Online learning has made it easy for anyone to learn almost anything from artistry to space science whilst sitting at their houses. Online learning or eLearning is also not limited to students but people from any walk of life may be a student or a working professional or an entrepreneur, they can use eLearning platforms to learn things.
On the flip side, online learning platforms have also enabled people with knowledge and skills to share their wisdom with students simply by creating courses and uploading them.
According to statistics, eLearning industry is expected to reach a market size of $240 billion by 2023. There are already millions of course creators who have an established profile on various eLearning platforms but hundreds and thousands are joining each day.
When it comes to content creators, they are tasked with choosing the right platform to upload their courses and interact with fellow students and also earn money on top of it. Deciding which platform to choose as it has become a confusing task as the market is so saturated and there are tens and hundreds of platforms ready for sign up.
Thinkific vs Teachable 2021: Which is the best?
If you are planning to launch your own online course, choosing the best is your first step. Here’s a no-fluff comparison and review on the two largest platforms aka Thinkific and Teachable.
Thinkific: Overview
Thinkific is an all-powerful platform with over 53 million courses taken, 40,000-course creators. It is used in 14 countries around the globe and has allowed creators to earn more than $200 million+ since the inception of the program. The platform offers high-end personalized websites and provides support to the students no matter if it’s ten or a million students attuned to your course. Apart from that, Thinkific has 100 dedicated employees that look after the services to keep both creators and learners satisfied.
Thinkific: Features
Talking about some of the features that Thinkific brings onboard, it is a great avenue that gives creators control over customer data and content they upload. The platform has a brilliant user interface and web design options and customizing it doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML or CSS either. The platform lets you add videos, text, quizzes, surveys, discussions, and more.
To add to this, you can combine it with other tools such as DropInBlog, which allows you to add a blog to Thinkific. It’s a great platform for both people who are just getting into the eLearning industry, and seasoned veterans alike.
Teachable: Overview
Competing against Thinkific, Teachable is another platform you can consider that has more than 100,000 creators for any and every area of expertise. It is an easy-to-learn all-in-one platform that has served more than 23 million students and counting. The robust platform offers 24/7 monitoring to record any outage and gives both creators and learners a refined experience like never before.
Teachable: Features
Teachable has a drag and drop editor that allows creators to design their own website based on their requirements. There’s an excellent analytics tool that captures everything from footfall in the classes to a number of subscribers and also, ROI on the platform. The platform is linked with advanced marketing pages that give a huge jumpstart to creators on this venue to compete with other eLearning portals like Udemy or Skillshare or Thinkific in this instance.
In order to draw a conclusion as to what platform you should choose, we have prepared a list of aspects where we will pit Thinkific against Teachable that should prove instrumental in choosing the best platform.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Performance & Uptime
The performance and uptime of any platform are crucial. This is because outages can cause issues for those taking classes or someone who is about to buy a course or those building courses. This is also one of the easiest ways to discourage masses and thus, damage brand image without any further ado.
Thus, reducing the downtime to a minimum is important. In this case, although both the platforms offer 99.9% of uptime with 24/7 monitoring for outages, Thinkific has less number of outages while Teachable has a dedicated team that monitors the platform and takes care of any outages. Most of the issues that are reported are latency issues, intermittent connectivity issues, issues with updating billing information however, Thinkific has undergone issues with the reduction in responsiveness and others.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Course Builder
For a beginner, using a platform that is powerful yet complex weighs less than a platform that is moderately powerful but intuitive to use. Both the platforms have almost identical features when it comes to course creation. Both support unlimited videos, quizzes, and organizing lessons once all the content is uploading on the platform. You can add anything from pdf, text, quizzes, audio, and video files that you can bulk upload and organize. The difference here is that Teachable’s course builder lets you organize things all at once while Thinkific’s course builder would need you to organize each lesson individually.
Furthermore, Teachable lets you add various multimedia files in the same lecture while Thinkific isn’t that flexible and requires manually layering all the supported files of any given lesson or chapter and this takes time. Similarly, Teachable lets users import content from Google Drive and equivalent at a faster rate and allows bulk import from the cloud while Thinkific doesn’t allow it.
Moreover, creating courses on Thinkific is super easy as there’s no need for coding knowledge and the video content is unlimited and creators can use pre-themes to launch their courses. Teachable, on the other hand, has a highly responsive website builder and its power editor can integrate powerful features on the creator’s website. Moreover, the platform allows tweaking language support for foreign students which is a great feature to learn potential leads from foreign countries into students.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Data Analytics
With students, on-board and hundreds and thousands of visitors that arrive on Thinkific and Teachable daily, making sense of the data is crucial as it informs creators what users like and dislike among other verticals such as student’s completion rates, the performance of the videos, number of users online, etc. Thus, data analytics is crucial and here, Teachable takes the lead.
On one hand, Thinkific seamlessly integrates with data analytics tools like Facebook, Google AdWords, and others. This gives creators an in-depth view of what students and visitors do on their website. There’s also a tonne of filters that enables creators to find a specific group of students to target and run highly personalized campaigns accordingly.
Teachable takes the lead as it can be integrated with a tonne of analytics tools. Track user’s signups and revenue over a specific period, check out the account types and completion rates of lectures on the go. There’s also support integrated with marketing tools like Zapier in an attempt to improve analytics in the long run.
Website Design & Customization
How a website looks and performs is really important nowadays as today, users decide whether to stay put on any website or not in just 8 seconds so making a good impression is crucial. Talking about Thinkific and Teachable, both platforms offer a wide range of design and customization options.
First of all, both the platforms offer free SSL certificates and free hosting with a free subdomain to go through although a custom one is available for paying for it. Moving on, the website themes are something that differentiates a website from another and Thinkific doesn’t fail to impress the masses with its theme library.
You can select from the various available themes and get set go with it. For those who would like to modify their Thinkific website, they can use the custom theme option to create an impeccable experience for its users via ‘Power Editor’.
Teachable does have an armamentarium of website themes although limited in scope so you would really have to work to get it working based on your prerequisites. Both the platforms have an efficient drag and drop builder that allows adding elements to beautify your website on the go.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Sales & Marketing Tools
Sales and marketing tools are the backbones of launching your online courses to the next level. Here, Teachable offers a 1-step checkout where users pay for what course they enrol and then create an account while Thinkific requires a 2-step checkout process where the first step is to create an account before paying for any course. The latter is, of course, a deterrent and discourages a good chunk of potential buyers.
Both the platforms support a one-time payment or a recurring subscription or choose a payment plan to get their courses enabled. Plus, there are a bunch of other offers that creators can associate with their courses such as 3 easy installments and others. This is one of the best ways to boost sales for sure.
When it comes to marketing tools on-board, Thinkific gives access to affiliate marketing and rewards associated with it that can be redeemed with instant payouts. Thinkific allows integration with over 1,000 marketing tools available across the internet that helps in channeling the power of marketing into getting more users.
Additionally, the platform gives us access to advanced data tracking as well as ad tracking and analytics for various platforms that gives a better understanding of how the marketing campaigns are performing.
On the other hand, Teachable offers a wide range of features to track affiliate programs. Creating coupons, promotional deals, and other campaigns to incentivize those joining your course are also available on just a click. The platform also enables various payment options including payment plans, recurring payments, and one time payments.
Teachable is a clear winner due to its immense choices of tools available for highly optimized sales and marketing that gives an upper hand over Thinkific without any doubt.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Security Measures
Protecting a website against cyber threats is crucial nowadays. Both platforms have robust technologies in place to keep cybersecurity threats. Talking about Thinkific, it’s cloud hosting keeps data safe 24*7 and takes automatic backups from time to time to reduce data loss. Furthermore, the platform rolls out security updates as well as takes required actions in case of any security breaches.
Teachable on the other hand is PCL Level-1 compliant that provides absolute data security as well as a 2048-bit SSL certificate that keeps data related to students safe and secure. All the data on the website is under your control and ownership as well.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Customer Support
Next up, talking about one of the most prioritized aspects in choosing any elearning is customer support. This is simply because the representatives can be contacted to fix operational issues. As no services are without flaws, robust customer support can enable outrun any inefficiencies and issues that might hit your website.
Apparently, both Teachable and Thinkific have brilliant customer support offering online tutorials, support tickets, knowledge base, onboarding emails, and Facebook groups that should resolve all your queries in a jiffy.
However, Teachable gets a bit of edge here with its real-time live chat support although it is limited to its Professional plan only while Thinkific gives you a form to fill and that’s when customer support takes the lead.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Pricing
Talking about the pricing, both the platforms offer 4 main pricing plans to choose from starting with the free tier which is of course free. Next up, the Basic Plan costs $39/mo on Teachable while the same plan on Thinkific is available at $49/mo. Moving on, the Professional Plan on Teachable is available at $119/mo while Thinkific’s Pro Plan is available at $99/mo plus its Growth Package which is its set of optional features that are charged on the basis of per active students.
The highest tier on both the platforms is called on Business on Teachable and Premier on Thinkific available at $499/o and $299/mo respectively. There’s no need for a rocket science degree to understand that Thinkific is way more expensive than Teachable although it offers instant payouts. When it comes to the popular plans on both the platforms, Thinkific is a clear winner although adding the add-on services can cost exorbitantly.
Additionally, Thinkific doesn’t charge any transaction fee on all its plans while Teachable takes a whopping $1+10% as a transaction fee for its Free Plan which drops to just 5% for the Basic Plan.
Thinkific Vs Teachable: Pros & Cons
This was all about the two major elearning platforms i.e. Thinkific and Teachable. Here’s a list of pros and cons that both the platforms possess that should help in deciding the best platform to choose.
Thinkific Pros:
- Create stunning pages & course
- There are no transaction charges on payments
- Its free subscription is an all-in-one plan for businesses without an upfront cost
- Video hosting is included in the plans and thus, no extra charges on it
- Integrate various payment gateways for instant payments
Thinkific Cons:
- The free plan is limited in features
- There’s no support for workshops
Teachable Pros:
- Use drag and drop feature for customizing high-quality course pages
- Intuitive data analytics to understand numbers & statistics
- Everything from hosting, settings, design, & customizations are all included in its plans
- The instant payout on Basic and above plans
- 1-step checkout process
Teachable Cons:
- It charges transaction fees on payments
- There’s no support for workshops
- Might undergo responsiveness & other critical downtime errors
No doubt choosing the right platform is a strenuous task even when we have already listed almost all the features, pros, and cons in this explicit review on Thinkific Vs Teachable. At the end of the day, choosing is subjective. Both the platforms are robust, highly-optimized, and have their own set of pros and cons to deal with. We would recommend you to evaluate the blog above and decide the platform that serves you well.
