Are you confused between SamCart and Thinkific and wondering which one would be best for your course creation? Confusion is natural because both platforms are among the best online course creation platforms and help online course creators sell their courses without hassle.
To help you and clarify, I have compared SamCart Vs Thinkific and created this article for you. So, without further ado, let’s get started.
SamCart Vs Thinkific
What is SamCart?
SamCart is an eCommerce product-selling platform founded by Brian and Scott Moran in 2014. It offers solutions for online selling. But wait, aren’t we comparing two-course creation solutions? Yes, we are.
For those who don’t know, in June 2021, SamCart added course creation tools to its online selling offering and helped creators create and sell physical/digital products along with their courses.
To this date, over 77,000 creators have used this platform.
What is Thinkific?
In our counterparts, we have Thinkific, a powerful course creation platform founded in 2014 by Greg Smith and other co-founders. If we look at the website description, Thinkific is a platform that helps course creators create, market, and sell courses online.
Many people identify Thinkific as the best alternative to the course-selling platform Teachable, but Thinkific has outperformed Teachable in many aspects. In this article, we will see if it outperforms SamCart.
Thinkific is one of the best online course platforms that provides a smooth learning experience to its students.
Features: SamCart Vs Thinkific
Let’s know the best course creation features in these two powerful software solutions.
SamCart
Course Creation
Let’s talk about the most important thing first. SamCart lets you create unlimited courses, regardless of your plans.
You can upload your courses in various media formats: video, image, text, and audio. You can also drip-schedule your course, create it, and set a date to launch it later.
SamCart also has a partnership with Wistia, a video marketing platform. This allows you to upload unlimited videos, so you don’t need to rely on YouTube or any other platform.
You can also create content tiers, which means you can distribute your content material in different layers that they call tiers and set pricing plans for those asking the students to purchase it to avail themselves of more content on the topic. This helps bring in more revenue.
Cross-Course Selling
Another revenue-boosting feature SamCart offers is cross-course selling, which involves advertising courses on your students’ dashboards so they can notice your other courses and buy them. It also allows you to feature your course in the course library, which means it gives you full control of showcasing the course you want to display to your students.
Student Progress
The most important element of your course creation journey is your students. The success or failure of your course largely or mainly depends on them. So, monitoring and tracking their progress is important to ensure they benefit from your course.
SamCart gives you quizzes and worksheets so you know whether your students are learning from you.
Drag-and-Drop Builder
For all those wondering what it would be like to use SamCart’s interface and how complicated it would be to create a course or landing page, you will be happy to know that SamCart’s interface is uncomplicated. You can easily navigate the platform and figure out the tools and options.
Creating a course in SamCart is extremely easy. You are given a library of pre-designed and tested templates you can customize as desired with the drag-and-drop editor. All these templates are 100% responsive, which means they will fit perfectly on mobile screens, so you don’t need to hire a developer.
Add Value, More Sales
SamCart offers sales enhancement support. Of course, they are the checkout specialists. They’ll let you add upsells, add-ons, and different payment types to your course cart, which will help you increase your sales.
Marketing Features
SamCart was launched as a shopping cart software offering all the advanced features and advanced features required to sell and market products.
SamCart has multiple marketing features, including discount coupons, cross-selling, upselling, order bumps, etc.
Combination of Products
SamCart lets you create courses alone and sell physical and digital products. This combination lets you stand out among other course creators and helps you close more sales.
You can sell a combination of the following products: eBooks and reports, Live event tickets, Video coaching programs, Monthly memberships, Paid newsletters, and Physical products.
Payment Options
To Generation Z adults, convenience is the top priority, and you need to simplify things to help them convert. Here are what SamCart did for you in terms of payment options.
Along with traditional payment options like credit cards and PayPal, SamCart lets you add UPI payment modes such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Microsoft Pay to your carts, so your visitors become your students conveniently.
SamCart offers a native payment processor, “SamPay.” This feature allows you to collect the payment without integrating a third-party service like Stripe or 2Checkout
Auto-Enrol Technology
This is another feature that provides convenience for your students. With this, your students would not need to remember the login credentials to log in to the course dashboard. When they purchase a course, they can access it directly without entering their username and password.
Pay what you want
“Pay What You Want” is a feature you can use as a masterstroke to gain more students. With this feature, your students can decide how much they want to pay for your course. Donation-based organizations and NGOs largely use this feature.
Subscription Saver
With Subscription Saver, whenever your students’ saved payment methods fail, SamCart immediately informs the students and asks them to change their payment mode so the subscription can be completed successfully.
Integrations
Any software needs to connect with other tools to do the work smoothly. It’s good to know that SamCart understands this and lets you integrate SamCart with other third-party tools.
SamCart offers Zapier integration, so you can connect with over 4,000 applications.
Checkout Pages
SamCart specializes in designing checkout pages. You can design your checkout pages from scratch or use a template to build them quickly.
You can use split testing to optimize your checkout pages. Here, you create different variations of checkout pages and select the best performer.
Click here to open your account with SamCart
Thinkific
Course Creation
Just like SamCart, Thinkific lets you upload your content in different media files like video, audio, text documents, PDFs, and multimedia, and they offer a feature called voice-over presentations.
Now, what is this voice-over presentation? You can upload a presentation file with multiple slides and then record your audio to explain the presentation. This feature allows course creators to explain complex topics or solve students’ doubts.
You can also drip-schedule your courses on Thinkific.
Value Adding
Like in SamCart, you can add upsell offers to increase your revenue. Another significant feature Thinkific offers is adding sales widgets on various external sites so prospective students can purchase your course without visiting your page.
Students Progress
Thinkific also lets you give assignments and take quizzes. So you can monitor your student’s learning progress.
Joint Venture
If your course is a joint venture with multiple partners, you can invite them to your course admin, give them access, and assign roles. You can also share your revenue on Thinkific with your partners without confusion.
TCommerce
TCommerce is Thinkific’s business management tool that lets you handle the administrative aspects of the business rapidly and easily.
For starters, Thinkific has a payment processor and does not need to rely on third-party apps. And you can easily control your students’ subscriptions and change them as and when required without any hassle.
But the best part is that you don’t have to pay any additional fee for TCommerce; it comes with all plans.
Website Builder
Not only does Thinkific let you create a course, but it also gives you tools to create a web store and sales pages for your courses.
Through the Thinkific App Store, which has over 80 apps, you can get customizable website themes, add custom domains, create multiple pages, and integrate with other apps.
Integrations
Like SamCart, Thinkific also allows you to integrate with third-party apps, e.g., email marketing services like Mailchimp and ConvertKit, analytics tools like Google Analytics, payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal, and CRM (customer relationship management) systems like Salesforce.
As said earlier, integrations with external apps help you use their best capabilities with Thinkific to streamline and strengthen your workflows and functionality.
Plans and Pricing: SamCart Vs Thinkific
No matter what you think or say, this section can change your mind.
In the end, you need to ensure you are spending less and getting the work done.
SamCart
SamCart offers three plans: Launch, Grow, and Scale. The monthly subscription costs 79, 159, and 319 USD per month, which can be reduced to 59, 119, and 239 USD per month in the yearly subscription plan.
Visit the SamCart Pricing Page
Thinkific
Thinkific has six paid monthly plans, including a free plan, along with five paid plans that include Basic, Start, Grow, Expand, and Plus, priced at 49, 99, 199, and 499 USD per month, except for the Plus plan, which has a custom plan. The rates are reduced by 25% if you subscribe to the annual plan.
Support: SamCart Vs Thinkific
To be honest, support quality varies from person to person. For both platforms, some users have reported positive support experiences, while others have mixed opinions.
This largely depends on various factors like the complexity of the ticket or problem, the efficiency of the support team, etc. Therefore, I will discuss what you get from them in terms of support.
SamCart
Speaking about SamCart’s customer support, they can help you in two modes: email and live chat. Their customer support team is available Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET.
Their normal response time is 24 hours, but you can expect priority support if you are on higher plans. Here is the email address where you can write to SamCart – [email protected].
For material support, you get a bunch of tutorials, blogs, and guides. To get more help as a creator, you can also choose to enroll in CreatorU, where they share blueprints that help you create and sell your online courses. However, it comes with a charge, which is 24 USD per month.
Thinkific
You get the Thinkific Academy in Thinkific, where you can take free online courses to grow as a creator.
Next, the help center provides blogs and tutorials to guide you and a Facebook community to collaborate.
Thinkific offers email and chat support.
For Thinkific’s Basic plan, support is available via email from Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
For Thinkific’s Grow and Expand plans, customers are given priority email and phone support.
Similarities between SamCart and Thinkific
- Both SamCart and Thinkific give you good course-building tools.
- Both SamCart and Thinkific charge no transaction or processing fee.
- Both allow unlimited courses in all its paid plans.
- Both offer unlimited students.
- Both provide a free trial on their paid plans.
- Both support Google Pay and Apple Pay.
- Both let you add upsell offers.
- Both offer a robust affiliate program.
- Both offer native payment gateway
- Both lack advanced email marketing features but can be fulfilled by integrating email marketing software.
Difference between SamCart and Thinkific
- SamCart is mainly a checkout solution, but Thinkific is a dedicated course-building solution.
- Thinkific offers live lessons and certificates, while SamCart does not offer these features.
- SamCart does not let you offer course completion certificates, but Thinkific does.
- Thinkific has voice-over presentations, but SamCart does not.
- Thinkific has a free plan but SamCart does not.
- SamCart offers a 7-day trial, but Thinkific offers a 30-day trial in all their paid plans except for the Plus plan.
What do I like about SamCart?
- SamCart has an intuitive interface.
- Creating an online store is easy.
- Effortless digital downloads
- SamCart comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which assures you that the software will not be down easily.
- SamCart offers unlimited courses, unlimited memberships, unlimited video uploads, Student assessments, and quiz facilities on all its plans.
- SamCart offers a 7-day free trial.
- SamCart does not have a transaction fee.
What do I not like about SamCart?
- SamCart does not offer a free plan.
- Features like A/B testing, Subscription Saver, and Affiliate center are only available on the highest plan.
- They offer standard email support even on the paid plan, which asks for 59 USD monthly.
- SamCart does not offer a course completion certificate feature.
What do I like about Thinkific?
- Thinkific offers a free plan.
- Thinkific has no transaction fees, not even on the free plan
- Thinkific’s pricing plans are affordable.
- Thinkific allows unlimited courses and students even on every plan.
- Even on the free plan, you can host unlimited students.
- It offers a 30-day trial on its paid plans.
- Thinkific’s voice-over presentation feature is brilliant.
What do I not like about Thinkific?
- The free plan allows you to create just one course.
- Thinkific has limitations on customization.
- Thinkific has a steep learning curve as compared to SamCart.
- Thinkific does not offer 1:1 coaching
SamCart Vs Thinkific: The Difference
Which Platform is the Best?
This depends on your situation. SamCart is the best choice if you want to sell digital or physical products. Or, if you have a website and want to sell your online course on your existing website, SamCart is a better choice.
However, if you want a dedicated online course platform, Thinkific is the best option.
Final Thoughts
That was it for this SamCart Vs Thinkific article. Both are the best platforms and provide the best user experience, course builder, and marketing tool. They are easy to use and help you grow your online business. I hope you now have a better insight into both platforms and can make an informed decision between these options.
Disclosure: 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.
