Thinkific vs Udemy: Which Is Best In 2025 (In-Depth Analysis)

Thinkific and Udemy are some of the most popular online course platforms for first-time online course creators.

These are online platforms that are used by instructors for hosting online courses and selling courses. However, Udemy and Thinkific’s comparison is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.

They are different teaching platforms with unique features and pricing models. In this article, we will discuss and compare Thinkific vs Udemy.

The analysis will help you understand the differences and identify which platform offers what you are searching for.

Thinkific

Thinkific is an online course creation platform to teach online recommended by top marketing experts.

It provides packages for everyone from free to premium. The platform has an easy and intuitive tool for designing your online courses based on a simple drag-and-drop editor.

You can stack all the content you want to include & rearrange it however you choose.

Pros

• You can create your brand with Thinkific, and it perfectly suits long-term business development in the online learning niche.
• This platform supports most media types without limiting course inclusion.
• It provides an easy tool to design your online courses to your exact needs, even if you don’t have experience with coding or web design.
• Unlimited students and content
• Active peer support from over 12,000 members Facebook group
• Powerful customization with the click of a button
• There are multiple online course payment options for various types of students and schools.
• It optimizes mobile devices, and you can incorporate language controls in your online courses.
• Another great thing about Thinkific is the inclusion of several promotional and marketing tools. You can create schedules to send out automated emails to target the right audience.
• Email Marketing is one of the effective business tools in digital marketing that Thinkific uses to run a successful campaign.

Cons

• It doesn’t offer live chat for customer support
• The platform can be costly for beginners. It charges a 10% course revenue transaction fee and will raise the prices if you build more courses.
• If you build online courses on a free plan, you’ll find that you have to upgrade before publishing the work.
• It also has limited customization and poor-quality check-out.

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Udemy

Udemy is an online course creator and online course hosting platform that allows people to share their skills with students. Udemy courses are easy to design and sell courses.

It does most marketing for you, though you cannot manage your business with the lack of marketing tools. Compared to Thinkific, Udemy is student-centered rather than instructor Center. Udemy courses can be marketed using built-in marketing tools.

It is one of the largest online educational platforms with over 180,000 online courses and over 44 million students. It is a well-established and proven marketplace with Global outreach. All the courses are accessible to students of every field.

Pros

• Udemy courses are available starting at $11.99 and going up to $199.99.The platform doesn’t charge monthly fees, and you can earn 97% of all sales you drive with your coupon code
• It offers close to 600 courses on a selection of topics
• There is a wide selection of courses on dozens of categories and subcategories
• The platform grants you instant access to every cause you adjust for life
• Udemy would have a 30-day refund policy if the course weren’t what you expected
• This platform focuses more on enabling learners to find tons of courses easily where they can choose whatever topic they like. It fits perfectly avid learners who wish to upskill without paying a lot of money.

Cons

• On Udemy, there is not much easy-to-find guidance for instructors, and there is nothing like a complete list of features for instructors to use. Dig deep and search for more information on the options available for instructors.
• Udemy focuses on helping learners rather than people who want to start an online course business.
• You don’t own your students as the platform has strict guidelines on what you can do with your students.
• The platform is not the best choice for an official certification because it doesn’t offer accredited certificates.
• Since Udemy doesn’t create course content, it can compromise the quality of courses.
• There is less chance of standing out because of the high level of noise in the marketplace.

Courses

Course creation on Thinkific and Udemy is a streamlined experience for course creators. The best thing about these platforms is that they do not require any coding or design experience to create a course.

The drag-and-drop interface allows users to build their courses with ease.

When creating courses on these platforms, you can integrate any content such as videos, images, texts, presentations, and any other type of content. There are also many pre-made course templates that you can use to get started.

You can create unlimited courses on both Thinkific and Udemy.

However, they differ and how you can create and manage courses. Let’s compare how these two platforms differ in course creation.

Thinkific

Thinkific platform allows you to do whatever you want with your course builder because you own it. You can create online courses and membership sites with Thinkific and enjoy the best support in the industry.

The advantage of membership sites is long-term customer retention. Moreover, membership sites also help students to explore and purchase newly updated courses.

It is a platform where instructors can create a market and start selling online courses on their course site. The platform focuses on instructors, giving them all the business tools to build, maintain and grow their online education business.

Another advantage of Thinkific is the creation of high-definition course material. The use of high-definition course material attracts customers.

Udemy

Udemy allows you to create online courses and find anything on your schedule. It is a big course market where everybody has their stand where they sell courses. Udemy practice courses can help students practice the tests before the final assessment.

This platform suits complete beginners who want to manage an online learning niche and are not concerned about building their brand.

However, you won’t have your site with Udemy, but you’ll be part of a huge marketplace with other competitors.

The platform doesn’t allow you to have full ownership of your course though you can have your name on the course and update lessons.

On successful online course completion, you aren’t able to remove the course from the platform and it doesn’t offer accredited certification or other completion certificates after completing a course.

Ease of use

Both are the best platforms and are fairly easy to use and intuitive mostly. Comparing Thinkific vs Udemy, selling online courses on Udemy is more straightforward than Thinkific.

Its design doesn’t change across courses, making it easy for students and content creators.

Thinkific

You need a basic design idea and imagination to use Thinkific to build your site from scratch. Since there is no set pattern, it can take time for students to figure out the set pattern.

Hence it can be a challenge for non-tech-savvy students. However, you can get help from a developer from sites such as Upwork.

Udemy

Comparing Thinkific vs Udemy, the latter is simple and easy because it doesn’t offer customization options. You upload your content to an existing platform.

Students will be familiar with the look and feel especially if they’ve taken other courses on Udemy. This familiarity enhances its ease of use. Thinkific vs Udemy, here Udemy is the winner.

Pricing

These platforms are different, so their pricing varies vastly. The choice depends on what is best for you. Thinkific offers several possibilities for pricing, so you can choose one that fits your bill.

For Udemy, there are no upfront costs as it charges nothing to upload your courses on the platform or for creating online courses.

Thinkific

Thinkific pricing entails four plans: free, basic, pro, and premium.

• The free starter plan provides you with instant access to their pro features. It has 3 courses and is ideal for those who want to explore the world of content creation.
• This free starter plan is a great option if you’re just getting started and are not sure how your online school will scale. It comes with unlimited students, analytics, and multiple types of course content. However, you can only create a few courses with the free starter plan.
• The basic plan starts at $49 per month for the monthly subscription or a $39 per month annual subscription. It provides unlimited courses and is ideal for those starting the cause. It suits those in the early stages of an online course on business development. The basic plan has unlimited courses, an affiliate program, and a custom domain.
• The pro plan starts at $99/month billed monthly or $79/month annually. It is ideal for seasoned course creators looking to expand the online course business. It, therefore, suits established instructors with a large community of students.
• This package comes with certificates of completion i.e. on successful online course completion, you will get the certificate and memberships. You will get You can also remove the Thinkific branding.
• Lastly, the premium plan starts at $499 per month. This package suits those who will build a content empire. It suits well-established businesses going through significant growth. Some of its highlights include priority support and an infusion of integration, though the costs are high.

The unique benefit of Thinkific is that they don’t charge transaction fees when selling online courses. However, this does not include the credit card transaction fee.

Udemy

Udemy works on a commission basis. Signing up for teaching on this platform is like starting a partnership with a company.

They will take 50% of your earnings while creating online courses. For instance, if Udemy brings traffic to purchase your class, they take 50% of the money for a course.

However, they won’t take your money if you bring traffic to sell online courses for them, except for minimum transaction costs.

You don’t need to pay a single penny to host your courses on Udemy, but they will take a commission from your payments when the sale happens. It also applies when a customer buys your course through the Udemy promotion.

Buyers can purchase using your coupon or a course referral link if you decide to promote your course through your marketing efforts. Buyers can purchase as many courses as they need.

Udemy can also promote you through their affiliate program of paid advertising, in which case you only get 25% off the sales. Fortunately, they offer non-stop discounts and big discounts at that. There is also a price cap policy where you can’t charge more than $200 for your course.

Teachers can view the student data and analytics. It includes their current progress, courses enrolled, performance, and other metrics.

Customer support

Talking about the customer support of Thinkific vs Udemy, each of these online course platforms has excellent customer support and community. It is an important aspect of any business if you don’t want to lose customers.

Thinkific vs Udemy in this category, offering phone support that is unavailable with Udemy.

However, phone support is only available to those who have subscribed to high plans, and you will use it a lot less than you think.

Thinkific

Personal email and phone support are available to contact customer support at the Thinkific online course website. You also get webinar support and free online training areas to get started and grow your courses.

The platform provides the tools to connect with many successful course creators to share ideas and ask questions via Facebook. Their support team is friendly and professional, with their emails answered within one day.

The support team monitors everything 24/7 and has a 99.9% uptime. You can rely on the help center section of the online course website, which contains many resources to help solve issues or learn how to do something properly.

The updates are automatic, meaning you always have the most up-to-date features available. However, there is no live chat feature, and you have to contact them via email when using a free plan.

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Udemy

Udemy offers email support and has a help center support page and a contact page to contact the customer support team.

The lack of phone support is a disadvantage for Udemy users. However, it still provides useful material to get yourself familiar with the video course creation process.

Other Comparisons:

➡️ Thinkific and Kajabi
➡️ Thinkific and Teachable
➡️ Thinkific and Podia

Final verdict – Thinkific vs Udemy

The winner is Thinkific because it has a lot of options to offer, including multiple payment options, design options, and complete control over your students. You can build your marketplace on Thinkific, unlike Udemy.

Many content creators start with Udemy to get a hands-on feel of online course creation before moving onto comprehensive platforms like Thinkific. Choose Udemy if you’re starting and want to gauge how well you can deliver content.

It is the best choice if you want a hassle-free online course platform where someone else handles everything. You only need to get your online course and upload it. You can use Udemy to showcase your skills to a wider user base and funnel them to your custom domain.

Thinkific is the best online course platform to replicate a classroom experience online. It’s the most scalable for multiple instructors, admins, and support staff. The platform provides flexibility to design courses the way you want, including their look and feel.

You can create courses and a custom domain to brand your online course business, market your courses independently, and charge students at a competitive price.

This platform integrates with many third-party applications to enhance the learning experience and improve the marketability of your online course. In this comparison of Thinkific vs Udemy, Thinkific I is a winner.