You’ll find hundreds of options when it comes to creating online courses or selling online. The reason is LMS market is rapidly blooming and projected to hit $70.83 billion by 2030. In this landscape, just choosing the right platform isn’t enough. It’s more like focusing on long-term business growth, scalability, and automation.
Kartra and Thinkific are two well-known platforms for online course creators and digital entrepreneurs. Kartra focuses on all-in-one marketing tools and sales automation features while emphasizing online course creation and delivery. Thinkific is purely a structured course builder platform with AI course builders, communities, coaching, and webinars. It emphasises learning outcomes more than sales and automation, unlike Kartra.
In this Kartra vs Thinkific comparison, we’ll break down which platform is best suited for business automation, multi-channel marketing and which one excels as a course-centric learning delivery system.
Thinkific Overview
Thinkific’s core strengths are content creation/delivery, as well as education management and marketing automation.
Thinkific allows educators to create, host, promote, and monetise their online courses under one platform. This platform is more like a white-label / LMS-style tool. It helps to grow your online business in every way, from communities to membership to digital downloads.
The highlighting feature of this platform is; creators can create and customise their own brand (custom theme, custom domain, fonts, colour). They can also sell digital products, courses, and many more related to online learning. Thinkific's site builder helps to create an eye-catching website to showcase creators’ digital products in a way that connects with their skills.
From professional templates to structure your online course, you’ll get everything customizable. Besides these perks, creators get to host webinars and run coaching. In that way, they can easily connect and interact with the students through an interactive experience.
As creators host their own courses, they can create payment plans and manage students. This gives creators full content ownership and greater independence in course creation. Moreover, this platform is committed to creating long-lasting value, generating recurring revenue, and scaling your business at every stage.
Kartra Overview
Kartra is a full-fledged marketing tool designed for the user who wants an automated workflow for every part of their customer journey. With its ready-made templates and campaign design, anyone can turn their knowledge (building a course, offering coaching or digital products) into a product. With Kartra, launching a digital program is quite effortless as it offers -
100+ pre-designed landing page templates
Powerful automation features and workflows
Multiple revenue streams
Ready-made sales funnels
Funnel mapper and simulator
Thinkific primarily emphasizes course delivery with basic marketing features. On the other hand, Kartra brings together course creation, marketing, sales, automation, and customer management
under one unified place. Hence, it becomes an ideal choice for creators who want both robust marketing power and scalable features.
Quick Comparison of Kartra and Thinkific
Before heading to the detailed comparison, let’s take a quick look at a comparison of Kartra vs. Thinkific-
Features | Kartra | Thinkific |
Focus | All-in-one marketing and sales platform | Course creation and delivery platform |
Course Building | Supports basic course creation | Advanced course builder with certification |
Landing Page Builder | Drag-and-drop landing page builder with funnel templates | Basic course sale page creation |
Sales Funnel | Integrated sales funnel | No native sales funnel |
Email Marketing Tools | Behavioural triggers with segmentation and built-in automation | Requires third-party integration for the advanced level |
Community and Engagement tools | No native community feature; only basic comments on membership sites | Integrated community features |
Best For | Businesses focused on automation, growth and scaling | Creators and educators who want a robust LMS experience |
Kartra vs Thinkific: Detailed Comparison
It’s necessary to understand how both platforms provide more realistic and scalable features for real-time scenarios and to achieve consistent growth when choosing the best creator platform. In this Kartra vs Thinkific comparison, we’ll break down six key areas where these platforms differ.
1. Online Course Building and Customization
Thinkific is dedicated to academic-style course delivery. It provides maximum flexibility of its drag-and-drop builder to create top-tier courses, quizzes, videos, downloads and certificates. It offers course delivery following a drip-scheduling process for higher student engagement.
This platform also provides a bulk importer for adding external images, videos, audio, and PDFs. For extensive student engagement, creators can leverage interactive learning through videos, interactive files and externally hosted content. Moreover, creators can host live sessions and webinars with Zoom meetings.
Thinkific’s course builder has an AI-powered course outline generator for quick course creation with a few clicks. Other features include a customizable landing page for courses and engagement tools. Such as gamification badges, to make the course creation process more structured and professional.
On the other hand, Kartra is designed for those creators who want a full business engine rather than a course platform. Though it provides some basic course creation features like creators can upload videos, PDFs, and sell digital products using its pre-made templates. It also provides a drag-and-drop course builder with white-label branding. Other features are- drip content, scheduling content and automated email notification.
Unlike Thinkific, Kartra lacks interactive content like live quizzes, lesson completion tracking and professional student certificates. Kartra’s focus for course building lies in easy integration with funnels, email automation, and upsell flows. This helps creators to market their course effortlessly, but it doesn’t provide a powerful LMS experience.
2. Landing Page Builder
Thinkific offers an AI generator to make a high-converting landing page instantly. Its landing page editor lets users design a course sales page or a simple conversion page using the template library and AI-powered content tool. Other aspects of page builders are-
Built-in lead generation form
Integrated checkout system
In-line editing tool for personal branding
Testimonials to drive conversion
Built-in SEO tools
Kartra’s landing page builder is one of the strongest features as it integrates deep sales marketing features and conversion capabilities. It offers 500+ plug-and-play designs that help to design lead capture pages, sales pages, opt-in forms, webinar registrations, upsell/downsell pages easily. With good action buttons and symbols, creators can effortlessly make an actionable landing page instantly.
Besides these, Kartra’s builders allow-
Effortless A/B testing
Dynamic pop-ups at key moments
Native form builder
Effective upselling tools
Additionally, users can automatically sync lead forms with CRM, and upon page behaviour, email sequences get triggered. This type of deep integration allows users to create a high-converting sales funnel with minimal page setup. Another powerful aspect is that users can customise page content for each visitor, like tag-based content (shows content for specific segments like gender), history-based content (showcase products based on purchase history) and list-based content (avoid showing unnecessary sign-up form for subscribed visitors).
3. Sales Funnels and Marketing Tools
Kartra offers all-in-one integrated sales and marketing tools without needing any help of external tools. This platform provides the best sales funnel tool designed for creators, coaches and experts. Kartra’s core is its integrated funnels and marketing automation, which makes it a powerhouse for entrepreneurs and businesses to focus on growth and scaling revenue.
One of the amazing features that Kartra provides is a drag-and-drop funnel builder, where users can set behaviour-based automation. Actually. sales funnel creation with Kartra is super easy with customizable templates, funnel maooper, funnel simulators and real-time analytics. On top of that, it provides 90+ pre-written campaigns targeting almost every brand niche.
Moreover, users can trigger automated email campaigns, SMS, and follow-ups based on customer behaviour, such as visited page, clicked link or purchased products. This approach helps to nurture leads with minimal effort.
On the contrary, as Thinkific’s main focus is content delivery, it provides basic sales and marketing features. It doesn’t allow a wide range of sales funnel creation, unlike Kartra. Common features are-
Creating a course sales page
Multiple pricing options with coupons and discounts
Email marketing with native and third-party apps (Mailchimp/ConvertKit)
Basic conversion analytics
Thinkific doesn’t offer any native funnel builder or any built-in marketing automation or conditional logic. Hence, it's clear that Kartra heavily dominates Thinkific in this aspect.
4. Communities
Thinkific provides a great community and engagement tools compared to Kartra. Thinkific’s community feature includes discussion threads, community posts and groups. Building a solid online learning experience is necessary and this platform provides integrated community features. In addition, the platform allows building course-related discussion areas where students can comment on lessons directly connected with the specific course and interact with instructors and peers.
Learner or consumer gets a link user experience to switch between courses and communities without any glitches. Other aspects of this feature are community analytics and on-the-go community access with a mobile device.
Kartra doesn’t have any standalone communities or forums. Rather, it offers membership sites where creators can upload their structured content. Learners can comment and interact within a paid model. The interaction on membership sites is more content-centric than community interaction.
5. Email Marketing Tools
Kartra provides an advanced and streamlined email marketing automation approach. All the email marketing functions, conditions and logics are fully automated with commands. Users can easily set up email marketing campaigns with advanced features like- if-then rules, triggers and tagging.
Some powerful Kartra email automation features are:
List segmentation
Drip campaigns
Triggered response based on customer behaviour
Its email automation is so convenient that it automatically conducts split tests, custom tag emails, optimizes emails and tracks email measurement parameters. Users can customise emails in a drag-and-drop style and use pre-made email templates. This helps businesses nurture leads synchronously and scale their business with minimal intervention.
In contrast, Thinkific also provides native email automation features (not advanced like Kartra). Users get ready-made templates, AI-generated email copy/ subject line, so less worry for manual branding. Moreover, users can use pre-made email sequences to get instant attention.
Other than that, course creators can automatically send welcome messages, enrollment confirmations, or simple announcements to the student list. FYI, Thinkific doesn't allow advanced segmentations or behavioural automation.
6. Pricing and Plans
Thinkific’s pricing plans are affordable and education-oriented, focusing on creators, academies and learning businesses. It also offers 30 day free trial.
Thinkific’s plans include-
Basic – $49/month
Start – $99/month
Grow –$199/month
THINKIFIC PLUS– Custom pricing
Kartra’s plans are designed to scale as your business grows. It offers a complimentary 1:1 onboarding call. However, it doesn’t offer any free trial option, so if you want to try out the platform, you need to pay first.
All the Kartra plans are-
ESSENTIAL– $59/month
STARTER– $99/month
GROWTH– $229/month
PROFESSIONAL – $549/month
So, Which Platform Actually Helps You Earn More Online?
In this part, we are providing a visual decision-making table of Kartra vs. Thinkific. Hopefully, this table will help you to choose the best platform for your business growth.
Better Alternative? EzyCourse: A Modern Platform to Monetise Your Knowledge
EzyCourse is an all-in-one online course creation platform where creators get all the features to monetise their knowledge. This platform offers everything that a creator needs to monetise their expertise. It is the right mix of flexibility, functionality, and affordability. Not only a course, but EzyCourse is also an ideal platform to sell your digital products with an in-built marketplace, website builder and on-the-go mobile app.
Actually, it’s not just a coding feature or to help you launch quickly, but to grow sustainably. With EzyCourse, creators get complete control over their brand, audience, and revenue.
What makes EzyCourse a creator-friendly platform is that, while most platforms charge high fees or limit what you can do under lower-tier plans, EzyCourse keeps things affordable while offering advanced-level features.
EzyCourse combines Thinkific’s simple course creation approach with the power of Kartra’s built-in email automation and sequence. This ultimately makes it a profitable platform for creators in today’s digital economy.
Let’s have a quick look at its key features-
13 types of lessons for flexible course creation (SCORM)
Drip scheduling system to publish byte-sized content.
Full control over your content.
Multiple interactive learning methods - a virtual classroom, one-on-one sessions, assignments, and quizzes
9 different pricing structures
Pre-built course landing page with a custom design option
Host coaching program with session-based scheduling
Create a multilingual website with over 170 languages
Futuristic drag-and-drop site builder with 250+ pre-built templates
Get your own white-label Android/iOS mobile apps (free with selected plans)
Built-in email builders, automation workflows, upsells, checkout options, and affiliate features
Create a Facebook-like community with a monetization feature
Pre-built calendar booking feature for appointments
A dynamic membership site builder for a recurring income source
24/7 human support
Decision Time: Which Platform Should You Choose for Your Business Growth
In the end, choosing the ideal platform depends on the type of creator or business owner you are, your desired growth, and the type of scalable features you prefer.
Kartra is a strong option if your business is heavily marketing-driven and you are an advanced-level user.
Thinkific works best for its ease of use, reliability for scaling student numbers, and its excellent performance as a learning management system (LMS).
But EzyCourse combines the key strengths of both Kartra and Thinkific — avoiding their limitations.
So, if you’re looking for a platform that offers ease of use, affordability, and advanced earning tools, EzyCourse brings everything together under a single dashboard. It’s the platform that lets you create, sell, and grow without limits.
And if that sounds you, then why not start a 1-month free EzyCourse trial?
