Online courses have seen a tremendous increment in their popularity since 2020. As a result, more businesses are entering the eLearning field and leveraging the online tools available to create, sell, and market their online products. Kartra and Thinkific are platforms that promise the end-to-end creation and marketing of online products and online courses.
Without marketing, there is no selling, and marketing is useless. Hence, businesses require a tool that helps them do both from a single platform. This is exactly why we are comparing Kartra Vs Thinkific today to understand which tool is better for businesses.
Kartra Vs Thinkific
What is Kartra?
Kartra is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps businesses build courses, create websites and pages, promote their products, and automate marketing processes. It is a one-type-suit-all platform that benefits businesses of all sizes in different industries. From entrepreneurs to big brands, Kartra ensures enough for everybody.
It specializes in marketing, course creation, selling products on a marketplace, creating websites, sales funnels, and more.
What is Thinkific?
Thinkific is an online course creation platform with advanced tools and analytics to create, market, and sell quality courses. It helps businesses monetize memberships, build a strong community, and deliver products under the business’ name. In addition, the platform has its own website builder and email marketer, making the end-to-end business brand-building process simpler.
Features: Kartra Vs Thinkific
Website Builder
Kartra
Kartra has one of the strongest website builders in the market currently. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor ensures you can quickly create websites, pages, and sales funnels. Furthermore, it offers hundreds of templates and allows creators to build websites without coding knowledge.
With Kartra’s website builder, you can also build membership sites and quality online courses. Every element has multiple website designs you can edit with a single click. Kartra’s A/B split testing allows businesses to compare more than two website pages to see which performs better and use that as their default page. This increases the chances of lead generation, retention, sales, and revenue. It also has several advanced tools to help you create your website page.
Thinkific
Thinkific has a simple and user-friendly website builder and editor. It offers premade website templates and three themes to choose from. The themes come with designs that set the entire website’s page, which you can edit accordingly.
Thinkific’s drag-and-drop editor is especially useful in building online courses, website pages, course pages, sales pages, checkout pages, landing pages, and pricing pages. This makes your online course selling process all the better and more attractive. Unfortunately, there are no templates for separate elements on Thinkific, which may restrict an editor’s point of view while creating a website page. Hence, customization is highly limited, and there is no A/B split testing option, making website performance tracking more difficult.
Winner
The winner is Kartra, which offers unparalleled advanced features while creating websites, whereas Thinkific only offers limited ones.
Course Creation
Kartra
Kartra offers advanced tools that help in course creation and marketing and has an intuitive interface that lets you build courses from scratch without hassle. Kartra is an all-in-no solution that offers a web hosting feature, a learning management system, email marketing, nosiness management, recipient tracking, help desk support, and much more. Furthermore, you can host videos for both live and recorded content for free on the platform.
It has incredible course templates that are bound to perform positively for any business. Marketing features like upsells/downsells, dynamic order bumps, adaptive behavioral marketing, and more make Kartra’s course builder useful. In addition, the built-in calendar feature makes scheduling meetings and calls on the business’ website easy.
Thinkific
Thinkific is popular for its course creation abilities. It offers incredible features that most platforms do not provide and helps you build, sell, and market courses like never before. Also, it is extremely simple to create an online course on Thinkific with its online course builder and editor.
Thinkific offers a slideshow and presentation creator that lets you add voiceovers, audio, and text for each video on the platform. You can also copy lessons, templates, and content to save you time while creating courses that link with each other. In addition, you can edit every element on Thinkific’s course builder without worrying about having any coding knowledge.
It also offers multiple survey templates and tools that help you monitor performance, track goals, create exams and quizzes, get feedback, and more. This engages the user and is good for the business’s growth. It provides many templates and lets you build courses from scratch, with free video hosting in-built software.
Winner
Thinkific is the winner in this Kartra Vs. The Thinkific segment is best known for course creation and focuses on providing users with incredible features.
Thinkific is a better Kartra alternative for course and membership sites.
Customizations
Kartra
Kartra offers a high degree of customization as the platform is flexible and allows the creator to mold the elements as desired. This helps in creating a successful marketing strategy and learning platform. You can create unique and intuitive online learning environments, website pages, and membership sites. With a single sign-on credential, Customizable welcome emails, and multiple membership tiers, creating anything with Kartra is truly customizable.
It also offers a muti-membership portal that allows you to bundle all of them into a global portal and get cross-selling opportunities. In addition, you can track the students’ progress from a customizable dashboard and see what you want to see, like content progress, business progress, sales, etc.
Thinkific
Thinkific offers limited customization when compared with Kartra. Even though you can easily customize online courses with Thinkific, the advanced features are fewer. You can choose from multiple themes and templates and integrate them with third-party tools to the desired look of the course website.
Thinkific also offers course completion certificates to students once they finish a course, creates a drip schedule, provides hidden courses, and more. This helps the business make a strong stand in the course creation market. Though customizations are not much, you can use multiple course instructors for a single course in real-time. There are also prerequisite lessons that allow students to request certain lessons for a better user experience.
Winner
In this section of the Kartra Vs Thinkific comparison, there is a close tie between the two. Though Kartra offers many more customizations than Thinkific, the latter has several helpful course-specific features.
Marketing Tools
Kartra
Kartra has the strongest email marketing systems in the industry. From scheduling emails, automated emails for the entire email list, and creating lists to providing email templates, tracking user behavior, and email customizations – you can do it all with Kartra’s marketing tools.
Its done-for-you-campaigns and adaptive behavioral marketing are unique features that set the platform aside from others. It helps you sell more courses, market them better, and increase lead generation. It also offers one-time offers for order bumps, downsells, and upsells that increase the selling potential of the online business.
Hosting eCommerce sites on Kartra is also easy, wherein you can create email campaigns, market them on several platforms, and sell digital or physical products seamlessly.
Thinkific
Thinkific has a strong email integration with several email providers to ensure you get all email marketing features handy. This helps you personalize email marketing campaigns, track email marketing results, advertise your product, and optimize the ads to favor your business.
With Thinkific, you can link your online course website with several other marketing apps that support the digital marketing of products. This will boost your marketing results and ensure that you are not behind others in the market.
Winner
Kartra is the clear winner in this Kartra Vs Thinkific segment because Kartra offers much more advanced tools built within the platform for marketing. Thinkific, on the other hand, mostly uses third-party integrations for the same.
Retention of Engagement Tools
Kartra
Kartra is best known for its additional features that support your online business with engagement. From creating membership portals, different tiers suiting different types of customers, and embedded video hosting to multiple student quizzes, feedback forms, custom domains, and more – Kartra has a set of advanced engagement tools. These tools help in retaining existing customers and attracting new ones.
Calendar membership sites are one of Kartra’s most useful tools, as they help users engage with the business by setting appointments. In addition, it automates email list creation and forms that support the business and create a strong community. Strong integrations and API ensure that the business can do almost everything under the same roof, even if it is not built with the Kartra platform.
Thinkific
Thinkific strongly focuses on student experience and engagement as it is best known for creating online courses. It supports the creation of quizzes, surveys, assessments, comprehensive exams, subjective forms, objective questionnaires, and more. Each exam leads the student to receive an award or certification, which also helps monitor their progress. Also, certifications help students gain a better touch of their achievements.
With Thinkific, students have several learning options, from live lessons to blended cases, on-demand videos, recorded sessions, and more. Automated check-ins ensure that each student receives what they want from the courses. Membership sites and communities are also created easily through the platform, which boosts engagement and revenue. Some of the worthiest Thinkific engagement features are –
- White-labeled URLs
- Course welcoming emails
- Course progress tracking emails
- Custom student dashboard
- Custom course-completion page
- Over 30 languages translations
- Ability to upsell to a different course
- Downsells and order bumps for each course
Winner
There is a close tie between both platforms in this Kartra Vs Thinkific section, as both have numerous significant retention and engagement tools to offer.
Analytics
Kartra
Kartra has a widespread data analytics dashboard for almost everything. From monitoring customer behavior, revenue, sales, and how a website page performs to understanding the business’ progress – Kartra’s data analytics dashboard does it all. This makes running the business easier and makes improvements if needed.
Kartra’s data analytics tool helps identify the best-selling products, the best way to sail through the market, and service requirements for better conversion. In addition, its lead segmentation dashboard enables you to understand the customer’s needs and fulfill them accordingly.
With Kartra, you get a lifetime revenue analytics dashboard that measures how much the business makes by selling the online product. Furthermore, it tracks all purchases throughout the customer’s lifetime with Kartra.
Thinkific
Thinkific also has a robust data analytics feature that provides you with metrics to stay ahead in the market. For example, it determines the performance of your course improvement areas and what is most liked by the customers. All information is available on a single dashboard, making it easier for you to compare everything with one another.
With Thinkific’s data analytics tool, you can understand user data from online and visitor campaigns. You can use the comparison to determine which campaign is doing better. In-depth segmentation, data exports, and account integrations with remarketing tools like Facebook and Google Ads make Thinkific’s data analytics more powerful. Its new addition, “Thinkific Plus,” focuses on revenue generation, lead generation, customer training, and employee training.
Winner
Kartra is the winner in this segment by a close call since it has a stronger data analysis system.
Differences between Kartra and Thinkific
- Kartra focuses on all-round marketing and the creation of an online business with physical or digital products, but Thinkific only focuses on online course creation
- Kartra has a dedicated helpdesk tool, whereas Thinkific’s support focuses on their student community and provides them with a comment section for queries
- Kartra has a strong email marketing tool, whereas Thinkific does not
- Kartra has strong advanced in-video features like CTAs and video tags, but Thinkific does not
- Thinkific has advanced course features like assignments, but Kartra does not
- Thinkific offers course completion certificates, but Kartra does not
- Thinkific offers a free 14-day trial and a forever free plan, whereas Kartra does not offer a free plan.
- Kartra comes with a calendar app, but Thinkific does not
- Thinkific has a mobile app, whereas Kartra doesn’t
- Kartra comes with an in-built webinar builder. You don’t get the same in Thinkfic
- Kartra has a stronger sales funnel builder than Thinkific
- Thinkific has more student-related tools for retention and engagement than Kartra
- Thinkific is cheaper than Kartra but also has fewer features than the latter
Similarities between Kartra Vs Thinkific
- Both offer a strong drag-and-drop website builder
- Both platforms come with several templates for everything
- Both platforms allow video hosting
- Both platforms have a successful affiliate management plan
- Both platforms support in-built content hosting
- Both offer customizable drag-and-drop editors
- Both platforms do not provide a free trial
- Both provide excellent support and have an academy for their users
- Both platforms provide a 30-day money-back guarantee
- Both Kartra and Thinkific have a marketplace from where you can hire experts for help
- Both Kartra and Thinkific have no transaction fee
Reviews
Let’s have a look at how the users rate these two platforms.
Out of 5 stars, 161 users have rated Kartra an excellent score of 4.5 stars. On the other hand, 177 users have given Thinkific 4.4 stars. To be honest, the reviews are equally good. Since the two platforms are one of the best in their specialties,
Support
Kartra
Kartra is known to have the strongest support teams in the market that are available 24/7 to solve all queries. Its ticket management systems help segregate all issues and solve them individually. With Kartra, there are several modes by which you can get in touch with the team and solve the issue. Their customer support department responds quickly through emails or the live chat feature.
There is also a free training program with Kartra and Kartra Academy, with various resources about using the platform effectively. It teaches the user how to use every feature efficiently.
Kartra also has a strong Facebook community of 18,900 members, wherein people actively participate in solving problems and discussing marketing strategies. Finally, Kartra Blog and technical documentation provide answers about the platform, its usage, and its features.
Thinkific
Thinkific also has a strong email, chat, and call support center. Its FAQ section comes with basic questions that solve initial inquiries. Besides that, its help center also has a dedicated blog section allowing users to explore different topics and learn about them.
These topics cover almost everything that you can do with the platform. From resources, blogs, training sites, and expert marketplace to status – Thinkific has a bundle of support items to read through.
Thinkific also has a learning center called Thinkific Academy that guides you with almost everything about course creation and online selling.
They have a strong community on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and you can connect with the support team by filling out a simple form. Booking a call with the tea is also hassle-free and readily available on the website. The platform offers specialists for every step of the business process, like implementation and launch specialists, growth and strategy specialists, priority support specialists, and more.
Pricing
Kartra
Kartra has four pricing plans. The three plans are shown in the below image. For the fourth “Enterprise Plan,” you must contact customer care for a price quote.
Starter
Kartra’s starter plan costs $99 per month when billed annually and consists of –
- 2,500 leads
- Unlimited emails and SMS
- 1 custom domain
- Unlimited pages
- 50 GB bandwidth
- Unlimited videos
- Unlimited products
- 100+ done-for-you funnels
- 1 language
- 5 team member
- Unlimited membership
- Advanced analytics
Growth Plan
This plan costs $189 per month, billed annually, and includes:
- 12,000 leads
- Unlimited emails
- 3 custom domains
- Unlimited pages
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited videos
- Unlimited products
- 10 team members
- Unlimited membership sites
- Kartra agency
- Webinars – 300 attendees
- Advanced automations
- Unlimited language
- Surveys & Quizzes
- Webinar Presenters – 6
- Affiliate Management
Professional Plan
This plan costs $429 per month, billed annually, and includes:
- 25,000 leads
- Unlimited emails
- 5 custom domains
- Unlimited pages
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited products
- Unlimited videos
- Unlimited membership sites
- Helpdesk connections
- 20 team members
- Kartra Agency
- Webinars – 1000 attendees
- Real-Time Funnel Analytics
- Helpdesk live chat
Thinkific
Thinkific has six plans, including a free one that you don’t see in Kartra. You can refer to the screenshot provided below.
Free Plan
Thinkific’s free plan. As the name suggests, it costs nothing. It is the most basic plan and supports businesses in creating their very first online course. The plan includes the following:
- 1 course
- 1 admin
- 1 community
- 2 spaces per community
- Unlimited students
- Digital downloads
- Email and chatbot support
- 0% transaction fees
- 100% ownership of all content
- Drag and drop course builder
- App store
- Website themes
- Integrated eCommerce
- Analytics
- Surveys and quizzes
- Free academy course
Basic Plan
The basic plan costs $36 per month when billed annually and includes:
- Unlimited courses
- 1 community
- 5 spaces per community
- Unlimited students
- 1 admin
- 0% transaction fees
- Email and live chat support
- 1:1 email communication with customers
- Drip Content
- Manual student enrollment
- Custom domain
- Affiliate selling
- Coupons and discounts
- Thinkific Foundation Academy courses
- Everything else in the free course
Start Plan
This plan costs $74 per month when billed annually and induces:
- Engagement tools
- Design tools
- Unlimited courses
- 1 community
- 10 spaces per community
- Unlimited students
- 1 admin
- 0% transaction fees
- Email and live chat support
- After purchase student redirection page
- Special access to specific students
- Zoom Meetings and Webinars
- 1 revenue sharing
- Live lessons
- Assignments
- Bundles and add-on packages
- Membership and payment plans
- Advanced course-building options
- Advanced website code editing
- Everything else in the basic plan
Grow Plan
This plan costs $149 per month when billed annually and includes:
- Unlimited courses
- 2 admins
- 3 communities
- 20 spaces per community
- Unlimited students
- 0% transaction fees
- Phone and priority email support
- Removal of Thinkific branding
- Bulk enrolments
- Bulk student emailer
- Randomized quiz question bank
- 3 revenue sharing
- API access
- Thinkific advanced academy curses
- Everything else in the start plan
Now, these three plans are more for professionals or side hustlers, running their businesses on an individual level they could easily afford. But Thinkfic’s remaining two plans are mostly suitable for businesses running on a large scale.
Expand Plan
The Expand plan is available at $374 per month when billed annually. Here are the features that you get in the Thinkific Expand plan:
- Unlimited courses
- 10 communities
- Unlimited spaces per community
- Unlimited students
- 5 admins
- Priority phone support
- Advanced code editing
- Custom domains
- 10 revenue sharing
- Everything else on the Grow plan
Plus Plan
This is the most elite plan offered by Thinkific, and the price of this is variable. It depends on the business’s exact needs, and you can contact their sales team for a rough estimate. The plan includes
- Everything in the grow plan
- 0% transaction fees
- Bulk selling app
- Plus Portal – Centralized dashboard to manage all Thinkific sites
- Enterprise API access
- Unlimited products
- 3+ separate Thinkific sites
- Unlimited administrators
- Service level agreement 99.9%
- Dedicated customer success team
- Email white-labeling
- Multiple seats and tiered pricing checkout
- Single sign-on
- Unlimited revenue sharing
Conclusion
Kartra is best known as an end-to-end website builder and marketing tool. In contrast, Thinkific is a specific online course builder. If you are a business that requires all services under one roof, Kartra is your choice. However, if you are a business looking only to sell online courses, you can opt for Thinkific too. Both platforms are well-designed and purposeful in their ways, but Kartra is more advanced in lead generation, analysis, marketing, and web creation.
Some links in this post are affiliate links, and I will earn a commission if you purchase after clicking. Please understand that I recommend these resources because they are useful, not just because of my commissions. Please do not purchase unless you need the materials to achieve your goals. Read the disclaimer.
I am Mohammad Fahad Usmani, B.E. PMP, PMI-RMP. I have been blogging on project management topics since 2011. To date, thousands of professionals have passed the PMP exam using my resources.
