The online course industry has grown significantly in the past few years.
The global market is currently estimated to be worth about $200 billion, which makes now a great time to get into the industry.
But, course creators need a wide range of tools to create, promote, and sell online courses, and if you are considering creating courses of your own, you must pick the right tools to help you build a successful online course business.
Fortunately, all-in-one course creation platforms provide you with all the tools you need in one convenient place.
Kartra and Thinkific are among the top options to choose from. Each platform has its unique set of tools to help you manage all business activities to build a successful knowledge business.
Below, we look at a side-by-side comparison of these two powerful platforms.
My team and I have spent over 11 hours reviewing and comparing them so you can get a better idea of how they stack up against each other and which one is best for edupreneurs.
1. Course Creation
Both platforms offer excellent course creation capabilities. Here’s a quick look at the Kartra vs. Thinkific comparison regarding course creation.
Thinkific:
Thinkific is one of the most popular tools for creating online courses. It’s easy to use and offers many features to market and sell online courses after building them.
As online entrepreneurs, check out the video below for a quick look at how to use the platform to create your first course for your online business:
Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to create a course on Thinkific, here’s a look at some of the features where the platform excels:
Slideshows and Presentations: Easily create voiceover slide presentations and record audio for each uploaded slide deck from directly within the platform.
Duplicate Lessons: You can copy lessons for easy course build-out, saving you .0time and effort when creating multiple related courses.0
56Surveys: Thinkific offers a range of surveys designed to help you track goals, get feedback, create long-form exams, etc.
The platform requires zero technical knowledge, and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor lets you put together stunning courses by simply clicking and dragging the elements you want onto a page.
You can host videos on the platform for free and use any type of multimedia content you choose.
You can either use one of the many predesigned online course templates or create your course from scratch.
Integrate other marketing tools, including email marketing, digital marketing, and automation software, so that you can manage your entire course online business from one convenient place.
Kartra:
Kartra is just as intuitive and easy to use as its counterpart. The video below shows you how to create a new course on the platform:
Here’s a summary of Kartra’s main course creation features:
- All-in-one solution features like web hosting, email marketing, business management, learning management system, help desk support, etc.
- Free video hosting for your live or recorded video content
- Stunning, optimized, and customizable course templates
- Advanced marketing features, including upsells and behavioral adaptive marketing (BAM), dynamic OTOs for order bumps, etc.
- The built-in calendar feature, as well as integration for Google Calendar
Winner: Thinkific
As you’ve seen from the two videos above, both platforms have much to offer to build beautiful courses.
However, one of the main differences between the course-building tools is membership sites.
This feature is particularly important for course creators, and Kartra offers a powerful approach to this with separate calendars, membership sites, and portal builders.
However, Thinkific gives you access to powerful design and customization features that allow you to build a truly unique course with a membership site.
With the platform’s membership site, you can provide coaching services and even create a classroom training experience for your students and track your line’s activity at all times, from when they purchase your course until they complete it.
2. Pricing
On Kartra, you can get a free plan and a 14-day trial to test out the software. Thinkific, on the other hand, offers a free plan version with limited features in terms of course creation, the number of learners, hosting services, etc., and an affordable price for the Basic plan.
Thinkific:
Thinkific has four pricing plans for their monthly subscriptions:
- Free ($0/month): Great to test out the platform and understand how everything works. Accessibility to 1 course, 1 community, 1 administrator, 1000 students, 0% transaction fee, fully integrated e-commerce, quizzes/surveys, and email/chat support.
- Start ($99/month): Great for those with a growing online school. This plan includes all Free plan features with accessibility to 10 courses, 1 community, 1 administrator, 2,500 students.
- Grow ($199/month): Great for those with a medium-sized online school. This plan includes all Start plan features with accessibility to 25 courses, 3 communities, 2 administrators, 5,000 students, and phone/email support.
- Expand ($399/month): Great for those with a large-sized online school. This plan includes all Grow plan features with accessibility to 75 courses, 10 communities, 5 administrators, 10,000 students, and priority phone support.
*Note: Thinkific offers a discount of 20% on annual subscriptions, and there are no transaction fees.
Kartra:
Kartra’s Pricing Plans are as follows:
Starter Plan ($99/month): With this Starter plan, Kartra offers you a custom domain and allows you to host 50 videos and 100 web landing pages.
You can sell digital products up to 20 items aside from selling courses for your online business, build two membership sites, and send up to 15,000 emails per month.
Silver Plan ($199/month): In this plan, Kartra offers features similar to the Starter plan, with the only difference being quantity.
For instance, on the Silver plan, you get three custom domains, an unlimited course, unlimited landing pages, sales funnels, videos, and products.
You’re also eligible to sign up for Kartra Agency so you can manage your clients’ full accounts.
Gold Plan ($299/month): In addition to all the Silver plan features, you get 25,000 leads, five custom domains, and unlimited everything, including team members, membership sites, sales pages, sales funnels, products, videos, bandwidth, and all the other features that you need.
Platinum Plan ($499/month): This is the ultimate plan for knowledge businesses with large lists of digital products or services and a membership site.
You get ten custom domains and a limit of up to 50,000 leads. All the features are unlimited aside from domains and lead count.
Kartra offers an impressive 25% discount for annual payments. You can pay $1 to try out Kartra’s features for 14 days.
Winner: Thinkific
When comparing Kartra vs. Thinkific pricing, Thinkific offers a free plan, making it perfect for content creators just getting started and small businesses wanting to create and start selling online courses without committing to a paid subscription.
3. School and Online Course Marketing
Here’s an in-depth look at Thinkific vs. Kartra platform’s school and course marketing features.
Thinkific:
Thinkific offers a wide range of tools to help you market your online course or school, including email integration with various providers so you can create highly personalized email marketing campaigns directly from your dashboard.
The data-tracking feature lets you keep an eye on your email marketing tools for advertisements and other marketing campaigns to optimize your efforts and maximize your returns.
There’s also an affiliate center where you can manage and reward others for selling your courses online and advanced affiliate management with marketing features.
In addition, use an affiliate management center to have granular control over how you incentivize your affiliates, with the ability to set different tiers of commissions for each affiliate.
You can also link your learning website to hundreds of other marketing apps and tools to supercharge your marketing results.
Kartra:
Kartra uses advanced BAM (behavioral adaptive marketing) to help you sell more of your courses by boosting conversions to sell courses.
The platform also offers dynamic OTOs (one-time offers) for upsells, downsells, order bumps, etc.
You can host your eCommerce site and create email campaigns from one place, making it extremely easy to run the business operations you need to market your school and online course effectively.
Winner: Kartra
When it comes to Kartra vs. Thinkific in marketing, we see that both platforms are powerful.
Still, compared to Thinkific, Kartra has more advanced marketing tools, making it the ideal option for users who want to get the most from their online course platform.
4. Instructor Support
When creating an online course, it’s important to have support and guidance whenever you need it.
Otherwise, you might find yourself stuck and unable to move forward with the course creation/marketing/selling online courses process.
Fortunately, both platforms offer robust support for instructors. Between Thinkific vs. Kartra, who is better?
Thinkific:
Thinkific doesn’t offer real-time support, but you can fill out a form on the website to contact the support team on any day of the week, and you will get a timely response that is relevant and personalized to your actual needs.
You can also get support in the following ways:
- Online tutorials
- Onboarding emails
- Support tickets
- Facebook groups
- Knowledge base
Kartra:
Kartra’s support consists of technical documentation, platform training, and an in-depth FAQ section on the support page.
You can contact the customer support team through live chat between 8 am and 12 pm PST Monday to Friday.
Winner: Kartra
With Kartra vs. Thinkific in instructor support, Thinkific offers support on weekends, whereas Kartra does not.
Also, their customer support staff seems more knowledgeable and can resolve issues quickly and effectively, making this platform the clear winner in instructor support.
5. School and Course Customization
If you don’t want your online course or school to look like every other course out there, you need to be able to fully customize the landing pages for course pages, sales pages, email marketing, and websites.
Let’s see how these two platforms stack up against each other in this regard.
Thinkific:
Customizing your course on Thinkific is a breeze.
There are many options to choose from, including multiple themes for showcasing content in the best way possible, private or hidden courses, and integration with membership sites.
You can also provide your students with completion certificates and create a drip schedule for your content, exclusive and hidden courses.
The platform also lets you use multiple course instructors, all in real-time.
There’s also a prerequisite lessons feature that enables students to request lessons or courses in advance aside from membership sites and its video hosting feature.
Kartra:
Whether you are building an online course or school, customization is a crucial part of the process.
It will play a determining role in your success in creating and marketing a successful learning experience.
Kartra lets you create a unique and intuitive online learning environment for your students.
You get single sign-on credentials, multiple membership tiers, and fully customizable welcome emails, among many other features.
Winner: Thinkific
With Kartra vs. Thinkific in customization, we see that although Kartra has a ton of stunning themes to choose from, all of which require zero web design experience.
Thinkific is the clear winner here thanks to its more powerful customization features and wide range of built-in integrations for marketing tools and apps such as a calendar app.
6. Student Experience and Retention Tools
If your students are satisfied with your course, they will likely sign up for more content from you and refer others, helping you reach your marketing and sales goals.
That’s why it’s crucial to provide a superior learning experience that allows them to retain information and achieve their objectives by the end of your course.
Let’s look at what Thinkific vs. Kartra offer regarding student experience and retention features category of Student Experience and Retention.
Thinkific:
You can create engagement features like assessments, comprehensive quizzes, engagement surveys, and more.
After the exams, Thinkific lets you award your students with course completion certificates to help them celebrate their achievements.
Students can choose how they want to learn, for example, live lessons, on-demand, or blended classes.
You can also create automated check-ins to ensure your students get what they need from your course.
Furthermore, you can create memberships and communities so your students can engage with you and each other while providing you with recurring revenue from your memberships.
Here’s a quick summary of Thinkific’s student experience features:
- Custom student dashboard
- Course welcome emails
- Custom course-completion page
- Ability to upsell to another course
- White-labeled URLs
- Easy translation to over 30 languages
Kartra:
Kartra will allow you to create an unforgettable learning experience using features such as membership portals, surveys, unlimited student quizzes, embedded video hosting, custom domain, calendar membership sites, forms, and various integrations and APIs.
This means you can create your learning environment precisely the way you want, to ensure that your students have the best experience possible.
Winner: Thinkific
With Kartra vs. Thinkific in student experience; Thinkific provides an unparalleled learning experience that allows you to bring your unique dream to life thanks to flexible content.
Including unlimited video hosting, unlimited courses, landing pages, sales pages, checkout pages, live lessons, assessments, communities, and much much more.
You also have robust progress tracking with in-depth reports to see how your students are progressing throughout your course – all in one platform for your online businesses.
7. Data Analytics
Course creators need to be able to analyze data to know how their own online courses are performing so they can make better-informed business decisions to boost conversions and sales.
Here’s what the course platforms offer in data analytics, not just for your online courses but also for a membership site, advanced affiliate management, and your entire online business.
Thinkific:
Measuring certain metrics will help you stay ahead of the competition as an online course creator.
Fortunately, Thinkific has a robust data analytics feature that lets you determine how well your course is performing so you can make the necessary improvements.
You can see all the information you need directly within your dashboard, allowing you to leverage your data for improved results.
At a glance, you’ll be able to see (and make sense of) all your user data from both your visitors and your online course marketing campaigns.
There are features like in-depth segmentation and data exports, affiliate management, and the ability to integrate your account with other data analysis and remarketing tools, including Google Ads and Facebook.
Kartra:
Kartra makes running your online business easy by providing powerful data analytics tools to help you identify the best way to market your products and services for optimum conversions.
You can use lead segmentation and analytics to discover the best ways to fulfill your individual customers’ needs.
You also get lifetime revenue analytics to measure where your online course business revenue comes from – not just the first purchases but every purchase in your customer’s lifetime.
Winner: Kartra
In the data analytics of Kartra vs. Thinkific, it’s clear that Thinkific offers an impressive range of data analytics features.
Still, Kartra takes the cup thanks to its ability to filter data to see information in different contexts.
This way, you can identify gaps in your learners’ understanding, identify trends for great performing content, and get a better experience of your student’s progress.
8. Advanced Tools and Developer Features
If you are a power user, you need full control when creating your online school or course with the platform’s powerful features.
You want a platform that allows you access to HTML/CSS editing to leverage the full power of the course creation software. So who will come out on top between Kartra vs. Thinkific
Thinkific:
Thinkific gives you access to SSO (single sign-on), a powerful theme importer, and an API specifically designed for web developers.
You also get advanced customization thanks to the theme import/export feature that you can use to edit, import, or export complete themes across different websites and each membership site, including all content assets like images, video hosting, forms, etc.
Thinkific also lets you use HTML/Liquid/CSS for advanced customization, and you get full access to all website theme code to add your own layouts, sections, snippets, styles, and custom assets.
Kartra:
Like Thinkific, Kartra provides the tools you need to build and launch your online business without hiring teams of web developers, designers, learning management system integrators, etc.
You can code your own custom integration on the platform using the API, IPN, and custom app tools, which is why developers love this platform.
Winner: Kartra
In Thinkific vs. Kartra, it’s clear that Kartra is the winner here. It’s the perfect choice for developers who want as much control over their website creation.
So, if you want advanced site administration and powerful developer features (including a membership site), this is the perfect platform.
9. Security for your School and Online Business
The security of your course is yet another important factor to consider when choosing the best online course platform.
With cybersecurity threats on the rise, it’s important for both instructors and students to use a platform that has built-in security, SSL, and other features to ensure your peace of mind.
Thinkific:
Thinkific has secure cloud hosting and maintains 24/7 security for your data.
The course platform gives you total control and absolute ownership of your information.
The security team on the platform monitors everything that happens 24/7 to ensure that any breaches in security are taken care of in a timely way.
Moreover, Thinkific has built-in SSL certificates, so you know your content is stored securely on their servers.
There are periodical security updates, and these are rolled out automatically, ensuring that you never miss an important update.
Regular automatic backups also mean you will never lose your data.
Kartra:
Kartra takes its security seriously, especially with regard to collecting payments online.
There are robust measures to ensure that your data and your financial transactions are kept secure at all times.
Like Thinkific, you get full control and ownership of your data. The platform is monitored around the clock and comes with SSL certificates and instant access to security upgrades.
Winner: Thinkific
In Thinkific vs. Kartra, it’s clear that both Thinkific and Kartra platforms excel in data and payment security options.
However, if I have to pick a winner, it would be Thinkific because it maintains the maximum uptime while providing more security measures for protecting your data and online payment transactions (with almost no transaction fees).
Final Thoughts for Kartra vs. Thinkific to Sell Online Courses
So what’s the overall verdict of this Thinkific vs. Kartra comparison?
Both platforms are excellent in their own right. But, one is better than the other for certain kinds of users because of certain features on offer.
Thinkific seems the clear winner overall because it’s an intuitive and easy-to-use platform with powerful online course creation, customization, marketing, sales, and analytics features.
However, if you want an equally intuitive platform that excels in data analytics and has advanced tools and developer features, Kartra might be better.
If you still aren’t sure which platform is right for you, you may want to consider reading about other Kartra alternatives or Thinkific alternatives.