Thinkific vs teachable unbiased comparison (so you can finally decide..)

12/05/2018 Thinkific vs Teachable UNBIASED Comparison (so you can finally decide..)
https://foundertips.com/thinkific-vs-teachable/ 1/76
Thinki c vs Teachable UNBIASED
Comparison (so you can nally decide..)
This is what you’ve been waiting for!
The battle of the giants!
Which Is The Best Online Course Platform?
START THINKIFIC TEACHABLE THINKIFIC VS TEACHABLE BEST ALTERNATIVES ASK A QUESTION
WHICH IS RIGHT FOR ME?

Everywhere I go when it comes to course platforms, the conversation inevitably ends up comparing
these both solutions:
Thinkiﬁc & Teachable
Conversations get emotional, it’s crazy.
To me it is more about weighing pros and cons. Looking at each speciﬁc person & company’s use
case and only then making the decision.

There are both love and hate situations with both of these platforms.
WARNING: This page contains lots of details and information that could easily leave you feeling
overwhelmed!
If at any point your head feels like after drinking too much champagne, there are two things you can
do:
1. Visit the self-serve recommendation page where I focus just on fundamentals and explain
which solution to pick using simple questions you can ask yourself;
2. If you’d like me to help with your exact situation, just fill out the form at the bottom of any
page on this website or use the contact form here. I’ve helped a lot of people achieve clarity
and cut through the fluff and I would be happy to get you UNSTUCK too.
Full disclosure, I’m brutally honest.
All these details might leave you feeling that there is no right answer because I don’t scream in awe
about neither Thinkific nor Teachable. I give my praises and criticise them where they deserve it.
If you like this approach – awesome!

Just remember that no matter what you choose – both of these platforms are really good solutions
and you can hack things together with either of them. They work!
But here we are putting these platforms under the lens and really taking the long-term view in
your course creation future.
I’m sure you would love to make the right choice from the start and not switch platforms one year in,
which will just confuse your existing students!
And remember this one thing..

TRUTH: there is no such thing as perfect software.
..but there are better or worse solutions for YOU!
Eh, I wish somebody had given me this info when I was going through all this process.
But nothing existed online to help me with the choice of Thinkiﬁc vs Teachable.
Just lots of BS all around.
I remember reading on Quora how one guy suggested how Teachable being able to automatically
collect VAT taxes was the key reason why he picked it.
But it’s not that simple.
Did you know there are many cases where VAT doesn’t need to be collected at all?
You can legally evade it or include it in the price yourself.
Me as a customer wouldn’t want to pick a $97 product just to ﬁnd out at checkout, that product
actually costs $126.
There is no black/white colors as most people would like to paint it.
There are lots of grays mixed with yellows and greens.

Bottom line is that this comparison will give you all the answers so you can make INFORMED,
SMART decision, while seeing the FULL picture.
Down below you’ll see the table of contents (yep, guide is that big).
Read it all through or jump to your interesting sections, it’s up to you.
Remember if you want to dive in deep in each one of these platforms individually there are also
standalone articles for Thinkiﬁc review and Teachable review available!
Pages on top of the page are like site level table of contents for course platforms themselves!

Now let’s put our Sherlock’s hat on and dive in?
Aye, aye, Dr. Watson!
Table of Contents
(use this to jump around and on bottom right corner use go back to the top button)

What Online Course Platform is SUPPOSED to do? (and what NOT)
How I FEEL about Thinkific and Teachable
Pricing
How good is free plan?
2nd plan
Pro Plans
Course Creation, Delivery & Engagement
Course Creation Process
Student Course Progress & Tracking
Content Dripping
Quizzes and their variety
Certificates
Course Attachments ( PDF, videos, files, images)
Email Marketing – Progress emails (can you track who hasn’t logged in for a few weeks
and reach out to them for example)
How Can You Consume Content? (download to view offline, mobile)
Student Experience
Website Design, Customization, Ease of Use & Whitelabel
User Experience
Setup Experience ( how easy to learn?)
Page builder
Site Language
How does it look on mobile?
WhiteLabel, Branding opportunities?
Sales & Marketing

Coupons for running promos, One time offers
Afﬁliate Program
Payout Process, Payment Processor integration (Paypal/Stripe)
Checkout process
1-Click Upsells
Landing & Sales Page Creation
Payment Options – subscription, different curriencies, payment plan
Course bundle creation
Sending Emails within Course Platform
Security, Customer Support & Community
Knowledge base (ease of learning)
Email support, live support
Facebook Group
Webinars, videos, blog – How do they help you become better?
How safe is your content? (backup, hosting,uptime))
Integrations
Future: Company Long Term Vision
Conclusion
What Online Course Platform is SUPPOSED to do? (and
WHAT NOT?)

I am including this section in here, because too many softwares nowadays claim to be ALL IN ONE
solution, but are far off with their quality as online course platform..!
For example:
Clickfunnels can be used for membership site, landing page creation, funnel building, email
marketing. EVERYTHING. But they are really great at only one thing which is building
advanced SALES FUNNELS! They are average at other things!
Convertkit allows you to build landing pages, small sales funnels, email marketing. You can
do a lot there, but Convertkit’s one thing is EMAIL MARKETING.

So what an Online Course Platform should do?
The Nr.1 reason why we use Online Course Platform is to deliver courses SECURELY. We
need something optimised for teaching and learning.
This means we are looking for:
Video & other asset hosting
Privacy, secure environment (to ensure only paid students get access to your content)
Tracking progress (we want to know how students are going through course. If in some part
students drop of, we want to know it and be able to ﬁx it)
Interaction (quizzes, surveys, can we easily segment students & communicate with them?)
All the other things course platform is able to do is ICING on the cake, but its NOT the cake!

If you have a team, consider making a course for your employees to go through and put videos
online for easy consuming. From there you can observe how well your employees are learning the
content the same way you would be observing your students.
Both Thinkific and Teachable in addition offers:
Landing Page Builder
Shopping Cart, Payment Gateway
Simple Email Marketing
Simple funnel building (landing page + checkout + thank you page, upsell)
There are several examples I know where content creators just use Thinkific or Teachable for this
secure content delivery & enhanced student teaching experience.
It’s already a great pain relieved from their shoulders!
*Fun Fact: Many bigger companies like New York Times & Hootsuite use
Thinkific or Teachable for their employee virtual training and onboarding
process.

Look at MentorBox for example:
Then checkout John Lee Dumas, Podcasters Paradise, where he uses Thinkiﬁc also ONLY for
content delivery (they build their own landing pages, for payment gateway they use Infusionsoft).
All this ramble… what’s my point?
My point is that you should know what ONE thing online course platforms are supposed to do.
This will help you to understand how you could eventually “upgrade” your game.
Mentorbox uses Teachable ONLY for delivering their courses, everything else is custom-built.

If initially you use Teachable for everything, eventually you could:
Build advanced landing pages using something like Thrive Architect or LeadPages
For advanced email automation use ActiveCampaign to do deep, personalised segmentation
Use ClickFunnels for advanced sales funnels, when you are scaling with paid traffic (FB ads)
Use your own WordPress plugin for payment gateway or something like SamCart to really be
able to customise it.
Most people will never do this, but it’s good to know what’s possible.
Nowadays Online Course Platforms do a lot and you can use them for:
Landing page creation
Sales page creation
Payment Gateway
Affiliate management, coupons
Simple sales funnel for checkout and 1-click upsells on Thank you page
Course delivery and simple email notifications.
All the softwares are trying to get the bigger piece of the pie and try to be ALL IN ONE solution,
Thinkific or Teachable are no exception.
That’s why it’s good to know what you 100% will need aside from online course platform.

This is simple.
You know the answer already.
There are two minimum expenses you will need when owning an online business:
1. You need your own website (WordPress, Squarespace) – any creator needs his own hub and
even if for example Teachable offers blog and page creation, you shouldn’t really use them.
2. Email marketing – like Activecampaign or ConvertKit – you should build relationships with
your audience in your email.
These are two additional MUST HAVEs – everything else is just optimisation and will bring you
only incremental improvements.

Sheesh, okay, got this off my chest.
Hope it brought you some clarity!
Lets move on!
How Do I FEEL About Thinkiﬁc and Teachable?
What?

You promised detailed analysis and now you are talking about feelings?
Yep, I am really going there.
While it’s very important to know all the functionality Thinkiﬁc and Teachable does – it’s AS
important to also notice how does it FEEL using these platforms?
If you are an Apple user, can you explain what’s so great about iPhone or your Macbook Pro?
It’s hard to put it to the words.
For me it just feels nice using Apple..
It just works..
When you will make your choice on course platform, you will need to trust it.
You should like using it in order to be motivated to create, edit your courses.
You will be spending hours in there editing, communicating, optimising..
It would be nice to enjoy the process, no?

Teachable Feeling Score – 8/10
We used Teachable on my business 1stWebDesigner when it ﬁrst came out and was called
UseFedora.
We were looking for alternative to Udemy back then, so I do feel a bit nostalgic about Teachable.

I really do like Ankur Nagpal, the CEO’s story and how they popularised online course platform
market.
They are raising money, growing like crazy and doing all the right things by improving their
customer support.
The reason I didn’t put higher score is because their backend could be better. WordPress has taught
us to expect live website builder capabilities and ﬂexibility with click of a button.
Right now it’s not so easy to make an unique Sales Page, I can easily spot Teachable sales pages,
because they all look almost the same & are simple (they still work though).

Right now you cannot preview live how your page looks like while you are editing it (it requires
extra click – View Demo).
I have come to expect live editing everywhere since I have it on WordPress and most site/landing
page builders.
I saw some screenshots showing that they are working on new website builder, but right now it’s
just OKAY, not great.

It does work, but you must have a bit of hackers mindset to be able to customise things (like know
some HTML/CSS).
Learning curve is a little longer than on Thinkific.
With that being said I love all the marketing capabilities (1-step checkout, affiliate, powerful 1-
click upsell) they have built in.
That’s where Teachable shines.
I know Teachable are working hard on rewamping their backend and I cannot wait when it comes
out.
This lack of editing isn’t a deal breaker, but it does affect how nice (read easy) it feels to use their
platform.
Thinkific Feeling Score – 9/10
Thinkific was founded in 2012 (Teachable in 2013) is like David in this battle.
Thinkific is a less known underdog, fighting back against Goliath (even though both companies are
more similar then they would like to admit).

For some reason Teachable is better known and receive a lot more monthly visitors, but Thinkific
holds its ground very well with Greg Smith, the CEO leading the charge.
The reason why I feel so good about Thinkific is because the getting started process has been super
pleasant with them.
1. Right after registration on site, I got a video popping up introducing me to the platform.
2. Then as I wanted to create my course, there were course templates I could choose that pre-
populated course with demo content.
3. As I was going through sections, every section had nice video introducing the section and the
live site builder is enjoyment to use.
I truly enjoy spending my time on Thinkfic backend and it feels good using it.
That being said, while I love using Thinkific, what I don’t love is their payment checkout process.
But more on that later.
Where Thinkific beats Teachable in usability and beauty…
…Teachable beats Thinkific in marketing capabilities and simplifying some technical aspects (taxes,
affiliates).
1. Pricing Plans

In this section we’ll answer these questions:
How good is free plan?
The first paid plan?
Their most recommended – Pro/Business plans?
I am really not the guy who likes shopping, just ask my wife.
When she needs to buy something, I try to first figure out if she has any girlfriends she could hang
out with instead.

When I do shopping, I try to be in and out from the shop in few hours.
I don’t like trying on hundred things.
If I like something, I get it and move on.
Checklist completed.
When it comes to shopping for online course platforms – it’s hard!
On pricing pages you get a full list of features, but you don’t completely understand how they work
and if/why you need them.
Thankfully both Thinkiﬁc & Teachable offer free plan with no credit card required.
At least you get a feel for a platform.
But still you cannot test drive all the advanced features.
You can just check them out to the level you would when doing window-shopping in the mall.

..but there are still so many unanswered questions.
Here I try to break it down how it’s like being an actual user of these course platforms.
And if you are anything like me, this matters.
Remember, we are trying to make the best informed decision before opening our wallet and
investing hours in building out this membership site engine.
Thinkiﬁc & Teachable Free Plans

This is a cool thing about both of these course platforms.
You can give them a test drive by registering for their Free Plan, with no credit card required.
This is where you can test your own “feelings” of the software and play around with each of them.
It’s actually what I would recommend you to do – just register on both sites and play around a
bit.
Set a timer and record your experience.
When you make your decision for Thinkiﬁc or Teachable – don’t start with a paid plan.
Set up as much as you can without paying anything.
You can setup your course and landing page with their free plans.

Only when you are ready to start driving serious traffic to your pages, you should upgrade to get
better transaction fees, white labeling and other more advanced features.
You get unlimited video bandwidth, hosting and access to the CORE features for free.
This means you can start selling your course already, but you’ll need to share the revenue.
There are no fees on free courses though, meaning that you can test drive your courses & build your
student base without any money investment if you would want to.
Fees on free plans:
Thinkific will take 10% from every paid course sale you make;
while Teachable will take 10% and 1$ from every sale.
This option is great if you are starting out and are looking for creating your own rags to riches
journey.
Start with no upfront investment.
Free plans for both Teachable and Thinkific are very similar.
The only bigger difference is that for Teachable you’ll receive money once a month (basically 30-
60 day delay), where for Thinkific your funds will be immediately deposited to your Stripe account.
Its not a deal breaker if you don’t mind waiting, and it’s easier to handle refunds this way.

Other little difference is that Thinkific allows email notifications as well as email integrations of their
free plan, while Teachable doesn’t.
You can do a bit more with Thinkific on their free plan than on Teachable.
Many beginner users use these platform free plans for long time.
It’s not ideal, but it works.
They are working towards their own rags to riches stories without excuses.
Basic Paid Plans – 39-49$/mo

If you already have built your community and have some money coming in, you will be looking at
the paid plans.
When you transfer to paid plans you’ll get better functionality, your own branding and start
paying less in transaction fees.
Both platforms have their basic/essentials plan for $39/mo for Teachable, $49/mo for Thinkific.
With this plan you’ll get your own custom domain, pay 5% in transaction fees and get access to
integration.
Let’s compare the basic plans:
Teachable:
$39/mo
5% in transaction fees
You can have your custom domain (foundertips.com vs foundertips.teachable.com)
Access to coupons, affiliate marketing, drip content and third party integrations
Integrated email marketing – you can send customized email messages to students straight
from Teachable
Thinkific:

$49/mo
Custom Domain Support
Access to coupons, afﬁliate marketing, drip content, basic integrations, upsells & bundles
More access to student details & send bulk email messages from Thinkiﬁc
This is the basic plan, that everyone should upgrade to get the base of online course platform
functionality.
This is the plan you should choose when you are selling some courses already, but the volume is not
high enough to allow for Pro plan with 0% transaction fees and to let you aim for white-labeled,
unbranded website.
Premium Plans: Professional & Business Plans – $99/mo

This is the plan you should choose if you want to take the full advantage of all the built in
functionality of these course platforms and get 0% in transaction fees.
With pro plans you get access to HTML/CSS editing so you can really customise your sales pages
and student dashboard.
This is where you can get white-labeled, unbranded website, so people don’t get confused with
Teachable or Thinkiﬁc branding somewhere.
You’ll also get access to their priority support/live chat for both of these platforms and for
Onboarding Call from Thinkiﬁc.

There are other subtle differences, but pro plan is for people, who are selling courses successfully
and want to take full control of everything on their online course platform.
Overview for both platforms:
$99/mo
Access to HTML/CSS for sales pages
White Labeled / Unbranded website
Priority support, access to Live chat
Advanced integrations and reporting
In general it’s very similar for both and its impossible to list all the features here.
I will do dig more in features in next sections.
But if you want to dig in deeper yourself:
Check the full price & feature comparison for Teachable
here: https://teachable.com/pricing/comparison
Check the full price & feature comparison for Thinkiﬁc
here: https://www.thinkiﬁc.com/feature-comparison/

Summary on Pricing
As you see both platform pricing and features are very similar, you will only feel small differences in
their Free plan.
All in all, pricing will not play a big role in your decision.
However now we move on to the bread and butter of these course platforms.
Their pricing on features may be very similar, but they differ quite a bit on executing these features.
Let’s get to it!
2. Course Creation, Delivery & Engagement

Under this category we’ll talk about:
Course Creation Process
Student Course Progress & Tracking
Content Dripping
Quizzes and their variety
Certificates
Course Attachments ( PDF, videos, files, images)
How Can You Consume Content? (download to view offline, mobile)
Student Experience

Email Marketing – Progress emails (can you track who hasn’t logged in for a few weeks and
reach out to them for example)
Now this is where it’s all about the backend.
About student experience.
About teaching experience.
How effectively can you communicate to your students and help them consume your content?
This part is crucial, because if your students won’t complete the courses they purchase:
they WON’T recommend it to their friends (no referrals)
they won’t purchase your next courses
they are likely to ask for a refund
And that, my friends, is a bad business.
If you want to dig deeper in this fact, here is a great article explaining why it happens.
Here is a dirty little secret of online learning – 90% of people who purchase
the course DON’T ﬁnish it!

But the point is that you must do everything in your power to encourage your students to consume
your content!
Do you understand now why its so important to look at course platform teaching tools and student
learning experience management?
I hope you do.
You can help your students by:
Creating action tasks for students
Tracking your student progress and reaching out to them, when they stop learning
Creating online community to make it feel like a tribe, where students motivate each other
Creating different forms of interaction – video, audio, text, quizzes
By offering certiﬁcate for people who ﬁnished the course successfully. (for example
ClickFunnels has created Two Comma Club for people who have created a million dollar
funnel, they get a special trophy and get to join the club – how’s that for motivation boost?
anyhoo..)

The reason I do that, is because we are looking at this for the long term. You might not use all the
functionality YET, but eventually you will graduate to it.
And when you do, these features will be deal breakers. And we don’t want you or your students to
go through the painful experience of moving to new platform if we can potentially avoid that, right?
DISCLAIMER: Before we start just so you know I’ll be comparing now
Thinkiﬁc vs Teachable on their Pro – 99$/mo plans.

Nuff’ Said.
..
Now.. How Easy It Is To Create Courses?
Lets look at this from a teacher’s perspective.
You want to start creating your course:
add PDF, quizzes
design the whole student experience.
Now here I must say Thinkific wins hands down in terms of user experience.
It is really a joy to create a content on Thinkific thanks to their intuitive page builder.
Teachable’s interface is alright, but it hasn’t been updated for a while and you can feel it.
To make some things work on Teachable you need to “hack your way through”.
Their text editor is very simple and you will need to use something else if you’ll want to style your
content (or use images for effects) like you would on WordPress.
But with Thinkific you can easily write your content within their editor.

Student Course Progress & Tracking – Sending Emails To Students

Again both solutions are very similar here. They have some basic overall analytics and you can
check individual student progress and send them emails.
Teachable wins with course reporting tools giving more data out of the box for PRO plan, but
Thinkific is not far behind.
They both have nice student support features like allowing to bulk email your users based on set
filters and check individual student progress.
You also get to optin for various student milestone or action notifications like when:
student completes course,
asks questions,
signs up,
enrolls to new course.
When it goes for email marketing, you’ll get to send broadcast emails to segmented groups of users
within platform, but for advanced email marketing you MUST use something else like ConvertKit,
Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign.

Don’t look at course platform as your email provider.
They will help with basic emails like:
weekly reminder emails,
welcome email,
purchase receipt,
course competition email
But if you want to personalise the student experience based on actions they take or don’t take, you’ll
need something more advanced.
From usability standpoint its easier to find all student related tools in Thinkific, but Teachable has
pretty much the same functionality, just takes a little more time to find it.

Teachable Course Creation, Delivery & Supporting Students Score – 7/10
LOVE
In view settings students can select the video speed and whether to auto-move to the next
video or not after finishing. (On Thinkific students need to press Next button in far edge of
the screen)
Has bulk content editing, allowing to quickly make several pieces of content downloadable,
published/draft or free preview on/off
Has advanced reporting features on their PRO plan giving you nice overview on lecture
completion, video stats. Thinkific also has some reporting, just Teachable has more.
HATE
In spite of their bulk uploader, its harder to add new pieces of content than on Thinkific. It
takes more steps and more time.
Text editor is hard to use. You need to use something else to customise your content and then
paste the code in their text editor.
You can do pretty much the same things you can in Thinkific editor, but user experience is so much
better in Thinkific.
On Teachable you must know some coding or use external tools to create textual content.

For example to do a survey you should use Google Forms, where Thinkific has surveys built in.
Same thing is for Competition Certificate, Thinkific supports them for PRO plans, where Teachable
doesn’t.
But still Thinkific uses Accredible, so you can integrate it with Teachable yourself too for little extra
cost. I mean it’s not a deal breaker, you can find a workaround, even though it’s nice to have it out of
the box.
Just be prepared when using Teachable to have a little longer “figuring things out” phase than with
Thinkific.
Thinkific Course Creation, Delivery & Supporting Students Score – 9/10
LOVE:
When creating new course, Thinkific offers picking between course templates – blank, mini-
course, flagship course etc. Templates populate the demo course with contents so you can
easily change it. Helps you avoid staring at the blank page
Bulk upload – Teachable also has bulk upload, but on Thinkific you can start editing course
content, WHILE videos are uploading. Feels amazing! On Teachable you need to stare at the
screen and wait till the upload completes.

Curriculum editor is awesome, it’s so easy to add new content and create it WITHIN
Thinkific – choose between different types of content like Video, Quiz, Multimedia (Google
Docs etc), Survey, PDF, Presentation, Audio etc.
Text editor is a joy to use.
Within curriculum editor there is a little suggestion box giving small tips on how to improve
your course.
In Pro plan has built in support for Competition Certificate
HATE:
No bulk content editing – in order to make videos downloadable, you need to check box one
by one, in Teachable you can bulk edit your content.
The one hate is not a deal breaker, I guess I should call this a “subtle dislike”.
But seriously Thinkific’s course management is very well thought trough and is optimised for good
teaching/student experience.
If you are person who’s not too tech/coding savvy, Thinkific will be much easier to start using.
1-0, Thinkific in the lead!
3. Website Design, Customisation, Ease of Use & Whitelabel

These are the things we’ll be looking at in this section:
User experience
Setup experience
Page builder
Site Language
How Does it look on mobile?
Whitelabel, branding opportunities?
User Experience

Thinkific is more enjoyable to use when creating your courses and building sales pages.
Teachable is harder to learn and customise, but they have an edge on better user experience
on Sales, Checkout and Thank you page designs
Setup Experience (how easy to learn?)
Thinkific has lots of great intro videos within the backend.
Teachable takes a little more digging in their knowledge base to uncover the functionality.
Page builder
Thinkific has an edge by allowing to build a great looking landing pages without any need to
touch code
Teachable customisation is outdated, but it does the job.
Site Language
Both platforms offer different languages and being able to customise text elements on your course.
Thinkific offers specific languages, where Teachable allows you to manually translate all the text (so
you can translate to ANY language).
How does it look on mobile?
Both course softwares are fully-responsive.

Teachable has iOS app, while Thinkific doesn’t.
Downside is that it’s Teachable app, which doesnt make it very good solution for whitelabeling.
However for Thinkific, you can encourage your students to save your Thinkific site to their home
screen and use it on their mobile platforms, as Thinkific is fully responsive.
You see?
Workarounds are everywhere.
WhiteLabel, Branding opportunities?
Thinkific has a big edge here.
If you really care about your branded URLS and you don’t want ANYONE to find out you are using
third party online course platform you should use Thinkific.
If you are not obsessed with branding Teachable does the job okay, but keep in mind that there will
be little indications of Teachable in login/checkout URLs.

For most people this will not matter but for others who really care about their branding, this could
be a deal-breaker.
Overview
From usability standpoint its far more enjoyable to design sales pages on Thinkific.
It seems now that Teachable motto is to focus on sales and conversions, where Thinkific is more
about design and great user experience.
Simply put I think of these platforms as..
Thinkific = Apple
Teachable = Android
Teachable Design, Customisation, Ease of Use & Whitelabel Score – 7/10
Teachable has a little outdated backend editor.
Where they shine in their marketing & sales functional capabilities, they lack in ease of
customisation.

Their backend editor and landing page builder really asks for update. Over years they haven’t
improved that part a lot.
Teachable will get the job done with the landing page, but if you want more customisation, I would
recommend to use third-party landing page builder and link the Call-To-Action button straight to
checkout page.
Otherwise you’ll need to hire a pro to edit HTML/CSS for you to make it look really sexy.
Where Teachable shines though is on their checkout process.
You cannot customise a lot, but their checkout page has 1-Step checkout, and Thank You page has a
nice option to add video and add one click upsell.
I’ll talk about this more in marketing & sales section, but I wanted to give a little sneak peak, just so
you know that Teachable is not all that bad.
It’s just that Thinkiﬁc really stepped up their game with design and Teachable hasn’t cached up yet –
they were busy giving their customers better support and marketing tools.
Yeah, and ﬁnally about White Labeling..
I don’t know why Teachable doesn’t offer an option (though Infusionsoft also doesn’t), but it’s not
nice that you cannot use your own domain secure URLs for checkout and login pages.
I understand why they are doing it.

Teachable is a platform that focuses on simplifying things for their users.
Their business model is building their community inviting course creators to collaborate together
under Teachable brand. You can see it with their myTeachable section and Teachable iOS app efforts
(read more what it does).
MyTeachable means that if a student already has Teachable account, they don’t need to create a new
account on Teachable and can see all Teachable courses within one dashboard. That could help with
conversions for repeat Teachable users.
These subtle differences make Teachable easier to use for beginners in expense of lack of
customisability.
Thinkiﬁc Website Design, Customisation, Ease of Use & Whitelabel Score – 9/10

Thinkific earns the badge of great setup experience by use of videos and giving a video tour to new
users.
It’s also much easier to feel like a BADASS web designer when using their website builder.
It’s hard to make your sales page look bad.
Thinkific has several theme designs and a lot of building blocks you can use to make your website
look unique and expensive.
It’s much harder to make Teachable sales page look expensive, Teachable is much more minimal.
Thinkific is a must go solution if you really care about whitelabeling.
The only thing I hate with Thinkific in terms of design is how little you can customize your checkout
and thank you pages. But we’ll talk about this more on Sales & Marketing section.
If you need more flexibility over your checkout process you will need to use external checkout
systems (like SamCart) through Zapier integration.
But so far 2-0, Thinkific leads..
4. Sales & Marketing

Design matters, but in the end of the day it’s all about whether or not your courses are bringing in
the money..
Just pretty design will not do the job. You need to know your customer to be able to craft the
message that speaks to him and you need sales tools to seal the deal.
This is especially important if you are using paid trafﬁc like FB ads, because these are “cold” leads,
AKA people that don’t know you and you need to have polished sales funnel to make it work.
Then there is the side of handling afﬁliates, offering coupons, payment options, different currencies,
collecting and reporting taxes.

This is the backend part that most people don’t see, but that eventually makes or breaks your
business.
Let’s look what’s under the hood, shall we?
Checkout process
For Teachable they recently updated their checkout process allowing people to checkout with 1-step.
Plus you can add trust badges and testimonials on Checkout page, which is great for conversion
boost! On Thinkiﬁc it’s two steps (they allow to sign-up with FB and Linkedin..which is nice), but 1-
step will be better for conversions.
Landing & Sales Page Creation
We covered this before, Thinkiﬁc allows to build sales pages better, Teachable does the job, but has
outdated design and limited customisability.
1-Click Upsells
Both companies offer 1-Click upsells, but Teachable does the job better, by offering clean above the
fold upsell with video, customizable call to action and decline button. Absolutely love Teachable
here.

Coupons
Wanted to show the live example! This is how its done on Teachable. After ordering there are details that order
went through and then there is a nice chance to offer One Time Offer for exclusive price!

Both companies offer coupons site-wide or for individual course.
Only difference is that Teachable has built-in bulk coupon generator, where Thinkific you must
request it for a cost.
Affiliate Program
Here Teachable offers far more flexibility of managing affiliates for you (if you use their payment
gateway).
For example you can define how long affiliate cookie lasts.
Then more importantly Teachable offers to do payouts to your affiliates automatically.
You can read more about Teachable affiliate program here.
Just know that for this management, you will get also delayed 30-60 payouts (because Teachable
manages money part).
Thinkific will provide you with affiliate data, with only difference that you will need to do payouts
yourself once a month.
In this case it’s just nice that Teachable offers two options:
you can do it with your own payment gateway and have instant payments, but manage
affiliates yourself
or do payments through Teachable and let them take care of affiliate payments.

Payout Process, Payment Processor Integration
Both platforms let you integrate with Stripe and Paypal.
Thinkific offers Stunning in addition with Stripe. Stunning helps to prevent failed Stripe payments.
Handy.
Teachable has additional option where you can choose that Teachable handle payments. This
includes them taking care of VAT taxes and affiliate payments.
This option might be helpful, if you are willing to wait and you have issues with VAT taxes.
Just know that you can handle taxes on Thinkific with third party solutions.
What I don’t like with automatic EU VAT tax collection on Teachable is that often VAT could be
exempt due to to discussion groups & instructor involvement.
I mean, there are ways to legally avoid paying VAT and you should take control of this because
every $$$ counts.

This is a business/cost saving decision as everything else. You shouldn’t pay any more dollar in taxes
than you absolutely must.
Course Pricing Options
Both companies offer different payment options for your students, but Teachable has a little more
options like allowing you to create a pricing in other currencies.
Explore this more if its important, but usually everyone is used to paying online in USD.
Course bundle creation – both platforms offer easy course bundle creation.
Sending Emails within Course Platform – again both platforms do good job and don’t differ much.
SumoMe integration

Finally, this is a small mention, but you should know that both platforms have native SumoMe
integration.
SumoMe is a great tool that offers a bunch of free apps that help you market your content.
Recap
In sales & marketing section Teachable takes a clear lead.
I personally LOVE Teachable’s Checkout Page design and 1-Click Upsell process.

Thinkific gets close there, but not quite.
When it comes for using Teachable payment gateway to get EU VAT and affiliate payouts handled..
It’s helpful, BUT to be honest, you should manage these things yourself.
You should take control of your money.
I would use Teachable payment gateway only when getting started. You just need Paypal account
then – no need to go through hassle of setting up Stripe account.
Teachable Sales & Marketing Score – 9/10
Teachable clearly offers more flexibility and ways to customise the way you collect payments.
For checkout process Teachable will give you better conversions than Thinkific unless you really
optimise it yourself.
The only thing I don’t like on Teachable is their sales page creation tools.
Out-of-the-box solutions do look outdated.

Thinkific Sales & Marketing Score – 8/10
Thinkific has all the tools to get the job done, but when comparing to Teachable.. the biggest
difference I would say is the checkout process.
I love Teachable checkout process and strongly dislike Thinkific checkout process.
It’s just not as polished as Teachable’s..
But on flipside Thinkific sales page creation is very nicely done, when Teachable has this area poorly
developed.
Tradeoffs everywhere..
When it goes for affiliate payment management and EU VAT collection..
Yes, it’s nice that Teachable offers you the option of handling these things, BUT you should look
further and learn if you really must pay EU VAT tax, because you really don’t. You can easily
optimise your school to be exempt of this tax.
For me paying unannounced 20-30% tax on checkout process would make me abandon the cart. This
is what happens on Teachable – course is listed as being $97, but then on checkout you are suddenly
charged $30 extra for tax.
Creators should include tax themselves in the course price.

Unannounced tax is like buying book for 20$ just to ﬁnd out in checkout that you must pay 40$ for
shipping.
Not cool.
Are we keeping score? 2-1 – Teachable catching up!
5. Security, Customer Support & Community

In this section we’ll focus on community side of things like:
Knowledge base (ease of learning)
Email support, live support
Facebook Group
Webinars, videos, blog – How do they help you become better?
How safe is your content? (backup, hosting,uptime)
Ouh, it’s been a long read huh?
It’s all in these nitty gritty details though..
But I have a surprise for you, this section will be very short.
The reason is that both of these companies are doing BRILLIANT job with their support.
For a long time Nr.1 complaint why customers switched from Teachable to Thinkiﬁc was because
Teachable had horrible customer support.
Even now you can see it mentioned on Thinkiﬁc comparison page.
It was true in past, but not anymore.
Teachable has turned their customer support around.

This is a huge turnaround.
Support and community is vibrant and active on both sides.
For Pro plans both companies offer live chat & priority support.
Though even if you are on your free plan, you’ll get a great support on their Facebook groups,
support tickets in few hours (if its working hours) and their knowledge bases will answer most
technical questions.
Here is the ninja tip though!
This is a report Teachable shared on their FB group, how their average response
time has come down from 9 hours to 1 hour in Aug, 2017.

If you want to really become better with creating, marketing and selling your courses you’ll sign up
for both of these softwares no matter which one you choose.
Let the emails come in and let them educate you for free..!
It’s like getting your personal trainer.
Join both of their groups and let the like-minded members inspire you!:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/thinkiﬁc/ – 16,731 members
https://www.facebook.com/groups/thefedorafamily/ – 22,884 members

What about Uptimes?

Since these course platforms are hosting your content, you must be aware how good is their platform
uptime!
Check for yourself here:
http://status.teachable.com/
https://status.thinkiﬁc.com/
In my experience Teachable has a little more incidents than Thinkiﬁc, but this could also explained
by the fact that they are growing faster. I haven’t experienced any serious downtimes though.
Videos are hosted on Wistia for both of these platforms, which is a company with a good reputation.

Don’t know much about Teachable hosting, but Thinkiﬁc has publicly stated that they are having
daily backups and secure cloud hosting.
None of these companies has had any issues with their content security in past.
I must give equally high score for both of these companies in terms of customer support and
community.
3-2 – Thinkiﬁc-Teachable
6. Integrations

This is another short section, because both of these platforms are very similar as it comes for
integrations.
There are lots of integrations available through Zapier as well as there are direct integrations with
most email marketing providers, Segment.io, SumoMe, Paypal, Stripe, Google Analytics, easy way
to add tracking pixel to your school.

For both platforms you can easily embed 3rd party tools like Google Apps & Typeform Forms.
I must mention that Thinkific has a few more unique integrations for students like Brillum for exams,
Articulate, Storyline and Captivate.
Thinkific really focuses more on better student/teacher experience, where Teachable focuses more on
sales & marketing segment.
This may be important if you are looking for something like LMS (learning management system),
Thinkific gets close to that with their 3rd party integrations.
There is also a direct ActiveCampaign & Infusionsoft integration for Thinkific, where Teachable
offers this integration through Zapier. Maybe it makes a difference to you.
Now are you ready for the final round?
We are close to the end…
Let’s find out what future holds for these companies?
7. Long Term Future Vision

If your mind is not blown already, I am truly delighted.
Its been a lot, but we are at the ﬁnal stretch.
Since we are considering to use either of the platforms for long term its important to look how both
of these companies might look in the future.
Teachable:
Organic trafﬁc per month – 104K
Backlinks (Referring domains) – 18.1K
Domain Rating: 86/100

Company size: 64 employees
125,000 courses,12,000 paying customers
Have raised money: $12.5 million
Founded: Oct 3, 2013, based in New York, US
Facebook Group size: 22,884 members
Thinkiﬁc:
Organic trafﬁc per month – 43.2K
Backlinks (Referring domains) – 9.3K
Domain rating – 83/100
Company size: 70 employees
25,000 course creators (no data of paying customers)
Venture-backed, but the amount raised is not publicly available
Founded: 2012, based in Vancouver, Canada
Facebook Group size: 16,731 members
*Data recorded on Apr 21, 2018
In nutshell Teachable has been doing a bit better with their publicity and they have been raising a lot
of money and getting Techcrunch to cover it.

Teachable has investors like Accomplice Ventures and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant as well
as a few smaller investors including Shopify founder Tobias Lutke, Weebly founder Chris Fanini,
Lynda CEO Eric Robison, and Getty Images founder Jonathan Klein.
Thinkiﬁc is also venture backed, but the information about the amount of money raised and who are
investors aren’t publicly available.
Both companies have been rapidly growing in the past two years:
Thinkiﬁc grew from 10 to 35 employees in 2016, and ended 2017 with 70 employees
Teachable grew from $5 million in sales in 2015 to around $90 million in 2017 and have
valuation of $134 million as of 2018.

This is a though call, because both companies are very similar in size and are both doing a great job
improving their services:
Thinkific recent update on their new site builder and announcement of themes, hugely
improved usability and power of the service
Teachable had big issues in 2017 with their customer service, they focused on it and as of
2018 the’ve really turned it around and improved response time from 7 hours to 1 hour.
Both companies are stable, growing and doing the right things to keep in the game and competing
hard for the place on the pedestal.
I am a little worried of how many investors Teachable has, because investors don’t care about the
customers. Investors care about ROI, getting your money in their wallets.
The more investors you have, the less decision freedom you have. The trick is now to juggle the
balls in air between the customer (you) and investors.
On other side, Teachable investors like Lynda CEO (learning platform), Shopify founder, Weebly
founder (website builder) could be great advisors and secret weapons to Teachable. Their vote of
confidence from these people also means something.
Before doing proper research I actually thought of Thinkific as underdog, but when digging deeper I
understood how truly similar these companies are.
The battle of the giants is happening right now!
And we will only benefit from this close competition. We will get better service.

I must give equal score to both of these companies. There is no clear victor here.
Conclusion
I really hope these analysis helped you to understand the beneﬁts and downsides of both Teachable
and Thinkiﬁc.
It’s been a lot, but if you are making a long term decision, then few hours you spend here, will save
you days/weeks of time spent making your own trial and error.

I have repeated this several times already, but repetition is mother of learning so..
..remember, there is no such thing as PERFECT SOFTWARE!
You must be prepared to hack it to your own needs. Both of these software are open to many
integrations and you can do pretty much the same things in both software, but since we are looking
for the best fit based of course platform core functionality, this final comparison will be useful.
Choose Thinkific if:
you want 100% unbranded, white-labeled website
you are starting free plan and want to get as much functionality as you can for free
the best possible student/teacher experience is your priority and you want tools out-of-the-
box to help you do it
you are non-technical and don’t want to touch the code, but still want designs / lectures to
look great
Choose Teachable if:
you want help with affiliate payouts, EU VAT management and use Teachable for payment
processing (less hassle for you)
you want more flexibility with payment plans, coupons, affiliates
you don’t mind touching little HTML/CSS or use external tools to customise your sales
pages
you want better sales funnel process out-of-the-box (custom checkout page, thank you page)

The way I view these platforms right now is:
Thinkific = Apple experience
Teachable = Android experience
This may be oversimplified answer, but I think it drives the point!
If you are still confused reach out to me below and I’ll be happy to answer your questions and give
you my best suggestion for your SPECIFIC case!
Alternatively you can go to this self-serve page or check individual Thinkific and Teachable reviews
as well as look into other options like:
100% self-hosted WordPress or Udemy marketplace option.
I wrote alternative course platform list article exactly for that.
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