Thinkific vs Teachable: Which Is the Best Learning Management System for You
In this Thinkific vs Teachable debate, we'll dive into the nuances of both platforms to help you decide which is the best learning management system for you.
When comparing the two all-time famous Ts of the LMS industry, the differences are subtle enough to be overlooked and yet significant enough to consider. It all boils down to what matters the most to you.
I’ve extensively tested both platforms so you don’t have to. But before I dive deep into the nuances of their features, here is an overview for the busy skimmers:
If you’d like to try Teachable yourself, sign up for a free trial.
Or sign up for Thinkific’s free trial by hitting the button below:
This comprehensive Thinkific vs Teachable review digs deep into how both platforms differ. Based on my experience with both, I will be reviewing everything that matters from pricing to UI, ease of use, marketing tools, website designing experience, and a lot more.
So, let’s get started with a head-to-head comparison to find out which is the best learning management system for you.
Free Trials and Ease of Sign Up
Both Thinkific and Teachable offer free trial to let you try their platform before you decide to pay for one of their paid plans. You can sign up for their free plans by providing some basic details like your name, email address, and mailing address, etc. For a candid comparison, below is my experience while signing up for each of the free trials, stating similarities, and differences for each one of them:
The free trial offered by Teachable allows you free access to their Basic plan only. Thinkific, on the other hand, has a free trial for each one of their paid plans separately.
At teachable, the duration of free-trial I was offered was 7 days. At Thinkific, the duration of free trial is 14 days. However, you can get a special limited offer of 30-day free trial here.
While signing up for the free trials of both platforms, I was required to put in my credit card credentials (which I didn’t like at all). This means, if you decide to not sign up for their paid plans, you’ll have to cancel the subscription or you’ll be automatically charged an amount after your free trial expires. (7 days in case of Teachable and 14 days in case of Thinkific).
Teachable Free Trial 
Thinkific Free Trial With Thinkific, while signing up for a free trial, I was also required to have sufficient balance in my card for a temporary holding charge.
Who Wins It?
Thinkific requires you to not only provide your card credentials but also pay a temporary holding charge (immediately refunded). Teachable does ask you to provide card credentials but there is no holding charge.
On the other hand, a 7-day free trial by Teachable is the shortest I’ve come across after trying a bunch of learning management software. Compared to a 14-day free trial by Thinkific, it isn’t enough to play around with all the features on a decent pace and get yourself fully acquainted with the platform.
In short, for the free trial signup, I will call it a tie! I will give each one of them 4 out of 5 stars. (Only if they had allowed to sign up for a free trial without a card, just like LearnWorlds does, it would’ve been a 5 out of 5 stars).
Sign up for a free trial with Teachable here. Or try Thinkific for free.
User Interface
Both Thinkific and Teachable have a well-designed, easy to use dashboard that makes everything easily accessible. Their user interface is intuitive and pretty much similar. Both have a minimalist feel without any clutter and a well-organized left pane where you can find pretty much everything you need.
However, with Teachable, they’ve taken ease of navigation one step further. Even when you are in a sub menu, e.g. in your site menu, the main menu remains visible and readily accessible on the left. With Thinkific, you’d instead need to move back and forth, moving in and out of the main menu and sub menus.
Who Wins It:
Although both LMS have a very intuitive interface and easy-to-use dashboard, and they don’t have a learning curve. When it comes to overall user interface, I would give a slight edge to Teachable due to its seamless navigation and an always accessible main menu, reducing the need to move back and forth.
for user interface and ease of use, Teachable gets 5 out of 5 stars and Thinkific gets 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Curriculum Builder
Now comes the crucial area of course creation. Thinkific and Teachable offer quite a few useful tools for course building, including text, pdf, downloadable resources, videos, quizzes, surveys, audios, and live meetings through Zoom. However, they differ a lot in the extent of customizability and options provided.
You can add more than one types of contents within a single lesson. For example, you can have a mixture of videos, text, and pdf. you can also give links to resources outside your course on the platform. Both platforms allow you to re-arrange the chapters and lessons and even the content types within a lesson by simple dragging and dropping.
Let us now have a look at some of the major differences between Teachable and Thinkific when it comes to individual content types for course creation.
Text Editor
Both platforms allow you to add text blocks within your lessons. However, after using both, I liked Thinkific’s text editor a lot better than Teachable’s. Thinkific provides a full-featured text creation experience with innumerable options. Teachable, on the other hand, has a basic text editor with limited editing tools.
Who Wins It?
Thinkific is clearly the winner with its feature-rich and comprehensive text editor. It gets well-deserved 5 stars while Teachable gets 4 out of 5 stars for it comparatively limited features in text editor.
Automation with AI Tools
Both Thinkific and Teachable have pretty handy AI tools to help you through outline generation to quiz creation and more. These tools significantly reduce you work load and speed up the process. Let us compare the degree of automation offered by AI tools in both LMS.
Both Thinkific and Teachable offer course outline generation through AI. All you have to do is to provide a short but precise description of what your course will be offering and who are your audience. In a few minutes, your comprehensive outline will be ready to which you can add content.
According to the content of your lessons, you can take AI’s help to generate Quizzes for the students. Both platforms are offering this feature as well.
At Teachable only, using their AI tools, you can generate summaries of lessons from the text content. This is something Thinkific should think of including in their AI course assistant.
AI Lesson Summaries with Teachable Another remarkable use of AI at Teachable is the automatic generation of subtitles for the videos you upload in the content. This is one of my favorite features in Teachable Curriculum builder.
Who Wins It?
Teachable is a clear winner when it comes to putting AI to its best use for course creation, quiz generation, captions, and content summaries.
Teachable gets 5 out of 5 stars here while Thinkific scores 4 stars with its somewhat limited use of AI.
Quizzes and Certificates
Both Thinkific and Teachable offer quiz creation to enhance student engagement. However, the level of customization offered here is better at Thinkific. Here’s how:
At Thinkific, you can create advanced-level quizzes with options like randomized questions banks, importing questions, adding explanations and more. Teachable on the other hand has a standard, basic format of multiple choice questions with no additional options other than adding an image which is also available with Thinkific.
Quiz creation with Teachable 
Quiz creation with Thinkific At Thinkific, you have a comprehensive, feature-rich editor in quizzes as well where you can format your questions as you want. Teachable doesn’t allow this flexibility.
Text editor for Quizzes in Thinkific Above all, taking student assessment to the most advanced level, Thinkific provides integration with Brillium to allow its users access to a full-fledged assessment system.
Both Teachable and Thinkific allow you to automatically award certificates to your students once they have completed the course. Thinkific offers as many as seven pre-designed templates for certificates that you can modify and tweak as you need. Teachable has three pre-designed templates for certificates. however, I think that would suffice for most creators. Thinkific also allows you to universally apply a selected certificate template to more all courses. This cannot be done with Teachable.
Who wins it?
Thinkific is a clear winner with its highly advanced quiz creation options, integration with Brillium for proper exam formats, a number of supported formats for quiz questions and answers, and seven professional predesigned templates for certificates. It gets a whopping 5 out of 5 stars while Teachable gets 3.5 stars with its very restricted quiz format.
Creating Assignments
You can create assignments for your students with both Teachable and Thinkific. However, Thinkific allows your students to submit their assignments for you to review them. This very basic and yet crucial feature is not offered by Teachable.
Who Wins It?
Quite logically, Thinkific is ahead of Teachable with the ability to allow the students to submit there assignments for a manual review leading to rejection or acceptance. Thinkific gets another 5 stars here, while Teachable scores 3.5 with complete absence of this feature.
Drip Feed
Both LMS offer the drip release feature where you can release new content either based on student’s enrollment date or by the date when you started the course. However, Teachable is a bit ahead here as it allows automated emails sent to the students when the new content is released.
Who wins it?
Teachable gets 5 out of 5 stars with its automated emails feature when new content is released, while Thinkific scores a 4 as it is offering both types of drip feed but is missing the auto email feature.
Course Compliance (Content Lock)
With both Learning Management Systems, you can lock further content supply until students have completed a certain level. however, at Teachable, you must follow the exact sequence of the provided lessons, which is a bit too rigid an approach. At Teachable, you will not get access to new content until you complete a specific lesson, e.g. a quiz which has been set as a pre-requisite. But here, you are allowed to go through the lessons at your preferred sequence.
Who wins it?
Thinkific gets 5 stars due to its flexible approach towards the content locking feature while Teachable gets 4.5 stars because of being a bit too rigid.
Community
When it comes to student engagement, the importance of community cannot be stressed enough. Both Teachable and Thinkific have in-built community features which cannot be called very advanced as they lack quite a few features offered by some other LMS like LearnWorlds, but they are still adequate to keep the students engaged and enhance their learning experience.
The difference here is, you can use Thinkific’s mobile app to check and participate in communities. Teachable doesn’t allow access to communities through the mobile app. However, Teachable lets you award badges to active members unlike Thinkific. On the other hand, you can create events in communities which isn’t available in Teachable’s community feature.
Who wins it?
I’ll give 5 stars each to both platforms for a decent community feature with adequate engagement guaranteed for the students.
Live Sessions
Both Thinkific and Teachable integrate with Zoom and you can set up live classes for your students. however, with Thinkific, you can also create recurring classes. This feature isn’t supported by Teachable.
However, you need to have a paid Zoom account to take advantage of the live sessions feature.
Who wins it?
I’ll give 5 stars to Thinkific as it also allows recurring sessions and 4.5 stars to Teachable because of a bit of a hassle you’ll have setting up new sessions every time.
Course Player
For both platforms, I’ll call their course player to be pretty ‘neat’. Both course players are free of distraction with the focus only on the content. Both have a ‘complete and continue’ button to help students easily navigate from one lesson to the other.
Having said that, Thinkific allows a more immersive experience by letting the students remove the side bar.
On the other hand, Teachable allows students to take notes as they go through the content, a feature I liked the most about their course player.
While both course players are overall quite neat and decent, it would’ve been great of the platforms allowed some degree of customization.
Who wins it?
Both Thinkific and Teachable have a course player that I would rate as that if intermediate level compared to other LMS I have tried. I would give both 4 stars each.
Mobile App
This is where Thinkific excels. They are offering a mobile app for both the iOS and Android for free. students can access not only the course but also communities through these mobile apps.
Thinkific is also offering a paid branded mobile app for $199 per month for your own brand.
Teachable, on the other hand, has only enabled an iOS app only and is yet to launch an Android app or a branded app.
Website and Page Builder
Thinkific and Teachable take care of all the technical stuff, security requirements like SSL certificates, hosting, coding, etc. They offer a drag and drop experience to help users with no coding knowledge design a decent website and build professional pages. Both platforms also auto-generate sales pages to let you pay attention to the core task of course creation.
You can also customize your site’s color, text, and themes, and you automatically get a subdomain for your website with both platforms. Let us now have a look at how the website and page builders differ for both platforms.
Thinkific has organized a cool themes library for its users to pick from three very professional looking themes. Each of these themes has several styles to meet your aesthetic preferences.
Thinkific Themes Library
Teachable does not have a dedicated theme library and you will be using their native template for your website. However, they do allow you to customize your site’s color, fonts, key sections like header and footer, and put up your logo. While it would be called lack of customization, I personally think it is a plus point for those looking to keep it simple when it comes to website designing and focus only on course creation. After all, there are people like me who aren’t really into the stuff related to web designing even when it is drag and drop.
For those who want to have it totally their way, Thinkific allows you to import themes into your website. Teachable hasn’t introduced this option yet.
When it comes to page builder, here too, Thinkific gives importance to customizability and you can craft a highly professional-looking page by simply dragging and dropping. Thinkific provides over 20 types of sections for you to add to your pages. Teachable, however, has a limited number of blocks, for example, it lacks the testimonial section.
The section I personally liked the most in Thinkific is the count-down timer where you can display a special limited time offer with ‘x’ days and ‘x’ hours remaining. This isn’t yet available with Teachable.
Thinkific page builder 
Thinkific Page Builder
Who wins it?
with a plethora of theme styles and professional looking themes, ability to import your favorite themes, and enhanced customizability while designing page sections, Thinkific stands out in the area of website and page building with 5 stars compared to 4 stars for Teachable with a decent inbuilt template and medium level of customization with page building.
Sales and Promotion
You can have multiple sales plans with both Thinkific and Teachable. For example, you can bundle up your courses or digital products and offer a discount when bought together. You can go for a single lump sum payment option or offer monthly or annual subscriptions.
Where Thinkific allows you to set monthly, annual, and quarterly payments, Teachable also allows weekly and biweekly payment plans.
With Thinkific, you can set a ‘custom first payment’, but this isn’t yet available with Teachable.
Both Teachable and Thinkific allow you to have more than one payment plan for one product. For instance, you can offer both monthly and annual plans for the same product. However, Teachable allows users to switch between these plans and upgrade or downgrade their plans while Thinkific doesn’t.
Both LMS offer discount coupons, and other promotional features like Buy now Pay Later.
With Thinkific, the users are allowed to purchase multiple seats for a course at once.
With both platforms, you can allow affiliates to promote your courses and earn a commission. You can set a percentage of commission they will earn. However, Teachable also allows you to set a cookie period and allow automated payouts to your affiliates through BackOffice.
With Teachable, exclusively, you can set up a referral program where students refer your courses to others at a discounted price.
With both Thinkific and Teachable, you can create several funnels to enhance conversions. You can use such offers at checkout like a free download, and free lesson funnel to encourage the users into buying your product.
Thinkific offers another additional feature of ‘Abandoned Cart Emails’ where you can send notifications to the users who have left their carts abandoned and didn’t return after putting a product in their cart for some time.
Who wins it?
When it comes to sales and marketing, both platforms have given creators unlimited options to maximize conversions and streamline payments. with a few differences, the overall sales and promotion mechanism for both platforms is pretty similar and very comprehensive. So, we have a tie here with 5 stars for each platform.
Reporting and Analytics
While reporting students’ metrics for an insight about their performance, Thinkific has a clear edge over Teachable with more in-depth analytics. For example:
Unlike an overall reporting format at course level with Teachable, Thinkific gives you the progress report about each student individually. By getting an overview of how much a student has progressed through the course, how slow or quick the progress is, and how much time is spent on each section, you can improve your course content accordingly.
In reporting too, Thinkific has a granular approach, showing the sales by each product. Teachable on the other hand only gives you overall sales.
Thinkific has introduced several report types that help you get insights into website traffic to conversion rate, monthly recurring revenue, total orders and top performing products, and a lot more. These insightful reports aren’t introduced by Teachable yet.
Who wins it?
Thinkific stands out here with its highly granular and insightful reporting and analytics. It gets 5 stars compared to 4 stars for Teachable with its very basic level of reporting and analytics.
Bulk Sales to Cohorts
One of the very useful features for creators, offered solely by Thinkific is that you can sell your courses to cohorts and organizations. You can even bulk enroll large groups of students. However, this feature is avialable for strt plan and higher. This is something Teachable should also introduce.
Who wins it?
Thinkific gets 5 stars for this feature while Teachable gets nil for missing this feature completely.
If you are considering pursuing a business and earning by selling your courses to organizations, Thinkific at the moment is among the best LMS platforms for selling to groups.
Third-Party Apps Integration
If you think any of the platforms is missing a feature that you need, you can integrate a third-party app to fill the void. However, Thinkific’s dedicated apps store has over 90 apps while Teachable has just over 20 apps. However, these integrations are a bit costly at both platforms.
Who wins it?
Thinkific is clearly a winner with its 90+ app integrations and scores a 5 here as well as compared to 4 stars for Teachable for limited integration options.
Pricing
Both Learning Management Systems (LMS) offer multi-tier pricing plans. Thinkific has much lower prices compared to Teachable, and the addition of transaction fees with Basic Plan makes Teachable even more expensive. Here is an overview of all the plans being offered by both platforms:
Who wins it?
Thinkific has lower prices for all plans and no transaction fees. Hence, Thinkific wins it with 5 stars as compared to Teachable with 4 stars as it is a bit pricey.
Try Teachable for free for 7 days.
Final Verdict
While both Thinkific and Teachable have their downsides and strengths, I liked Thinkific better because of high degree of customization it offers, highly professional website and page builder, ability to sell courses to cohorts and organizations, a plethora of third party apps to be integrated, insightful analytics and reporting, robust community features, all-in-one mobile apps both free and paid white label, and ofcourse higher degree of student engagement through immersive quizzes and ability to manually check student assignments.
Above all, it is very reasonably priced with no transaction fees and doesn’t limit the number of courses that you can create unlike Teachable that has a limit on number of courses and also has a transaction fee on its Basic Plan.
You can try it for free before you select a suitable plan for yourself.
Teachable, on the other hand, has a clear edge when it comes to a beginner-friendly user interface, which is better organized compared to Thinkific. Moreover, I found its AI automation tools to be a lot more powerful than Thinkific. If these are the traits you prefer, you should give Teachable a try.