Thinkific vs Teachable
Thinkific vs Teachable
Intro
If you’re thinking of starting an online course business, you are very likely to have come across Thinkific or Teachable. Thinkific and Teachable are both amongst the best online standalone course platforms which allow you to create and sell online courses from your own website.
Both allow you to create and deliver content and manage your courses and students while customising your website. Since the two platforms are quite similar even though each one has their own pros and cons, creators usually find it hard to pick one that best suits their needs. In this blog post we will put the two at odds with one another and make it easy for you, saving you from hundreds of hours of research before you get your answer to Thinkific vs Teachable.
We are also going to be introducing you to another modern course creator platform - EzyCourse - so you can not only compare between Thinkific and Teachable, but also realise there are better options out in the market now, that offer you more at even reasonable pricing plans, so you don’t necessarily need to choose some platform that might not be offering all that you need just because its been on the market for a long run.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Overview
Thinkific Overview
Thinkific is one of the most popular online learning platforms. With Thinkific you can build websites to create and sell your courses online and engage with your community.
Thinkific features a simple, user-friendly interface, allowing creators to quickly setup, build and launch their own websites to deliver their content, without having to bother much about the intimidating technical know-how.
Teachable Overview
Like Thinkific, Teachable is another online course platform, which makes selling online courses easy.
Unlike online course marketplaces like Udemy, both Thinkific and Teachable allow creators to build white-label solutions, while having their creators back on the technicalities.
Key Differences - Feature Comparison
Even though both platforms seem to have great similarities, they differ in certain specific features. Thinkific primarily focuses on course creation, whereas Teachable mostly focuses on customizability and ease of course creation.
Let’s start by comparing the course creation and delivery experience.
Course Features:
Both Thinkific and Teachable provide similar course content delivery options, from hosting unlimited videos, organising courses into lessons and modules, drip feeding your content, offering course completion certificates, tracking student’s progress.
In general, Teachable prevails in terms of ease of usability, and adaptability. Despite the fact that both platforms offer similar features, Thinkific does a better job overall, it offers much more. Thinkific allows creating more interactive course content, with advanced quizzes, and assessments. Unlike Teachable, Thinkific also gives creators the capability to collect feedback from students through surveys and polls. Even though these differences might feel insignificant, receiving feedback is crucial for course enhancements.
Site Design & Customization:
When using site builders to build an online platform, one important factor to take into consideration is the site customisation availability and extent.
While lacking in scope compared to other popular online course platforms like Kajabi, both Thinkific and Teachable allow creators to host their courses on professional-looking websites either on a free subdomain, or on their own custom domains in paid plans, and with higher priced plans, creators can get a full white-label, branded site.
Though Teachable allows you to add your brand identity by letting you customise the logo, fonts and colours, but, unfortunately Teachable has only one site theme, restricting it greatly in terms of site design customizability. The Thinkific site builder, on the other hand, offers a variety of themes in various styles to meet your unique requirements. So Thinkific has definitely got a competitive edge here.
So, Thinkific is undoubtedly the better option if you value personalised branding and design flexibility.
Sales & Marketing:
While deciding which platform is best for you, it is important to consider the marketing and sales capabilities the available platforms have to offer. No matter how excellent your content is, if you don’t market it the right way to your target prospects, you won't be able to generate sales to make your business grow.
Both Teachable and Thinkific deliver sophisticated systems to market your courses, and make income from them. Both allow you to sell courses in different ways, create subscriptions, bundle courses, provide lifetime course access, conduct email marketing campaigns and launch affiliate marketing campaigns.
It’s very evident that both offer extensive tools, but there are some differences which you need to take into account before choosing one platform over another. The two platforms most significantly differ from one another regarding their checkout procedures.
While Thinkific requires users to first register an account before they can complete the payment, Teachable's 1-step checkout process is well optimised and leads to higher conversion rates.
On the other hand, Thinkific gives you more control over subscription pricing and upsell creation. Thinkific also provides instant payouts for creators on all plans, whereas Teachable users have reported some delays with payouts processing in regions outside US or Canada, unless you’re on a higher priced plan.
Hence, with the easy, one step checkout process Teachable wins in terms of sales and marketing.
Customer/Technical Support:
It is a quite well known fact that the majority of the existing software systems offer support only through tutorials and ticketing systems which have response times of 24-48 hours or longer, depending on if it's a premium service or not. However, individuals who aren’t tech savvy rely heavily on proactive customer/technical support, particularly when they encounter technical issues that impact their sales and revenue.
Fortunately, both Thinkific and Teachable have a good record of customer support, even if only email support is included in the free plans, and real-time live support is offered only on higher priced plans. Thinkific provides live phone call support whereas Teachable provides live chat support. Moreover, both platforms have robust social media communities for creators to discuss and resolve their queries.
Additionally, both the platforms have invested heavily in training their users, building a comprehensive knowledge base as well, where they have included step-by-step instructions on carrying out different actions on the platform.
Teachable created TeachableU - an online training school, where it provides resources to support creators at every step through their course building journey. Besides, Thinkific also offers a premium training called the Online Business Masterclass which is available to its paid subscribers at no extra charges.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Pricing/Subscription Plan Comparison
Both Thinkific and Teachable offer 4 different pricing plans, with 3 amongst them being paid plans.
The starter plan on Thinkific costs $99/month, whereas Teachable offers the basic plan at only $39/month.
The most popular pricing plan on Thinkific is namely the ‘Grow’ plan at $199/month, and on Teachable the most popular pricing plan is called the Pro plan at $119/month.
And the highest priced plan differs by 200$ between the two platforms. So there’s a major difference in the pricing plans on Thinkific and Teachable.
Though Thinkific looks expensive, it has 0% transaction fee on all its plans, on the contrary Teachable charges transaction fees on its free and basic plans. Both the platforms, Thinkific and Teachable offer the same discount(25%) on yearly subscriptions.
Thinkific vs Teachable: Which is the winner?
The bottom line is that both Thinkific and Teachable are reliable platforms, with relatively long market grip track records. So, which is better? Thinkific or Teachable?
As both the platforms offer remarkably similar course creation experience, ultimately the decision depends on your professional business objectives.
If you’re prioritising site brand and power of design customisation, and looking for advanced assessment providing tools, Thinkific obviously is the winner.
On the contrary, if you’re a beginner, looking for a simple solution to just create a course and leave it in addition to effective prospect customer conversion procedures, Teachable might be a better option.
Still finding some features missing? Are you among one of the 2.5 billion Android users worldwide? Sorry to say, you’ll be missing out on a native mobile experience, as none of these platforms, neither Thinkific nor Teachable offers an Android app, furthermore Thinkific doesn’t even have an app at all, so leaves out roughly around 15 billion of the smartphone users from access to your courses. Or maybe the cost at which these platforms are offering particular features is getting tight on your budget.
We know what you’re looking for and thus, we want to introduce you to another platform - EzyCourse - a modern course creator platform. Read on to gain more insights on EzyCourse, so you yourself can decide how EzyCourse is the best option available for you.
Our Choice - EzyCourse
We are doing something that no one else is doing by connecting, educating, and building a community of educators and learners who can solely rely on one platform only.
EzyCourse offers the tools you need for every step of your online journey, from initial product creation, to well past your launch.
Why EzyCourse?
Because we provide practically all of the services offered by Thinkific and Teachable, in addition to being a top-notch, modern community and site-builder platform with fantastic mobile apps available on both Android and iOS and much more.
EzyCourse’s state-of-art site builder is a one-size-fits-all solution. The best online course platform should afford you the most flexibility, but none of the online course platforms provide complete dynamic site customisation abilities. EzyCourse’s site builder features 250+ ready-made blocks and templates, besides with the drag-and-drop builder. EzyCourse team is continuously working on keeping the design library up to date with new designs.
EzyCourse also gives creators more revenue generation options, even with the site-builder. If you upload your own block/template into EzyCourse’s design library you get extra revenue when other creators use your designs. EzyCourse also lets you save drafts of your work, generate links with edit access and simply share it with external designers from anywhere in the world so they can customise your site pixel by pixel to fit your needs.
EzyCourse makes learning an exciting journey by allowing creators to offer powerful communities to nurture teacher-student and fellow learners discussions. EzyCourse also lets teachers offer group/private chats to their students, so that it facilitates students learning by getting real-time help. Communities and group/private chats can be offered as standalone products or as add-ons with any courses or bundle courses or products.
Apart from supporting digital products sale, EzyCourse adds native support of physical products sale, a feature no other course platform has built-in support. Moreover products are built-in SEO-friendly.
Also, EzyCourse offers very affordable pricing plans. EzyCourse includes a forever free plan, and 4 priced plans. EzyCourse doesn’t charge any additional transaction fees on any of its plans, unlike Teachable.
EzyCourse offers you the most in basic plan itself, in contrast to Teachable or Thinkific which don’t include all features unless you purchase their most expensive plan.
Conclusion
In the end the choice eventually depends on your business goals. It’s totally your personal preference, about what will work for you, your business and your target customers.
By now, you must have got a clear idea of all the three course creator platforms, the features they offer, benefits and drawbacks of one over another. So you must’ve decided your ideal choice.
Although you may already be aware of the platform that is best for you, our opinion is that EzyCourse will prove to be the best online course platform, providing an interactive and engaging quality learning experience to your students, while also providing the customizable abilities allowing you to design your stunning unique website. EzyCourse is your true all-in-one solution unlike other so-called ones, with all tools built-in you’d ever need to grow and scale your online business under one hood.
