12 Best Thinkific Alternatives

Learning Management System (LMS) has transformed the way people learn things in today’s age. Amidst so many available options, Thinkific has managed to secure a high rank in the market. From their “build from scratch course builders” to the customizations, the platform offers many features.

Thinkific is a cloud-based platform or LMS, which enhances the volatility of the data to an extent. Also, the platform is quite a lot more expensive compared to its competitors. Citing these issues, it isn’t surprising that content creators and online teaching enthusiasts are looking for alternatives.

After a lot of extensive research and a thorough understanding, we have sorted out the best alternatives for you. All of these options are well-curated, loaded with features, and come at affordable pricing too.

So, let us jump on and look at some of the best Thinkific alternatives.

Top Thinkific Alternatives – Reviewed

When looking at the best Thinkific alternatives, our focus was on three factors:

• Better features
• Better pricing
• Better user interface and experience.

And, after looking through 20-30+ available LMS platforms in the market, we have sorted out our top picks.

1. Mastera

Mastera is a leading video experience platform that shapes your talent and knowledge into recurring revenue. The platform is versatile, well-equipped, and not to mention, a lot more affordable. The user interface and individual features are curated to meet the needs of any user with a varying legion of talent.

Host Live Classes

Mastera is not just a course-builder; it is a one-stop solution for everything your dream looks like. From basic website hosting, online course development to hosting live and on-demand classes, Mastera takes care of all. It integrates with third-party apps like Zoom for easier live class progress.

Flexible Pricing with 100% Ownership

Besides the general monthly fees that you pay Mastera, there are no additional or hidden commissions involved. The creators have 100% ownership of their content. Even the pricing and the subscription models are in the hands of the user. There is no interference from Mastera with the revenue of the creator.

Sell Beyond Online Classes and Teaching

Mastera has a host of ongoing users who do more than just host live classes. The platform offers the users all the tools they need to host live classes and even create their merchandise for further sales. The platform enables you to transform your video lessons into on-demand content.

Transparent Communication

Having an open channel of communication with the subscribers or members of the community is life-changing. This is something that the developers at Mastera understand. So, you get to connect with your audience via text messages for seamless communication.

Class and Calendar Bookings

Mastera also has tools that help with organization, especially when it comes to taking one-on-one class bookings. You can manage your calendar to ensure none of the critical events clashes.

Pricing – Starts from $39/month after a 14-days free trial.

 

2. LearnWorlds

If your business is structured around online courses only, LearnWorlds is your best alternative to Thinkific. It enables you to monetize your skills and teachings in a lucrative recurring monetization. Not just the creation part, LearnWorlds also helps with marketing your online courses.

Build and Market Online Courses

The giveaway and bestselling feature of this platform is its ease of course development. You can either use the wide range of preconceived templates or you can build your course from scratch. Whatever you choose, the platform has all the tools to make them a possibility. The marketing tools on the platform are result-driven, which is a benefit. You can effectively indulge in repeated sales and recurring revenue in no time.

Create a Website

Having a personal website to showcase your services is essential. This assures authenticity and makes your approach genuine and worthy. LearnWorlds has the tool to help you build your online school to channel in more students and interested candidates under one roof.

Build a Mobile App

Having a mobile application is mandatory in a world where billions of people are hooked to their smartphones. Much like the online website, LearnWorlds also helps build a mobile app. You can integrate sales features like push notifications and in-app purchases to upsell and augment your revenue.

Get Analytics

You can never track your growth without data. The reports and insights part on LearnWorlds takes care of that. You get access to the raw data about engagement and the marketing outreach to support your decision-making.

Pricing – Starts from $24/month with a 30-days satisfaction guarantee.

 

3. Podia

Podia is an OG brand when it comes to the LMS platforms. It has been around for some time and offers a holistic approach to your online course-building experience. You can create courses, sell them and even host live classes and webinars.

Create and Sell your Online Products

Podia is a versatile platform that isn’t restrictive. This means that your virtual products aren’t just limited to online courses. You can offer live webinars, digital downloads, community interaction – all in one platform. And, not just the creation part, Podia offers you the tools to market them as well.

Optimum Marketing Options

Just like we touched base in the previous pointer, Podia has a host of marketing tools integrated into the platform. You can start with the custom website development and even try your email marketing to market your courses and services. It integrates affiliate marketing tools so other affiliates market your products. The on-page live chat widget helps resolve queries of your customers quicker.

24×7 Support

When you are switching to an online career selling your courses or classes, having prompt tech support is a need. This helps you resolve any glitches or technical issues on the spot, so your audience or students don’t have a bad learning experience. Podia executives are available round the clock.

Pricing – Starts from $39/month after a 14-days free trial.

 

4. TalentLMS

If we had to pick a Thinkific alternative closest to its features, TalentLMS takes the spot. This is ideally a team-based learning platform and is a hit among corporates, especially with their training. It helps teams grow with the company’s ideals and goals.

Intuitive Interface

The first selling point of this platform is the UI and UX. It is fun, quirky, and interactive. If you don’t enjoy bland passages of the learning experience, this is just the right choice. Also, the platform is accessible across any device with a working internet connection so that you can learn from anywhere and at any time.

Easy Course Development

When you have a team to train, relying on a month-long course curation process is futile. It is not just time-consuming; it affects the work progress too. With TalentLMS, the users get instant access to new course development tools. You can create your courses with a few clicks only.

Personalize According to Branding

Another essential feature of this platform is personalization. You get to personalize your courses and training modules to match your branding. This helps abide by the company ethics for a smoother and efficient rendition of the whole learning experience.

Access Readymade Courses

As weird as it sounds, TalentLMS also has readymade courses. Yes, you heard it right. For all those lazy people or those who don’t have the time to create their courses, this platform takes care of your needs. You get to brush up on your soft skills without much effort quickly.

Pricing – Starts from $59/month. Has a free plan with minimal features.

5. Teachable

If you want to amalgamate the importance of online courses with coaching services, Teachable is your platform. Within a few years, the platform has grown in abundance and allows you to transform your knowledge into a thriving business.

Easy Access Course Builder

Not everyone wants to or has the time to spend hours creating an online course from scratch. Teachable developers understand that and thus offer all the tools for easy course creation. The stress-free platform makes the content creation process easy without needing any extra technical skills or knowledge.

Choose from Hundreds of Customization Tools

At Teachable, the creators understand the importance of customization and branding. So, you get to indulge in methods that help personalize your courses and content to meet your needs. You get to curate your content based on your company’s ideals.

Take care of the Financials

One of the best features of Teachable is that it takes care of the finances and revenue part. From the payouts to the taxes and affiliates, the platform takes care of all your needs. You won’t have to fret about anything at all.

Pricing – Starts from $29/month with a free subscription plan with limited features.

 

6. Kajabi

If money isn’t a factor for you, Kajabi is a pretty great Thinkific alternative. However, be assured that you’d have to pay a lot more in the monthly or yearly subscription fees. The higher price tag is because the platform caters to the needs of advanced course developers and marketers.

Multiple Ways to Monetize your Content

Kajabi is a versatile platform that allows you to make the most out of your knowledge. You can generate multiple income sources, be it with online courses or even with other digital products. The platform also supports membership sites, community interaction, and so much more.

One-Stop Solution

If you aren’t the most tech-savvy person and want everything under one roof, Kajabi makes that possible too. From your courses, content to the marketing needs, Kajabi takes care of all your needs. The platform allows you to program your business solutions seamlessly without worrying about the technical side of things.

Seamless Payments

With online courses and any online business, securing the payment becomes the most challenging part. Kajabi streamlines that with payment integrated systems like Stripe and PayPal. You can indulge in one-time payments or recurring subscription-based payments with one click. There are no hidden commissions or transaction fees, so everything you earn is yours only.

Data-driven Decision Making

When you are investing in an LMS platform, you want insights and analytics. The data and reports from Kajabi streamline your decision-making. You can view reports, get a better understanding of customer growth and get insights about customer engagement. All of these reports can help make better data-driven decisions for better results.

Pricing – Starts from $119/month after the 14-days free trial.

7. Ruzuku

Online courses can become frustrating to create, especially with the same old boring templates. If you want to make things different and more accessible, Ruzuku is just the right platform for you. The platform offers its users a host of tools to focus on creating creative and engaging content.

Optimal Course Management

It doesn’t matter if you want to start with one online course or multiple; Ruzuku is here to take care of all your needs. All you need is to follow the five-step golden rules to create and develop your course from scratch. It takes under an hour to create a course that can effectively lure in all the prospective users.

Support Different formats of Content

Some creators rely on video content, while some individuals are more comfortable sharing PDF-based content. Whatever you want, Ruzuku gives you the ease and freedom to choose the option that best suits your needs. Users can directly host their videos on the platform for ease of marketing at a later date.

Engagement Tools

As a content creator who relies on their digital products to share value, keeping the audience engaged is essential. Typically, Ruzuku keeps your audience hooked with all the engagement tools you’d need, including e-mails and direct messaging. The daily reminders and updates about the course help the student stay on top of their game daily.

It is also an ideal platform for the students who want to keep up with their progress. Being able to track your progress in one platform makes the process a lot more engaging.

Comfortable Payment Options

Another highlight of using Ruzuku is the ease of payment processing. There are subscription-based or single payments that you can indulge in from your students. The payments can also be processed via PayPal and Stripe, making the withdrawals a lot easier. The direct “register and pay” option is a boon for the creator and the student.

Pricing – Starts from $74.75/month when billed annually.

 

8. SkillShare

If you are looking for a similar interface like Thinkific, SkillShare is your best friend. Besides helping you build your course from scratch, the platform also offers seamless options to market your courses. The e-commerce handling part of Skillshare is a lot better compared to Thinkific.

Variety of Niches

The bestselling point of SkillShare lies in its versatility. The platform isn’t focused on one or two types of niches like cooking, guitar, or animation. You get a host of course options that you can curate and share. This allows you to break out of your shell and teach people what you best know. The process is just that simple.

Online Community of People

Unlike most other online course builders and LMS where you have to essential market your courses, with SkillShare, things are a bit different. You have an open community of people who are subscribed to SkillShare’s platform. Every time someone likes your channel or your course, you get paid for the playback time. Essentially, with quality content and the rightly optimized title and description, your video or course comes up when people search for it.

Subscription-based Platform

The way SkillShare works is different from most other online course platforms. This is a user-subscription-based platform. So, people won’t necessarily pay for a single creator; they are paying for the platform published on the content. You, as a creator, get paid depending on the number of times the audience views your courses.

Ideal for Smaller Creators

Most of the LMS caters to creators who have a good online following. Skillshare doesn’t distinguish. If your content provides value and attracts the users’ attention, nothing is stopping you from going to the top and attracting more and more audiences. If you don’t have a pre-requisite audience from other social media platforms, this platform can help you grow.

Pricing – Subscription-based.

 

9. LearnDash

If you already have a WordPress website that you want to transform into an online course platform, LearnDash is your tool. It is a popular WordPress plugin. The plug-in is convenient to use and makes the transformation easy, especially if you don’t want to pay a monthly recurring fee to a cloud platform for hosting your online courses.

Designed and Developed by E-learning Experts

The best thing about this plug-in is that it’s curated by experts in the field. This suggests that the plug-in is developed after a lot of research and consistent learning principles from the experts in the field. If you want to enhance the completion rates of your course, this is just what you need.

Complete Flexibility

Creators often tend to lose control over their content when it comes to cloud-based LMS. With LearnDash, users have complete control while selling online courses. From deciding the pricing for the courses to the overall renewal and refund policies, you get to decide them all.

Drip-Feed Content

When managing online courses, you want to stay consistent and on the top of your game every time. The drip-feed content offers flexibility to schedule the content at a specific time to be published for the students or the audience. This reduces the stress from over your mind.

Consistent Upgrades

Given that e-learning experts designed LearnDash, it isn’t surprising that the platform is undergoing consistent changes and growth. The creators and developers consistently add more features and enhance their capacities to streamline the user experience more.

Pricing – Starts $159 one-time fee.

 

10. Trainual

Trainual is an abbreviation for Training Manual because that is what it serves for. Businesses are consistently leveraging this platform to document the process and policies for every job role for a smooth onboarding process.

Hundreds of Templates

Unlike most of the other platforms, Trainual isn’t a diverse platform. You won’t find random online courses in different niches. It is a business-centric platform that is used by businesses and organizations. The platform has over 150+ SOPs and templates to get you started creating the new hires’ resources.

Seamless Employee Training Platform

Long gone are the days when corporations hired a shadow for their new employees. In this digital age, everyone is reliant on the internet for their training. Trainual bridges that gap and helps make the training process more fun and interactive for the new hires.

Tests and Assignments

Since the platform is to shape the knowledge and implementational skills of the new employees, tests are a must. Trainual understands that and integrates interactive assignments. Several accountabilities checks make the training program a lot more interactive and make the training assessment easier.

Easy Integration

Just because you are leveraging a new software doesn’t mean you’d have to let go of your previous ones. Trainual comes with easy integration with the ecosystem of productivity apps that your organization uses daily. This makes the onboarding process a lot more holistic too.

Pricing – Starts from $49/month when billed annually. Two months extra credits.

 

11. Kartra

If we had to include an OG platform for course creators, entrepreneurs, and marketers, Kartra would be the best pick. This is a one-in-all platform that features an intuitive UI and an easy to start course builder to make your life a lot more meaningful and more accessible.

Easy Checkouts

Kartra has secure online checkout forms for easier selling and management of the payments for creators and online personalities who wish to sell their courses. The drag and drop builder further adds to the benefits of this platform. Also, all the digital courses created on this platform are 100% mobile optimized.

Generate Leads

Not every online course creator has a massive following on social media. So, finding leads and students willing to buy your products or services can be difficult. Kartra tends to that issue actively. It allows you to build your lead and customer database using custom lists or even custom tags.

Optimal E-mail Marketing

Kartra offers live and automated e-mail marketing campaigns that help keep your audience engaged and hooked to your brand. Besides e-mail, communication is also made easy with SMS for precise engagement and transparent understanding.

Supports Affiliate Marketing

So, you have a product or service that you take pride in. However, you aren’t the best with marketing. Well, let your team of affiliate marketers do the job for you. From flexible commissions to great payment milestones, you get to earn and help people earn using your digital products from flexible commissions to great payment milestones.

Optimal Customization

This might not catch your attention if you aren’t tech-savvy. However, if you are tech-savvy, we’d recommend that you indulge in Kartra’s comprehensive API to customize your add-ons to your courses, services, and digital products.

Pricing – Starts from $79/month when billed annually.

 

12. Tovuti LMS

Unless you have dug in deeper, you probably won’t know about Tovuti LMS. This next-gen platform is designed to engage online learners with interactive online courses. If this strikes a bell in your ear, you need to consider this a fantastic alternative to Thinkific.

Unlimited Course Development

With Tovuti, you get to create and share endlessly. If you think your courses will provide value to the viewers, there’s no one stopping you. The creators also get to align their courses with assessments to streamline the student’s learning experience further.

Optimal Administration Tools

When creating a course from scratch, maintaining the administrative part can be taxing. Tovuti takes care of that issue. From KPI dashboards to track learners, the platform offers optimal support to help you keep track of your business growth without any questions asked.

Easy Integration

The open-source API and the SAML capabilities of the platform allow you to integrate different tools and resources to your courses for more accessible communication and development of the courses in question. Also, since this is a white-labeled platform, the users have complete free reign to change their logos and colors for better alignment with the company’s branding.

Easier Gamification

Everyone loves to learn when they are fun. If you are sharing a course with mounds of paragraphs with no exciting elements, no one will engage as well. However, add fun tools like badges, awards, and leaderboard games, and your course students will engage better with the course.

Better e-commerce Integration

Another notable benefit to this platform is the easy e-commerce integration. Not only do you get to sell individual courses, but you also get to turn your knowledge into a recurring income with subscription-based learning. Also, Tovuti partners with different payment gateways to ensure encrypted payments so the users can blindly rely on before investing in you.

Pricing – Custom quotes after Registration.

 

Why is Mastera Better Than Thinkific?

With all the 12 alternatives that we highlighted in this article, there is a reason Mastera tops the list.

The platform is relatively new, but their customized plans with unique features make the platform worth every penny you spend.

Unlike Thinkific, which comes with restrictions on the niche and content, Mastera is versatile and open to every creator’s creativity.

However, the best part of Mastera that makes it superior to Thinkific is the versatile engagement and communication with the users. Connecting with the students and the users directly is a way to connect and engage with the audience that helps channel revenue.

Mastera and Thinkific might seem similar due to their pricing models. But, they differ when it comes to the intricacies of their features.

Mastera supports third-party application integration on their platform that Thinkific doesn’t. The metrics and analytics on Thinkific are limited too. With Mastera, you get to deep dive into personal analytics and understand how your online business is thriving.

Mastera also beats Thinkific with their personalized E-mail marketing approaches. The overall UI and UX with Mastera are flawless, not to mention that it’s designed for every person, tech-savvy or not.

FAQs

What is better – Thinkific or Kajabi?

Despite the price difference, Kajabi is considered a better alternative to Thinkific. This is primarily due to the ease of accessibility of the individual features. Kajabi is diverse and a lot more versatile, while Thinkific is restrictive in some cases, especially with the niches they cater to.

Is Thinkific Open Source?

Thinkific does have an open API and architecture that gives users the complete free will to choose the tools they want to work with. They also provide secure cloud-hosting technologies.

Is Thinkific Free?

Yes, Thinkific has a free version known as the “Test-Driving” version that is free. The free plan comes with very restricted features and supports one site admin account.

Does Thinkific Own your Content?

Like most LMS platforms, even Thinkific offers 100% ownership of the published content in the hands of the users. So, no, the content’s rights are entirely in the hands of the users.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Thinkific is an excellent platform to create and sell your online courses on. However, with the world evolving, it is time to branch out. Given that Thinkific comes with so many restrictive features choosing an alternative is your best call.

With all the alternatives that we have mentioned, you get something new and unique to try out. Be it the flexibility of uploads or the ease of customization; there is always something better.

We’d always recommend you start with shortlisting the top 3 among the list and then choose the best from that. Our personal favorite is Mastera, especially with the level of customization it offers. However, we always hope you find an option that works the best for your needs.