5 Best Thinkific Alternatives & Competitors (2024 Update)

Thinkific is a solid online course builder and LMS platform. However, after using it for a while and testing its course creation, online community, website building, and native marketing tools I ran into a few roadblocks that made me consider its competitors:

• Barebones community experience: Unlike comprehensive platforms like Circle and Mighty Networks, Thinkific’s community feature resembles a simple forum and lacks essential tools like native livestreaming, polls, discussion boards, and leaderboards. The community-building tool is also offered separately from its online course builder, making it feel like an afterthought rather than part of the learning experience for students.
• Basic website builder: Thinkific website builder offers limited customization options, making it hard to build a professional-looking website that feels uniquely yours. Most of its templates are simple and less customizable. If you want a modern-looking website that reflects your brand, you’ll want to look elsewhere.
• Affiliate management is a pain: The affiliate management system on Thinkific is cumbersome. Affiliates must be registered manually, and each payment must be manually approved. This process can be time-consuming and ineffective, especially if many affiliates recommend your courses.
• Outdated video course player: Thinkific’s video player lacks automatic captioning, requiring manual upload of SRT files for subtitles.
• Customer support leaves a lot to be desired: After reading independent reviews from review and forum sites like G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, and Reddit most of the problem that users faced was poor quality support. Yes, they do have a rich knowledge base, but having human representatives help your customers navigate issues effortlessly is crucial—and Thinkific seems to struggle with that. 

In this post, we’ll explore the top Thinkific alternatives and show you how each stacks up to help you make an informed decision.

Thinkific Alternatives: A Quick Summary

Here’s a table summarizing top alternatives to Thinkific showing you where they excel at.

What Makes the Best Alternative to Thinkific? How We Made This List

Thinkific is a solid platform for building online courses, but it does have limitations in areas like website building, community features, and marketing.

While it does offer these tools, their functionality is limited. So much so that it’ll often prompt you to look for more robust software that offers either of the capabilities. However, this in turn will cost you more money.

So why not consider alternatives that offer these features right from the start?

That’s exactly what this guide is here to help you with—so you can make a well-informed decision.

When we created this list of Thinkific alternatives, we didn’t just throw random platforms together and call it a day. We wanted to do better than that.

We established a strict selection process, where we tested each platform’s capabilities, pushed them to their limits, and identified where they excelled.

For this guide, we started with over 20 platforms that offer similar features to Thinkific. After thorough testing, we narrowed it down to five platforms that we believe truly stand out. Here’s what we considered:

• Course Creation:  We focused on how easy it is to create courses on each platform. If a platform’s course builder felt clunky or made content creation a hassle, it didn’t make the cut. We also evaluate the tools to see if they support various course structures including self-paced, drip-scheduled content, or cohort-based learning. Additionally, we prioritized platforms that offer course engagement tools like quizzes, assessments, badges, live events, and certifications to keep learners involved and motivated.
• Community Building: A thriving community keeps students engaged and coming back. We chose platforms that offer strong community-building features—think forums, discussion boards, or private spaces where your students can interact.
• Marketing and Sales Tools: A strong alternative to Thinkific needs to offer robust marketing tools. We evaluated the availability of email marketing, funnels, landing pages, and integrations with other marketing services. Kajabi, for example, stood out with its powerful marketing suite.
• Integrations and Scalability: As your business grows, so should your platform. We looked for tools that play well with others—whether it’s email services, payment gateways, or CRMs. We also made sure these platforms are scalable, so you won’t hit roadblocks as your course business expands.
• Pricing and Value for Money: While Thinkific is affordable and has a range of pricing tiers, we looked for alternatives that offer a competitive price point without sacrificing essential tools.

Now that you know the key factors we considered in choosing the best Thinkific alternatives, let’s get into the list and see how each platform stacks up.

Best Thinkific Alternatives and Competitors

1. Circle — Best for building learning-focused online spaces.
2. LearnWorlds — Well-rounded LMS platform.
3. Kajabi — Best all-in-one info business solution.
4. Mighty Networks — Best for building branded social communities.
5. Teachable — Best for simple course creation.
6. Skool — Best for simplicity and gamification

1. Circle

Best Thinkific alternative for building learning-focused online communities.

Circle is an all-in-one platform that enables you to build an online community around your digital courses and coaching business. Beyond selling courses and memberships, Circle offers all the features you need to create a community-centric learning experience. 

You can set up discussion forums, initiate group chats, implement gamification, and natively host live events—all on the same platform. This can encourage knowledge sharing, and student participation transforming your courses into a collaborative peer network rather than an isolated learning experience.

Circle vs. Thinkific

Right off the bat, Thinkific offers more features than Circle. But more doesn’t always mean better. After testing both platforms and comparing them, a few aspects made me lean more toward Circle over Thinkific. Here’s what makes Circle a compelling alternative to Thinkific.

• Circle has a more polished community builder than Thinkific: Circle is a community-first platform with online courses as part of its offering. As a result, it allows you to seamlessly integrate online courses into your community which can foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among students. With Circle, you can create individual spaces for chats (the Slack style), discussion boards, events, and courses. You can set access to these spaces for specific members and choose how you can charge them, either as a one-time fee or a recurring membership subscription. Inside those spaces, you can engage members using posts, polls, quizzes, live streams, and gamified rewards. Meanwhile, Thinkific offers courses and community as separate products. Its community platform feels dated and lacks many features such as native live streaming, group chats, gamification, member profiles, and well-refined moderation tools. 
• Circle offers native live streaming, Thinkific depends on Zoom integration: Circle allows you to host live events directly from the platform and enables students to join them using the Circle mobile app or via the web. This is ideal, especially for coaches offering live cohorts or sessions to a specific group of students. During a livestream, you can record and save it for repurposing as course content. On the other hand, Thinkific depends on third parties like Zoom to host live video streams. Zoom limits you to 30 minutes of livestream in its free plan. If you have a live session longer than that, it’ll force you to pay for its premium plans. This can add up costs pretty quickly.
• Circle offers a robust community post editor,  Thinkific’s a pain to use: Circle post editor allows community owners and members to create and format posts the way they like. Just hit the “/” key and it’ll display various formatting features including, headings, lists, code, blockquotes, and more. You can further embed various content formats into your posts including GIFs, polls, PDFs, tables, forms, videos, and audio. Meanwhile, Thinkific’s community post editor resembles the basic post-creation tool and it’s unintuitive to use. First, it opens as a popup rather than a full window—and it does not have any feature to maximize the window. It lacks basic content formatting tools like italics, bolds, and headings.

Circle Pricing

Circle plans are competitively priced. Apart from its entry-level plan, the rest allow you to have unlimited members in your community. However, it does limit the number of spaces you can have per community. 

Here’s an overview of its plans.

• Basic Plan: $49/month
• Professional Plan: $99/month
• Business Plan: $219/month
• Enterprise Plan: $399/month
• Circle Plus: Talk to sales

Circle Pros and Cons

Bottom Line: Why Choose Circle Over Thinkific

Circle is the best Thinkific alternative for building community-driven online courses and coaching programs. It lets you create interactive spaces where students can engage through discussions, gamification, polls, live events, and chats. Thinkific lacks well-rounded community-building features that can encourage student participation.

2. LearnWorlds

Best Thinkific alternative for building interactive courses.

LearnWorlds is by far the closest Thinkific alternative for creators and educators, looking for a platform that enables them to build engaging courses, establish their education brand, and sell their digital products all on the same platform.

With LearnWorlds, you can create courses, build your website, and manage marketing without needing extra tools. It offers sales funnels, popups, and affiliate programs to drive course sales. Additionally, the course platform includes robust sales-boosting tools like coupons, discounts, upsells, and course bundling.

LearnWorlds vs. Thinkific

Both LearnWorlds and Thinkific offer strong features for creating online courses. But after trying both platforms and comparing them side-by-side LearnWorlds has an edge over Thinkific in several areas:

• LearnWorld’s course builder is more advanced than Thinkific’s: LearnWorlds offers comprehensive LMS features for creating online courses, engaging students, and tracking their progress. The course video player is robust, allowing you to add interactive elements such as customizable buttons, questions, polls, and subtitles to your videos. You can further engage your learners using live sessions, either as group sessions or 1-on-1 coaching sessions. Additionally, you can create quizzes, self-assessments, and exams to evaluate their skills. Once they’ve completed the course, you can also issue a certificate of completion or track your student’s progress using a grade book. On the other hand, Thinkific offers simple features for online course creation. It does support student assessment tools such as quizzes and exams but lacks an interactive course player offered by LearnWorlds.
• LearnWorlds website builder is robust and has sleek themes and templates: LearnWorlds enables you to build professional-looking websites for your education and online coaching business eliminating the need for third-party tools. Upon signing up, you gain access to over 20 templates that can be easily customized to match your branding. Additionally, it provides over 50 section templates that can be used to design specific parts of your website without having to start from scratch. If you have coding skills, you can further customize the themes with custom code. On the other hand, Thinkific’s Site Builder is more basic, offering limited customization options and basic templates.
• LearnWorlds offers native workflow automations while Thinkific depends on third parties: With LearnWorlds, you can set up automated processes based on specific event triggers, actions, and conditions. For example, if a user hasn’t accessed a course in a certain number of days, you can automatically send them a reminder email. While these automations aren’t as advanced as dedicated tools like Zapier, they get the job done—perfect for when you need automations but don’t want to pay for external services. On the other hand, Thinkific doesn’t have any built-in automation tools, meaning you’ll need to rely on Zapier or similar platforms to handle these tasks.

Pricing

 Here’s a simple breakdown of LearnWorlds pricing.

• Starter: $29/month
• Pro Trainer: $99/month
• Learning Center: $299/month
• High Volume & Corporate: Custom pricing

LearnWorlds Pros and Cons

Bottom Line: Why Choose LearnWorlds over Thinkific

LearnWorlds is a strong alternative to Thinkific for building interactive, engaging courses. Its video course player allows you to seamlessly integrate interactive elements like quizzes, questions, buttons, and presentations, enhancing student engagement. LearnWorlds also offers built-in marketing tools like a website builder, sales funnels, and opt-in popups, to help you boost your course sales without requiring additional software.

3. Kajabi

Best all-in-one solution for info businesses.

Kajabi is a comprehensive digital business platform that integrates online courses, online coaching, communities, and podcasts. It also offers built-in marketing features including, funnels, website building, and email marketing automation all in one place. 

It best suits creators, education businesses, and knowledge entrepreneurs looking to build and grow their digital businesses all in the same place—without needing extra third-party tools for sales and marketing.

Kajabi vs Thinkific

Kajabi excels as an all-in-one platform for education and digital content businesses, while Thinkific stands out as an online course software. Despite their similarities, Kajabi outperforms Thinkific in areas such as sales, marketing, branding, and reporting. Let’s expand a little bit more and see what makes Kajabi a compelling alternative to Thinkific.

• Kajabi’s website builder gives you more design control than Thinkific: Kajabi offers a professional website builder that effectively replaces the need for specialized website and landing page builders like WordPress and ClickFunnels. It features a drag-and-drop website builder with highly customizable themes and templates. You can customize your website by adding custom code, changing fonts and colors, even creating custom cta boxes and sliders, and also adding animation effects to the elements. You can further create custom layouts and resize them as you need. Meanwhile, Thinkific offers a basic site builder that’s less customizable. Most of its themes are basic and there are limited options to add custom elements to your site.
• Kajabi has more student engagement features:  With Kajabi you can build interactive classes using its built-in live sessions. Unlike Thinkific, which requires third-party tools like Zoom or eWebinar, Kajabi has native livestreaming capabilities. You can host sessions for up to 200 participants, and record the live sessions, so you can use them as lessons later. Kajabi also supports one-on-one or group coaching programs, making it easy to provide personalized learning experiences. Plus, you can boost student engagement by organizing challenges, hosting group chats, and awarding points or badges based on achievements. Thinkific doesn’t offer any of these built-in features, making Kajabi the clear choice if you want to keep your students engaged and motivated.
• Kajabi offers superior sales and marketing tools: Kajabi has sophisticated marketing and sales features that can replace specialized tools like ConvertKit and ClickFunnels altogether. To begin with, you can create fully customizable sales funnels to launch end-to-end marketing campaigns for your courses or digital products. It offers various funnel templates for marketing scenarios such as webinars, product launches, and lead generation. Plus, every funnel part is customizable—you can redesign landing pages, add new steps, and fine-tune email sequences to fit your strategy. Kajabi also includes robust email marketing features. You can build detailed email sequences, manage your contact list, and set up automations based on specific triggers—all without needing additional software. In contrast, Thinkific’s funnel options are basic and limited. You can’t add extra steps, customize forms, or split-test anything. And when it comes to email marketing, Thinkific only offers the essentials—no email sequences, tagging, or advanced list management. If you’re using Thinkific, you’ll need external tools like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign to fill in those gaps—features Kajabi already has built in.

Kajabi Pricing

While Kajabi’s plans are more expensive, the all-in-one solution with AI features, extensive automation, and unlimited marketing capabilities provides superior value, especially for businesses looking to scale efficiently. 

• Kickstarter Plan: $69/month
• Basic Plan: $149/month
• Growth Plan: $199/month
• Pro Plan: $399/month

Kajabi Pros and Cons

Bottom Line: Why Choose Kajabi Over Thinkific

Kajabi is the ideal Thinkific alternative if you’re looking for a comprehensive platform that seamlessly blends course delivery with marketing. It features a sophisticated marketing system including sales funnels, email automation, and website building — capabilities that Thinkific struggles to provide.

4. Mighty Networks

Best for building branded social learning communities.

Mighty Network offers a powerful blend of online community building and course creation features, making it a great alternative to Thinkific, for building thriving social communities for your digital products.

Unlike Thinkific which is an online course builder first, everything in Mighty Networks starts with a community where you can organize it into spaces and space groups. Inside those spaces, you can offer courses, host live events, and start a discussion board. You can also mix and match different community features in one space. For example, you have a single space featuring courses, live events, discussion boards, and a feed instead of having separate spaces for each. 

Mighty Network Features

Mighty Networks offers strong course and student engagement features that directly rival Thinkific. Here are outstanding Mighty Networks features.

• Robust members profiles
• Native live streaming
• Leaderboards
• Courses and resource libraries
• Members’ tags and badges
• Mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices
• White-label emails
• Course quizzes
• Membership paywalls

Mighty Networks Pricing

Here’s an overview of Mighty’s pricing model:

• Community Plan: $49/month
• Courses Plan: $119/month
• Business Plan: $219/month
• Path-to-Pro Plan: $360/month
• The Mighty Pro Plan: Contact their sales team for pricing

Mighty Networks Pros and Cons

Bottom Line: Why Choose Mighty Networks over Thinkific

Mighty Network is the perfect Thinkific alternative for course creators, coaches, and eduprenuers who want to go beyond teaching and create a space where students can connect, collaborate, and grow together. In contrast, Thinkific’s community features are less refined and feel like an afterthought rather than a part of the learning experience for students.

5. Teachable 

Best for starters.

Teachable provides an intuitive platform for creating and selling courses, coaching programs, and digital downloads. It’s a great option for beginners since you can start for free, making it ideal for those looking to monetize their knowledge without upfront costs.

You have flexibility in pricing your digital products. You can price them as a one-time payment, a recurring subscription, or a fixed monthly fee. You can also bundle multiple offerings, such as courses and coaching, to increase sales.

Additionally, Teachable includes marketing features like sales pages, checkout systems, and upsell funnels. Although they are not as robust as Kajabi’s or ClickFunnels, they get the job done by helping instructors increase the student lifetime value boosting sales.

Teachable Features

• Upsell funnels to boost sales with orderbumps and upsells
• Course curriculum designer with AI-integrated
• Certificates of completion
• Landing page builder
• Basic email marketing tools
• Coaching programs
• Online communities
• Affiliate marketing

Teachable Pricing

Here’s an overview of the Teachable paid plans:

• Basic Plan: $59/month
• Pro Plan: $159/month
• Pro+ Plan: $249/month
• Enterprise: Custom

Teachable Pros and Cons

Bottom Line: Why Choose Teachable Over Thinkific

Both Thinkific and Teachable are strong platforms for building and selling digital courses, downloads, and memberships. However, Teachable stands out as a better choice for beginners, offering a cleaner, more intuitive interface. It also provides built-in marketing tools like sales pages, checkout systems, and upsell funnels, all seamlessly integrated into the platform.

Final Thoughts

Thinkific is a good platform for creating and selling digital courses, but it lacks robust features for community building, website creation, and marketing.

Even though most platforms claim that they can replace Thinkific in most aspects, only a few made it to this list.

That said, choosing the right platform isn’t just about what can replace Thinkific—it’s about what you’re offering and what you need. 

For example, if you want a platform to build a thriving online community around your courses where you can hold discussions, chats, and live events natively, you’ll want to go with Circle. 

But if you want a course platform with strong marketing tools and don’t want to pay extra for third-party services, Kajabi is your best bet.

For more insights on selecting the best platform for community building or course creation, check out one of these detailed guides:

• Best community platforms to choose
• Best Kajabi alternatives
• Circle vs. Mighty Networks

Catch in the next masterpiece.

Top Thinkific Alternatives: FAQs