You’re probably comparing Thinkific vs Udemy because you plan to create and sell a course online. Thinkific and Udemy are two great platforms for selling online courses but they both are different on their own. Let’s see how and figure out which one suits you best.
Thinkific is an online course management platform where the course creator has complete control over many aspects like course pricing, personal branding, management of courses, direct interaction with students and many other key features. Udemy is basically an online course marketplace where the course creator has very limited control on key aspects like pricing, direct student interaction, branding etc. We will explain every important aspects below.
Why Thinkific?
If you’re serious about your online course creation business, and you plan to benefit from the business in the long run, you should definitely consider Thinkific over Udemy. We have solid reasons to recommend Thinkific as the best option. Thinkific is basically an online course management platform that helps the course creator to create, organize, upload, and host the course in an efficient manner. Pricing, branding, and marketing are totally in the control of the course creator.
As a course creator, you can set your own price (change it anytime), set your own branding, logo and you can market the course at your own will. You will get the full details of students who enroll for your program. If you want, you can run your own discount offers, campaigns, Facebook ads, Google ads all under your control. You can also create affiliate programs for your course offering a fixed percentage of the sale for other websites/Youtube channels who refer your course.
If you’re confident of building an audience through your website/blog, Youtube channel, and social media, and you can convert a percentage of the audience to buy your course, I believe Thinkific will be the best option. The reason is simple, in the long run, you will make 10x more money via Thinkific compared to Udemy.
Key Benefits of Thinkific
#1 Full control over course content – As I wrote before, you’ve full control over the course content. You can decide almost every aspect about your course.
#2 Pricing rights – You create the course and you decide the price. You can alter the pricing at any time. You can also create customised promotions offering discounts set by yourself.
#3 Full ownership rights – You have full ownership rights. You can delete the course anytime or if you want to switch the platform, you are free to do so anytime.
#4 Course features – Thinkific provides interactive course management features like videos, images, text, quizzes, forms, surveys, discussions, downloads and lot more.
#5 Your own branding & design – You can choose from different themes to create your own branding. You can customize logos, HTML/CSS and many other design elements.
#6 Full control over student’s data – You’ve full control over student’s data. You can collect their emails, send them marketing email communications, and also upsell them with new courses. This feature is very useful when you switch platforms, say you decided to move to Teachable, or to your own self hosted LMS. In such a scenario, you can take your students along with you to the new platform.
#7 Custom domain name – You can map your Thinkific profile to a custom domain name and manage everything under your domain name.
#8 Other Features – Thinkific offers lots of other useful features as describe below.
- Payment – can be collected in 100 different currencies
- Flexible Payment Plans – can collect as one-time fees, recurring fees or as multiple fees
- Cloud hosting – host your courses in a secure cloud environment
Affiliate marketing – you can market your course by creating specific affiliate programs
Why Udemy ?
As I said before, Udemy is more of a course marketplace rather than a course management platform. The best part of Udemy is its high popularity and existing customer base. If you don’t have an existing audience through your own website or Youtube channel, Udemy’s existing userbase will be a blessing for you. You can create your course and start selling to the existing Udemy customer base. If we think in that sense, Udemy is a great platform for beginners who want to make money selling online courses right away.
What I recommend from my research is that, if you’re a beginner who likes to see some immediate results, start with Udemy. But in the long run, you can make 10x benefits if you focus on creating your own branded course with the help of platforms like Thinkific, or Teachable. As I said, you need to build an audience first using your own website/blog. So get started with a WordPress based blog first (along with your Udemy course), start publishing content, build an audience, collect email lists, build social media audience and all those stuff. Once you reach 1000 visits per month or more, start with platforms like Thinkific.
