LearnWorlds vs Thinkific 2024: Which Is Better?

Updated on

Jun 20, 2024

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Show Pros & Cons

Thinkific and LearnWorlds Shine in

Online Course Platform Innovation

Thinkific emerges as a powerhouse in the online learning platform space, particularly distinguished by its intuitive interface that caters to both course creators and students. Its robust ecosystem is further enhanced by an expansive app store, providing unparalleled extensibility. The platform truly stands out with its budget-friendly approach, offering a free plan and the ability to host unlimited students across all pricing tiers.

In contrast, LearnWorlds brings its own set of compelling advantages to the table. The platform distinguishes itself with innovative features like interactive video experiences and a highly adaptable website builder. Additionally, built-in blogging tools provide creators with comprehensive content management capabilities, setting LearnWorlds apart in the competitive online course marketplace.

Navigating the world of online course platforms can be challenging, especially when you’re searching for the perfect solution to bring your educational content to life. If you’ve narrowed your selection to Thinkific and LearnWorlds, you’re already on the right track to finding a powerful course creation and marketing platform.

At first glance, these two platforms share remarkable similarities. Both are robust hosted solutions designed with course creators in mind, offering comprehensive tools for building, marketing, and selling online courses. However, choosing the right platform requires a deeper understanding of their unique characteristics.

This in-depth comparison of Thinkific and LearnWorlds is your ultimate guide to making an informed decision. We’ve conducted thorough testing and evaluation, meticulously examining each platform’s usability, feature set, pricing structure, and customer support. What follows is a comprehensive breakdown that will illuminate the strengths and potential limitations of both platforms.

LearnWorlds and Thinkific represent sophisticated cloud-based online course platforms engineered to empower creators in developing, marketing, and monetizing digital educational content. These platforms handle the critical backend operations, including comprehensive hosting, consistent maintenance, and seamless system updates.

Both solutions provide robust toolsets that enable creators to effortlessly upload and organize course content, facilitate effective course delivery, and implement comprehensive student assessment mechanisms. While not positioning themselves as complete all-in-one solutions, these platforms offer sophisticated website-building capabilities and diverse monetization tools that support creators in establishing and growing their online education businesses.

LearnWorlds’ homepage

At a high-level overview, LearnWorlds and Thinkific share remarkable similarities while maintaining distinct characteristics that set them apart. Our comprehensive comparison will dive deep into the nuanced differences between these two powerful online course platforms.

We’ll kick off our analysis by examining the user interface—a critical element that can make or break a creator’s experience when selecting the ideal course platform. The intuitiveness, design, and ease of navigation can significantly impact your course creation and management journey.

Ease of Use

We’ve thoroughly tested LearnWorlds and Thinkific.

In our experience, Thinkific is very easy to use. Its simple design and easy navigation allow you to quickly access all settings and start building a course.

Thinkific’s admin interface

You can easily access and manage your learning products, create pages, and more from the left menu. Also, the tools are user-friendly. For instance, the course builder has a simple drag-and-drop editor and supports bulk uploading, making course creation easy.

Thinkific’s admin interface

Our experience with LearnWorlds has been quite different. The user interface feels cluttered. Both the main dashboard and the course builder are filled with many options and settings.

LearnWorlds’ admin dashboard looks busy

The platform’s user interface presents several frustrating design quirks that can impede workflow efficiency. When hovering over lessons in the course builder, cryptic icons mysteriously appear on the right side, leaving users puzzled about their precise functionality.

The video integration process proves particularly cumbersome. Instead of a straightforward upload directly into a lesson, creators must first navigate to the video library before they can incorporate their content into the course material.

Additional user experience obstacles further complicate the creative process. The page editor, for instance, displays element settings directly atop page components rather than in a convenient side panel. This unintuitive layout creates significant friction, making content creation more challenging than it needs to be.

A guide to using LearnWorlds’ admin interface

In the realm of user experience, Thinkific emerges as the clear frontrunner. The platform distinguishes itself through a more intuitive interface and a comprehensive suite of user-friendly tools that streamline the course creation process. Creators will appreciate the platform’s thoughtful design, which prioritizes simplicity and ease of navigation without compromising on powerful functionality.

Course Creation and Engagement

Rating

Curriculum Builder

Excellent

Good

Video Hosting

Unlimited

Unlimited

Course Player Themes

Single

Single

Mobile App

Free + Branded

Quizzes

Advanced

Very Basic

Assignments

Certificates

Live Classes

Zoom

Zoom

Interactive Video

Community

Basic

Basic

Coaching

Content Drip

Course Compliance

Gamification

Copyright Protection

Basic

Basic

Your course platform should have strong tools to create your course and connect with students. Let’s see how LearnWorlds and Thinkific compare in this area.

Course Builder

Thinkific and LearnWorlds offer robust drag-and-drop course builders that provide exceptional content creation flexibility. These platforms support an impressive array of content formats, encompassing video, audio, PDFs, text-based materials, interactive quizzes, live lesson capabilities, and even advanced SCORM/HTML5 file integrations. Both solutions also provide unlimited hosting, ensuring creators can store and share their comprehensive course content without storage constraints.

Course organization receives equal attention, with both platforms enabling users to structure their educational content through intuitive chapter and lesson divisions. This approach allows for seamless material arrangement and logical curriculum development.

Despite these fundamental similarities, Thinkific distinguishes itself by offering superior flexibility and a more streamlined user experience. The platform goes beyond basic content management, providing creators with a more adaptive and user-friendly course development environment.

Thinkific’s course builder

LearnWorlds’ course builder seems messy

First and foremost, Thinkific offers a significantly more intuitive course builder platform. The interface boasts exceptional clarity and provides a remarkably streamlined user experience.

Take video lesson creation, for instance. With Thinkific, course creators enjoy maximum flexibility. You can seamlessly upload a video file directly into the course builder or effortlessly select a video from your existing library.

Conversely, LearnWorlds presents a more complicated workflow. Unlike Thinkific’s straightforward approach, LearnWorlds requires creators to first upload videos to the library before incorporating them into a lesson. This additional step creates unnecessary complexity in the content development process.

How to add a video to a LearnWorlds course lesson

Multiple scenarios demonstrate how LearnWorlds introduces unnecessary complexity into the course creation process.

Additionally, Thinkific’s course builder excels with its bulk uploading capability, allowing creators to upload multiple files simultaneously. The platform intelligently transforms these files into organized lessons automatically, streamlining the content development workflow.

LearnWorlds falls short in this area. While the platform permits adding multiple videos to the library, creators must laboriously add each video to lessons individually. This manual approach significantly increases time investment and reduces overall productivity for course developers.

Thinkific demonstrates superior versatility in content composition, offering unparalleled flexibility when constructing lesson materials. Creators can seamlessly integrate multiple content types within a single lesson, a feature that sets it apart from competitors.

For instance, Thinkific empowers course developers to incorporate multiple videos into one lesson or effortlessly supplement video content with additional text explanations. In contrast, LearnWorlds imposes significant limitations, restricting the creative potential of course creators.

As a result, Thinkific emerges as the definitive frontrunner in the course creation process, providing a more intuitive and flexible platform for online educators.

Learning and Engagement

This section will explain how Thinkific and LearnWorlds handle learning and engagement in their course platforms.

Quizzes and Certificates

Thinkific and LearnWorlds offer robust and comprehensive assessment tools that cater to diverse educational needs. Their platforms provide instructors with a wide range of powerful features for creating engaging and flexible evaluation methods:

  • Develop sophisticated quizzes featuring multiple-choice and multiple-response question formats
  • Generate extensive question banks with the ability to randomize question selection
  • Efficiently import questions in bulk to streamline content creation
  • Design interactive assignments that allow students to submit file uploads
  • Implement flexible grading options, including automatic scoring and manual evaluation

How to make a quiz question in Thinkific

LearnWorlds has a small advantage with its extra features.

It allows more types of questions, like matching, sorting, and fill-in-the-blank. You can also set time limits for exams and control the number of retakes.

Quiz question types available in LearnWorlds

Both platforms provide built-in certificate generation capabilities.

LearnWorlds offers a standard certificate template with basic customization options. Instructors can modify the certificate to include essential details such as the student’s name, specific course title, and completion timestamp.

However, the platform presents significant limitations in design flexibility. Those seeking a truly unique certificate appearance will need to develop a custom PDF template externally and subsequently upload it to the platform. This workaround introduces additional complexity for course creators wanting a more personalized certificate design.

Making a certificate in LearnWorlds

Thinkific offers a user-friendly certificate builder with ready-made templates. You can easily personalize the design and select the fields to include.

Creating a certificate in Thinkific is simpler. You can design and assign a certificate to multiple courses.

Thinkific’s certificate builder

Consequently, Thinkific’s certificate creation tool demonstrates superior flexibility and user-friendliness compared to its competitor.

Content Sequencing and Access Management

When developing a course with Thinkific, instructors enjoy comprehensive content release strategies. You can instantly make the entire course accessible to students or implement a strategic content drip schedule, releasing materials after a specific number of days or on a predetermined date.

LearnWorlds provides comparable content sequencing capabilities. The platform distinguishes itself with an additional feature: automatic email notifications alerting students when new course content becomes available—a functionality not currently supported by Thinkific.

LearnWorlds scheduling tool

Concerning course progression and student engagement, both platforms provide robust compliance tools. Instructors can establish lesson prerequisites, ensuring students cannot advance without completing specific foundational content.

Additionally, these platforms offer granular content access controls. Educators can mandate that students watch a predetermined percentage of video content or successfully pass a quiz before progressing to subsequent course materials. This approach ensures comprehensive learning and meaningful student engagement.

In essence, Thinkific and LearnWorlds demonstrate comparable capabilities for content sequencing and access management.

Online Community Features

Both LearnWorlds and Thinkific empower course creators to establish interactive community spaces within their platforms. These integrated environments enable students and instructors to generate discussion posts, foster meaningful interactions, and create organized community segments.

However, notable distinctions emerge, particularly in Thinkific Communities, which offers several distinctive advantages:

  • Seamless integration of live event hosting directly within the community platform
  • Advanced access controls allowing community restrictions based on specific course enrollments or membership tiers—a feature absent in LearnWorlds
  • Flexibility to create and manage multiple distinct communities

A community created with Thinkific

A sample community built on Thinkific

Consequently, LearnWorlds demonstrates slightly more sophisticated community capabilities. However, both platforms fall short of a truly comprehensive community solution. They lack critical features such as robust livestreaming, interactive group chat functionality, and sophisticated personalized notification systems.

Live Class Integration

This comparison reaches a draw, as both platforms offer seamless Zoom integration for incorporating live lessons directly into course structures. Creators can conveniently configure live sessions within the course builder, a particularly valuable feature for facilitating cohort-based learning programs.

A notable limitation remains: neither platform provides native livestreaming capabilities, requiring external tools for real-time video instruction.

Interactive Video and Digital Resources

LearnWorlds distinguishes itself with robust interactive video functionality. The platform enables creators to embed text, images, quizzes, and various interactive elements directly within video content, creating a more engaging and dynamic learning experience.

A sample community built on Thinkific

LearnWorlds offers sophisticated interactive eBook capabilities, allowing students to engage deeply with digital resources. Learners can create personalized annotations, highlight specific text passages, and interact with content in meaningful ways that enhance the learning experience.

In contrast, Thinkific lacks these interactive features natively. However, the platform distinguishes itself through an innovative solution: a comprehensive expansive app ecosystem that enables creators to extend platform functionality.

Through Thinkific’s app store, instructors can integrate powerful third-party tools to enhance course interactivity:

  • ThingLink for creating immersive, interactive video experiences
  • Wobo to develop dynamic workbooks and enable comprehensive note-taking
  • Pointagram to introduce engaging course gamification elements

Notably, Thinkific stands as a unique hosted course platform, offering this level of extensibility. Its app store boasts dozens of applications designed to transform and elevate the online learning environment.

Course Content Presentation

LearnWorlds and Thinkific share a remarkably consistent approach to course content delivery. Both platforms utilize an intuitive interface design featuring a navigation panel positioned on the left side of the screen, complemented by a spacious content display area on the right.

The learning experience is further enhanced by several user-friendly features. Students can effortlessly track their progress, engage with course materials through commenting functionality, and seamlessly switch to a full-screen view for an immersive learning environment.

Thinkific’s course player

A sample community built on Thinkific

LearnWorlds distinguishes itself with enhanced course player customization options. The platform provides multiple course player skins and offers unprecedented layout flexibility, including the ability to completely remove the side navigation menu.

Course creators can exercise granular control over the user interface, even hiding Next and Previous navigation buttons to create a more streamlined learning experience.

However, LearnWorlds’ course player suffers from significant aesthetic limitations. The design appears dated, characterized by diminutive font sizes and a visually uninspired layout. In contrast, Thinkific’s course player presents a more refined, contemporary, and visually appealing interface that enhances the overall learning experience.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s course player

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s course player

Regarding mobile accessibility, both course platforms ensure responsive design for mobile devices.

Moreover, Thinkific provides a complimentary mobile application enabling students to engage with courses and communities from anywhere.

LearnWorlds diverges by not offering a free mobile app for end-users.

Both platforms enable you to obtain branded mobile applications through premium services. However, Thinkific distinguishes itself with a fully managed mobile app solution, whereas LearnWorlds requires a more hands-on approach.

With LearnWorlds, you’ll need to personally utilize its app builder for design and customization. This process involves managing app store developer accounts and meticulously ensuring your application meets all submission requirements.

Thinkific simplifies this process—you merely submit your specifications, and their team handles the entire development.

When it comes to intellectual property safeguards, LearnWorlds offers more comprehensive protection. While Thinkific provides fundamental security measures like preventing text copying and video downloads, LearnWorlds extends protection by allowing watermark integration into videos and PDFs with personalized user details.

Thinkific introduces a distinctive capability to generate custom pages, enabling content addition and access restrictions based on purchase plans—an especially valuable feature for membership site management.

Ultimately, Thinkific demonstrates superior performance in content delivery and mobile learning experiences.

Course Creation – The Bottom Line

Thinkific demonstrates superior capabilities in course development and learner engagement. The platform simplifies course creation through its comprehensive set of lesson types, innovative learning tools, and user-friendly course interface that enables educators to craft compelling educational experiences. Moreover, Thinkific’s expansive App Store offers an impressive array of integrative tools to enhance platform functionality and extend your educational ecosystem.

Conversely, LearnWorlds introduces distinctive features like interactive video experiences and sophisticated intellectual property safeguards. While the platform boasts advanced assessment capabilities, its complex and cluttered interface significantly diminishes the potential impact of these impressive technological innovations. The overall user experience suffers from navigational challenges and design complexity that can potentially frustrate both course creators and students.

Site Design and Customization

Rating

Hosting

Unlimited

Unlimited

Custom Domain

Site Themes

Page Builder

Intermediate

Advanced

Advanced Customization

Blogging

Podcasts

White-Labeling

Change Site Language

Modify Default Text

As anticipated with hosted course-building platforms, Thinkific and LearnWorlds manage the technical infrastructure comprehensively. Both services provide essential technical foundations including SSL certification, website hosting, and complimentary subdomain access.

The platforms also enable you to implement full white-label branding. This extensive customization encompasses a personalized domain, elimination of platform branding, branded mobile applications, and even white-label email communication systems.

Furthermore, users can seamlessly adjust site language settings and modify default text configurations to align with their specific branding requirements.

Let’s delve into the website page creation and visual customization capabilities.

Website Themes

When it comes to site themes, both Thinkific and LearnWorlds offer pre-designed templates ready for installation and personalized customization.

While Thinkific provides three professionally crafted templates, LearnWorlds significantly outpaces this offering with nearly 50 site themes, presenting creators with substantially more design flexibility and aesthetic options.

LearnWorlds offers many site themes

These Site Flavors represent pre-designed templates tailored for specific industry verticals. Upon selecting a flavor, you gain the flexibility to personalize the design by adjusting the default color scheme, typography, and overall page layout.

Comparatively, Thinkific offers three website themes, each supporting multiple stylistic variations to accommodate diverse design preferences.

Thinkific site themes

While theme customization allows modifications to color palettes and typography, layout configurations remain fixed. However, Thinkific offers an advanced option for technically proficient users: direct theme code editing, which significantly expands customization possibilities.

Page Builder

After selecting a website theme, the critical next step involves page design using the platform’s page builder. Both platforms provide page creation capabilities, but the key differentiator lies in the user experience and intuitive design process.

Thinkific features a section-based page builder that streamlines website development. Constructing website pages becomes effortless through pre-configured content sections. The platform empowers creators to incorporate diverse elements including text blocks, imagery, video content, countdown timers, course curricula, and pricing information.

The builder’s drag-and-drop interface enables seamless content rearrangement. Customization options permit minor refinements such as adjusting element focal points, alignment configurations, and background imagery. Nevertheless, the modification scope remains relatively constrained.

Available page sections in Thinkific

LearnWorlds’ page builder offers substantially greater design flexibility, despite occasional technical hiccups during page creation and editing. The platform provides a robust set of tools that expedite page development.

Initially, users can access an extensive library of page templates, serving as comprehensive starting points for customization. Similar to Thinkific, the page builder includes pre-configured page sections, but LearnWorlds distinguishes itself by offering dozens of unique section templates that dramatically simplify the customization process.

Moreover, the platform grants unprecedented design control, allowing granular modifications to virtually every visual element. Users can fine-tune image dimensions, adjust margins and paddings, and even implement sophisticated scrolling effects, ensuring a truly personalized website experience.

Templates ready for LearnWorlds page blocks

The page builder presents notable user experience challenges. The editing interface can quickly become cluttered, requiring users to navigate through multiple modal windows just to view the page under development.

Furthermore, the builder lacks full drag-and-drop functionality. Users cannot seamlessly move entire sections by simple clicking and dragging. The absence of a sidebar menu for section management means constant vertical scrolling becomes necessary to make precise edits.

Despite these limitations, LearnWorlds maintains a more adaptable page builder with significantly expanded customization capabilities compared to Thinkific.

Blogging Tools

LearnWorlds empowers course creators to integrate a blog directly into their course website. Activation is straightforward—simply enable the blogging feature to begin sharing expertise, industry insights, and critical updates with your student community.

The blog editor mirrors the page builder’s design philosophy, offering remarkable creative flexibility for crafting visually compelling content. Beyond standard text and media elements, creators can enhance blog posts with interactive components like lists, forms, buttons, accordions, and additional engaging features.

Editing a blog post in LearnWorlds

The platform provides comprehensive blog management features, including the ability to create blog categories, personalize the blog’s visual design, and implement search engine optimization strategies for improved content discoverability.

Thinkific lacks native blogging functionality. As an alternative, users can integrate Thinkific with WordPress to establish a blog or leverage the DropInBlog application available through Thinkific’s App Store.

Website Creation – The Bottom Line

LearnWorlds definitively outperforms Thinkific in website development capabilities. The platform boasts a comprehensive theme library, a highly adaptable page builder, and seamless blog integration directly within the course website ecosystem.

While Thinkific provides site themes and a drag-and-drop page builder, these features pale in comparison to LearnWorlds’ robust offerings. Additionally, Thinkific’s blogging functionality remains dependent on third-party applications, further limiting its website creation potential.

Sales and Marketing

Rating

Product Pricing Options

Multiple

Multiple

Coupons

Payment Gateways

Thinkific Payments + Stripe + PayPal

Stripe + PayPal + Others

Checkout Process

1-Click Upsells

Sales Taxes

Affiliate Marketing

Marketing Funnels

Very Basic

Basic

Landing Pages & Popups

Webinars

Email Tools

Very Basic

Very Basic

Course creation represents just the initial phase of your educational business journey. Effective promotion and sales strategies are crucial for success. Let’s dive into a comprehensive comparison of the

sales and marketing

features offered by Thinkific and LearnWorlds.

Product Pricing Options

Both platforms provide comprehensive pricing flexibility for course creators. Users can implement diverse monetization strategies, including one-time purchase options, recurring subscription models, and adaptable payment plan configurations.

Specifically, subscription models support both monthly and annual billing cycles, with the added capability of offering complimentary trial periods to potential students.

Product pricing options in Thinkific

Despite the overall similarities, each platform offers unique subscription pricing capabilities. Thinkific distinguishes itself by enabling creators to implement custom initial payments for subscription-based courses—a functionality absent in LearnWorlds.

Conversely, LearnWorlds provides enhanced flexibility by allowing subscription duration configurations in days and weeks, offering more granular billing cycle options compared to traditional monthly and annual models.

LearnWorlds’ subscription plans

Moreover, both platforms enable comprehensive product bundling. Thinkific provides flexibility by allowing you to combine courses with community experiences, while LearnWorlds focuses exclusively on course bundling options.

Beyond bundling, both platforms support promotional strategies through coupon creation, empowering you to offer strategic discounts on your educational content.

Payments and Checkouts

Payment processing in LearnWorlds follows a straightforward approach. Educators can seamlessly connect their Stripe or PayPal accounts to facilitate student transactions.

Thinkific, by contrast, leverages its proprietary Thinkific Payments, a robust Stripe-powered payment solution. This integrated system enables diverse payment methods, including credit cards, digital wallets, and flexible buy-now, pay-later arrangements. The fee structure precisely mirrors Stripe’s standard rates, with no supplementary charges applied.

Thinkific additionally offers the option to utilize personal Stripe or PayPal accounts. However, educators should note a sliding transaction fee ranging from 0.5% to 5% when employing custom payment gateways.

Furthermore, both platforms boast comprehensive Shopify integration, allowing course creators to expand their sales channels through Shopify storefronts.

Checkout experiences on both platforms are optimized with single-step processes engineered to maximize conversion rates. Students can complete purchases without the friction of mandatory account creation.

An example checkout page made with Thinkific

Thinkific’s checkout allows some simple customizations like adding student reviews, while LearnWorlds lets you choose a template and add different features.

Templates for LearnWorlds checkout page

Both platforms share a limitation in checkout customization, with no ability to create unique checkout pages for individual courses. Customization settings uniformly apply across your entire course catalog.

Thinkific distinguishes itself with several compelling checkout enhancements:

  • Enables seamless 1-click upsells and strategic order bumps.
  • Provides native sales tax management through Thinkific Payments.
  • Allows course gifting to other individuals.
  • Supports bulk course purchases in multiple quantities.

In the checkout optimization arena, Thinkific demonstrates superior conversion tools, while LearnWorlds offers more flexibility with payment gateway selections.

Affiliate Marketing

Both Thinkific and LearnWorlds deliver comprehensive affiliate management capabilities, enabling creators to:

  • Invite and register affiliate users
  • Configure personalized commission rates
  • Select specific products for promotion
  • Monitor affiliate performance metrics

Affiliates enjoy dedicated dashboards for tracking referral link engagement, earned commissions, and payout details. Despite their robust features, both platforms share constraints—neither permits varied commission structures, creative asset uploads, or automated payout processes.

Other Marketing Tools

Beyond previously discussed features, LearnWorlds and Thinkific extend additional marketing capabilities.

LearnWorlds introduces an innovative Funnels feature designed to streamline product promotion through strategic landing page sequences. This tool empowers creators to quickly deploy marketing funnels by selecting from pre-designed templates spanning lead generation, webinar registrations, and course sales opportunities.

LearnWorlds’ funnel templates

Thinkific has a feature called Funnels that works in a similar way. It supports three types of funnels: Free Lesson, Free Download, and Sales Page.

Funnel types in Thinkific

However, Thinkific’s funnel capabilities reveal several significant limitations:

  • Funnel templates are rigidly preset, eliminating design customization options.
  • Page additions are restricted, constraining users to Thinkific’s predefined funnel structures.
  • The accompanying page builder remains basic, offering minimal personalization capabilities.

Candidly, LearnWorlds’ funnel builder also falls short of comprehensive marketing expectations. Its functionality essentially amounts to landing page organization rather than creating truly integrated marketing funnels.

For example, while a webinar registration page can be generated, the system lacks backend event registration mechanisms. Creators must still rely on external webinar platforms to manage actual event logistics.

Beyond funnels, LearnWorlds introduces popup capabilities for strategic lead capture and offer presentation.

Regarding email functionality, both platforms handle essential transactional communications such as course enrollment confirmations. They enable broadcast messaging to student populations, with LearnWorlds offering additional flexibility for triggering individual automated emails based on specific user interactions.

Nevertheless, both platforms demonstrate limitations in advanced email marketing—neither supports comprehensive automated email sequences or sophisticated subscriber tracking. Creators will need to supplement these platforms with dedicated email marketing solutions.

As a final distinguishing feature, Thinkific provides embedding widgets that enable seamless course linking across external websites through simple code snippets.

Sales and Marketing – The Bottom Line

LearnWorlds and Thinkific demonstrate remarkable similarities in their sales and marketing feature sets. Both platforms provide creators with comprehensive selling tools, including adaptable pricing strategies, conversion-optimized checkout experiences, and robust affiliate management capabilities.

Subtle nuances distinguish the two platforms. LearnWorlds distinguishes itself with a more sophisticated Funnel feature, while Thinkific excels in checkout and conversion tool implementations.

In terms of page builder capabilities, Thinkific’s customization options appear more constrained compared to LearnWorlds. Additionally, Thinkific necessitates integrating third-party applications to enable blogging functionality.

Reporting and Administration

Robust reporting and administration tools form the backbone of effective online course platforms, empowering creators to track performance and manage student interactions with precision and insight.

Reporting and Analytics

LearnWorlds and Thinkific excel in delivering comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities. These platforms offer an extensive suite of analytical tools covering critical metrics such as revenue generation, student enrollments, course progression, individual student performance, and video engagement analytics.

The platforms provide exceptional flexibility in data exploration, enabling creators to apply multiple filtering options. Users can seamlessly concentrate on specific products, individual courses, targeted user segments, and precise date ranges.

Course progress tracking exemplifies the platforms’ analytical depth. Both systems generate detailed statistics on average course completion rates, with sophisticated filtering capabilities. Creators can dissect completion data through various lenses—whether by enrollment date, specific group classifications, or product bundle configurations.

The granularity extends further, allowing educators to examine completion rates at the individual lesson level and track the precise progression of each student’s learning journey.

Thinkific’s report on student performance
User progress report in LearnWorlds

While the reporting approaches of Thinkific and LearnWorlds differ in subtle ways, they converge on delivering comprehensive and insightful analytics. The platforms offer nuanced reporting tools that provide creators with meaningful, actionable insights into their online course performance.

People Management

Thinkific and LearnWorlds demonstrate remarkable similarities in student profile management, offering robust tools for comprehensive user administration. Both platforms provide intuitive interfaces for tracking and managing student interactions across your educational ecosystem.

Creators gain complete visibility into each student’s journey, with the ability to instantly access detailed information including course purchases, learning progression, quiz performance, and overall platform activities. The platforms empower educators with flexible user management capabilities, allowing for precise individual and bulk profile modifications.

The systems enable granular user management, from manually adjusting individual student profiles to performing targeted bulk actions. Administrators can effortlessly enroll multiple students in courses, send targeted communications, and maintain precise control over user interactions and course access.

Thinkific’s user section

Both platforms introduce powerful user group functionality, offering creators sophisticated tools for organizing and managing student collections. These group features enable flexible categorization across various contexts—from corporate training programs to educational cohorts and organizational learning initiatives.

Administrators can strategically create dedicated user groups, providing specialized management capabilities. Group managers receive elevated permissions to monitor member progression, facilitate course enrollments, and track collective and individual activities. This functionality proves particularly valuable for businesses and educational institutions delivering targeted training programs or managing complex learning ecosystems.

Thinkific’s Groups feature

LearnWorlds distinguishes itself with an innovative User Automations feature that sets it apart from Thinkific’s offering. This sophisticated tool empowers course creators to design intelligent, responsive user management strategies through customizable trigger-and-action rules.

The automation capabilities provide unprecedented flexibility in engagement and administrative management. Creators can implement intelligent workflows that respond dynamically to student behaviors. For instance, the system enables automatic course progress resets upon student request or proactive re-engagement through targeted reminder emails to users showing signs of decreased platform activity.

These intelligent automation rules transform platform management, allowing for personalized, responsive interactions that can significantly enhance student experience and administrative efficiency.

How to set up automation in LearnWorlds

Both platforms demonstrate robust user management capabilities, with LearnWorlds gaining a marginal advantage through its advanced automation features.

User Roles

Thinkific and LearnWorlds provide comprehensive user role assignment, enabling creators to designate specific permissions for site administrators, course managers, revenue partners, community moderators, and group supervisors.

LearnWorlds elevates user role management with its custom role functionality, offering unprecedented flexibility in permission configuration. This advanced feature allows for intricate access control, proving particularly valuable for complex organizational structures with diverse departmental needs.

The platform goes a step further by introducing pre-configured custom roles—such as developer and mobile management positions—to streamline role assignment for various organizational contexts.

Third-Party Integrations

When it comes to third-party integrations, Thinkific emerges as a clear frontrunner, boasting an extensive app store featuring over 90 diverse third-party applications.

The platform’s integration ecosystem transcends standard email marketing and payment gateway connections. These apps are designed to enhance student experiences, introduce innovative learning features, and streamline operational management. Notably, some applications are exclusively developed for the Thinkific platform.

Standout examples include Omnisearch, an intelligent tool enabling students to conduct comprehensive searches across videos, PDFs, and various lesson content. Another notable application, Flix, transforms the student dashboard into an immersive, Netflix-inspired streaming interface.

Thinkific’s App Store

LearnWorlds presents a more limited integration landscape, focusing primarily on email marketing and analytics solution connections.

Both platforms provide Zapier integration capabilities, expanding their connectivity potential. Additionally, they offer API access, empowering developers to construct custom integrations tailored to specific organizational needs.

Single Sign-On (SSO) support on both platforms ensures a frictionless login experience, enabling seamless connections with existing authentication systems.

Customer Support

In the realm of customer support, Thinkific distinguishes itself with a comprehensive assistance model. The platform provides live chat support across all paid subscription tiers, with availability during weekdays from 6 AM to 5 PM Pacific Time. For inquiries outside these hours, users can leverage email support channels.

Notably, Thinkific’s Grow plan includes priority phone support, offering an additional layer of personalized assistance for course creators seeking immediate resolution to their queries.

Thinkific’s Customer Support Channels

In contrast, LearnWorlds adopts a more limited support approach. The platform provides email support exclusively across all subscription tiers. Live chat functionality is absent, with phone support reserved only for the Corporate plan—which comes with custom pricing and requires direct consultation.

LearnWorlds customer support widget
Beyond basic support mechanisms, both platforms excel in providing comprehensive self-service resources and intuitive help systems. Their integrated knowledge bases are seamlessly woven into help widgets, enabling users to rapidly locate and access pertinent information with minimal friction.

While Thinkific enhances its support ecosystem with an active Facebook community for customers, LearnWorlds currently lacks a dedicated user engagement network.

Pricing Plans

Thinkific and LearnWorlds implement comparable subscription-based pricing strategies. Each platform presents multiple tiered plans featuring distinct capabilities and access levels.

Their most compelling mid-tier plans are identically priced at $99/month, both eliminating transaction fees and delivering extensive platform functionality.

Thinkific’s pricing plans
LearnWorlds’ pricing plans

After a comprehensive evaluation of Thinkific and LearnWorlds across multiple critical dimensions, we’ve reached a definitive conclusion about their respective capabilities and value propositions.

Thinkific emerges as the more compelling platform in this head-to-head assessment. The key differentiators center on its exceptional user experience, designed to streamline the journey for both course creators and learners. Its course development infrastructure stands out with a remarkably adaptable course builder and complimentary mobile applications that extend learning accessibility.

The platform’s distinctive app marketplace represents a game-changing feature, providing course creators with expansive opportunities to customize and elevate their educational offerings. Perhaps most significantly, Thinkific distinguishes itself through its generous free plan and unique ability to accommodate unlimited student enrollments across all pricing tiers, positioning it as a more economically attractive solution for educators and entrepreneurs.

In contrast, LearnWorlds distinguishes itself through a suite of specialized capabilities that cater to more advanced course creators. The platform’s distinctive offerings include sophisticated interactive video technologies and robust copyright protection mechanisms that set it apart in the competitive online learning marketplace.

LearnWorlds provides an enhanced toolkit for educators,

We hope this comparison of LearnWorlds and Thinkific helps you choose the right platform for your business and courses. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

What are community rules?

Community guidelines are rules that all members agree to when they join a group. These guidelines usually list what to do and what to avoid, and they help promote participation and teamwork among members.

Any behavior against the group’s values is not allowed in an online community. This includes spam, harassment, and harmful behavior.

The best way to inspire positive behavior in your community is to lead by example. You can also find key members of your group and ask them to set a good example.

Check your group to see if the content aligns with your community guidelines. If discussions are going off-topic, address it. Also, review your engagement rate—if it’s decreasing, people may be losing interest in your group. It's your job to find out why and fix it.

About The Author

Daniel Nic

Hey there! I'm Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I'm here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.

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