Thinkific
10
Our Score
Huge list of features.
User-friendly.
Easily customizable.
Support can be limited.
Transaction fees.
Welcome to my Kajabi vs Thinkific 2023.
I spent 24+ hours researching about Kajabi vs Thinkific online course platforms that are some of the most popular platforms available.
In this Kajabi vs Thinkific review, we’ll take a look at all the features and benefits of this software and see how it compares to other options.
I’ll also answer some of the most commonly asked questions about Kajabi vs Thinkific.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Kajabi vs Thinkific Review 2023
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Things to Consider Before Buying an Online Course Platform
It can be overwhelming to navigate a new idea for your business on your own. Anyone can create a brand and sell it online these days, but how can it be successful without the right tools?
Say you’ve already got your online business, but you want to expand. You don’t want to get scammed if you seek advice. It’s hard to know who has legitimate services and who is just trying to rip you off.
If you’re an expert in your field and want to help others with your knowledge, teaching is a great way to do that. With the rapid growth of technology and people needing services online, online courses are becoming a necessity.
On Thinkific, you can create your courses in pretty much any field of expertise. According to Thinkific themselves, “People use Thinkific to teach all types of courses from learning to play guitar, to flying a drone, to enhancing your digital marketing skills! The opportunities for online education are unlimited.”
Before you join Thinkific, Kajabi, Teachable, or any other online course site for your business, make sure you know what your starting point is. Do you already have a blog or website? Do you have a large audience? How many more people would you like to reach?
Presenting Thinkific
Founded in 2012, Thinkific promotes itself as an all-in-one platform that helps you grow your current business. You can increase your audience by selling your courses on your website with their technology and support.
Thinkific offers services that help you launch your site and add multimedia to your classes, even if you have no previous experience with this type of technology. Since Thinkific and Kajabi constantly get compared, let’s take a look at how they introduce themselves.
Founded in 2010, Kajabi also promises many services through one convenient platform. They also market towards people just getting started and current entrepreneurs and influencers looking to grow their audiences.
While Thinkific offers quite a lot (and some of it for free, unlike Kajabi), you want to avoid Thinkific if you don’t already have an area of expertise to share or have just started your business and have no following.
There is no course marketplace, and it would be up to you to market on your own. It is still possible with the tools and features that Thinkific offers, such as affiliate marketing and paying for advertising, but it might be more difficult.
Keep reading to find out more about Thinkific and alternative platforms. For now, let’s keep it simple with Thinkific’s pros and possible cons if you are not sure about which platform is right for you.
Thinkific Pros
- Huge list of features in all of their plans
- User-friendly and easily customizable
- Free 30-day trial
- Unlimited number of students
- Affordable plans
Thinkific Cons
- Support can be limited (for example, no live chat help and email support is available only from 9-5 Monday-Friday)
- No mobile app
- There are some transaction fees
Features and Benefits
Thinkific’s incredibly thorough Features page breaks down their five main categories, which are (in order on their page):
- Build Your Courses
- Design Your Site
- Market and Sell
- Support Your Students
- Security
While you can also do more research through their site on your own, let’s break down the different features they offer. Hopefully, you’ll be able to learn more and make an informed decision about if Thinkific’s style is the right match for you and your online courses.
Build Your Courses
Thinkific allows you to create your courses with user-friendly drag and drop for your content. You can upload many things to Thinkific to your courses as well, including videos, quizzes, surveys, discussions, Google Docs, and more. The best part is, no coding is necessary.
You can also easily customize your course to suit your brand and style. Thinkific gives you a choice to make courses private or hidden, add either expiring or lasting content, add drip schedule content, prerequisites for your students, and so on. All you need to do to customize is click a button.
Design Your Site
It’s incredibly easy to design your site on Thinkific, even if you have no experience designing at all. They have a series of premade themes to choose from, and you can customize and organize it as you’d like. There are also helpful instructional videos to show you the ropes.
Thinkific also mentions that you could create a new domain name or deep-link the current domain name for your business to ensure that your audience can seamlessly transition into your courses.
I’ve mentioned that their site design tools are excellent for beginners, but Thinkific offers advanced options for those familiar with HTML and CSS.
Market and Sell
Here is where Thinkific offers quite a few options for you to sell your courses and make sure they’re appealing to your audience and potential new students. You have complete control over how you package your courses and make money from them.
You can give your students the option to pay through memberships or subscriptions, choose a payment plan, and more. Free trials and promo deals are options for potential students so you can grow your potential audience.
As for payment, Thinkific offers you the choice to charge in over 100 currencies with 100% secure payments. They also accept all credit cards, so your potential students won’t be turned away if they don’t have the right card.
When it comes to marketing, Thinkific has features to help you reach more students. You can try affiliate marketing, create email campaigns, use data tracking that offers support for Google Ads and Facebook.
Support Your Students
Growing your audience is important for business, but keeping your current students interested is equally crucial. You can keep your students motivated by encouraging and supporting them through messages and by congratulating them when they’ve completed lessons or full courses with certificates.
Thinkific also allows your students the option to go over materials and lessons again (if you don’t choose the option to let the content expire). You can also track students’ progress and collect reports.
Security
Thinkific promises you security through several features, as they promise that it is their number 1 priority to keep your data safe. They offer cloud hosting and daily backups with built-in SSL certificates. Automatic updates ensure that you have the most recent versions of all features.
They also have 99.9% uptime and 24/7 monitoring, which is amazing! You can rest assured that your courses will be available to students and working properly.
Kajabi Vs Thinkific Reviews
During my research for tools to help other business owners, in addition to those numerous Kajabi vs. Thinkific reviews, I found user reviews on both sites. The reviews for Thinkific were incredibly positive. I expected to see more skeptics with bad experiences, but the overall rating was quite high, as you can see here:
Alternatives
Naturally, Thinkific is not the only platform out there to help you share your expertise and improve your business. As we’ve covered a little bit of what seems to be its main rival, Kajabi, let’s go into some more detail about Thinkific’s competitors.
1. Kajabi
As mentioned before, Kajabi is a platform for entrepreneurs looking to sell classes about their expertise, even those new to online business. At first, it doesn’t sound all that different from Thinkific.
Kajabi does arguably make it easier for those who have never run an online business before. Like Thinkific, you have templates and design options, but you also have more tools to make marketing simpler.
Kajabi also boasts many success stories from business owners who have used their platform and have a good deal of testimonials about their service.
Kajabi Pros
- Free two-week trial
- Helps with making your courses, marketing them, and sales
- 24/7 customer support helpline
- iOS and Android app
- No transaction fees
Kajabi Cons
- A more expensive platform
- Does not offer a free plan
2. Mighty Networks
Might Networks markets themselves more as a community than a platform for your courses. In contrast to Kajabi, they opt for more approachable ways to market your content, hence a common theme through Mighty Networks being their actual networks.
Only recently, Mighty Networks added top-rated online courses and memberships to their community. They want their customers to market less “aggressively,” as they put it, using the power of networking and building your way up to build onto your business.
Like Kajabi, they also offer an app on iOs and Android so that you can keep an eye on your business wherever you go. More than half of Mighty Networks’ growth and engagement occur on the mobile app. They even allow you to upgrade and offer your courses and memberships to your mobile app.
If you’d rather not get into the technicality of marketing the way Kajabi does or the way Thinkific offers help, Mighty Networks may work for you.
Mighty Networks Pros
- Mobile app available
- Community and networking based engagement
- Can convert or add your courses to your own mobile app to keep track of business on the go
Mighty Networks Cons
- Not originally a platform for online classes
- Not as many marketing tactics to help you grow
3. Teachable
While Mighty Networks offers a community space, Teachable (as its name suggests) tells its users that “everything is teachable,” as their main focus is online courses.
They also don’t market exclusively to business owners as other platforms might. People who want to make money online and have no business yet are still welcome to join and offer their services.
Thinkific and Teachable share similar features on their platforms, but there are some other differences. For example, many of the options on Thinkific, such as course templates, video libraries, surveys, and the ability to copy your lessons to make your next one easier, are not available on Teachable.
In fact, many people who started on Teachable have actually moved their courses to Thinkific. This switching of platforms isn’t necessarily a bad thing for teachable, as it seems like a great way for non-business owners to start out!
Teachable Pros
- Great for beginners
- Covers all of the tech
- You can sell ebooks, conferences, workshops, and other services
- Can pay your affiliates automatically
Teachable Cons
- Upsales are difficult to create
- Maintenance can interfere with your work and classes
What Next?
Drawing from my extensive experience with both Thinkific and Kajabi, I’ve found that Thinkific excels in its user-friendly approach and customization options.
Having personally utilized Thinkific to launch courses in diverse fields, including digital marketing and photography, I can attest to its ease of use for both beginners and experts.
The intuitive drag-and-drop course creation, coupled with options for personalized branding, ensures an engaging learning experience.
While Kajabi also offers merits, my personal familiarity with Thinkific’s intricacies and its positive impact on my online courses solidifies my preference.
I’ve found Thinkific to be an excellent platform that can help people share their knowledge and expand their business. Don’t forget that you can give it a try with the free trial.
