7 Best Thinkific Alternatives 2022
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Considering choosing Thinkific as a platform to host your online course? It might be a great choice, but there are other alternatives that you should consider first.
What are the best Thinkific alternatives? My top Thinkific alternatives are Udemy, Kajabi,
In this article, I’ll explain why you may want to look at alternatives before settling on Thinkific to host your online courses. Then I’ll walk you through some of my favorite other options.
Why Should You Look For Better Thinkific Alternatives?
With most things in life, one size doesn’t fit all.
Just because an online marketer or influencer that you follow raves about Thinkific, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best choice for your business.
Different online course platforms will be better or worse depending on what stage your business is currently at. And you may simply value some features in a platform more or less than others.
Thinkific allows you to create professional online courses. But its price is also higher than some other marketplaces like Udemy or Skillshare once you get past their free plan.
Thinkific also doesn’t help with marketing efforts, so you’ll need to put a lot more time and resources into promoting your online courses if you choose to use their platform.
- You can read the full review of Thinkific online course platform to learn all pros and cons, and compare Thinkific Pricing Plans to choose the right one for your course.
With that in mind, here are my top 7 Thinkific alternatives.
1. Udemy
If you’re just starting out, Udemy is one of the platforms with the lowest barrier to entry when it comes to creating courses.
They only have a few quality requirements for courses on their platform. Your course needs at least 30 minutes of video, and at least five modules.
But aside from that, anyone can sign up to be an instructor and sell their courses on Udemy.
Udemy also offers a lot of help along the way with getting started. When you sign up to be an instructor on their site, they’ll provide you with a lot of tools to help you succeed.
You’ll get access to a tool similar to Google Analytics that will help you determine if your course idea will get enough traffic to consider pursuing.
They also provide a large range of lessons and other resources to help you start creating high-quality courses, even if you’re a complete beginner.
Since Udemy gets a percentage of the earnings from every course you sell, it’s in their best interest to help you succeed and create worthwhile courses.
Since Udemy is a market leader when it comes to online courses, there also isn’t much you need to do in terms of marketing. This is a big advantage over Thinkific.
You can choose to promote your course if you wish. But you can also simply create it and upload it to Udemy, and people will start to find it and sign up organically.
- Read the full review of Udemy where I go over all pros and cons of this online course platform.
So it’s one of the more passive course creation platforms that are available.
The downside to all of this support is that Udemy takes anywhere from 25% to 50% of every sale you make, depending on how many people are signing up for your courses per month.
So you’ll have to consider if that’s a sacrifice you’re willing to make. Or alternatively, you may want to consider other platforms where you keep more of your earnings, but need to do more legwork in finding students on your own.
- Here I list and compare all Udemy Alternatives and Competitors.
Putting a course on Udemy is sort of like uploading your eBook for sale on Amazon. While you own the content, you’re using someone else’s platform. So your business is at the whims of someone else.
You may not be able to connect with your customers directly or get them to sign up for your email list. And if the platform decides it doesn’t like your course, there’s the risk that it could shut down your course overnight.
Lastly, you’re likely to face more competition from other course creators on Udemy.
Since the platform has over 100,000 courses available, it might be hard to find a where at least one or two courses aren’t already available.
While these other courses will exist regardless of what platform you use to host your own course, when you publish on Udemy it means you’ll be directly competing with them in the site’s own search results.
But even with these cons, I do think Udemy has a lot to offer to new course creators who have no existing audience.
It’s a great way to get started. And since Udemy does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to promoting your course, you can make creating great course content your main focus.
2. Kajabi
Kajabi is one of the Thinkific alternatives that offer more of an “all in one” package. It’s a great choice if you consider yourself an intermediate or advanced level course creator.
It’s also worth checking out if you already have an existing coaching business, or are an expert in your field.
The sheer amount of options Kajabi offers might be a bit overwhelming for a complete beginner. But you don’t need to be a very technical person by any means to use it.
You can use the platform to create great courses without any frustrating coding or other technical details.
With Kajabi, you get everything you need to create a great online course and everything that goes along with it.
Of course it includes all the basics you’d expect in an online course. But it also allows you to create a membership site or private social area for your course.
It also comes with website building tools and blogging features included as well.
Want to connect with your students in realtime? Built-in video streaming capabilities is something that you get from Kajabi that Thinkific doesn’t currently include.
Kajabi is also a powerhouse when it comes to marketing, and provides you with everything you need to drive course sales.
You get email marketing tools, landing page tools, and automated marketing funnels to start building your email list.
Plus it also includes a whole range of affiliate marketing features.
You also get more streamlined payment processing with Kajabi, that’s all done without having to leave the site.
In terms of Pricing, Kajabi does cost more. The basic plan is $119 per month, compared to $49 per month if you go with Thinkific. But for that higher price tag, I think you do get a lot more features.
One thing that Kajabi may not help with is creating a uniquely branded or very customized website.
But if you already have a premium WordPress theme for your site, this is probably less of a huge deal.
- Learn more about Kajabi and why it’s my top online course platform in my in-depth review.
- Read my comparison over Kajabi Pricing Plans.
- View these Kajabi Course Examples and inspire.
- You can also find 7 Best Kajabi Alternatives here.
3. Teachable
Teachable is another Thinkific alternative that I’d consider if you’re interested in a platform that provides more support for promotion and marketing.
Teachable is easy to initially set up. With just a few clicks, your school will be ready to go with minimal configuration needed.
However, in terms of customization things get a bit trickier than on some other platforms.
Some users report that
So
Teachable comes with a great affiliate program built in. So it’s super easy to get satisfied students and others to promote your course for you, in exchange for a percentage of your sales.
This can really get the word out there and provide a major boost in course sales.
The platform also comes with powerful email marketing tools that allow you to set up specific triggers at various steps along the way.
For example, your students may receive an email after signing up, a congratulations email after finishing all of the modules, or other key points in the process.
Teachable includes all sorts of surveys and forms to get feedback from students. This allows you to better communicate with your customers and hear how they really feel, or areas you may be able to improve your course.
Teachable is also awesome for creating sales pages! Lastly, this Thinkific alternative comes with a lower price tag.
Their basic plan costs $29 per month, compared to $49 per month with
- You can learn more about features in course building in this Teachable review.
- Compare Teachable Pricing plans
- See these Teachable Course Examples
- Find more Teachable Alternatives
4. LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is an alternative that offers a lot in terms of third-party marketing tools, analytics, and other areas where I feel it surpasses what Thinkific offers.
It also allows for the creation of really engaging and interactive courses.
Like a lot of online course platforms, LearnWorlds helps you with SEO (search engine optimization) and helps you to manage keywords, metatags, and other information.
But it does a lot more including landing page and sales page creation, native mobile apps, full white label branding, and more.
What I really love about LearnWorlds is how it handles video. It allows you to add interactions to your video without a lot of extra time-consuming editing and post-production.
You can simply upload your video and then add questions, pointers, overlay images, links, and a lot more directly to your videos on the platform.
LearnWorlds also automatically extracts an interactive transcript from your video. Not only does this improve accessibility for students, but also makes your video content easier to navigate.
You can choose to either host your video content with LearnWorlds directly, or use any major video provider if your videos are already hosted somewhere else in the cloud.
LearnWorlds features a built-in social network that further helps boost course engagement.
Your students can share tips and ideas, talk about their experiences, or give feedback on any issues they’re facing.
Your students will love the chance to communicate with each other, and this can also add a lot of extra value in terms of networking.
If you’re looking to generate residual income instead of just one-off course purchases, they also support a subscription model.
LearnWorlds starts off at $24 per month for their Starter plan. But in my opinion, this plan lacks a lot of features. Plus at this tier they charge a flat $5 fee per course sale.
So if you’re selling more than about 10 courses per month, it makes sense to upgrade to their $79 Pro Trainer plan which has no transaction fees, unlimited courses, and many other features including Zapier integrations, question banks, and more.
- Learn my LearnWorlds review to gt a good overview of the platform and what it offers.
- Compare LearnWorlds Pricing plans.
- Find more in my Learnworlds vs. Thinkific comparison article to know which platform is better.
5. Podia
Podia is yet another Thinkific alternative that allows you to have all of your tools in a single platform.
You can use Podia to run online courses and membership sites, plus host all of your digital downloads to go along with them. It also includes email marketing, landing page creation, and a built-in live chat tool.
Podia is a bit more limited compared to other platforms when it comes to customization. But if you aren’t looking for something super customized and branded, you can likely overlook that.
Especially for the price tag for their lower package of only $39 per month. Their more premium package is $79 per month and includes a few extra features including the ability to create membership subscriptions, a blog, embedded checkout, affiliate marketing, and third-party code.
But no matter what Podia plan you choose, there are always zero transaction fees.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re making $10 per month or $10,000 per month, you always pay the same monthly fee.
- Read my deep Podia Review and check out Podia Pricing Plans.
6. Clickfunnels
If you’ve been in the world of internet marketing for any period of time, then you’ve probably heard the name Clickfunnels before.
But you may not necessarily associate it with creating online courses.
While other course platform alternatives like Thinkific are more focused on organizing and presenting course content, Clickfunnels has a strong focus on making more money for its users.
Where ClickFunnels excels is getting customers to buy your product. In this case, your online course.
It features an easy-to-use page builder with a drag and drop editor. It’s a fairly simple platform to learn and start using.
But it also has a lot of additional sales features that other course platforms may not offer.
Including A/B testing capabilities, and lots of easy integrations with third party software to take payments and capture emails right on your site.
Clickfunnels also has a WordPress plugin that will save you a lot of time and effort in terms of site integration.
Unless you’re hosting your online course on a site like Udemy, chances are that you’re going to need some kind of sales funnel to promote your online course anyway.
So it makes sense to just use your sales funnel software to also host your online course. Otherwise you’ll need two separate services, and some way of connecting them.
And in my experience, the more different platforms and software you’re trying to link together, the more chance there is to run into technical difficulties.
One downside to Clickfunnels is that their pricing is a bit higher. They have two plans for either $97 or $297 per month.
That might be a bit much for you if you’re a new course creator that’s just starting out.
- Learn more about Clickfunnels membership site in my guide.
7. LearnDash
LearnDash is a bit different than the other Thinkific alternatives I’ve discussed so far. Most online course platforms require you to upload your content to them.
But LearnDash is an LMS (Learning Management System plugin for WordPress.
I prefer this because every part of your course is on your own site. You don’t have to worry about other platforms having outages or closing.
You have full control over your content. So it’s my preferred way of running online courses.
LearnDash is rich with features and allows you to customize your course and deliver it exactly how you envision it.
It includes a powerful page builder, plus you can add your own user forums, course quizzes, and other interactive features.
It also integrates nicely with most of the major shopping cart plugins, which makes taking payments easy and straightforward.
LearnDash is more expensive than Thinkific, with its basic plan costing $199 per year.
But considering the full control that you get over your course, I think it’s a great value for instructors who are serious about selling online courses.
- Read the full guide over LearnDash WordPress LMS plugin here.
Conclusion
Thinkific is one of the top platforms that you should consider when creating your online course.
But there are alternatives that could be a better choice, depending on your specific situation.
The online course platform that you select is likely something that you’re going to stick with for years to come. So it’s worth doing your due diligence to find something that will best suit your needs.
Not just in the immediate future, but also long-term as your online course business continues to grow.
Get inspiration by these Thinkific Course Examples if you decide to choose Thinkific as you online course platform.
About the Author Jacob M.
Jacob has a background in finance and engineering. Outside of his day job, he is a lifelong learner, who enjoys reading, taking online courses, and writing about what he's learned.
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