Thinkific vs Teachable Comparison 2021


Thinkific vs Teachable Comparison 2021

Thinkific and Teachable are both fantastic course creation platforms.

In this review we are going to pit these against each other and see which one emerges as the winner.

If you’re going to create a course in 2021 look no further. This is the apt time.

 

What is Thinkific

Founded by Greg, Matt and Miranda, Thinkific is a course creation platform. Considering the pandemic and the rise of online learning interest in course creators has never been so high.

What is Teachable

Teachable was first called Fedora and started in 2013. Has over 100 employees and 100,000 course creators have used the platform.

Here are some of the standout features that Thinkific as a course creation platform offers you:

Features of Thinkific

  • Create rich video and image supported courses
  • You can use multiple formats like quizzes, or surveys and integrate through Typeform and Google docs.
  • Supports tools like Adobe captivate and articulate.
  • Course creation in customized manner
  • Website creation options to sell courses
  • You can connect a site and host the courses on the site.
  • Add coupons and discounts to the courses sold
  • Supports over 100 currencies for payment
  • Affiliate marketing set up
  • 3rd party tool integration
  • Analytics and data tracking
  • Customized learning and progress bar for students.
  • Reminders on course completion, emails informing of progress.
  • Communication with students to provide motivation
  • Secure data and ssl certificates.

What are the features of Teachable

  • Options for customizing courses and coaching courses
  • 3rd party integrations like Zapier, Mailchimp and ConvertKit.
  • There’s landing page editor as well
  • Tracking of student sales and other insights
  • Team members can be added for the platform.
  • Create unlimited number of courses and take in as many students as possible
  • One on one sessions.
  • Course material control and levels
  • Quizzes with levels. Course completion certificates for passing students
  • Advance payment options like setting up subscriptions and membership levels, bundled payments and others.
  • Affiliate membership is supported. 
  • Supports more than 130 currencies worldwide for payment.
  • The payment pages are fully secure because they are ssl backed.
  • There’s plenty of data and fraud security. The fraud detection team blocks all fraudulent attempts.
  • There’s a knowledgebase of articles and videos for course creators to get started with understanding the platform well.

Comparison between Thinkific and Teachable

To choose between the platforms, here’s the detailed Thinkific vs Teachable comparison for you to go through.

Ease of Use

Ease of using the platform is one of the primary things you look into course creation platforms. This is across video editing, blogging or course creation.

Ease of use might mean many things at once. It can be the ease with which you access something be it the front facing UI. You can never afford for the learning curve to be too steep. At this you risk course creators to never come back to using the platform ever.

Thinkific

  • It’s easy to navigate Thinkific. The site is structured really well.
  • The navigation is smooth.

Teachable 

  • Teachable uses a clean and minimal UI to get through.
  • The large fonts of clean layout means there’s plenty of breathing space for each element.

Thinkable has a great front-end and the overall design makes for it to be easy to use.

 

Thinkific 

  • Thinkific sports a drag and drop creator that lets you build out your course sooner.
  • There are options to hide information. You can create private courses
  • You can schedule content delivery of the posts. The courses can be delivered based on how soon or how late a student is plouging through the listed items.
  • You can set the course to have an expiration date.
  • Create course website with the help of the templates that Thinkific provides to you.
  • The templates are ready to go and are designed well. 
  • Add surveys from Typeform
  • Add videos and images.

Teachable

  • With teachable link to your site to teachable under its domain name. You can own a domain and redirect it to teachable and access it through website.teachable.com
  • The power editor inside means you have a lot of control over course creation. Integrate videos and images and use quizzes on the platform.
  • Teachable is great for coaching.
  • You can schedule one on one sessions with the Calendy integration.
  • Create drip courses or self paced courses
  • Have live chat sessions
  • Crete milestones for courses.

 

Thinkific and Teachable both are equally good when it comes to the number of course creation options at hand.  

Options like drip feeding courses, adding quizzes, 3rd party integrations and others add to the number of options with the tool.

However some features are unique to each course creation platform. With Thinkific you can create private courses. You can hide courses. This is exclusive to Thinkific. You can also create a list of tasks and host calls with students.

The number of course creation and optimization options are plenty with both platforms.

Marketing and Sales Features

Courses are almost always created with the sole intent of selling these courses. That means most course creators look at all the different selling options that make up in a course creation platform.

Thinkific

  • With Thinkific customizing your course with brand’s logo and other brand building activity is easy.
  • Integration with Zapier that powers 900 integrations, along with Keap, Mailchimp, Zapier and others.
  • Track ad performance with the Google adwords account. You can alo use ad retargeting campaigns.

Teachable

  • With Teachable use the page editor to create sales pages
  • Integrate with 3rd party marketing tools with Zapier integration.
  • The customization possibilities are endless.
  • Set up ways to handle affiliate marketing payments. Teachable can do the complete handling for you.
  • Facebook and Google ads through teachable tracking.0

For marketing and sales automation both the platforms are equally great at what they do.  With 3rd party integrations, affiliate and ad tracking platforms setting up your course and marketing it is going to be quite easy,

Resources and Knowledge Center 

Ease of use and navigation abilities are another few factors that tend to score big.

You have a number of articles and videos on the platform.

The software is intuitive to use and and has a number of features. Better understand each feature before you start using the platform.

Thinkific

  • Thinkific comes with a good help center. There’s a FAQ page, there’s the resources page and case studies. All of this is designed to help you and come out on top with the platform. The articles and videos answer all the different questions you have regarding the platform.
  • Thinkific has a training site to create courses. Both free and paid plans.

Teachable

  • Teachable lets you register for free webinars covering course creation and video upload. It lets you customize the brand build sales pages.

Thinkific does a lot more in terms of producing knowledgebase articles and videos that you can use to familiarize yourselves with the platform.

You can address all the queries with this knowledgebase.

Customer Support

Even with a number of knowledgebase articles, not everyone has the time to read through everything.  People always yearn for quick support and this is more the rage now.

Thinkific

  • Thinkific says that 90% of the queries costumes forward them get replied to in under 5 hours.
  • The customer support team is accessible by both phone and email. The email communication is personal and responsive to any questions you may have around the platform.
  • Teachable
  • The support only is available on weekdays
  • The live chat is only for users on the pro plan,.\

Payment Options and Features

When you are a course creator with a global audience being able to offer muti currency payment plans is a core thing you should think of.

Thinkific

  • Thinkific has a number of membership plans and subscription options to choose from.
  • Promos in the form of coupon codes and trials are another feature. You can offer different payment plans tIt offers promotional features like coupon codes and free trials.. 
  • Support for 100 currencies in secure environment
  • The payments can be made through all major credit cards too.

Teachable 

  • With teachable there are subscription options, membership plans, one time payments, bundles that can all be included to pricing tiers.
  • You can get paypal payments, tax compliance, author payments and so on.
  • Coupon codes
  • 130 currencies
  • EU vat is takenc are of 

 

Teachable scores better in payment options. It supports more number of currencies, and EU taxation is well taken care of. 

Security

As a platform that accepts money, the website, data collection etc. should happen on a secure environment.

Thinkific 

  • The pages have built in SSL. The data is taken in securely.
  • The versions and updates are automatically updated.

Teachable

  • Supports instant updates
  • The data pages and platform are all secure with 2048 bit security.

Both sites support cloud protection. There’s however no backup plan for the content. Keep the backup of the content through 3rd party apps.

UpTime and Monitoring

As an online course creator, you want your courses to be always up. These courses are now more and more in video and audio format than just plain written format. The visual content format is more in appeal now.

Thinkific 

  • According to Thinkific there’s 99.9% uptime on their platform
  • The platform also gives you 24 by 7 monitoring.

Teachable

  • Offers 24 by 7 monitoring
  • The monitoring and good hosting means all outages are solved before they even take place.

Another factor is outages tend to happen. They are most unexpected. If you go for these random instances the numbers vary monthly.

Pricing

As a fresh course creator pricing is one of the most important factors playing into choosing a platform.

Here’s the pricing for each platform

Thinkific

  • Thinkific comes with a free plan that can help you limited courses but enroll a number of students
  • The basic plan costs $49 per month
  • The pro plan is priced at $499 per month
  • Thinkific has a enterprise plan for which pricing is not available on the site
  • The paid plans have a 20% discount if you go for the annual pricing.
  • No transaction fee.

Teachable 

  • Teachable does away with free plan but has a free trial for just 14 days
  • The basic plan comes with 5% transaction fee billed to $39 per month
  • Pro plan is cheaper at $119 per month
  • The business plan costs $299 per month
  • For slightly better pricing the features are almost comparable.
  • Also if you pay annually the fee is reduced on further.
  • Plans paid monthly are expensive and the annual plans come with a big discount. Respectively the earlier plans get around a 20% discount and turn to $29 per month, $99 per month and $249 per month.

Thinkific is the clear winner when you see its pricing. For the individual and small enterprise plans Thinkific is your one-stop solution. There’s also a free plan and the transaction fee is fully absent. All of which makes it a better choice.

What do you think of the head to head comparison between the two tools? Do let us know in the comments below.

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