Thinkific is an online platform that allows those who own businesses to craft online courses and sell them via their websites. Thinkific does not offer a mobile app at the moment, however, they have hundreds of apps and a mobile site that admins and students can navigate easily.
Back in 2020, they noted that 100,000,000 courses were taken on the platform, and since then it has grown even more. The app store has cemented Thinkific as one of the top ways to market, create, and sell courses online.
It is up there with Teachable and other platforms that allow businesses to create courses and sell them, but the app store does give them an edge in the online course world.
While we would love to talk about how the Thinkific site is so successful with its online course roster, we are actually a lot more interested in its newer app store solution. We are also curious as to why this new app store has not yet developed this app idea further and become a mobile app.
We took the time to investigate Thinkific Apps and take a look at some of the top-rated apps they have in their app store. If you are considering Thinkific Apps as part of your business plan for online learning courses, stop here, and have a read.
We did all the research and testing so that when you need an app to give your business a boost, you know you choose the right thing!
Let’s get right into it!
What Is Thinkific?
Before we jump into Thinkific Apps, let’s hold on a moment and take a look at the Thinkific brand as a whole.
If you are new to Thinkific, the name is actually short for Thinkific Labs Inc, which is an online-learning site allowing individuals and businesses to share skills, knowledge, and expertise. A bit like some others such as Udemy and Coursera.
They have over 50,000 creators of courses, and they have made over $650,000,000 for their instructors so far. They also have a user base that includes some brand name companies, even as big as Samsung, as well as entrepreneurs too!
They give you all the tools you could need to create a course perfectly customized, as well as tools to build up membership sites, and to be able to adequately market them to your target audience as well.
You can build a course with many different types of content, and use images, videos, text, audio, and files that can be downloaded.
Thinkific also ensures you can create a sales page for your students, and even includes payment portals and access to courses. They are also fitted with course designing tools that help you to create quizzes, lay out the curriculum of your courses, and offer your students course completion certificates.
Thinkific Plans
When you are looking at selling your courses via Thinkific, they have four plans you can choose from with which to do so.
| Plan | Fee | What’s Included |
| Free | $0 | Ideal for one course, and first-time tutors who want to dip their toes in the water with selling courses. |
| Basic | $39 pcm | Includes perks including live chat support, unlimited students, unlimited courses, customized domain, etc. |
| Pro | $79 pcm | Ideal for individuals wanting to launch a business based on courses. Enjoy benefits such as completion certificates, priority support, live lesson streaming, etc. |
| Premier | $399 pcm | Ideal for those who want to enhance their online course business. Has many more advanced tools for advanced online learning and more resources. |
If you are not sure whether or not Thinkific courses are for you, you can make use of their one-month free trial option. (Check out ‘How Many Courses Can You Create For Free On Thinkific [Process Explained]‘)
Thinkific Apps: What Are They?
Okay, so, now we understand what Thinkific is, let’s move on to Thinkific apps.
What are Thinkific Apps? Well, these are essentially 3rd party software that you can add to your course site to help you better accomplish certain tasks. It is a bit like having the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, but this is more specific to course sites.
You just search for what you need, download it, and install the app.
Thinkific has integrated software in the past, however, an app store is just better, and it saves the users of the site from having to look around, and load the sites of 3rd party software.
If you do not have adequate skills or knowledge, it could be harder to download software and be sure that it is compatible with both your user’s devices and your site, so an app store is just a better idea, and Thinkific thought of it first.
Now you have a more simple and more direct way to build mailing lists, issue certificates of completion, and create lesson plans. You can also select appropriate apps and add them to your site in mere minutes
Thinkific App Store
Thinkific’s app store contains so many apps, all made for varying needs for course creators to utilize. Some of these are already well-known and popular, such as Shopify, which will help you create an online shop for your course.
There are also apps such as Google Analytics, which can help you gain important information regarding the activity of your students.
Each of these apps are carefully and precisely designed and arranged to assist in the overall layout of Thinkific’s app store, which is minimalist and clean.
The design is also made to help you find the ideal apps for what you need. It all depends on what you, the user, are trying to gain. When you navigate the store, you will also notice there are different categories, which makes things extra easy.
These categories include:
- Business Operations.
- Connections and Social.
- Email and Marketing.
- Engagement and Assessment.
- Learning Experience.
- Selling and Conversion.
- Site Design.
The only issue is there are so many apps, it is still fairly difficult for you to find what you need, even with these categories in place. So, the app store further breaks down apps into even more segments, to try and make it even easier for you to find the ideal app.
It breaks down into these categories:
- Getting Started.
- Thinkific Expert picks.
- Most Popular.
- Rising Stars.
One other thing that the Thinkific App Store has going for it is that you do get options offered to you if you cannot find an app that you desire.
You also have the option to use Zapier to connect with other apps through Thinkific. But, what we find even more useful is that you can actually suggest app ideas to Thinkific, and they will then attempt to add something suitable.
Aside from this, they also bring in developers to build apps for their app store. So, they are always innovating new ways for course creation to be enhanced.
Some Thinkific Apps
We are not going to list every app that is on the Thinkific app store, but we will tell you about some of the best ones they have on there right now, and how they can help you.
Having the ideal app can actually help you get solutions for making your courses better and gain more sales as a result. However, most of your success in this regard will depend on the app you choose to aid you.
So, here is a heads-up on the hottest, best apps at the moment that can give your business a boost.
PeerBoard
Peerboard is an application that focuses on keeping your students interested in your courses via an online community that keeps them connected to the journey.
It is essentially a plug-and-play community that has modern and interactive abilities, it is ideal for forging engagement and connections.
It is an ideal move as studies show that usually only 20% of students fully complete online courses, often due to isolation and loneliness. Bringing in a social aspect can make your courses and educational tools more interesting.
There is even a newsfeed similar to Facebook integrated into this, forums, member areas, profiles, and more. It is free or comes at a $29 per month fee, depending on what you want from it.
DropInBlog
This app is brilliant, it allows you to insert a blog into your site, you just add it to your platform and can start creating content relevant to what your students need. It has plenty of features that can make your course page look even more awesome! (For more information about making a blog, click ‘here‘!)
Your blog also automatically takes on the aesthetic of your site, and you can customize it further still, even being able to schedule posts and allow comments.
You can insert YouTube content, and use SEO analytics to make sure that your posts are optimized for search engines and that you can enhance your overall business even more.
You can get a 14-day free trial and pay $19 per month minimum for this app!
Adaptive SimpleSim
This app helps your student’s likelihood of completing your courses successfully. It lets you set up test or exam simulations so that your students have an idea of what they need to complete your course successfully.
It has features such as easy exam set-up simulations, real exam situations, Q&A explanations, and so on. It does not store data, however, so it can function well as a tool to gain an idea of your student’s performance.
You can pay for this for as little as $29 per month.
Active Campaign
This app is for marketing purposes.
It backs up email marketing to help you enhance your chances of enrollment. While Thinkific does assist in some emailing functions such as broadcasts and welcome messages, it does not exactly function super well as a sales tool, or have CRM capabilities like this
Active Campaign gives you mailing lists and helps you set up email automation based on the actions of your students. You can also set up varying personalized campaigns based on the activity of users, and gain endless other integrations too!
Flix
When you use Flix you essentially turn your student’s dashboard into an entertaining streaming space. You can transform otherwise boring and tedious learning into binge-worthy experiences for your students, making it more fun to learn.
Flix helps you to create tracks based on the categories of your course, and it also functions as a ‘smart app’ as it makes recommendations per student behavior.
It has color schemes that are similar to other streaming sites such as Amazon, Hulu, and so on. It is super easy to use, and you can customize it, so it fits your brand.
What is better… You only pay for it once at $199!
Stunning
This is a brilliant app for those who use Stripe as their payment gateway. It helps you to recover past due or failed payments, preventing any revenue loss, acting almost as an accountant for your business, and keeping tabs on payments for you.
Students could easily miss a subscription payment due to an expired card, so it sends them reminders and prompts to update cards in this event. It also lets you know if a payment has failed.
It offers a 15-day free trial and then goes up to $50 a month. Worth it to prevent delayed payments if you ask us.
Community Box
The final app we will mention is Community Box, which lets you add member directories to your course site and can create a nice little community for your course. (Check out ‘What Is Thinkific Community?‘)
You could create a directory for all the students you have enrolled at any specific time, or even for those who have passed. It gives your students the ability to customize their profile adding in resumes, images, galleries, and so on.
They can network amongst themselves too and work as a way to enhance career opportunities by doing so.
Your students will certainly thank you for it.
However, at the same time, it allows you to add value to your course and prove it. You can also customize this to your brand too.
You can use this for 25 students or fewer, with plans starting at $9 per month.
What Do Thinkific Apps Allow You To Do?
Since there are so many apps on the Thinkific app store, it can be hard to tell exactly what these apps can allow you to do. You see, these apps are all for different things, some help you market yourself better, create more engaging content, or keep students interested.
There are so many options, so let’s cover what exactly these apps can do for you.
Impactful & Engaging Learning Experiences
Thinkific has provided plenty of ways that can boost the learning experience online. Using zoom, credible certificate abilities, and more, but boosting these experiences even more with their app store is just another way of making things even better for learners.
All the above options that can impact and enhance your student’s learning experience and more are available via the apps on the Thinkific app store. There are apps such as Hello Audio, which can convert content into podcast feeds that learners can listen to.
There is Motrain which lets your students earn coins for completing lessons and Community Box which makes your learning space into a space to grow and learn with others.
Making your content more interesting and engaging is a great way to keep your students learning and keep them interested.
Powerful Marketing
Nothing helps an online business more than the right marketing strategy, and Thinkific apps can offer more ways to enhance your marketing so that you can succeed in your bid to be a course creator in the long term.
There are apps like DropInBlog that lets you blog on your Thinkific website and help you to offer additional learning content and bring others into your learning space.
Poptin works as pop-ups and forms, that are essential for building audiences, and helps you create them and add them to your site in just minutes!
There are so many marketing apps in the store, with many email providers for automated emails and such. It can really boost your marketing efforts and help you branch out in ways you couldn’t before.
Data & Insight
Knowing where you stand in terms of data is important in any business, but managing something like this, especially on your own, is hard, so having an app to help you is critical to ensure you make good decisions on your products.
Correct data can also help you better understand your learners, what they like, what they don’t like, and what they are not using on your site.
There are apps like Mixpanel, which analyzes the actions of your students and interested parties on your site, as well as informs you of your page views
Google Analytics is also available from the Thinkific store. It helps you to better understand your learners and helps you to make decisions around your online courses and business ideas through data-driven knowledge.
Making decisions based on data is something that can 100% make your business a success, no one platform will give you all you need, but having many options gives you the ability to choose the app best suited to what you need.
Okay, But, Are These Apps Free?
We have already briefly covered some of the costs of Thinkific apps, but are any free?
Well yes and no. Integration is free, the integrated apps with Thinkific are free, and they are part of your license with Thinkific, however, third-party apps are not free, and you will have to pay the typically associated fees to use the pieces of software.
Some will have no fees, you can always use Google Analytics for free for example, and you can use the Zoom integration too. However, you will have to pay, just having a Thinkific license won’t give you free access to the huge amount of software programs on their app store.
Why Is There Not A Mobile App For Thinkific?
Some people have been asking why Thinkific does not have a mobile app, the reason for this is that it just is not necessary.
The site in general gives you features that other course creation platforms just do not, even when they have a mobile app. Their platform is 100% mobile responsible though so there really is no need.
Can You Use Thinkific On Your Mobile?
While they do not have an app for their platform, the online platform does work very well on mobile phones, tablets, and other mobile devices.
It has a responsive design, so you can see everything clearly, and its dashboard for admins is very responsive, even when managing your dashboard through your phone.
Navigating The Thinkific App Store
Navigating the app store is really easy, as they have so many sections you can simply search via the category you are looking for. If you wanted to enhance your marketing for example you could simply look in their category ‘email and marketing’.
In some ways, it is about as easy to navigate as the Google App Store.
How To Install From The Thinkific App Store
If you want to install an app from the Thinkific App Store. Every step is the same for installation.
Thinkific first asks you to confirm that you are giving the app permission to access your site.
Once you confirm, installation begins, each app will have its own specific steps, depending on what it is, some are simple, and some have many steps to complete.
After the installation is done, the app appears in the section titled ‘Apps’ in your dashboard, from here with just a few clicks you can alter the settings and support for the specific app you installed.
Overall
The Thinkific app store was a genius idea to enhance course creators’ ability to have even more success with their online course businesses.
While most of the apps do come with extra costs, they can be extremely beneficial to businesses that own a Thinkific account, and help them with marketing, data collection, and student engagement.
Who could say no to that?!
