Thinkific Reviews 851

Absolutely exceptional in every way. It's the most user friendly LMS out there. After five years using it I couldn't be happier. And the customer support is always honest, responsive, and human.

At HURACT (Switzerland & Italy), we specialize in providing high-quality online and in-person training courses tailored for organizations. Since 2020, Thinkific has been the backbone of our online learning platform, huract.online, where we offer courses on leadership, coaching, communication, and much more.

Over these years, my experience with Thinkific has been nothing short of exceptional. The platform is user-friendly, reliable, and adaptable to the diverse needs of our clients. From a technical perspective, I’ve never encountered any major issues, and—perhaps most importantly—neither have our learners. Feedback from our clients has been consistently positive, highlighting how intuitive and smooth the platform is to navigate.

However, what truly sets Thinkific apart is the quality of its support. Not only have they promptly solved any technical questions I’ve had, but they’ve also provided creative input that has helped us shape a better learning experience for our users. In my personal experience, finding a platform that feels like a partner is rare, but that’s exactly how we feel about Thinkific.

With Thinkific’s support, we’ve been able to create a robust suite of courses that empower organizations to develop their teams’ soft skills and grow professionally. You can check out the result on huract.online and see how Thinkific has helped us transform our educational projects into something remarkable.

I like the digital download addition and free plan, but as soon as Thinkific dropped Paypal I was forced to switch to another platform that offers so much more. So in a way, this was a gift in disguise. Thanks to Thinkific for being a nice platform to start with though !

This is my first experience using an online training platform. It's delivering what I need and the Thinkific team and site provide ample information for helping me to build courses, landing and payment pages. When I have questions I find it quite easy to get the answers.

I recently started using Thinkific for my business. As an experienced producer and entrepreneur, I have worked with several similar platforms.

Unfortunately, my experience with Thinkific's technical support has been deeply disappointing.

My account has faced several bugs that have prevented me from launching my product as planned. For the past month, my team has contacted Thinkific support daily. For most of the issues they can't presentva solution, even for things like integration with my e-mail marketing tool.

I only to receive vague responses like, "You will have to wait for an email from us." When solutions are eventually provided, they are ineffective and seem designed merely to buy time.

Due to this ongoing frustration, I am now researching alternative platforms.

They charged me totally wrong. I cancelled my plan in July and they said I would get a refund. This never arrived at my bank. Now I saw they used my refund money to keep charging my account (I never started a new subscription) until now my bank freezed their billing (of course, as I never agreed to an abo). It's basically FRAUD. Apart from not accepting my cancellation they also charged me 100€ too much. Counting all the official plan rates I never come to the sum they took from my bank account. Now I talked to the support and they said they are not going to do anything about it, they only freezed my website (even though they still have my payments for the end of the year). I am talking to my lawer to get my money back, but please please don't do this to yourself and use another website (thinkific is overpriced anyway, for a recurring payment option they want 100$ monthly; you get that for 14$ in wix).

Did 14 day free trial, then was blocked out of the account and they keep trying to charge by card. Cant change or cancel. also Impossible to get in touch with someone from support, just sent down rabbit holes of online guides.

I've been using Thinkific for a few years now. What I like about it is that it gets the job done in terms of course creation and communicating with learners, and has a few good app integrations (which is probably the only reason I've stuck with it to date). I also like the fact that they allow unlimited courses, which can be helpful for those who produce a lot of different courses.

The parts that I find problematic for my international business are:
1) Unable to create multiple sites. For example, if you want to offer your course in another language, it will cost you a ridiculous price of $2000/month under their Plus plan. The regular plans do not have a multi-site option, as you would get with their biggest competitor which starts with a K (@ $399/m). This is a HUGE con for me as I am trying to expand now. You wont be able to export your content from the platform, so think ahead..

2) Despite what they say, under their Grow plan, you can't fully remove "Thinkific Branding." This is more obvious when you start generating Emails/"Notifications" from their platform; the emails come from Thinkific's email address, so everyone will know that you are using their platform, including your competitors who want to replicate your success.

3) If you want to add a blog to your thinkfic-hosted site, the only option is "DropinBlog" - which is an expensive $40/m app add-on. This leads to my next point..

4) From a technical SEO standpoint, the platform has not been good to me. What this means is that my site doesn't rank in Google. Header tags are not defined to start, and there are limits to what you can do. Yes you can define an SEO title and description - but that's about it. I am familiar with SEO practices and have had an SEO expert thoroughly review my site - without much improvement.

5) They won't tell you this on their pricing page, but I notice I typically still pay 6 to 9% transaction fees on their Grow plan, which you might have read is "0% per transaction (transaction fees do not seem to be mentioned anymore on the sales page, but is still shown in their "upgrade" page when you're signed in). Guess they forgot to add disclaimers... There are actually several additional fees related to transactions. For example, Local payment method fee, Currency conversion fee, International card fee, Adjustment fee, Subscription fee, Sales tax calculation fee, and Currency flat fee. Also, if you have to do a refund OR someone uses a fraudulent credit card- you will be fully absorbing these fees... This means if you got scammed, then you will still have to pay Thinkific for that transaction.

At the end of the day, the platform is decent/reliable with little downtime, but the fact that I have to spend $2000/m or $24,000 per year to essentially replicate my site in another language is just sad. Unless you are coming out of the gate with oodles of money, then this just isn't financially sound. I can live with the other things or find a workaround (in some cases) - but this multi-site limitation is well... very limiting as I am now experiencing.

I am on the free trial, I have some questions and I have really tried to obtain answers, but the chat box was unable to help, said they would get someone to help me but nothing. I have tried to email, all I am sent are marketing emails, no response to my Questions. I want to progress but how? I hope sincerely that you can help me as a result of this message. I never wanted to communicate via this route. Please sort out your customer engagement. Not a good customer experience.

One of the absolute worst experiences. We have been with them for 2+ years and are leaving because of nearly fraudulent practices on behalf of Thinkific Payments. BEWARE of Thinkific Payments - it is not at all what they advertise it to me. Hidden fees and impossible to leave once you're on it (if you have recurring revenue)

It tells you you cant upload 2gb videos when the video is way below 2gb and offers no solutions, the chat bot just ignores you.

From a customer perspective I can confidently tell you that this has been one of the most frustrating experiences I ever had or seen, and I have been working in software and tech for over a decade. My takeaway is that it has nothing to do with the people involved (you and your team) but rather with the policies you adopt (Really? Setting a 100 custom sections limit and not communicating about it?!) and the fact that you are clearly working with a data structure and platform architecture from the early 2000s, which doesn’t allow you to even provide basic data in a simple format without hardcoding it.

As customers, we will definitely not recommend Thinkific to others, and we will run away from it as soon as we have a tangible opportunity to do so. Certainly, next time we have a problems with Thinkific we will ask ourselves ‘is it still worth it to keep this platform after discovering the 100th issue?’

One of the worst experiences i have had regarding customer support. It's just impossible to get a hold to their team when things don't work and they keep refereing you to pages that don't offer any solution. It all seems to be an endless loop of deception.

I have been using Thinkific for almost 4 years and have been happy with much of what is provided, but terribly disappointed in other aspects.

The latest of which is then charging a fee on top of Stripe's fee. The Stripe fee is 2.9% and I just noticed that Thinkific is charging me a flat $8.99 PER CUSTOMER on top.

I created one course on their free plan a few years ago, with the honest intention of upgrading to their basic plan once my second course was ready to publish.

They have randomly removed paypal as a payment option, causing a HUGE loss in sales (to the point where I'm panicking), without informing me.
It says on their website that paypal should be an option for those on the free plan, and their customer service says it's no longer an option anymore?! What else are they advertising that's false?

They also randomly changed my default currency to US dollars instead of British Pounds, so people were purchasing my course in the wrong currency (at the same value), then the exchange rate meant that I was earning around £15 less per sale. I had to jump through hoops to get them to reimburse me the difference.

I have brought literally thousands of people to their site, whilst still on the free plan. I do NOT plan on upgrading when I'm ready to upload my second course, and have already chosen a more reputable alternative.

It was going okay before all the above happened!

Their support is pretty bad. It's like they don't read your email.

In one message, I asked for account 'B' to be cancelled. I'd set that up as a test. But it had the same name as my main active account 'A'.

I had a separate support ticket open with account 'A'. They replied to it saying that they'd seen my request to close my account, as if it was account 'A'. No!

Another support experience overnight has me in the very unusual situation where I'm seeking out a 3rd party review site. Because I don't know how else to get a message to Thinkific's leadership: your support is AWFUL. I'm stuck in your platform now, but there's no way I'll ever use it again in the future.

Support is horrible. Platform autorenews with no notification and there is no way to turn off auto review.
Its a scam.

A 5-star platform, but 0-star customer loyalty and appreciation. Couple of years ago, they changed all their plans and removed features that were already included in our plan and asked to upgrade and pay more if we wanted to keep those features.

This year, they are adding a 5% extra charge per transaction if their customers keep using Stripe or PayPal instead of their TCommerce solution. Again, asking to pay extra for a feature that was already included in their plans.

It's understandable that they have probably heavily invested in TCommerce and probably haven't seen enough uptakes. But perhaps some customers are not interested in using their payment gateway and prefer to use well-known and well-established internationally recognized Stripe or PayPal.

With both Stripe and PayPal, if we have any payment issues, we get in touch with a live call agent support in a minute and they are extremely helpful. With our current Thinkific plan, we only have email support. Does that mean that we should now upgrade yet again and pay more if we want to get same customer service as we get with Stripe and PayPal? Besides, Stripe and PayPal are specialized in payment processing, they know every in's and out's of payment management, especially if you have to deal with complex payment issues (more specifically international payments), not sure the level of expertise Thinkific has with international payment management compared to Stripe and PayPal.

Thinkific sends an email from their CEO explaining why it's much better for their customers to switch and why they decided to charge extra. According to the CEO's email, apparently this extra charge is an "incentive"! Here is the full sentence: "As an incentive to move our customers onto TCommerce, all transactions processed on third-party payment providers will incur a fee as of July 3, 2024." Although the message is well crafted, that doesn't sound like a proper use of the word "incentive".

I also wonder about some of the marketing campaigns that TCommerce will save you from tax problems. Is that a way to make customers worried about tax issues to switch to TCommerce?! And they seem though as giving tax advice to the customers. Here is one of those marketing campaigns:

"Pop Quiz: If you have a single paying student in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, do you need to register for VAT?
If you answered no, you may be at risk for an audit!
Don’t Panic! We’ve got you.
TCommerce’s Sales Tax solution takes care of automatically calculating, collecting, and remitting sales tax for your US & Canadian students."

They make a lot of claims that TCommerce is better than other payment gateways. Let's say that is true and TCommerce is indeed much better, in that case your customers are smart enough to switch and if they are not smart enough, well, it's their loss. But they don't need to be incentivized by being charged more or panic about tax audit so then they decide to switch. How about instead of charging your customers extra, as a "real" incentive you offer no payment transaction fee for a year for your customers who switch to TCommerce?!

In my opinion, Thinkific is in the business of learning platforms NOT payment processing. Their competitive edge (which they are great at, by the way) is into enhancing unique "learning" features of their platform for their customers and their customers' students NOT investing into payment processing just because it's more profitable (or less costly) for them to do so. But of course that's their leadership decision on what strategic investments to make but again I don't agree that customers have to pay extra to cover their investments.

It's unfortunate that a Canadian-based company which provides a great learning platform is not thinking deeply about its customer loyalty and appreciation. For a small learning provider, like us, any small extra charge has a big impact on the bottomline.

Now as a Canadian training provider and after being with Thinkific since we started offering online courses years ago, we are forced to go back to market and research all other alternatives to hopefully find one that suits our needs and our students' needs, spending our valuable time away from supporting our students and enhancing our courses.

All in all, if you are just deciding on which platforms to partner with or still haven't been deep into using Thinkific maybe you want to expand your search. It looks like there are good alternatives out there.

The looney tunes support continues.

So - never got a resolution on the endless enrolment loop - seems it was best just to ignore that one - makes for better report on the ‘number of issues resolved KPI’

Having spent hours working the problem - I found more - including the enrolment process now skipping the screen where students enter their personal details - Thinkific response is :

With regards to the Thinkific Built-in Checkout, this is the default process and once the students make a purchase they will automatically create a user profile.

Well no - this was precisely my point in the video I sent - it’s not happening- but - as usual - let’s sweep that one under the rug.

Secondly - I need to give users the option to select which language they choose for the site. It’s not working,

Response - let’s use Edge- one of the least used browsers to prove that it does work - really? Why deliberately not use Safari or Chrome? - Obfuscation perhaps?

Regardless - let’s sweep that one under the rug as well - best to keep those KPI’s where management expects…

Thirdly - it appears that students can quite easily be charged twice for a course following a simple mistake- response… crickets…

Well - that’s awkward - best to ignore and hope it goes away?

I have never been involved in a more convoluted kafkaesque nonsensical support process. It would be laughable if it wasn’t my livelihood. I would also note that my courses have had 1000’s of enrolments - it’s not as though I am irrelevant- not that that should matter.

The set-up and design of the backend for my online education site was good, and fairly simple to set up, but when a customer had a chargeback, their customer support fell apart.

They let me know the customer asked for a refund, which was fine, so I reached out to the customer for more information, and to see if we could work it out, but didn't get a response.

On pretty much every online purchase, the seller and the buyer have to communicate, on some level, before a refund takes place. Verify the refund request, can another product be offered in exchange, verify refund information, something.

Then about 30 days later, Thinkific says you didn't provide their bank the proper information, so we are sending the money back.

Sending the money back isn't the issue. Why didn't you tell me there was a process with the customer's bank? Why didn't you tell me they needed more information from me?

Thinkific was derelict in their duty to serve my interests, or just flat out incompetent. Either way, I closes my account with them. If this is how they handle, or don't handle, disputes, I don't need them. They didn't earn their cut as middleman. I didn't feel like one of their customers. Just a cow being milked.