You’ve got the knowledge, the passion, and the drive to create an online course that will inspire, educate, and earn you some money while at it. But you’re down to the big question. Which platform will help you turn that vision into reality?
There are too many online course platform choices in the market and equally many features and functionalities you must consider to create, market, and sell your online course successfully.
In this article, we’ve narrowed it down to two outstanding online course creation platforms—GetResponse and Thinkific. Each one of these platforms promises to make your online course creation and selling journey smoother. But which one will fully align with your needs?
Dive into our GetResponse vs. Thinkific head-to-head comparison to find your perfect fit.
GetResponse vs. Thinkific overview
| Feature | GetResponse | Thinkific |
| Course creation | Intuitive AI course creator, Drag-and-drop tools | AI-powered course outline generator, Drag-and-drop builder, course templates |
| Supported content formats | Video, in-house webinars, PDFs, audio, text, external resources, and quizzes | Text, images, videos, downloads, PDFs, audio, and presentations |
| Payment | PayPal and Stripe integrations | Built-in payment gateway |
| Email Marketing | Advanced email tools: autoresponders, segmentation, automation | Basic email marketing automation |
| Automation | Advanced workflow automation for lead nurturing and marketing. | Basic email sales sequence, course-related automation |
| Social Media & Ads | Built-in ad management feature, social media templates | Built-in social sharing |
| Integrations | Integrates with Thinkific via Zapier, over 170 third-party tools like CRMs and payment platforms. | Integrates with GetResponse via Zapier, third-party tools like Google Analytics and Zoom. |
| Pricing | $69/month 30-day free trial | $97/month 14-day free trial |
| Strength | All-in-one platform for marketing, great course delivery, and business scalability | Course creation and student learning experience |
GetResponse and Thinkific provide online course platforms that empower educators, entrepreneurs, businesses, and creatives to monetize their expertise. Their features also make reaching global audiences easy for these course creators.
However, each one’s online course creator has its unique strengths since the two were originally designed with different purposes in mind.
GetResponse is a powerful all-in-one platform that combines email marketing, marketing automation, landing pages, webinar hosting, and an AI-powered course builder. Its holistic approach allows you to not only create and sell courses but also handle all your marketing and promotional activities without needing multiple tools.
For course creators looking to streamline all their course creation operations and focus on scaling, GetResponse offers an impressive set of features to help you do so seamlessly.
Thinkific, on the other hand, is a dedicated course creation platform specifically designed for building, managing, and selling educational content.
Therefore, it has course-building specialist features and overall great course-builder functionalities. It also supports unlimited students and courses.
However, most Thinkific users don’t seem to necessarily like the limited analytics and reporting capabilities or API limitations. Limited customization when creating complex course designs and using Thinkific’s website builder is also a recurring problem for several users.
Features and functionality
So, how do these two online course platforms’ features and functionality compare?
1. Course creation and customization
The GetResponse AI-powered course creator allows you to build online courses in minutes. You can use it to organize your content into modules and lessons. This provides a logical flow to help your learners easily navigate your course.
The AI feature can also help you create content for different topics and subtopics and even suggest some of the content formats to include in different lessons for better student engagement.
As shown below, you will receive tips and instructions to help you move from a blank page to a published course in no time.
If you do not wish to use AI, you can build your course manually by adding each module and its content to your course.
We also let instructors create a course creator’s profile, which will help you and your online courses be easily discoverable by potential students. This presents an excellent opportunity to showcase both your content library and expertise.
In addition, your students get a membership area where they can keep up with purchased courses, progress made, and your latest content.
How about Thinkific? Thinkific lets you kickstart your course creation journey with a customizable AI-powered course outline generator.
After this, you can start designing your course using the course templates and the drag-and-drop course builder. If you already have an existing course and student list, Thinkific saves you time and effort through the bulk import option.
You can deliver your content in self-paced, scheduled, or cohort courses, which gives your learners a choice. This also opens up your course to more students who probably don’t have the time to learn your course at a specific time.
The two platforms have mobile apps that allow your students to access your course material even when they are on the go.
2. Supported content and assessment formats
GetResponse lets you structure your course into up to seven modules. These modules can include videos, PDFs, webinars, audio, text, and external resources.
You can also include interactive quizzes and assignments in your course to help your students engage and learn more effectively. The students’ outcomes will help you determine learner satisfaction and engagement rates, which provide crucial insights into your course structure and delivery.
We also allow you to create certificates of completion for your students. These certificates make your course more credible and provide tangible proof of their achievements.
Thinkific supports various mediums, including text, images, videos, downloads, PDFs, audio, and presentations. This makes it easy for instructors to use and combine different teaching styles.
Additionally, you can connect to your students in real-time through live streams or using Live Lessons with Zoom.
If you have live classes at the same time, say each week, you can set recurring lessons to avoid setting up a live lesson each time.
Like GetResponse, you can use AI-generated quizzes, surveys, and exams to create engaging online courses. Once your students finish the course, you can send them completion certificates to celebrate their success.
3. Payment methods
GetResponse supports Stripe and PayPal integrations, making it easy for you to sell your online course directly through your website or landing pages. Once the customer purchases your course, the price you charge is automatically transferred to your Stripe or PayPal account.
The best part is we do not charge any extra fees for processing your transactions, meaning you keep 100% of your earnings. However, you must still pay the default Stripe and PayPal transaction fees.
Thinkific, on the other hand, uses a custom digital product payment gateway—TCommerce.
The custom payment gateway boosts conversions for creators by offering various payment solutions, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, Buy Now, Pay Later options, and even gifting.
Thinkific’s “TCommerce” helps you process student refunds quickly and easily with one-click payment controls. In addition, you don’t need to waste time chasing down failed payments thanks to its smart retries and incomplete purchase reminders email features.
Besides that, it offers an automated tax solution to simplify tax management and compliance, depending on where your business is based.
Marketing and promotion
The competition will drown out your online course unless you market and promote it strategically. Fortunately, both GetResponse and Thinkific provide tools to help you reach your target audience and convert them into learners.
1. Email marketing and automation
This is one of the areas where the GetResponse online course platform truly shines, thanks to our strong foundation as an email marketing tool. We provide an extensive range of tools to help you build relationships with your target audience and guide them through the sales funnel until they convert into paying students.
First, you collect email addresses with our signup forms, pop-ups, landing pages, and native integrations. You can also use live webinars to build an audience and collect email contacts. This is an especially great tool to build a prospect list. People who sign up for your webinar have already shown interest in your course’s topic, so they’re likely to become paying customers.
You can then nurture these email contacts with valuable content through our AI-powered newsletters. The drag-and-drop creator helps you create engaging newsletters quickly. Plus, you can borrow inspiration from our professionally designed templates.
Segmenting your audience is crucial for sending targeted and personalized emails that resonate with your audience. Our built-in segmentation tools and custom tags can help you organize your contact list based on subscribers’ behavior and engagement.
We also offer autoresponders, automation tools, and a time travel feature to help you send emails at the perfect time for maximum engagement. Our automation workflows, in particular, trigger emails based on user actions, such as signing up for a free course.
Drip campaigns nurture leads over time, while dynamic content, like adding a student’s name or course details, ensures that emails feel personal.
Additionally, features like lead scoring help you prioritize prospects based on their engagement with your campaigns.
Meanwhile, Thinkific’s email automation tool lets you use AI and ready-made templates to create your email copy, subject lines, and CTAs. It also offers customizable, pre-built sales email sequences and automated emails to win back abandoned carts.
Thinkific’s marketing solutions are not as advanced as GetResponse’s, and that’s why some users integrate it with GetResponse or other email marketing tools.
Though this solves the problem, it means you will be juggling multiple platforms and incurring additional costs. GetResponse users avoid all this since they can build courses and access advanced marketing tools in one place with one plan.
2. Social media and paid ads
GetResponse supports social media and paid advertisements by integrating ad management tools directly into its platform. With our built-in ad creator, you can design and launch paid Meta and Google ads without additional software.
The GetResponse AI-powered content generator will help you create high-converting ad copy. Once your ads are live, our detailed analytics track the performance of your campaigns.
You can also win back interested leads through retargeting ads by connecting your Meta Pixel with your landing page in a single click. The pixel allows you to run targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, with a compelling incentive to reignite their interest and convert them into students.
For instance, you can offer your warm leads a discount on your course, which GetResponse allows its creators to do with ease.
Thinkific has a built-in social sharing tool that encourages students to share their progress and your online course landing page on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
However, it lacks a built-in ad management feature. As a result, you will need to use integrations to access ad management tools like Facebook Ads Manager and Google Ads.
All features considered, GetResponse is the better choice for growing your audience and running sophisticated marketing campaigns that maximize your course sales.
Automation and integration
Automation and integrations help you streamline workflows and manage repetitive tasks.
1. Connecting GetResponse and Thinkific
One of the greatest capabilities of these two platforms is that it does not always have to be GetResponse vs. Thinkific. They can integrate seamlessly.
So how does it work?
The connection between GetResponse and Thinkific is typically established through a third-party automation tool—Zapier.
Zapier allows you to create “Zaps,” which are workflows that connect different apps to perform specific actions automatically. Each Zap consists of a trigger (an event in one app) and one or more actions (tasks performed in another app).
For instance, your trigger can be a new Thinkific enrollment, and the corresponding action can be adding the student to a GetResponse email list. So, when students enroll in a Thinkific course, their information, such as name, email address, and course details, is automatically sent to GetResponse. This adds the student to your email list, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
The two also integrate with other third-party tools. GetResponse, in particular, supports over 170 integrations, which include payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe, CRM systems like Salesforce and Zoho, and WordPress.
They also support API access, which enables advanced users to create custom integrations for highly tailored automation processes.
2. Supported triggers and actions
GetResponse supports triggers such as email opens, clicks, course purchases, tagging events, and subscription cancellations. These triggers can initiate actions like sending follow-up emails, scoring leads, moving prospects between lists, and milestone celebrations.
Here’s an example.
Thinkific supports a few email sales workflow triggers, such as cart abandonment and purchase confirmations. However, as it was primarily built as an online course platform, most of its triggers and actions are centered around course activities.
The triggers include course enrollments, course completions, student inactivity, and completed quizzes. Actions could include sending welcome, onboarding, inactivity, and course completion emails, adding students to email lists, and automatically sending course certificates.
Pricing comparison
Both GetResponse and Thinkific offer flexible pricing options, but there’s a significant difference somewhere.
GetResponse offers just one plan for creators, starting at $48.30/month. This plan gives creators access to all content monetization products, including the online course builder, premium newsletters, and membership sites.
Our course creator price plan includes unlimited courses, 24/7 live chat support, and 0% transaction fees. They also allow unlimited access to the platform’s powerful marketing features.
They include email marketing, autoresponders, marketing automation, websites, AI-powered landing page builder, popups, forms, webinars, analytics, and custom reporting. Since GetResponse was originally built as a marketing platform, these features are finely tuned for optimal performance and seamless integration into our course creator.
You can also experience the full range of features before committing, thanks to the 30-day free trial.
Meanwhile, Thinkific offers four different plans, with paid plans starting at $36/month.
The platform also stands out with its free plan, perfect for beginner creators. But, the plan limits you to only one course, one digital download, one online community, and five coaching and webinar sessions.
All plans include a few marketing tools such as a website builder, AI-powered landing pages, and email automation.
Building a successful online course business
You need more than a great course with valuable content to build a successful online course business. You also need the right tools to help you reach more students, engage them effectively, and drive consistent growth.
GetResponse and Thinkific provide a comprehensive set of tools to support the growth of your online course business. These include course creation and customizable templates, marketing automation, email marketing, various integrations, and payment gateways.
GetResponse’s main strength lies in its ability to serve as an all-in-one platform. You can create online courses and promote them through your course website, unlimited landing pages, webinars, email campaigns, social media paid ads, and more. Our platform ensures that you actually get to make money from your online course.
Meanwhile, Thinkific shines in its focus on creating engaging learning experiences. It offers tools such as interactive course formats and student progress tracking.
Thinkific vs. GetResponse: Choosing the right platform
GetResponse and Thinkific are both powerful tools in their own right, and choosing between them or integrating them will depend on the unique needs of your online course business.
If your focus is purely on comprehensive course creation tools, Thinkific, with its learner-centric features, might be a better fit.
However, if you’re looking for a scalable platform that covers all aspects of your course business, from course creation to student feedback, then GetResponse is the ultimate choice. With its all-in-one approach, you won’t need to juggle multiple platforms like WordPress, social media platforms, Google Ads, or Google Analytics to build a successful online course business.
But remember, you can always get the best of both worlds by integrating the two platforms.