
Quick verdict:
Thinkific wins on course depth, unlimited courses, and 0% transaction fees, while Teachable wins on mobile apps, affiliate marketing, and checkout optimization.
Our conclusion, or rather the opening to this Teachable vs Thinkific comparison 2026, is this: Teachable was built for selling courses, while Thinkific was built for creating them.
Keep that in mind, and this entire comparison will make sense.
Let’s go.
| Category | Teachable | Thinkific |
| Starting price | $39/month | $49/month |
| Transaction fees | 7.5% on Starter, 0% on Builder+ | 0% with Thinkific Payments |
| Course limits | 5 on Starter, 10 on Builder | Unlimited on all plans |
| Student limits | 100 on Starter, 1,000 on Builder | 10,000 on all standard plans |
| Completion certificates | Yes, all plans | Start plan ($99/mo) and above |
| Mobile app (iOS/Android) | Yes, student apps on all plans | No native student app |
| Affiliate program | Builder plan and above | All plans (basic) |
| Live sessions / Zoom | Not available | Start plan and above |
| Assessments (quizzes+) | Quizzes, short answer | Quizzes, surveys, exams |
| SCORM compliance | Not available | Plus plan only |
| Custom domain | Builder plan+ | Basic plan and above |
| Community features | Basic on all plans | Basic on the Start plan+ |
| AI course tools | Create with AI on all plans | AI quiz generator, AI tools |
| Free trial | 7-day free trial | 30-day free trial |
| Group program delivery | Not built for this | Not built for this |
There are Teachable vs Thinkific pricing comparisons that only show you Teachable at $39/month and Thinkific at $49/month, and call it quits.
But what happens after your first sale is where the real villain arc begins.

The Starter plan at $39 per month is what Teachable leads with on its pricing page.
What it doesn’t lead with is the 7.5% transaction fee sitting quietly underneath it. That fee is a platform charge on top of whatever Stripe takes from your pockets.
So, at $3,000 per month in course revenue, that 7.5% eats $225 before Stripe even looks at the transaction.
Your real Starter plan cost is $264 and not $39.
And that’s before you hit the other walls on that plan:
In essence, the Starter plan is just a trial with a monthly subscription fee.
From there, the Builder plan at $89 per month removes the transaction fee completely, making it the real entry price for any creator generating actual sales.
| Plan | Monthly price | Transaction fee |
| Starter | $39/month | 7.5% on every sale |
| Builder | $89/month | 0% |
| Growth | $189/month | 0% |
| Sellers | Custom | 0% |
You should also know that Teachable caps the number of active students per plan until you hit $10,000 in annual sales directly on the platform. Once you cross that threshold, the student caps disappear.
But that transaction fee on the Starter plan doesn’t.

Thinkific leads with a $49 monthly price for the Basic plan. And unlike Teachable’s Starter, it gives you unlimited courses, 0% transaction fees with Thinkific Payments, a custom domain, and reporting from day one.
So on the surface, the Thinkific vs Teachable pricing comparison already looks different once you factor in what each plan actually includes.
That said, the 0% transaction fee applies only when you use Thinkific Payments.
Switch to your own Stripe account, and Thinkific adds a third-party gateway surcharge on top of Stripe’s standard rate.
Now, the surcharge varies by plan, and as of March 2026, subscription and payment plan transactions incur an extra 0.7% fee, even through Thinkific Payments. That brings the real rate on subscriptions to 3.6%, and not the headline 2.9%.
PayPal is also locked behind the Grow plan at $199 per month.
If a chunk of your audience pays with PayPal, that limitation alone could decide your plan.
| Plan | Monthly price | Transaction fee |
| Basic | $49/month | 0% with Thinkific Payments |
| Start | $99/month | 0% |
| Grow | $199/month | 0% |
| Plus | Custom | 0% |
And there’s the 10,000-student cap across every Thinkific plan.
Admittedly, most creators never hit it, but if you’re building toward a large audience, the ceiling exists, and Plus pricing is custom, so you’d better have great negotiating skills.
On Teachable, these features require a plan upgrade that many creators don’t expect:
On Thinkific:
Winner: Thinkific (for any creator generating real sales)
Unlimited courses and 0% transaction fees on the Basic plan make Thinkific the more cost-effective choice at almost every revenue level. Teachable’s real entry price for a serious creator is $89 per month, and at that point, Thinkific’s $49 flat rate with no product caps becomes very hard to ignore.
Both platforms offer a drag-and-drop course builder, video, audio, text, PDFs, and quizzes, and support drip scheduling, so they look identical on paper.
But you only notice the difference once you start building.
The Teachable course builder lets you pile multiple content types inside a single lesson.
You can add a video, a text block, a quiz, and a downloadable file all in one place, without splitting.

That’s useful if you’re a creator who wants students to watch a video and immediately answer questions about it without having to click anywhere else.
What’s more, Teachable lets you embed product upsells directly inside lesson content.
A student finishes a video and sees an offer for your next course right there on the same page, turning your course content into an active sales channel.
From there, Teachable also lets you upload content directly from Google Drive and Dropbox without downloading and re-uploading files.
And the AI course outline generator gives new creators a curriculum structure to work from before they start building.
That said, Teachable locks a custom domain behind the Builder plan at $89 per month.
On the Starter plan, your course lives on a teachable.com subdomain. For a platform selling itself as a professional course tool, that’s a strange place to draw the line.
Thinkific, on the other hand, takes a different approach.
Instead of combining everything into a single lesson block, it uses dedicated lesson types.
You pick the format first (video, audio, presentation, PDF, quiz, survey, live session, exam, or text) and the platform builds the display around that specific type.

What you get is a cleaner experience for students.
For instance, a video lesson loads the player front and center, a presentation lesson shows slides, while a survey shows questions without distraction.
This ensures your students always know what they’re about to engage with before they start. Such clarity may seem minor, but it compounds across an entire course.
The AI quiz generator is worth calling out as well.
Feed it your lesson content, and it creates assessment questions automatically.
For creators building courses with dozens of lessons, that feature alone saves hours.
One area where this Teachable vs Thinkific comparison clearly favors Teachable, though, is content dripping.
Teachable drips at the chapter level, meaning you can release individual lessons within a chapter on a schedule, while Thinkific drips at the module level.
If you run 30-day challenge courses or daily lesson programs, Teachable’s granularity is a real operational advantage.
Winner: Thinkific
Teachable wins on in-lesson upsells and chapter-level drip scheduling. But Thinkific gives you more lesson types, deeper assessment tools, a cleaner student experience, and a custom domain on the entry plan. For the majority of course creators building structured learning programs, Thinkific delivers more of what actually matters inside the course itself.
You can tell a lot about what a platform prioritizes by looking at its assessment tools.
As I said before, Teachable was built around selling courses, while Thinkific was built around teaching them.
That gap shows up here more than anywhere else in the Thinkific vs Teachable comparison.
Teachable has auto-graded quizzes with multiple-choice questions and short answer submissions that require manual grading.

With course-compliance tools, you can enforce quiz completion and require a passing grade before students advance.
Both work fine for simple self-paced courses.
But if you need surveys for student feedback, formal exams with randomized question banks, or assignment submission workflows with grading rubrics, that’s where Teachable lets you down.
These gaps become structural limits for any creator running certification tracks, corporate training programs, or any program where documented student progress matters.
Thinkific’s assessment toolkit covers the full range.
Quizzes include passing score requirements and question randomization, surveys gather student feedback at any point in the course, and assignments let students submit written work for instructor review.

Plus, the Brillium exam integration supports professional exams with built-in anti-cheating tools and formal certification requirements.
From there, the AI quiz generator automatically generates questions from your course content. This feature alone saves hours of writing time per course, freeing up more time to teach and less time building assessments.
Why is this important to your business?
Because assessment depth determines completion rates. And completion rates are what produce testimonials, referrals, and renewals.
Courses with mandatory assessments achieve 40% higher completion rates than those without assessment requirements.
So the platform you choose for student assessment is the same platform you choose for student outcomes.
In essence, teaching online courses without proper assessment tools is like running a coaching program without tracking whether your clients are really improving. The numbers look fine until someone asks for proof.
Winner: Thinkific (and the gap’s wide on this one)
Thinkific has quizzes, surveys, exams, assignments, an AI quiz generator, and Brillium integration for professional certification programs. Teachable, however, offers quizzes and short-answer submissions. For any creator running a program where learning outcomes matter beyond watching videos, Thinkific is the only serious choice between these two platforms.
This one doesn’t need a long setup because Teachable has a native iOS and Android student app on every plan, while Thinkific doesn’t.
Everything else below is just context.
Every Teachable plan includes iOS and Android apps for students.
They download the app, log in, and find all their enrolled courses waiting, with content downloads for offline viewing and push notifications for new lessons and announcements.
The whole experience works the way a proper mobile app should.
If you’re a creator in fitness, language learning, or professional development where students learn on the go, this feature makes more sense than almost any other feature on this list.
A student who opens your course during a commute finishes more of it than one who has to sit at a laptop to access it.
That’s just how people use their phones.
Thinkific doesn’t include a native app on any standard plan, so your students must access courses through the mobile browser.
And sure, it works, but it also delivers a noticeably different experience.
There are no offline downloads, push notifications through an app, or an app icon sitting on your student’s home screen reminding them to come back.
The branded mobile app add-on at $199 per month gives you a white-label app in the App Store under your name.
That’s a strong option if you’re a serious course business.
That said, it costs $199 per month on top of whichever plan you’re already paying for.
So, on the Grow plan at $199 per month, adding the branded app brings your total to $398 per month before any processing fees.
Compare that to Teachable, which includes a branded app on the Starter plan at $39 per month. Suddenly, the Thinkific pricing looks less competitive at the point where mobile matters most.
Winner: Teachable
Native iOS and Android apps on every plan versus browser-only access on Thinkific’s standard tiers. For any creator whose students learn on mobile, which in 2026 is most of them, this isn’t a close call. Teachable wins this category outright, and Thinkific has no equivalent answer on standard plans.
Now, neither platform was built for community-led learning, but both offer community features that they use as selling points.
And both “community software” deliver something closer to a message board than an actual learning community.
Teachable rolled out a community feature as a newer addition to the platform.
You can create a community, restrict access to specific enrolled students, and organize content into categories and tags.

Its interface is clean and more modern-feeling than many community tools tacked onto course platforms.
However, the feature set is basic because there’s no gamification, direct messaging between members, or discussion tied to specific lessons.
Students who want to discuss Week 3’s content post in a general forum, hoping the right people see it.
From our 8-year community-building experience, that’s less community-driven learning and more of a message board with a nice interface.
Thinkific’s community uses a Spaces model.
You organize discussions into different spaces (kinda like Slack), each with its own topics and threads.

Threaded replies and user mentions also work well, and you can have private spaces for specific cohorts or groups.
Plus, add weekly digest emails to keep members coming back.
The Start plan gives you 1 community with 10 spaces, while the Grow plan adds 3 communities with 20 spaces each.
That structure is more organized than Teachable’s category system and supports some basic segmentation between different student groups.
But the same fundamental gap exists.
The discussion community lives in a separate section from the courses, so students finish a lesson and have to navigate away to find the relevant discussion.
There’s also no lesson-level community integration, gamification, or automated re-engagement for quiet members.
Winner: Thinkific (by a small margin)
Thinkific’s Spaces model is more organized, supports private cohort spaces, and has been part of the platform longer. Teachable’s community, on the other hand, is newer and cleaner but shallower in structure.
Neither platform connects community to lesson content by design, and neither has gamification or automated re-engagement. So Thinkific wins on organization, but both platforms leave serious community work to external tools.
Teachable was built by a team that thought deeply about selling, while Thinkific was built by a team that thought deeply about learning.
That origin shows up clearly when you compare their sales and marketing tools, and the gap is bigger than most Thinkific vs Teachable comparisons let on.
Teachable’s sales tools are more developed than Thinkific’s across the board.
Coupons, upsells, order bumps, and cart recovery emails are included in the Starter plan, so even at $39 per month, you have the tools to maximize revenue from every visitor who lands on your checkout page.
The standout is upsells inside lessons.
When a student finishes a video inside your course, Teachable can show them an offer for a related product right there on the same page, without any redirect.
That single feature turns your course content into an active revenue channel, which is something most online course platforms simply don’t support.
From there, the affiliate program on the Builder plan goes deeper than Thinkific’s.
Custom commission rates per product, real-time referral tracking, and payout management from the dashboard.
That level of affiliate tracking is a real operational advantage if you run launch campaigns with JV partners.
Built-in email marketing also comes with the Builder plan and above.
It’s not a replacement for ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign, but it handles basic sequences for enrolled students without requiring a third-party integration right away.
Thinkific’s sales tools cover what most creators need to start.
The Basic plan includes abandoned cart emails, coupons, order bumps, gifting, and flexible payment options.
Meanwhile, the TCommerce suite adds buy now, pay later options, smart credit card retries for failed subscription payments, and automated sales tax handling.
That said, Thinkific stops short of checkout optimization depth.
There’s no upsell inside the lesson content, email sequences are less sophisticated than dedicated marketing tools, and creators whose primary growth lever is funnel optimization or affiliate-driven launches need external tools.
Where Thinkific does pull ahead for certain businesses is group orders on the Grow plan.
One client buys access for an entire team in a single transaction.
For B2B coaching and corporate training programs, that capability opens sales that individual seat checkout systems cannot support at all.
Winner: Teachable
In-lesson upsells, a more mature affiliate program, and built-in email marketing give Teachable the edge in the Teachable vs Thinkific sales and marketing tools comparison. Thinkific’s TCommerce suite is solid, and group orders are genuinely useful for B2B sales. But Teachable was built for the seller first, and that priority shows up in every layer of the checkout experience.
Both platforms let you build a course school without hiring a developer, but the level of control you get, and when you get it, is different enough to matter depending on how seriously you take your brand.
Teachable provides templates for sales, checkout, and thank-you pages.
The original editor was basic enough that many creators just used it as a starting point and connected external tools.
But the newer 2.0 page builder was a real improvement, with drag-and-drop building blocks.

That said, the number of building blocks is smaller than what dedicated page builders offer.
Custom CSS requires the Builder plan at $89 per month, so your visual control on the Starter plan is limited to what the template allows.
That ceiling arrives faster than expected if you care about brand experience
Thinkific uses a theme-based system.
You pick one of three themes, and the platform generates all essential pages automatically, including home, about, checkout, and course pages.

From there, the visual page builder lets you click any section and edit it in the sidebar with changes appearing in real time.
The editing experience is more intuitive than Teachable’s.
What you see in the editor is what your students actually see, which sounds obvious but is rare in this category.
And HTML and CSS editing unlocks on the Start plan at $99 per month (one tier below Teachable’s equivalent gate).
What’s more, a custom domain is included with Thinkific’s Basic plan at $49 per month.
On Teachable, a custom domain requires the Builder plan at $89 per month.
So if you want your school to live on its own URL from day one, that difference alone changes the decision on the entry-level plan.
Winner: Thinkific
A more intuitive page builder, theme-based site generation, HTML and CSS access at a lower plan tier, and a custom domain on the entry plan. Thinkific gives more design control at every equivalent price point. Teachable’s 2.0 builder is better than it was, but Thinkific’s design toolset starts further ahead and stays there across every plan comparison.
Of course, no online course platform does everything, so the real question is how cleanly it connects with the tools you already rely on, and how much of a plan upgrade that connection costs you.
Teachable allows 1 third-party integration on the Starter plan, 3 on Builder, and 5 on Growth.
Zapier, webhooks, and public API access require the Growth plan at $189 per month.
Those limits are a real constraint for lower plans, especially if you need your online course platform to integrate with your email marketing tool, CRM, or analytics system from day one.

You can connect with ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Drip, and ActiveCampaign once you reach the plan that unlocks the integration slot for them.
Even so, Teachable’s integration approach is focused rather than broad, with fewer connections deliberately chosen.
For creators who only need a handful of integrations and know exactly which ones, that focused list is not necessarily a disadvantage.
Thinkific’s app store gives you access to a wider range of native integrations without having to route everything through Zapier first.

Email marketing tools, analytics platforms, and CRM connections are available from lower plan tiers than Teachable offers.
What’s more, Zapier triggers are included with every Thinkific plan, including Basic at $49 per month.
Zapier actions and API access require the Grow plan at $199 per month.
SSO for organizations integrating Thinkific with existing identity management systems requires Thinkific Plus, as with CRM integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce.
Essentially, Thinkific gives you more connection points earlier, and the Thinkific vs Teachable integrations comparison reflects that at every plan tier.
Winner: Thinkific
A broader app store, Zapier triggers on every plan, and more native connections available at lower price points. Thinkific’s integration approach is the more practical choice for creators who want their online course platform to work with existing third-party tools without paying for a top-tier plan to unlock basic connectivity.
Many creators don’t think about customer support until they’re mid-launch, and a student can’t log in.
By that point, the support tier you chose three months ago becomes very personal, very fast.
Teachable offers email support on every plan.
Live chat support, the kind where a real person responds while you are still panicking, unlocks on the Builder plan at $89 per month.
Priority SLA-based support and a dedicated account manager come with the Sellers custom plan.
That said, Teachable’s support team handles creator issues, including your account, settings, and billing.
But when your students can’t log in, access a video, or have a payment question, the support team they contact is you.
That’s your inbox, time, and launch day getting slower while you troubleshoot someone else’s browser settings.
Thinkific offers email and chat support on the Basic and Start plans.
Phone support and priority chat unlock are included on the Grow plan at $199 per month, while a dedicated customer success team comes with Thinkific Plus.
The same student support gap exists here because your students’ technical issues land in your inbox on both platforms.
For course creators running programs with hundreds of enrolled students, that operational burden grows with every cohort you launch.
What Thinkific does give you that Teachable doesn’t is time.
The Thinkific free plan comparison point that most reviews gloss over is Thinkific’s 30-day free trial.
Teachable, however, offers 7 days. That’s four times the runway to test your course builder, your checkout flow, your community setup, and your student experience before you pay a cent.
If you want to assess a platform with real course content before committing (which you should), that difference alone is worth factoring into the Teachable vs. Thinkific 2026 comparison.
Winner: Thinkific
The 30-day free trial gives you four times the evaluation runway of Teachable’s 7 days, and that’s important when you’re deciding where to build your entire course business. Teachable’s live chat unlocks earlier at the Builder plan, which is a real advantage. But Thinkific’s trial length, combined with email and chat support on every plan, makes it the more practical starting point for most course creators comparing the two platforms before committing.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔ Lower starting price ($39/month) | ✘ 7.5% transaction fee on Starter plan |
| ✔ Native iOS and Android student apps on all plans | ✘ Only 5 courses and 100 students on Starter |
| ✔ In-lesson upsells | ✘ Custom domain locked behind Builder ($89/month) |
| ✔ Mature affiliate program with custom commission rates | ✘ Zapier and API require Growth ($189/month) |
| ✔ Built-in email marketing (Builder+) | ✘ Limited assessments (basic quizzes only) |
| ✔ Cart recovery, order bumps, coupons on Starter | ✘ Only 7-day free trial |
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔ Unlimited courses on all plans | ✘ No native student mobile app (browser only) |
| ✔ 0% transaction fees with Thinkific Payments | ✘ Branded app costs $199/month extra |
| ✔ Custom domain on Basic plan ($49/month) | ✘ Completion certificates locked behind Start plan ($99/month) |
| ✔ Richer assessments: quizzes, surveys, exams, assignments, AI quiz generator | ✘ PayPal only on Grow plan ($199/month) |
| ✔ Zapier triggers on all plans | ✘ Basic affiliate tools compared to Teachable |
| ✔ Broader app store and integrations | ✘ No in-lesson upsells |
| ✔ 30-day free trial |
Feature comparisons tell you what a platform can do, while user reviews tell you what it feels like to live inside one for a year.
This is what shows up consistently across verified reviews on G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot.
“I’ve had a very positive experience with Teachable overall. It made it easy to create and sell online courses without needing a lot of technical knowledge. The course builder is simple to use, and I like that I can upload videos, PDFs, quizzes, and other resources all in one place.” Verified Reviewer on Capterra
“Teachable makes it incredibly easy to transform your knowledge into a course you can sell. The editor is straightforward, setup is quick, and you don’t need any technical expertise to easily create something that looks professional. The integrated payment system is also a huge plus — there’s no need to search for additional tools just to receive payments.” Verified Reviewer on G2
“When I first started with Teachable I had an amazing experience. However, once I got a little deeper into my process I realized that there are many limitations. They have the ability to create a quiz but that quiz can only be multiple choice and the multiple choice can only have one correct answer. Therefore, the assessments are very limited — you can’t have students reflect with writing in their own words.” Verified Reviewer on Capterra
“No live chat, tickets are handled on an obscure in-house system where you have no idea if they saw your issue or when they will answer. When they answer, it’s not even level 1 support, it’s ‘have you looked at the knowledge base?’ Overall they lack crucial tools for building a business. They are decent if you want to create a school for a hobby, but now that we grew our school to be a business, they are severely lacking.” Verified Reviewer on Capterra
“The platform gave me flexibility in structuring content, strong analytics to track learner progress, and reliable integrations that supported a smooth learning experience.” Verified Reviewer on Capterra
“We needed a platform that could easily manage both on-demand and live courses, and the course builder in Thinkific gave us the flexibility that we needed to scale.” Verified Reviewer on Capterra
“I had to join Kit and couldn’t natively use my other platform to automate sending emails.” Verified Reviewer on Capterra
“The platform feels a little dated and as far as I know, there’s not a way to interact with other students on the platform.” Verified Reviewer on Capterra
Neither platform was built for the format producing the highest completion rates, the strongest student retention, and the most sustainable long-term revenue in the online learning space: Structured group programs.
In Teachable, the course and the community live in separate sections, so students finish a lesson and then navigate elsewhere to discuss it.
In Thinkific, the Spaces model is better organized, but the community still lives outside the curriculum, so students move through course content in one place and discussions happen in another.
Neither platform has built the bridge between the two by design.
That gap is where GroupApp lives.

GroupApp is a group learning platform for coaching and training programs.
Here, your discussion channel for Week 3 lives inside Week 3, so students ask questions where the content is, instead of a general feed they have to search through to find the right thread.
That determines how engaged cohorts feel and how many students complete your program.
This is what you get when you build on GroupApp.
All plans include a native iOS & Android app, plus 0% transaction fees, so you keep 100% of the profits.
| Feature | GroupApp | Teachable | Thinkific |
| Starting price | $0 | $39/month | $49/month |
| Transaction fees | 0% on all plans | 7.5% on Starter, 0% on Builder+ | 0% with Thinkific Payments |
| Lesson-level discussion channels | Built-in by design | Separate community section | Separate community section |
| Cohort segmentation | Automatic at enrollment | Not available | Not available |
| Enforce sequential progress | Enforce Completion toggle | Course compliance tools | Course compliance tools |
| Workflow automation for delivery | Scale plan ($144/month) | Limited automation | Limited automation |
| Group subscriptions for B2B | All paid plans | Not available | Grow plan group orders only |
| Progress tracking with re-engagement | Real-time across all programs | Basic analytics | Basic analytics |
| Completion certificates | All plans | All plans | Start plan and above |
| Native mobile app | Scale plan branded app | Student app on all plans | Browser only on standard plans |
| Free trial | Free plan | 7 days | 30 days |
Comparing Teachable vs Thinkific vs GroupApp on features is one thing, but seeing what changes when a program moves to the right platform is another.
Read our case study on how Little Flower Yoga made $200K in 6 months using the certification track with sequential enforcement and steal their playbook today.
After going through every category in this Teachable vs Thinkific comparison 2026, this is where the decision lands.
Choose Teachable If:
Choose Thinkific If:
Choose GroupApp If:
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