Thinkific Pricing Uncovered: Is It Worth It & The Best Alternative

As far as online course creation and online community building are concerned, Thinkfic is a big name in town. The platform offers one of the most robust online course creation tools at an affordable price.

The Thinkific pricing structure is designed to help every business create an online community and courses. Whether you are a small business owner, own an enterprise, or want to create an online community, Thinkific has a pricing plan for you.

Today, we’ll dive deep into the Thinkific pricing structure and help you evaluate which plan is best for you.

Specifically, you’ll learn:

• Different Thinkific pricing tiers and whom they’re best suited for
• What to expect from each of Thinkific pricing packages
• And finally, we’ll show you the best Thinkific alternative offering robust online creation tools without breaking the bank.

To that end, let’s get started.

What is Thinkific?

Thinkific is an online course creation and online community-building platform. The platform offers the tools you need to launch and sell your online course and build your community.

As an online course creator, you get access to a course creation tool, a website builder, and student engagement tools.

Thinkific users include:

• Online coaches offering online training and consultant services
• Online content creators build a personal brand around their passion or expertise
• Corporate training institutions like universities
• Large enterprises looking to offer online training for their employees or customers

Thinkific Pricing Comparison

Contrary to most learning management systems (LMS), Thinkific offers one of the most affordable pricing packages that comes with a ton of features.

The online course platform offers five pricing packages.

• Free – costs $0
• Start – costs $99/month
• Grow – costs $199/month
• Expand – $499/ month
• Plus – contact their sales team to get custom pricing

The packages are priced according to the number of communities you can create, the level of security you want, and how far you would want to customize your membership website, supposedly using their developer API.

In this Thinkific pricing comparison, we’ll show you what you get in each of their plans. We’ll also show the winning side and also the drawbacks of each pricing package.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of Thinkific pricing.

Thinkific Free Plan

As the name suggests, you absolutely pay nothing to get started with this Thinkific pricing package. Using the Free plan, you can enroll an unlimited number of students into your course and build one community.

You can also integrate your payment system like Paypal and even extend the functionality of your online course by integrating it with third-party apps like Zapier.

Who Should Use The Free Plan

Although the free plan comes with interesting features, don’t expect too much from it. For example, you can only create a single course or one community, and you can’t monetize your membership site.

The Thinkific free plan can be the best fit for users who are actively trying to figure out if Thinkific is the right platform for them or those who want to familiarize themselves with the Thinkific user interface.

Pros

• You can easily create and monetize a course without paying a dime
• Zero transaction fee for the sales you make
• Access to free video and content hosting
• Build a community for free
• You can create course quizzes and surveys for your student
• The ability to integrate third-party apps into your membership website allows you to extend your site functionality

Cons

• You can only create just one course and community
• Being unable to host your course in your domain limits your ability to add a touch of your brand to your online content
• You can only have one admin for your membership site
• Limited support from the Thinkific support team
• You cannot monetize your membership site or enable members-only content
• The drip online course content feature is not available
• Limited community engagement tools

Thinkific Starter

The Starter plan is an advanced version of the Free, but this time with added features that allow you to create a better learning experience for your students.

With the Thinkific Starter plan, there’s no limit to the number of online courses you can create. You can also make content that only members can see by using a subscription membership website, where you can make money off of your community.

Who Should Use The Starter Plan

The Thinkific Starter pricing plan is best suited for individuals and small businesses who have decided to sell online courses or build an online community. Although it’s not the most robust plan, it’s a perfect choice, especially for:

• Small businesses looking to create an online community of loyal audiences who will fall in love with their products.
• Creators looking to monetize their expertise.
• Users who have decided to choose Thinkific as their LMS but still want to explore if the software has what they want.

Pros

• You can host your entire online course on a custom domain, allowing you to brand your content.
• There’s no limit on the number of courses you can create
• You can monetize your membership site
• You can offer promotional discounts and coupons, allowing you to increase signups
• Better support via email and chat
• Customize your site using custom HTML and CSS
• Offer a custom certificate of completion to your student
• Get access to advanced audience engagement tools for your community, like Zoom Meetings and webinars

Cons

• The inability to remove Thinkific branding in your course player and membership site makes it hard to fully customize your online course and add a touch of your brand.
• You still lack better support from the Thinkific team.
• Limited analytics to assess your student engagement and performance of your course
• Single sign-on (SSO) is not available
• Low-level security features
• You cannot integrate your site with their Standard API
• Zapier’s actions is not supported in this plan

Thinkific Grow Plan

The Grow plan grants you access to Thinkific’s premium suite of tools, which allows you to scale your online business. The Grow plan starts at $199 per month if you choose to pay monthly but $149 per month if you opt for an annual plan.

You also get privileged email support and phone support. If branding is a big concern for you, using the Grow plan, you can remove the Thinkific branding and customize your membership site and online course to match your brand.

What’s more, you get access to Thinkific API to extend the functionality of your online course and membership site.

Who Should Use Growth Plan

The Thinkific Grow plan is the best option for SMBs, creators, and solo entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses using the power of online community building and e-learning. For once, this is by far the only plan that gives them total control of their membership site and online course.

Pros

• Thinkific API access allows them to add extra functionality to their site and online course system.
• You can remove Thinkific branding and fully customize your landing page to match your business branding.
• A bulk student emailer is included, allowing you to send mass emails to your students directly within the Thinkific platform.
• You can easily bulk enroll or unenroll students in your online course, saving you a ton of time adding new users to your course one by one.
• You can offer life lessons to your students with classes and group coaching sessions, as well as host, live webinars directly within Thinkific.
• Using Grow plan, you can edit your website code to meet your desired appearance.
• Advanced reporting tools provide you with greater insights into your business, allowing you to make wise decisions faster.

Cons

• You can only create three communities.
• Single sign-on (SSO) is not supported on the Thinkific Grow plan, which is essential in providing a seamless, logged-in experience for your student.
• If you own multiple membership sites, it becomes hard to manage them since you don’t get access to their plus portal, which allows you to manage multiple sites under one dashboard.

Thinkific Expand

The Expand plan focuses on providing more resources to host your online courses, an extra security level, more branding capabilities, and dedicated support from their team.

The Expand plan costs $374 per month, but you can get a 25% discount if you choose to pay annually.

You get access to unlimited spaces per community, allowing you to host discussions on a topic, facilitate introductions, post important updates, and invite students to share assignments without any limitations.

Who Should Use The Expand Plan

The Expand plan is the best solution for growing businesses looking for more resources and an extra security level.

Pros

• Dedicated support via phone.
• Custom SSL adds an extra security layout to your website.
• An expert onboarding team will help create your account and launch your online course.
• Advanced filters that allow users to easily navigate through the content library.
• You can drip your content to avoid overwhelming your audience with a lot of learning materials.
• Create unlimited member spaces where you can create discussion topics with your audience.

Cons

• It’s too expensive considering that there are hardly any notable differences with its lower-tier plan.
• Does not support Single sign-on for your student

Thinkific Plus

Thinkific Plus gives you the most control and scalability for your online courses and community. You get access to more resources and integrations using their Enterprise API to create more advanced workflows, plus you get dedicated support from their success team.

Who Should Use Plus Plan

Thinkific Plus is the best option for huge enterprises looking for more infrastructure and control of their online courses. Schools that want to add online courses to their teaching methods will also find the Plus plan is the best choice.

Pros

• There are no limits to the number of online courses, community, site and course admins, course share revenues, and students you can have.
• You get access to advanced security tools.
• Allows your students to sign up for your course with a click of a button using a Single sign.
• Access to enterprise API gives you advanced integration capabilities to create a powerful workflow system.

Cons

• You need to contact their sales team to get custom pricing, making it hard to evaluate your budget before reaching out to them.

GroupApp: Best Thinkific Alternative

Thinkific is a reputable online course platform used by big players in the industry, like Samsung and Hootsuite. Even though the platform has been around for a while, it might not be the best choice for edupreneurs and creators who want more than just the ability to make online courses.

It’s hard to create a paid membership site, an online coaching platform, build a highly engaging community, or even sell digital downloadables like e-books using Thinkific. For one, the company’s core features are centered around creating online courses.

Unlike GroupApp, Thinkific’s pricing is not as cheap as you would want it to be. Their starter and free plans come with a ton of limitations, requiring you to upgrade to the higher tier plans to access the most essential online course-building tools.

In this section, we’ll show you how our tool stacks up against Thinkific’s and why it’s the best alternative to build your community and sell online courses.

GroupApp is an All-in-One Learning Community Platform

GroupApp allows you to create your own online community and brings together all the resources needed to keep your community engaged. What’s more, you don’t need a separate course builder and community platform. GroupApp includes both platforms with all the tools you need to sell your online course as well as build a community in one place.

With GroupApp, you can create your own membership websites and charge a subscription fee. You also gain access to tools like group chat, direct messages, and moderation tools that allow you to manage your group.

GroupApp allows you to display upcoming events and live courses to keep your community engaged. You can also schedule posts so that they are always shared with your community. You can even schedule email broadcasts so that you can talk to people in the future.

In short, if you are looking for an all-around learning community builder, GroupApp is the best choice.

Intuitive Course Builder

Perhaps this is the most interesting part of using GroupApp as your course-building platform.

Despite being an online community builder, GroupApp allows you to build and host courses online. You get access to the most user-friendly course builder that allows you to create and organize your content.

GroupApp allows you to create engaging course content using videos, audio, PDFs, and worksheets. You can also embed resources from external websites like Wistia and Vimeo.

Our online course platform allows you to create cohort-based courses. This makes it easy for your students to collaborate in learning, creating a social and fun learning experience that boosts your course completion rate.

Another problem that we’ve noticed affecting online course completion rates is that most students are overwhelmed by the number of resources that they find in a course.

This is where our drip schedule tool comes in handy. Using this feature, you can release a particular portion of your course lessons for a particular number of days, and once your students are done, you can release the other portion.

When it comes to building a successful online course, you need a robust tracking system. That’s something that we value at GroupApp. You can track your student’s course progress as well as their activity level. This allows you to understand if your students are stuck so that you can provide personalized support.

GroupApp is the best Thinkific alternative that comes with a powerful online course builder with a clean user interface for both the creator and the student.

Create a Paid Membership Community

What if you could develop a marketing channel with a 4,530% return on investment (ROI)? That’s possible because online communities are already achieving that ROI.

Paid online communities are among the best ways to create and monetize your skills, build stronger relationships with current customers, and even generate more sales for your online products.

GroupApp is a powerful community builder that you can use to bring together like-minded individuals, share your expertise, and forge relationships at a personal level.

Using our platform, you can build a community in minutes and even configure the subscription plans that a member can choose from.

Here’s how to create a paid membership website using GroupApp.

In the admin panel, go ahead and click on “subscriptions”. If you haven’t integrated the payment gateway yet, you can connect Stripe to allow members to make payments using their credit cards.

After that, you can configure your membership site by setting up your subscription plans that users can choose from and setting the access level of your community.

 

From there, you can organize your community discussion, resources, and subgroups using channels.

Affordable Pricing

GroupApp is the best Thinkific alternative when it comes to pricing. AlthoughThinkific dubs itself as the cheapest course-building software, it’s not, and this is why.

Firstly, there’s not much to offer in their Free and Starter plans. In their free plan, you cannot monetize your community or create a members-only website section.

You can still remove the Thinkific branding from your landing pages and courses in their starter plan. This makes it hard to personalize your online course or community. Also, the level of security you get from the two plans is quite ridiculous.

That’s not the case for GroupApp. You can monetize your community from day one. We make it possible for small and new businesses to generate their first dollar online by sharing their expertise for free.

Our basic plan allows you to brand your online courses and community. You can also use your custom domain to host your online courses and community.

Secondly, Thinkific’s pricing is expensive in comparison with the features they include in each of the paid packages.

For example, their most basic plan, the Starter plan, starts at $99 per month, which is equal to the price of our most advanced plan, the Pro plan.

And yet you cannot provide your student with a seamless login experience using Single Sign-on (SSO), prioritized customer support, remove Thinkific branding, get insightful analytics, or even bulk import and enroll students.

These are features that you can get with GroupApp without costing you an arm and a leg. So, if you are looking for a cheaper yet more powerful Thinkific alternative, GroupApp is your best bet.

Conclusion: GroupApp is The Best and most Affordable Thinkific Alternative

Thinkific offers one of the best platforms for creators to sell their expertise and a superb LMS for corporate learning institutions. As an edupreneur, it offers a platform where you can upload as much course content as you want and even build a landing page to promote your products.

Nonetheless, the online course builder may not be the best option for small business creators looking for an affordable online course builder without breaking their bank account. Neither is it the best choice for users looking to incorporate an online community and an online course in one place or build an exclusive paid membership website.

In that case, GroupApp helps fill in the gap. We built the tool to help small online creators like you monetize your expertise by selling online courses or creating paid memberships.

For businesses looking to create a community of loyal fans whom they can upsell, GroupApp has the tools you need to educate, keep them engaged, and even better, convince them to convert.

Get started with our free plan or sign up for our 14-day free trial and see what our premium tools have to offer you.