Thinkific is a platform for creating, hosting and selling online courses. You build lessons, set a price, and students log in to a course site under your brand to learn. Around the course, it adds communities, memberships, coaching, digital downloads and marketing tools.

It concerns experts, coaches, trainers and companies who teach for a living or train customers and partners. If the course is the product, and you care about quizzes, certificates and how far students get, Thinkific is one of the main names you will compare.

What is Thinkific?

Thinkific is a hosted learning management system with commerce built in. It hosts your school or academy, the video lessons, the checkout and the student accounts. You can connect your own domain or use it next to an existing website.

Across its plans, Thinkific's own pages list:

  • Courses: unlimited courses with video lessons, quizzes and student discussions. Higher plans add assignments that you grade and lessons that unlock as students progress.
  • Communities: a private feed with direct messages and weekly digests. The number of communities depends on the plan.
  • Digital downloads: ebooks, workbooks or templates, with a cap of 5 on the entry plan.
  • Memberships and subscriptions: monthly access to a course library.
  • Live cohorts and coaching: Zoom sessions, bookable calendars and attendance tracking.
  • Certificates in PDF that students can share.
  • Commerce: checkout, coupons, order bumps, gifting, abandoned-cart emails, bundles, upsells and payment plans.
  • Marketing and analytics: landing pages, email automation, sales and student dashboards.
  • Advanced options: API access and webhooks, B2B group orders and invoicing, and on the top tier SSO, SCORM and an AI teaching assistant.
  • A branded mobile app for iOS and Android, sold as an add-on.

Thinkific is not a link-in-bio tool or a store for physical products. It is a school first, with selling tools around it.

Why it matters

A course business depends on more than a checkout. Students need a clear lesson player, progress, a place to ask questions and proof they finished. Thinkific puts these in one system, so you do not glue a video host, a forum, a quiz tool and a payment page together.

At the time of writing (September 2026), Thinkific's pricing page, as displayed to European visitors in euros, lists Basic at €53 per month (€39 billed annually), Start at €107 (€79 annually), Grow at €213 (€159 annually) and a custom-priced Plus plan. There is no free plan. Every account starts with a 30-day free trial. The branded mobile app is an add-on listed at $199 per month. Thinkific states that its built-in processor, Thinkific Payments, is priced at 2.9%, in line with other processors, and that using Stripe or PayPal instead adds a third-party gateway fee that varies by plan.

A worked example for a course priced at $197:

  • 20 sales a month bring $3,940.
  • On the Start plan billed annually, the subscription is €79 a month. That is about 2% of revenue, before processing.
  • With 4 sales a month, revenue is $788, and the subscription becomes roughly 10% of it.

The platform makes most sense once course sales are steady, or when you need features like certificates, cohorts or B2B seat sales that simpler tools lack.

How it works

A typical Thinkific setup:

  • Start the 30-day trial. Build courses and communities before you pay.
  • Outline the course. Structure it in chapters and lessons. Thinkific offers AI tools such as a course outline generator to get started.
  • Upload lessons. Add videos, text, quizzes and downloads. On higher plans, add graded assignments and lessons that unlock as students progress.
  • Set the price. One-time, payment plan, subscription or bundle, depending on the plan.
  • Connect payments. Use Thinkific Payments or a third-party gateway such as Stripe or PayPal.
  • Build the site and landing pages. Use a template, your own domain and, on Start and up, the HTML and CSS editor.
  • Launch and follow up. Email automation and abandoned-cart emails bring people back. Dashboards show revenue, enrollments and completion rate.

Students then log in to one hub to follow lessons, join the community and book or attend live sessions.

Benchmarks and examples

Typical Thinkific setups:

  • A photography teacher sells a $197 online course with quizzes and a certificate, plus a $29 per month membership for new lessons.
  • A finance educator runs live cohorts four times a year, with Zoom sessions and attendance tracking.
  • A software company trains customers and partners, and sells bulk seats to other businesses with invoices.
  • A professional association offers accredited training to members through SSO and SCORM content on the top tier.

Completion rates for self-paced courses are often low, commonly quoted between 5% and 15%. Cohorts, deadlines and community tend to push completion higher. Track it: students who finish are the ones who buy again and refer others.

Common mistakes

  • Choosing by the entry price only. Memberships, coaching, certificates and upsells start on Start. Check which plan your model really needs.
  • Forgetting gateway costs. Using Stripe or PayPal instead of Thinkific Payments adds a gateway fee that varies by plan.
  • Building a huge course first. Twelve hours of video before any sale is a risk. Validate with a shorter first version.
  • Ignoring the trial window. Thirty days pass fast. Plan what you want to test before you start.
  • Expecting the platform to bring students. Thinkific hosts and sells. Traffic still comes from your audience, content and ads.

Best practices

  • Map your offer to a plan. List every feature you need at launch and in six months, then pick the tier.
  • Pay annually once validated. The annual price is about 25% lower on each plan.
  • Use quizzes and certificates on purpose. They give students milestones and something to share.
  • Add a live element. A monthly call or a cohort raises engagement for self-paced courses.
  • Set up abandoned-cart emails early. Course buyers often hesitate at checkout.
  • Review student reports. See where learners stop and fix that lesson first.

In Roctify

Roctify and Thinkific start from different places. Thinkific is a course platform first. Roctify is a store first: a link-in-bio page with built-in checkout and a full online store on one shared catalog, with 0% transaction fees on every plan. You can sell a course or downloads as a digital product delivered automatically after payment, next to physical products, with Stripe, PayPal or cash on delivery, and email your buyers from the Creator plan.

Thinkific does many things Roctify does not offer. Roctify has no quizzes, certificates, student progress tracking, live classes, communities, order bumps or public API. Memberships and subscriptions are on the Roctify roadmap, not shipped. If your business is a structured school, a dedicated course platform fits better. If courses are one product among templates, merch and coaching packages, a store can be enough.

FAQ

Does Thinkific have a free plan?

No. At the time of writing (September 2026), Thinkific offers a 30-day free trial instead of a free plan. You can build courses and communities during the trial and cancel at any time.

Does Thinkific take a transaction fee?

Thinkific states that its built-in processor, Thinkific Payments, is priced at 2.9%, in line with other processors. If you use Stripe or PayPal instead, Thinkific adds a third-party gateway fee that varies by plan, on top of their own processing fees.

Can I use Thinkific with my existing website?

Yes. Thinkific says you can use it only for creating and delivering courses while keeping your main website elsewhere. You can also connect a custom domain to your Thinkific site.