Teachable vs Thinkific: Which Wins for Most Course Creators?
Thinkific wins for most course creators. It doesn’t take a slice of your sales on paid plans, and its course builder gives you room to grow into. Teachable is the better call in one specific situation — I’ll get to it before the end.
Thinkific for most creators.
Teachable if you want the simplest possible checkout and you sell mostly one-off, low-priced courses.
Sample article. It ships with the skeleton to show the house voice and layout — delete it before you go live. Your agent replaces these with real, price-verified pieces.
The thing nobody puts in the headline
The monthly sticker price is not where these two differ. Put the plans side by side and the gap is small enough to be noise.
The transaction fee is the story. That’s the cut the platform takes from every sale you make, on top of what your payment processor takes. It hides one click deep on the pricing page, and it scales with your success — which is exactly what makes it expensive.
Sell a little, and you’ll never notice. Sell well, and it quietly costs more than the plan itself.
How they compare
| Thinkific Winner | Teachable | |
|---|---|---|
| Transaction fee, entry paid plan | None | Charged |
| Course builder | More flexible | Simpler, more limited |
| Checkout setup | A few more steps | Fastest to launch |
| Best for | Most creators | Simple, low-priced courses |
Prices verified: July 2026
Two creators, two answers
Meet a business coach with one flagship course at $400 and about two hundred students a year. She isn’t a heavy user of anything — she wants the lessons to look right and the money to arrive. For her, the fee line decides it. Two hundred sales is enough that a percentage skimmed off the top pays for a year of the plan, twice over. Thinkific, without a second thought.
Now a language teacher selling a $19 mini-course to a small mailing list. Twenty sales in a good month. The fee costs her the price of a coffee, and what she actually wants is to stop fiddling with settings and get back to teaching. Teachable’s checkout is the shortest path from idea to first sale, and that’s worth more to her than a percentage she’ll barely feel.
The pattern is simple. The more you sell, the more the fee matters, and the further ahead Thinkific pulls.
Who should not pick Thinkific
If your course is one video and a worksheet and you want it live tonight, Thinkific will walk you through more setup than you need. Simplicity has a value, and it’s fine to pay for it.
And if you want email marketing and sales funnels built into the same tool, neither of these is your answer. You’re shopping for an all-in-one, which is a different comparison with a different winner.
The switch cost, before you commit
Both platforms let you export your student list. Neither lets you export the momentum. Your course URLs change, your reviews don’t come with you, and every student has to be told where to log in from now on.
Treat this choice as semi-permanent. Not because migration is impossible, but because it’s the kind of week you’ll resent.
The verdict
Thinkific for most creators. No sales fee on paid plans compounds in your favour every single month, and the course builder won’t box you in when your second course arrives.
Teachable if your courses are cheap, your volume is low, and the fastest possible launch matters more than the last few percent of margin. That’s a real situation, and there’s no shame in it.
Whichever you pick, open the pricing page and read the fee line before you enter a card number. It changes more often than either company advertises.
FAQ
Which one is actually cheaper?
It depends on how much you sell, not on the plan price. Below a few thousand dollars a year in sales, the difference is small. Above that, the platform without a sales fee wins by a widening margin.
Can I move my students later?
Yes, both allow an export. You keep the names and emails, and lose the course history and reviews. Plan on it being a painful week rather than an afternoon.
Do either of them take a cut of my sales?
On paid plans, Thinkific doesn’t. Teachable’s entry plan does. Payment processing fees apply on both regardless — those go to the processor, not the platform.
Is the free plan enough to launch on?
Free plans on both have changed more than once, usually in the direction of doing less. Check the live pricing page before you build anything around one.