Your Course Platform is Costing You $4,200/Year in Hidden Fees
If you're a course creator choosing between Thinkific and Teachable, you're about to discover why one platform will drain 10% of every sale while the other caps fees at $99/month.
A head-to-head breakdown of Thinkific and Teachable covering pricing, features, fees, and migration. No fluff -- just the data you need to pick the right platform.
Your first course ships tomorrow, or it stalls for another month while you wrestle with a clunky editor. Thinkific and Teachable both promise drag-and-drop simplicity, but your builder experience will vary wildly -- one lets you chain conditional lessons and nest multimedia without custom code, the other fights you on basic content types. Transaction fees are the silent killer: Teachable's Free plan takes 5% of every sale, so $100K in annual revenue costs you $5,000 that vanishes before it hits your bank account. Thinkific drops fees entirely across all paid tiers. Community features exist on both platforms, but they're afterthoughts -- most creators bolt on Circle or Mighty Networks anyway, adding $50–$200/month to your stack. Your choice here dictates your margin, your launch speed, and whether your students get a native mobile app or just a responsive web view that breaks on older Android devices.
What is holding your current website back?
Common gaps we find in nearly every audit.
What Your Website Could Look Like
Custom-designed for your industry. No templates. No stock photos.
How We Build This Right
Every safeguard, built in from Day 1.
Course Builder UX
Thinkific uses a drag-and-drop curriculum builder with inline content previews. Teachable's editor looks cleaner, but it's less flexible when you need complex course structures with conditional paths.
Pricing & Transaction Fees
Thinkific charges $0 transaction fees on all paid plans (Basic $49/mo, Start $99/mo, Grow $199/mo). Teachable charges 5% on the Free plan, then drops to $0 on Basic ($59/mo), Pro ($159/mo), and Pro+ ($249/mo). Check current pricing at thinkific.com/pricing and teachable.com/pricing before you commit -- these numbers move.
Community & Engagement
Thinkific Communities is a native feature with discussion spaces, events, and member directories. Teachable leans on course-level comments and only recently added community spaces -- and only on Pro+ plans.
Email & Affiliate Marketing
Teachable includes a basic email tool and a built-in affiliate program on Pro+. Thinkific handles email through integrations and offers built-in affiliate tracking starting on the Grow plan.
Analytics & Reporting
Both platforms give you enrollment, revenue, and completion dashboards. Thinkific goes deeper on quiz and assessment analytics. Teachable's reporting gets meaningfully better once you're on Pro+.
Integrations & Mobile
Thinkific supports Zapier, Mailchimp, and API access. Teachable has a native iOS app (Teachable Online) for students. Both handle custom domains, SSO, and webhook-based automations.
What We Build
Purpose-built features for your industry.
Build courses with conditional paths and mixed content types without fighting your editor
Your course builder either accelerates production or adds two weeks of friction per module -- choose the one that ships faster
Drop transaction fees entirely and keep every dollar of your revenue
A 5% transaction fee on $100K revenue costs you $5,000 annually -- money that could fund your next cohort or hire a teaching assistant
Ship community spaces on starter-tier plans instead of waiting for enterprise pricing
Built-in community tools save you $600–$2,400/year compared to bolting on Circle, if the platform actually includes them below Pro pricing
Create full landing pages with custom code blocks, not just checkout templates
Custom landing pages with real conversion tracking let you A/B test headlines and CTAs -- weak sales pages kill paid traffic ROI in days
Export student data and course content cleanly when you outgrow the platform
Your students expect a native mobile app in 2026 -- responsive web views feel dated and break retention for Android users
Test mobile experiences on real devices before your launch, not after refund complaints arrive
Clear data export paths mean your next migration takes hours, not months of manual CSV wrangling and lost student progress
Built on a Modern, Secure Stack
Our Development Process
From discovery to launch. Quality at every step.
Requirements Audit
Week 1We map your course catalog, student base, revenue model, and integration needs. That tells us whether a hosted platform -- or a custom build -- is actually the right call.
Platform Selection & Setup
Week 2We configure your chosen platform: theme, domain, payment gateway, tax settings, and third-party integrations.
Content Migration
Week 3We migrate your courses, student data, enrollment history, and media assets. No student progress gets left behind.
Sales Funnel Build
Week 4We design and build high-converting landing pages, checkout flows, upsell sequences, and email automations.
Launch & Optimization
Week 5You go live with monitoring in place, analytics dashboards configured, and a 30-day post-launch support window to tune conversion rates and catch edge cases.
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Explore related industries
200+ employee company? Complex multi-tenant, auction, or multi-location requirement? We have a dedicated enterprise capability track.
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