Hey there, I’m glad you’re here. You’re probably considering using Thinkific for your online course needs, right? Well, I’m here to share my honest, no-nonsense review of the platform. I promise you, there’s no hidden agenda. I’m not pushing any other software or trying to sell you on an alternative. I’m just a guy who made a big mistake, and wants to save you from making the same one I did. Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Note: since posting this review the amount of people that have emailed or DM’d to thanked me for calling them out has been unbelievable. I’ve even had a few people say my comments below are “too nice”. I’ll leave that up to you to decide as you keep reading.
What Is Thinkific?
Thinkific, in a nutshell, is an online platform that helps you create and sell your own online courses. Read their salespage and they’ll tell you they’ve got all the bells and whistles you’ll ever need – quizzes, surveys, and discussion forums. It even promises to help you with marketing your courses. Sounds pretty sweet, right?
Sure, it looks good on paper. But when you actually get down to using it, you’ll quickly find yourself getting more angry and frustrated than your boomer parent when they don’t get their own way. The platform’s functionality doesn’t always live up to its hype.
So, before you jump on the Thinkific bandwagon, let’s take a closer look at what you’re signing up for.
The Thinkific Review Platforms
When you search “Thinkific Reviews” you’ll find fairly positive stuff overall.
But then you read a little deeper.
These reviews? They’re not the whole story.
New users, especially, can be easily misled. You have no context of who left the reviews. Typically, they are left by beginners, who’ve not made money yet.
When I first looked at the reviews before signing up for the platform it was a quick glance to see what the sentiment was. It looked fairly positive.
What you quickly realise is that any functionality you need to build a respected business is missing. An easy overlook for a beginner!
Later I went back to check the reviews again. I started reading them one by one. It was then very easy to tell that most of the reviews had come from people who had just setup their first online course.
If you’re brand new to creating courses, then anything is going to look good.
I had to leave multiple public Thinkific reviews
The first month I gave them the benefit of a doubt. But as I constantly got the run around from their support team I had to take my concerns public.
In fact, I had to leave 2 reviews on their Trustpilot because they were so bad.
Checkout the reviews here: https://au.trustpilot.com/reviews/654c1fb1495ed8ce8633427d
And here: https://au.trustpilot.com/reviews/65e65d712ef940b68edc80c2
Enrollment Problems
First, let’s talk about enrollment. You look on their website, they have a “bulk student migration” feature and you’d think it’d be a breeze, right? Wrong.
It’s a slow, clunky process that feels like it’s stuck in the 2000s.
I had the “pleasure” of enrolling 15,000 students. Well, it was an absolute nightmare.
Bulk enrollment should be as easy as a few clicks and uploading a nicely structured CSV file. But nope.
The process is outdated, like using a dial-up modem when everyone else is on 5g. The only way you can upload your students is a csv for each individual course. And each upload takes 10-20 minutes per upload. And you can only have 1 upload running at a time!!!
It took us 2 days to get this completed.
Affiliate System Flaws
We built a brand with hundreds of affiliates. It was a core part of each launch.
I saw they had an affiliate system when I was doing my research, but I didn’t put enough time into looking further into it. Instead I found out the hard way these things.
- You have to manually register EVERY affiliate. Yep, you heard me right. No bulk importing, no automations, no streamlined processes, just good old-fashioned manual labor.
And it doesn’t stop there. - Once your affiliates start making sales, you need to manually approve each payment.
“What do you mean Mitch, surely you don’t go into every single commission, click on the commission, click approve, then go to the next and follow the same process do you? That would take forever!”
Yes!!! That’s exactly what I mean.
Now, I’ve used at least 3-4 other systems before. Even the worst ones were smooth sailing compared to this. You’d set up your affiliates, they’d start selling, and the system would handle the rest.
What this now means is that one of my VA’s will now have to spend a half-day to an entire day once a month approving commissions and paying our affiliates. The old system we used to do it in 10 minutes.
*New update: I lied. My VA no longer has to spend so much time doing it because we lost all of our best affiliates due to the platform not having the features our affiliates wanted. They couldn’t track their link clicks properly and they hated the affiliate dashboard. We saw more than a 70% drop in affiliate revenue when we moved to Thinkific.
Video Player Limitations
The video player is old and outdated. It has no automatic captioning. You need to upload every SRT file individually.
Subscription Management
Subscription management 101:
Step 1: Identify when someone becomes a member and tag them.
Step 2: Identify when someone cancels their subscription, and remove their tag.
Thinkific decided step 2 has no importance and left it out. Quite possibly the stupidest design failure I’ve ever seen from a software company.
So if you are taking subscriptions payments then you have to pay for a separate Zapier account in order for the subscription to function correctly.
Also, if you want to leave they’ll tell you they cannot migrate the subscriptions to your next software. Even though they simply use Stripe. This is largely not true. They just try to lock you into their platform. Make sure you fight it if they try this.
Share Revenue Feature
We work with a lot of instructors. So we have different revenue share arrangements with them. It’s complicated for us to track manually so this feature was a big draw card. However, it’s just another nothing feature. It’s not connected to the instructor accounts in any way, and it doesn’t show on any dashboards.
The only thing it helps with is identifying whether an affiliate sale matched a revenue partner sale. It’s a ridiculous design.
Website Design
It’s impossible to design anything nice with the Thinkific website builder. You either need to hire someone to fully custom code your pages (super expensive) or purchase a website builder add-on. You can find them in the apps section of Thinkific but expect to pay another few hundred dollars to do so.
Lack Of Updates And Support
For the first six months, I did not see a single new feature shipped of any significance. Plus the support team pretty much just send you generalised answers to support docs. Even when you need more substantial advice.
Honestly, if their support team was more helpful, I wouldn’t have got so frustrated and wouldn’t have had the urge to warn others of this platform. Even as I update this post 3 months later they’ve not got any better. It was just last week I created a ticket, and as of updating this post, I’ve sent 5 emails back and fourth only to still not get anywhere. I’ve requested they escalate the ticket to someone who can help and it’s still not getting us anywhere.
I did see they recently added an “Email Marketing” feature to the dashboard. It doesn’t work yet, but it looks like they are going to create an email marketing service. This will look great on the salepage to every beginner. They’ll get excited that they don’t have to pay extra money for another tool because it’s included.
I’d love to be proven wrong, but based on the quality of the rest of the product I’m sure this will just be another half baked feature that isn’t really useable for more experienced creators.
Upsells
The upsell flow they claim to have is below average at best. There’s no real option to edit the design. The design is simply a tiny text element at the bottom of the course access page with a button. Your characters for that section are very limited so it’s hard to write a solid headline.
And with the buttons to the courses above it, I’m sure less than 5% of your audience even see the upsell button, let alone consider it.
Community Feature
The community feature is just weird. It feels like it’s detached from the main part of the software. It feels as if it was an after thought and someone was bored over a weekend so they just coded something while tipsy and published it.
Slow AF
The whole backend is just slow.
Conclusion
Don’t use it! WordPress is far superior for 10% of the cost.
For the latest tools I recommend check out this page.
Ultimately their marketing is super misleading.
It should say “we help you setup your course with a super simple course platform”.
- Sales tools = no!
- Marketing tools = no!
- Order bumps and upsells = no!
- Email marketing = no!
- Website builder = no!
- Community = no!
Don’t be misled by the features they claim to have. While they may be functional (barely) in the platform, they have no real world use for creators and marketers.
If you’re one of those creators who has DM’d me and thanked me for calling out their misleading platform then I encourage you to do the same. It’s time for some accountability!!!
New: How We Solved Part Of The Issue
I didn’t want this post to become about pushing other products, but I constantly get DM’s about it.
While we’ve not moved away from Thinkific due to it being a massive job that isn’t really worth our time right now. What we have added is a new checkout software on top of it. This allows us to solve the major issues on our end:
- We can now do proper bump offers and upsells
- We have a good affiliate program with all the features our affiliates want and can easily pay them
- We can go back to using our WordPress pages for salespages and landing pages. We no longer need build any of the website on Thinkific which is a huge relief.
From a members perspective, our membership looks fine. It doesn’t have anything fancy but they get access to all of the content. So leaving the content in the platform works for us right now. This was the most viable solution to the massive list of problems without starting again from scratch.
I won’t name the checkout software but there are a few options. Just look for those that have a direct integration with Thinkific.
It does add another $300+ per month to our expenses, but the first month we used it we were able to increase the Average Order Value by 30%. This is actually huge for our business and the extra $300 was well worth it.
For my personal brand I’ve gone with a community first platform with a separate checkout software. There are a couple of options to choose from here as well. I’m much more happy with that solution than this one.
My Most Annoying Realisation After 10 Years In Digital Business
The truth is there will never be an all-in-one platform that is scaleable for the serious entrepreneurs. They all promise the world and can never deliver.
The unfortunate realisation is that if you care about quality, if you care about scale, if you care about your customers then you need the best tools that solve for small parts of your tech needs. So you may end up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars more per month on multiple tools, but at least they’ll provide you with the highest quality features.
Secondly, as your business scales you will likely need to rebuild your tech stack multiple times at different levels. So plan and prepare for that.
Over and out!