Offering courses online, but confused about whether to choose Thinkific or Learndash? Our Thinkific vs Learndash comparison will enlighten you more.
Thinkific is a superior online course creating a platform designed to allow you to develop world-class courses and sell them on the internet. Thinkific is the best go-to platform that offers completely modifiable eLearning solutions characterized by high-profile clients. It’s a Canadian company with great clients from York University in Canada.
On the other hand, Learndash is a WordPress LMS plugin, providing solutions for business owners to transform their sites in minutes. It’s a leading-edge platform that infuses advanced eLearning methodology into WordPress. It gives experience-driven and hands-on guidance to enable organizations and individuals to set up their online courses in a breeze.
Learndash—Everything You Should Know
Learndash is the most trusted learning system for WordPress websites. It provides the ultimate solution for those who want to sell and manage online courses using self-hosted and personally controlled websites. The site has been growing in popularity since it was introduced in the learning management systems.
It’s currently the most preferred LMS WordPress plugin used by nonprofits, educational institutions, developers, independent course creators, and CEU training organizations.
Learndash keeps advancing over time, with its latest version being the Learndash 3.0 that has advanced Focus Mode, premier course builder, and lots of premium features to enable you to manage and sell online courses.
The Learndash is the most powerful and straightforward plugin you can ever get that has enough impressive features. The plugin enables users to configure the settings and develop amazing courses on WordPress sites.
If you have a practical and exciting theme, you can use it to create online courses, which you can sell and earn money. The best thing about Learndash is that it lets you set your payment options as per your desires. You configure it to customized membership plans, one-time price, recurring subscriptions, or even repeated payments.
The plugin is designed such that it will provide you a golden opportunity for you to create remarkable learning experiences for your readers. You can seamlessly do that through a range of engagement triggers, gamification techniques, and reward systems.
Who Does Learndash Best Fit?
The Learndash plugin has a unique design and features that make it ideal for a certain group of users. The plugin is best-suited for sites looking to provide educational services on a subscription basis, companies looking to provide practical training to workers, and site owners looking to sell courses to people.
Unlike Thinkific, Learndash allows you to provide certificates to participants who successfully complete their courses
Main Features of Learndash
Learndash has an extensive range of features. Here are some impressive features that make Learndash the perfect choice of an LMS WordPress plugin.
- Drag-and-drop course builder
- Back-end style UIS
- Focus mode
- Assignments and Quizzes
- Counterintuitive menus
- Add-ons and integrations
Thinkific—Everything You Should Know
Thinkific is an all-inclusive course platform designed to make it easier for people to create and sell award-winning courses through customized websites. Thinkific provides a seamless platform for course developers to make money from selling their products. Thinkific is also a great platform for anyone who wants to enhance their brand reputation by reaching out to a higher audience.
Why Should You Use Thinkific?
Thinkific is the ultimate choice of an online course website that’s specially designed to ensure you can create and sell courses with minimal hassle. It does not include extra technical features, meaning it’s designed to match the unique needs of beginners.
It’s the favorite choice for those who don’t like using WordPress LMS plugins. That’s because it does save you from the extensive up-front technicalities and the demanding ongoing maintenance.
Who Does Thinkific Best Fit?
People who have little to no idea of what online course selling is all about should choose Thinkific. All it takes to get everything ready when working with Thinkific is to have a functional email marketing automation tool as well as get your domain registered.
Thinkific is also fit for users with an advanced skill set. That’s because it allows them to develop personalized domain names as well as build unique pages on their pages. Those who have no skills at all can easily create individual pages on their sites using Thinkific.
Thinkific can be used for an extensive range of business models to achieve multiple business goals. Thinkific is the platform for you if you want to train and educate your audience about certain products or services.
It’s the most preferred site used widely alongside reputed blogs and YouTube channels to enable speakers and authors to grow and earn more from their skills. It’s the site used by most businesses, tutors, and consultants to reach out to a higher audience and sell out their services and products to a higher customer base.
Main Thinkific Features to Consider
Thinkific has an impressive range of unique and practical features that make it the most preferred course building and selling platform.
- Ability to build your personalized course curriculum from scratch.
- Ability to create personalized websites for delivering the courses.
- Integrated eCommerce feature that enables you to accept payments for different courses.
- Offers unique student success tools and student-focused learning environment.
- Integration with the best marketing and business tools.
Thinkific vs Learndash—Which One Should You Choose
Thinkific is simply cloud-based, and so the range of features available to you are limited. You don’t have the control of what you can add to your course or site when using Thinkific. Also, in the case of trending content or systems, you must wait until the team at Thinkific adds it. You cannot do it by yourself.
As with Learndash, you’ve got total control over the features and kind of additions you can make to your course building site. Once you’ve bought the Learndash license, you’ll get full access to the features, ownership, and control of the courses you build.
Learndash is a bit complicated and technical, meaning it’s not suited for beginners who want to create courses and sell them online. On the other hand, Thinkific is very user-friendly and allows anyone with the necessary skills to develop and market unique courses online.
Great review! I’ve never used these programs, but I’ve been involved with others who have done the technical part of it as we’ve set up online training courses through various websites. As you pointed out, there are clear differences between these two programs, although they have a similar goal in the end. The method to get to the end result and the speed at which one would do so would be a couple of the differences as it appears to me. I think I would prefer LearnDash, the plug-in for WordPress. Seems like it would be better for those with some mid-level experience with websites and WordPress.
I will look at the options closer as I plan to start more instructionals soon and will be doing them myself. Thanks for the post and the information.
Darrin
Thank you for the comment Darrin! I though it would be interesting to compare these two – one being a SaaS model and the other being probably in my mind the best wordpress solution.
I might be biased because I’m an old school wordpress developer but I think I would also lean towards LearnDash. However I be remissed if I didn’t say that Thinkific really is an elegant solution for those that are not accustomed to toiling with WordPress into the late hours.
If you have any questions about anything, always happy to help.
Thank you so much for sharing a beautiful and insightful article with us. It is truly impressive that you covered this subject so well in your post. I’ve learned a lot from reading your article and what I can do to develop my own courses. I took the LearnDash online course a few days ago and learned a lot from it.
I’ll be sure to share your site with my friends!
I’m glad you enjoyed the article! I thought it would be very interesting to compare these two platforms since there are some key differences then say comparing Thinkific to Teachable. Sounds like your leaning towards LearnDash and I don’t blame you! If you already have experience with WordPress it is a really solid option.