huge as — Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera. However, these platforms come in handy for building individual courses and have more flexibility. Such as with both platforms, you can create courses on any niches uploading various feature-rich media such as videos, audios, text, quizzes, accepting payment, and so on. 

The best part with Teachable and Thinkific is that you don’t need any technical knowledge to create, manage, and market online courses and memberships. 

Note: If you want to know more about Thinkific check our detailed Thinkific Review.

Let’s check which one excels where. 

Where Thinkific Excels Over Teachable?

Where Teachable Excels Over Thinkfic? 

Thinkific vs Teachable: Features Compared (Side by Side)

Well, in this section, I’ll compare and review the features and modules of these learning platforms. So let’s dive in. 

The Interface

In any online course creation platform, a clean and intuitive dashboard is always preferred. 

Coming to these platforms, Thinkific and Teachable both offer a good interface for creating and managing online courses. Let’s find out which once excels where. 

Thinkific provides a clean interface where you will find every tool and feature in a streamlined dashboard. It has a sidebar approach where all the tools and features are accessible. 

On the dashboard, you will find handy courses creation options. What’s more, you will have various options such as Manage Leaning Content, Design Your Site, Market & Sell, Advanced Reporting, Support Your Students, and so on. 

Sometimes you need to dwell into the main menu to find other features. Such as if you want to check the Integrations module, you need to check Market & Sell features. 

In typical online course secretion platforms like Kajabi and others, the Integration module is under the Settings section. 

Let’s check the dashboard of Teachable. 

The dashboard of Teachable is also clean and intuitive. You find a quick option to start creating courses on the go. You will find various features and options on the dashboard itself, such as Dashboard, Users, Sites, Sales, Emails, and Settings. 

Teachable also has a similar approach to Thinkific, and you will get a sidebar with nested menu options. Overall, Teachable has an intuitive interface that makes it easy to create and manage online courses and memberships. 

To simply put, both the platforms, Teachable and Thinkific, are mobile-friendly. That means these platforms are handy and optimized for all the devices and screen sizes. 

Verdict: With Teachable and Thinkific, you will get a user-friendly interface. You can easily create courses on the go with little to no experience. Well, if you want to make changes on the go, Teachable comes with a handy iOS app.

Course Creation Module

Let’s check which one excels when it comes to creating courses. In this section, you will also get to know the course creation module of Thinkific and Teachable. 

• Courses Structure & Uploading

Both the platforms here allow you to structure your courses properly. You can also easily add audio, videos, pdfs, quizzes, and other feature-rich media. 

Let’s talk about Thinkific courses structure and uploading. 

With Thinkific, you can create chapters and lessons while creating your course. As here, Thinkific enables you to manage your content into different chapters. Using the chapters and lessons module, you can structure your courses in a better way. 

No doubt, Thinkific courses builder support more content types compared to Teachable. It supports various feature-rich media formats such as surveys, live streams, quizzes (elaborated), webinars, comments/discussion, narrated presentations, etc. 

Thinkific doesn’t support SCORM files; however, you can use storyline and captivate files with it. 

The standalone point of Thinkific is — it helps you add multiple media content types in the same lecture. For example, in the same lesson, you can add text as well as videos. This is something you can’t do with Teachable. 

On top of all that, Thinkific also allows you to create landing pages to help you with various goals such as —

• Generating leads of potential students’ emails. 
• Selling courses that are pre-selling
• Showcasing course creation progress bar on your site. 

Let’s talk about the courses structure and uploading module of Teachable. 

Teachable makes it easy to create courses; it allows you to create two types of teaching modules— online courses & coaching. 

First of all, you need to pick a type from the Courses and Coaching module. You should choose the Courses module if you have a framework in mind, such as how-to format. Otherwise, you should get going with the Coaching module to offer one-to-one coaching. 

The best part is that Teachable has various ready-to-use templates. You can choose from different templates to get started right away. 

If you want to create your courses from scratch, choose the blank canvas. Once you choose the blank canvas, the interface will guide you to complete the other aspects. Such as adding the course details like name, step-by-step process section. After that, you can easily add different layers — Sections and Lectures. 

What’s more, Teachable supports various feature-rich media files such as — text, videos, images, audio, PDFs, surveys, PDFs, etc. 

All in all, both platforms have easy course structures. When it comes to courses uploads and media, Thinkific excels as Thinkific supports more feature-rich media than Teachable. 

• Content Delivery

Here both the platforms have a robust course delivery method. 

Teachable and Thinkific allows you to change the course players’ look, feel, and other functionality. For example, students can easily toggle the course player to fullscreen, tuning to video speed, quality, etc. What’s more, the player will also mark the lessons as done once a student finishes watching the lesson. 

Teachable content delivery is reliable, as it helps you engagingly present your content. Previously, Teachables supported Viza to add a poll and quizzes to your lesson. However, as of now, Teachable doesn’t integrate with Vizia. 

Teachable and Thinkific both allow you to interact with your students. Teachable helps you to enable comments within your online courses and memberships. To add a comment, students need to scroll to the bottom of the page. 

With Thinkific, students can easily raise discussion if they have any doubt. To start a discussion, a student needs to click on the Discussion button right on the side of the course player. 

The best part about Thinkific it offers seamless Live Lessons that allows you to train your students in a live class. You can make use of platforms like Zoom. 

• Coaching & Community Module

Here Teachable allows you to add a products type which is — Coaching. You can make use of such a module to create and sell 1:1 coaching programs. 

With the Teachable coaching module, you can easily set the pricing, build forms, creating coaching modules with milestones. What’s more, you can also communicate with your coaching students/clients with the help of private messaging. 

Thinkific doesn’t have a similar coaching module; however, it has a module called community. Using the community feature of Thinkific, you can quickly build a solid online community for your online courses. 

Thinkific allows you to add the community module to any specific courses easily. What’s more, you can manage your students real quick and easily. 

Coming to Teachable, it doesn’t come with a community-building module. However, Teachable does come with a comments section. You can enable the comments to any of the particular lessons or courses you want. 

With the native comments feature of Teachable, students can easily add comments and start discussions with the courses’ lessons. You can also reply to the comments and queries there.

Similar to Teachable, Thinkific also has a commenting system. Thinkific commenting module functionality is similar; however, you can’t embed comments to specific courses or modules. 

Overall, Thinkific has the community and comments features that help you manage your course’s students. On the other hand, Teachable comes with a handy coaching module. 

• Certificate of Completion

Teachable and Thinkific both help you create and rewards students with certificates of completion. 

Coming to Teachable, it comes with around three pre-designed templates to get started. Even you have the option to create a certificate from scratch. 

With Teachable, the certificates are liked by default to courses. Once a student completed any particular course, they will get the certificate. 

Thinkific also has a certification system to award your students with completion certificates. It helps you create the certificate from scratch; you can also choose from 7 certificate templates and customize them. 

Once a student completes a course, they will be automatically rewarded the certificate in a PDF format. The best part, Thinkific also integrates with popular certification services Accredible. Anyhow, if you want top-notch certification, you can make use of such services. 

Overall, Thinkific and Teachable both come with robust certification modules for creators. 

• Content Drip & Locking

Both platforms allow you to drip content on various parameters. Teachable enables you to send drip emails to your students real easy. 

On the other hand, Thinkific doesn’t allow you to send automated emails for content dripping or release some new content. 

With both platforms, you can easily restrict various aspects such as — students’ progress until they view/pass a previous lesson or complete a quiz. 

The compliance feature of Teachable is more flexible and robust compared to Teachable. As with Teachable, you can enforce compliance at the course level, while Thinkific allows you to do it at the level of the lessons. 

Both the platforms come with a powerful course video watching compliance. For example, with Teachable, students must see a defined percentage of a video to move or progress to the next lesson. The down part, Thinkific, doesn’t come with such a flexible video completion compilation module. Here, by default, Teachable is set to a 90% completion rate.

Bottom Line of Courses Creation Module: Well, we have compared all the courses creation aspects of Teachable and Thinkific. Both the platforms come with all essential features; however, Thinkific excels in the courses creation module. It offers many robust features such as community and does better in terms of engagement and learning tools. What’s more, Thinkific also has some other cool features such as flexibility to create — assignments, servers, live lessons with zoom, robust courses compilations tools, etc. Overall, Thinkific excels when it comes to courses creation modules, you can rely on this platform. 

Design & Customization Options

Well, website design is one of the most critical aspects of any online venture. 

Before getting started with any courses building platform, make sure it comes with all design & customization options you will need. So let’s check what these platforms got to offers when it comes to design. 

Both the platforms come with a reliable and easy-to-use drag and drop editor. With Teachable and Thinkific, making changes to design is easy and a breeze. 

Teachable comes with a flexible design and customization options. You can create web pages on the go; however, Teachable comes with one single theme to choose from. 

Well, Teachable comes with various design and customization options; you can change the design of your website in many aspects. Some of them are:

• Making changes to typography and choose from different fonts.
• You can use custom texts and sizes. 
• Customizing the color scheme of your website, such as courses headers, footer, body text, etc. 
• It allows you to add a favicon, custom logo for the website and choose different navigation options. 

If you’re familiar with coding, you can make use of Teachables’ Power Editor 2.0. Using the editor, you can customize the design aspect of your courses. Customizing your website with code might get a bit technical, including HTML, custom CSS, and code snippets. You should only choose the coding design aspect when you’re aware of what playing with. 

Also, when it comes to customization, Teachable allows you to make changes on the website level and not for specific pages. 

Let’s check the design and customization options of Thinkific. 

Thinkific comes with many themes and templates to choose from. You can choose many themes available as per your design needs. What’s more, you can easily customize the themes and templates of Thinkific. 

The drag and drop editor of Thinkific is powerful and responsive. You can quickly create sales pages, landing pages, checkout pages, etc. Overall, Thinkific has the edge over Teachable when it comes to design and customization options. 

You can white-label or use APIs’ of Thinkific and teachable to customize your course pages. In the down part, you will see Teachable branding in the login, checkout, and sign-up page. 

Bottom Line: No doubt, Thinkific is the clear winner when it comes to website design & customization options. Teachable is good for designing when you know to code and make changes through HTML and custom CSS. On the other hand, Thinkific is beginner-friendly with many templates options available. 

Sales & Marketing Modules Compared 

Once you’re done creating your online course/membership, how would you market and sell it? For this, you will need an online courses builder that has all the sales and marketing tools available. 

Both the platforms come with robust sales and marketing tools to help market and sell your courses. However, let’s check out the sales and marketing modules of Teachable and Thinkific. 

• Selling Digital Products

Both platforms allow you to create and sell digital products. You can offer various digital products, including video tutorials, ebooks, case studies, webinars, and other digital products. 

However, Teachable allows you to sell physical products as well. What’s more, Teachable even allows you to add a billing and shipping address right from the checkout page. 

Selling physical products with Thinkific isn’t handy at all. However, Teachable makes it super easy to sell digital as well as physical products. 

• Marketing Courses Online

Both the platforms allow you to market your courses and membership real easily. 

With both the platforms, you can easily: 

• Easily bundle courses, promote and create discounts offers for them. 
• You can create coupon codes for promotions. 
• Creating landing pages for pre-selling courses.
• Capture leads of people who are interested in your online courses/memberships. 
• Creating a fully-fledged affiliate program for courses. 
• Make of basic email marketing modules.

Let’s explore some of the differences between these platforms.

Teachables comes with a robust in-built blogging module. The blogging module isn’t that powerful as compared to self-hosted WordPress.org. However, Thinkific doesn’t come with any blogging module. 

• Payments Processors & Payouts

Payment processing is important for receiving payments for your online courses. Let’s check out the payment processors & payouts of these platforms. 

Both the platforms allow you to receive payments via Stripe and PayPal. Also, you can accept credit card payments via Stripe. 

With Thinkific, the payments option is straightforward; you’ll get instant payouts. Once someone buys your course/membership, the amount will be credited directly to your PayPal/Stripe account. 

The teachable approach is a bit different compared to Thinkific. I would say the payments processing options of Teachable are nested. It allows you to choose third-party payment gateways such as PayPal/Stripe or choose the payment gateway of Teachable. 

Even you can get the money to your own PayPal or Stripe account without any delay. However, you should know the custom payment gateway is available only with the — teachable Professional and Business plan. 

If you choose the Teachable payment gateway, all the transaction amounts will process through the Teachable gateway. The only downside is that you won’t be eligible for the instant payout if you’re a resident of the US, Canada, UK, or Germany. 

The main benefit of using the Teachable payment gateway is accepting payments via Apple Pay and Google Pay. 

What’s more, the Teachable payment gateway comes with a robust suite called BackOffice. With the BackOffice, you can also transfer money to your affiliates and the authors of the courses. But the down part is, the back office charges 2% of the transaction fee. 

Overall, both platforms have easy payment processing and handling. 

• Affiliate Marketing Module

Both the platforms come with a reliable affiliate marketing module. You can easily create and manage the affiliate program for your online courses/memberships. 

Thinkific and Teachable allow you to:

• Track affiliate cookies (for around 30 days)
• Approve/disapprove affiliates 
• Set easy commission rates
• Manage all the affiliates from a single dashboard
• Invite influencers/promoters to promote your online courses.

The best part about Teachable affiliate management is that you can download affiliate details in bulk from a CSV file. Overall, both platform has a good affiliate marketing module. 

Bottom Line On Sales & Marketing Module: This section has covered all the sales and marketing modules of Teachable and Thinkific. Both platforms offers flexible marketing features that you can rely on. The checkout process of Teachable is one step, while the checkout process of Thinkific is two-step. Overall, both the tools have all essential sales and marketing modules. 

Reports & Analytics

Analyzing the performance of your online courses is necessary. Both Thinkific and Teachable offer more insights and reports of your online courses. 

With Thinkific, you will get detailed insights into the performance of your courses and memberships. The only down part, you need to have Thinkifics’ Pro and Growth plan to get in-depth reports and details. 

While Teachable offers more in-depth reports compared to Thinkific. You will get finer details of courses such as students breakdown, free students, full-price students, paid discounted students, etc. 

Bottom Line: Here, Thinkific and Teachable both offer detailed, actionable data. However, Teachable offers more in-depth reports and data compared to Thinkific. 

Integration Options

Let’s check the integration options of Thinkific and Teachable. To be more precise, Thinkific has more direct integration options compared to Teachable. 

Both Teachable and Thinkific have robust platforms — Google Analytics, Segment, Facebook pixels, etc. 

For email marketing, Thinkific integrates with up to seven popular email marketing platforms such as ConverKit, Aweber, etc. It also integrates with other platforms such as Lessonpace (for live lessons), Early Payout (for referral marketing), etc. 

In the case of Teachable, it has direct integration with email marketing providers such as ConvertKit, MailChimp, etc. 

However, both the platforms also support some of the advanced configurations — Webhooks, Zapier, SPIs. What’s more, you can also do the White Label thing with Teachable and Thinkific. For example, with Zapier integration, you can create sales funnels with ClickFunnels, etc.

Bottom Line: When it comes to integration options, Thinkific has more robust integration. At the same time, Teachable integration options are also good with plenty of email marketing features, webhooks, Zapier, etc. 

The Pricing Battle: Which One Affordable? 

Thinkific and Teachable have flexible pricing options. 

Both the platforms Thinkific and Teachable, have a free forever plan. However, both platforms have a load of restrictions on their free plans. Check the restriction of the Thinkific free plan here; check the Teachable free plan restriction. 

Let’s check the paid pricing plans of Thinkific and Teachable. 

The base plan of Teachable costs $39/month, and the Thinkific base plan costs $49/month. This plan includes all the essential features. 

The most popular plan — The teachable Pro plan costs $119/month, while the Thinkific Start plan costs $99/month. 

The highest tier plan of the Teachable Business Plan costs $375/month, while the Thinkific Grow plan costs around $199/month. 

The key takeaway is the pricing and restrictions. 

With Thinkific, you don’t have to pay additional transaction fees. However, Teachable charges around $1 + the transaction free on the free plan alongside 5% transaction of the basic plan. 

Bottom Line: The pricing plans of Teachable and Thinkific are flexible. You choose the as per your needs. 

Pros & Cons: Thinkific vs Teachable

Here we have listed the pros & cons of bothe Thinkific and Teachable. Lets get inside it. 

Thinkific Pros: 

• Create sale pages with pre-build drag & drop builder. 
• You can customize your courses according to match your brand 
• Unlimited courses and students 
• You can sell monthly subscription courses 
• Best customer support via phone and email support 

Thinkific Cons: 

• No coding snippets 
• No integrated email marketing 

Teachable Pros: 

• Students get certificate after the course completion 
• Comes with easy and user friendly interface. 
• Allows you to offer coaching service 
• Gives you full control of your students data 
• Powerful course builder for creating and launching courses 

Teachable Cons: 

• Limited native integration 
• No priority customer support 

Related Read:

Kajabi vs Teachable
Kajabi vs Thinkific
Kartra vs Kajabi

The Verdict: Thinkific vs Teachable (2024)

No doubt, Thinkific and Teachable are the two popular course creation platforms. Both are affordable, flexible, and offer great value-for-money features. 

So here’s the final verdict. Simply put, Thinkific has the edge over Teachable in various aspects. Let’s find out. 

Why Choose Thinkific? 

Thinkific has robust modules for quizzes, assignments, creating a community, and so on. Moreover, you can also manage and sell your courses in bulk. Also, Thinkific has a better membership module compared to Teachable. 

What’s Thinkific also has a robust design and customization options available. It has a robust drag-and-drop builder that is beginner-friendly and has many themes and templates available. 

The best part, Thinkific has more flexible pricing available. On top of that, it doesn’t charge any kind of transaction fee. 

Why Choose Teachable? 

If we talk about Teachable, it has an easy-to-use interface for course creation. It comes with a robust coaching module where you can give 1:1 coaching to your students/clients. 

Teachable has more robust marketing features compared to Thinkific. Also, in the checkout process, it supports Apple Pay and Google Pay options with its payment processor. Overall, it’s a power-packed solution but has some limited options for design and customization options. 

We hope this Thinkific vs. Teachable comparison suits your purpose well. 

What do you think, which one are you going to choose? Let me know in the comments section below.

FAQs: Thinkific vs Teachable