Thinkific vs. Teachable: an LMS-As-A-Platform comparison

Both Thinkific and Teachable are hosted, platform-as-a-service solutions. This means that you essentially “rent” space on their platforms for your courses and memberships.

With a WordPress solution you have more ownership over your course content, and freedom to migrate to another LMS or membership management plugin if you encounter limitations with your existing setup.

On the upside, with hosted, platform-as-a-service solutions you won’t have to invest in website hosting, a premium theme or page builder, video hosting, security, or platform maintenance because these are included in your investment.

Unfortunately, this means that you play by their rules: if you want more features or flexibility, you’re left with no easy way to take your content with you when you cancel or decide to move on.

Some of these platform-as-a-service tools have opened their system a little more for more advanced pricing plans to allow you to export your content and members if you do decide to move, but it’s not always in the most usable format.

Granted, both platforms are well-designed and easy to use both Teachable and Thinkific have closed systems that are not easily extended by installing add-ons and plugins.

So if you want to add things like advanced gamification, or more customized setups and features, you’re stuck waiting for their developers to create the feature or using a third-party tool like Zapier to power the integration.

Teachable and Thinkific offer basic built-in email automation functionality, which allows you to send triggered emails from within the platform based on your students’ actions.

However, if your business uses advanced sales and fulfillment funnels for your online courses you’ll want to ensure the platform you choose integrates with your marketing automation system or CRM of choice.

Teachable and Thinkific have been expanding their integrations and at the time of this review, you can integrate Teachable directly with ConvertKit or MailChimp. Thinkific integrates directly with MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, and Infusionsoft.

Other marketing automation systems can be connected using a third-party tool such as Zapier.

Thinkific and Teachable have been actively developing and expanding their learning management system features since their first inception. Here are a few highlights. 

One advantage of Thinkific’s quiz features is that you will have access to more advanced quizzing options such as randomized question banks and explanatory response options.  You can also include videos and images in the question and answer options for your quizzes.

Thinkific has an assignment feature as well, so you can collect homework and create a more engaging learning experience to check and reinforce comprehension of your course material. 

Certificates of completion can be distributed as course participants complete their courses and you’ll have a library of templates to choose from, however, this feature is only available on Pro plans and above.

In comparison, Teachable also boasts a certificate of completion feature and you can also build quizzes into your courses, but your options are more limited and all of your quizzes will be in plain text. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a homework or assignment feature available to Teachable users, but you could use a third-party tool like Google forms and link out to them.

If student progress and overall course participation metrics are important to your business model, both Teachable and Thinkific include reporting features, but you’ll find more advanced and comprehensive reports using Teachable.

Bulk course enrollment is a powerful opportunity for you to sell your courses to larger groups like corporate team training and family accounts. With this setup, a single person purchases a group of licenses at once, then, they can add their team members immediately, or over a period of time as needed.

Recently, this feature has been in high demand, and new use cases for this are becoming more and more popular from online course owners.

Thinkific has recently released their “groups”  feature to their growth and premier users so it’s now possible to offer group or bulk course enrollment on their platform. 

Unfortunately, with Teachable, the process isn’t fully automated or idea for most people, but it is possible. You can sell courses in bulk by creating an offer for the number of people the buyer is purchasing for, then providing each person with an individual coupon code to redeem for access to the course.

Both Thinkific and Teachable integrate with Stripe and PayPal, but Teachable offers additional payment gateway integrations that could be advantageous for your business. 

In addition to Teachable’s internal payment gateway, Stripe, and PayPal, you have the option to set up both Apple Pay and Google Pay as well. These additional gateways create potential for increased conversion rates on mobile devices for Teachable users.  

Unlike most other platforms, Teachable collects and remits VAT for your business when appropriate when you use their back-office feature. Some shopping cart integrations and tools will handle this for you, but most learning management platforms don’t.

You can also create coupons and 1-click upsells with Teachable. This functionality also exists within Thinkific, but the major difference between the two systems is their order forms. 

You’ll likely find conflicting evidence regarding one-step or multi-step order forms and their impact on conversion rates but know with Teachable you’ll be creating one-step order forms. 

Thinkific users use a two-step checkout process, but also give you the option to opt-in to take part in testing a one-step setup. 

The two-step checkout process can be advantageous, especially when it comes to conversions since you’ll be capturing potential customer’s email addresses on the first step, making it easy to follow up and recapture those abandoned carts. 

Another advantage to Thinkific is your ability to create free or paid trials for your potential customers, which is also known to help increase conversions. 

If you’re planning to offer recurring subscriptions or payment plans for your courses and memberships you won’t be able to do so with your PayPal integration but will be able to with Stripe. 

When you make a sale your earnings are immediately available within your payment gateway, but unfortunately, Thinkific doesn’t automatically collect VAT or remit payments on your behalf so be sure to consult an accountant to best determine how to handle this for your business. 

If VAT is an essential component of your business, you can use third-party integration tools to make it easier to collect and remit these payments.

Thinkific and Teachable both have a built-in affiliate management feature, but they do things a little differently.

If you’re a Thinkific user, you can only set an affiliate commission to be the same percentage for all of your courses and programs and you’re not able to create a custom cookie window for tracking. You’ll only be able to track affiliate activity on your Thinkific hosted pages and order forms unless you have a developer that is able to create custom Javascript to enable this functionality.

Affiliate payouts will need to be processed manually, but with tools like PayPal mass payout, this can be done quickly and easily.

In comparison, Teachable’s affiliate management features tend to be a bit more advanced than Thinkific’s.

With the use of Teachable’s back office, you can automatically pay affiliates, collect W-8 and W-9 forms, and issue their 1099s, but you do have to pay a 2% fee for this functionality.

You can also create custom cookie windows and create unique tracking links for URLs hosted outside of Teachable making it a little more flexible than Thinkific.

• Budget isn’t a major concern for advanced features
  You’re a brand conscious business owner and want as much design flexibility as possible
• You’re in need of more advanced LMS features such as quizzes and homework submissions
• Community engagement is important to your online course
  You want direct integration with your CRM or email marketing system
• You don’t mind giving up full control to have your courses hosted for you on a 3rd party platform that you can’t easily export or leave

• You want to build a storefront or simple website quickly and get your courses for sale right away 
• You’re willing to adapt and compromise your branding to fit within the ‘out-of-the-box’ design offerings and don’t mind the Teachable branding reflected within your course
• Multi-currency offerings are necessary for your course sales and you don’t mind paying additional fees for tax and e-commerce features for ease of the user.
• You won’t mind setting up your business on ‘rented land’ and manually migrating when your business grows
• In-depth progress reporting for your courses as a whole and on an individual level is an asset to your business
• You want to have the ability to A/B test your sales pages to optimize for conversions