Thinkific

Pros

We researched many Platforms before choosing Thinkific.

We love that Thinkific is Canadian.

We love the journey that students take from first encountering the site landing page, going to the course landing page and then immersing themselves in the course.

I appreciate the helpful support from the Thinkific team. They do a great job of answering our many questions.

I am fortunate that Thinkific rebuilt their course editing software quite soon after we began developing our course. Their new software is quite easy to use and easy to revise.

I really like their flat-rate monthly subscription fee with no hidden costs.

Cons

I wish students could purchase this course in the currency of their own country.
I wish we could pay for our subscription in Canadian funds instead of American.
We have had to purchase a separate Discussion Forum because their Disqus Plug In is a social media plug in that is not confidential, and their built in Discussion Forum is very awkward and poorly organized with no ability to search, edit, or even manage posts.
Thinkific focuses much more on supporting marketing than on supporting online course development. We were fortunate that we had already taken two excellent courses in online course development that we could apply to the Thinkific Platform.
Thinkific is less responsive to good ideas for improvement than I would like them to be. For example, despite many, many requests from many course developers it is still not possible for the course author to copy, paste and edit quizes and so there is a lot of unnecessary labour involved in inputting quizes

Pros

Thinkific is easy to use. Add a new Module, one click to add content, module after module. So easy!

Better yet, I LIKE how it looks to the user. I LIKE how the site can look like mine -- not another platform. It does look different, but MY site name is on top, visible, so users know where they are immediately. I've tried others and never quite liked the look as I work with seniors who have retired... and wanted simplicity. This time I found just that. AND YET -- very functional, with every content option I'd like to add.

Thinkific has a great Facebook group too. Very active and helpful, learned how others are doing their classes so gives me new ideas. Some groups were full of people whining about what the software didn't do or needed to be corrected... that didn't work for me either, yeah, picky picky! :)

Cons

I only had to ask Support one question while adding my first course. My only question was: how to add a manual student who paid me privately (or complimentary class) if they didn't purchase through Thinkific itself. I know its there, just chose to ask instead of searching! :)

I didn't even use HELP pages to learn how to use it... it was pretty intuitive for me and I love that! Please don't think that means its not a fully integrated teaching service, it really is. They simply "got it" where the user (me, the instructor) and the other user (student) is concerned. Someone did the work to think about how both users will interact with the software. Kudos!

Pros

I like that it is customizable. I like that Thinkific offers lots of webinars and help with all aspects of publishing online courses. It allows a couple ways to collect money for your courses. They spell out exactly what to do! For a newbie like me, I began setting things up months ago while I was working on my course. As I completed it, I began uploading the lectures and made some changes to my text and landing page and other info. Easy to make it your own. I am happy with how professional it all looks. Now I will get busy with the marketing end and Thinkific can help with info about that too! Customer service is awesome and they reach out frequently to see what they can do to guide you! I highly recommend this solution for getting an online course published. I am at the entry level, but am testing the waters until I need to go further and unlock more features.

Cons

As expected the free version is basic, so in order to get to some of the good stuff, you have to upgrade. Not a big deal really, since I am producing my first course and need to go slowly.

Pros

The way Thinkific presents content, from landing page to course completion page, is beautiful and appealing to the user. There are ample ways to connect with the user through various integrations if desired. It's also useful that you can customize the branding and even your own site theme if you have the available resources to do so! After switching from a sub-par LMS, our users are more engaged and more excited about signing in to consume our courses.

Cons

Reporting leaves much to be desired - best count on using Zapier to pull data into a 3rd party for analyzing user progress and completion rates. It's also frustrating that I have to wait for some reports to be emailed to me after requesting them. Perhaps the most frustrating part is that the front-end is designed using Liquid, which is difficult for a novice with basic CSS / HTML knowledge to navigate in order to make small text changes across the site.

Pros

Thinkific made it easy to create & host our digital course for financial advisors. With any platform there is a learning curve at the beginning. Thinkific's support team was always quick to reply and help us learn the ropes.

Cons

I don't really have any complaints. It would be nice if the WYSIWYG editor were as good as Apple Pages, and turned out prettier text layouts in the templates. But, it's good enough.