Which community and membership stack is best for you? I break them all down and show you what their sales pages won't say out loud!
The cheapest real course builder with a community attached. $54/mo, or $40 on annual, 30-day trial, 0% fees if you use Thinkific Payments. The community is one feed with 5 Spaces on Basic, the email tool is a few canned sequences, and bringing your own Stripe on Basic costs 5%.
Thinkific is the pick if you want a proper course builder for under $60 a month and a community that's good enough. It's the wrong pick if the community is the product, or if you want to run email from inside it.
Pricing, checked on thinkific.com/pricing, 16 October 2026. Basic is $54 a month, or $40 on annual billing. Start is $109, or $82 annual. Grow is $219, or $164 annual. Plus is custom. There's a 30-day free trial, which is twice what anyone else here offers, and no free plan.
Every plan gets unlimited courses and 10,000 current students. What changes is everything around the courses: Basic gets 1 community with 5 Spaces, 5 live events, 5 digital downloads, 5 coaching sessions, and 1 admin. Start makes most of those unlimited. Grow gets 3 communities with 20 Spaces each.
Use Thinkific Payments, which is built on Stripe, and you pay 2.9% plus 30 cents. That's processing, not a platform cut. Thinkific takes nothing on top.
Bring your own Stripe and it's a different story. Thinkific's gateway fee FAQ lists a 5% fee on Basic, 2% on Start, 1% on Grow, and nothing on Plus, on top of Stripe's own fee, on your first $1M in sales (Third-Party Payment Gateway Fee FAQ). So Basic plus your own Stripe is 7.9% all in.
Honestly, that's the most expensive "bring your own processor" penalty we've seen. Just use theirs.
The course builder. Quizzes, surveys, drip, completion certificates, learning paths, and a Content Uploader that bulk-loads your video, audio, and PDFs so you're not adding lessons one at a time (Course Migration Guide). This is the part Thinkific has been doing for a decade, and it shows. Skool's Classroom doesn't come close.
Bulk student import. CSV or XLSX through the Smart Importer, with bulk enrollment into courses (Import Users in Bulk). If you're moving from another course platform, this is the part that works.
Payments, three ways. Thinkific Payments, Stripe, PayPal. Memberships, bundles, one-time, subscriptions, payment plans. Tiers are just more products.
It's a feed with Spaces. Posts, comments, live events, a weekly digest. The digest goes out Tuesdays at 3pm UTC with the three newest and three trending posts, to everyone, and members can opt out but not change the day (Communities: Weekly Digest). Skool's digest is daily and members choose. Thinkific's is weekly and they don't.
Gamification is badges. Thinkific's own help centre says native gamification means Digital Badges and Learning Paths, and points to third-party apps like Pointagram for points and leaderboards (Does Thinkific have gamification). No levels, no leaderboard, nothing unlocks.
Keep in mind the Basic caps: 5 Spaces and 5 live events. That's a coaching program with a lounge, not a Circle-style network.
Thinkific has "Email Automation." It's a handful of fixed sequences, mainly a Sales Flow and abandoned cart emails, and the help centre is clear that you can't change the triggers, the number of emails, or the timing (Engage Your Audience with Email Automation). It also says plainly that it isn't a broadcast tool. For that you use Mass User Email, which sends one message to students.
So: you can email your students, and Thinkific will run a sales sequence for you. You can't build your own sequences or segment a list. That's a Kajabi feature, and it's why Kajabi costs three times as much.
The good news is the integrations are native. Mailchimp, Kit, and Constant Contact all have one-click apps, so new students flow into your real email tool without Zapier.
Students, yes. Export from the User Table and a CSV gets emailed to you with whatever columns you had showing (User Table). Community posts and course content: not mentioned in the export docs. Assume you rebuild.
No. The 30-day trial is the runway. After that, $54 a month, or $40 if you pay for the year.
If you sell courses with quizzes and certificates, yes, and it's the cheapest place to do it. If the community is the thing, no. Thinkific's feed is fine; Skool's is the whole product.
Thinkific if you want the course builder and you've already got an email tool. Kajabi if you want email and funnels in the same bill and you're willing to pay $179 for it.
We'll have Teachable verified soon. The short version: they're the same shape, and the differences are in fees and the community.
Sources, all checked 16 October 2026: Thinkific pricing, gateway fee FAQ, User Table export, Smart Importer, gamification, email automation, weekly digest, course migration guide.
The course platform with everything in one bill: courses with quizzes, unlimited email and automations, funnels, payments, and a community tab. $179/mo to start, $143 on annual. No free plan, a 2,500-contact cap on Basic, and the community is the weakest part of the package.
A course and coaching platform, not a community platform. Teachable has paused its Community feature. From $39/mo with a 7.5% fee on Starter, 0% from Builder ($89). Shared student app, broadcast email, native Mailchimp sync.
Courses, downloads, community spaces, and real email marketing in one plan, from $42/mo billed annually. 5% fee on Mover, 0% from Shaker. Daily or weekly digests, eight native email integrations, no mobile app, no gamification.
