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Squarespace Courses vs Thinkific

Published by Today Testing Team

Last Updated on January 20, 2024

Are you trying to decide between Squarespace Courses vs Thinkific for creating, marketing, and selling your online course?

Well-designed landing pages, multimedia content, and simple pricing are some key requirements for course creators today, as they strive to monetize their knowledge and experience with learners around the world. Tools like Squarespace Courses and Thinkific help creators create stunning online courses to add value to their customers.

Squarespace Courses is an all-in-one platform for building, selling, and promoting online courses.

Thinkific is also a course creation platform that makes it easy to create and sell courses, but both platforms differ on many fronts.

So, which of these two platforms should you choose? Read on for a full side-by-side comparison of Squarespace Courses vs Thinkific so you can make an informed decision.

Before we continue, it’s important to mention that Thinkific gives you a chance to try out their platform with a free course. Similarly, Squarespace also offers a 14-day trial period at no cost. With this, let’s get started.

Squarespace vs Thinkific Summary

Thinkific is a widely-used platform for building and selling courses while Squarespace Courses is a new kid on the block. Nevertheless, Squarespace also comes with extensive features that make it a breeze to create beautiful websites for your courses and market them.

We’ll now see how both these platforms stack against each other in different aspects.

Website Design and Templates

When you sell things online, having a great website is important.

Ideally, you’d want to create websites and landing pages that are attractive and reflect your brand. When customers find your sites attractive and trust your brand, they are more likely to stay engaged with you. So, which of the two platforms has the best templates that are easy to customize and look good?

Squarespace

Squarespace comes with beautiful-looking website templates that can be customized to meet your specific needs. You can choose from hundreds of templates that are well-designed and mobile-optimized. Furthermore, its drag-and-drop editor is intuitive and supports comprehensive customization.

Thinkific

Thinkific also comes with many website templates that can be customized with a drag-and-drop editor. You can even have your colors, fonts, and logos that reflect your business. The editor is intuitive to use and you can even add multiple elements needed for your course like surveys, forms, and more.

Verdict

When you compare the two platforms, Squarespace Courses is the winner here. Its website design and templates are truly stunning and rank as one of the best in the market today. Moreover, it is well-optimized for all devices, and there’s no additional work needed from your end.

That said, Thinkific is also a solid choice, just that its templates are not as aesthetically appealing as Squarespace. Of course, no coding knowledge is needed to use either platform.

Blogging

When you compare the two platforms, Squarespace is the winner here. Its website design and templates are truly stunning and rank as one of the best in the market today. Moreover, it is well-optimized for all devices, and there’s no additional work needed from your end. That said, Thinkific is not bad either, just that its templates are not as aesthetically appealing as Squarespace. Of course, no coding knowledge is needed to use either platform.

Squarespace

Squarespace comes with many built-in blogging tools. The platform provides various images for your blogs, making them visually appealing. These images also help you explain complex concepts to your visitors. You can have many people contribute to your blog. You can also add social share buttons for more visibility.

Thinkific

Thinkific does not offer a native blogging feature, and you’ll have to integrate a third-party tool to create a blog.

Verdict

The verdict is clear- Squarespace Courses is the winner here. You can use third-party tools to blog on Thinkific, but they won’t give you as much control and visibility as a built-in feature. Squarespace, on the other hand, has extensive blog templates. You can customize them to make blogs quickly.

Course Site Builder

Course site builders make it easy to create online courses. You can add quizzes, forms, surveys, and more to enhance the quality of learning and outcomes for your students. It can also help to have a Learning Management System (LMS) that can track student progress.

Squarespace

Squarespace has come up with a new feature called Courses, built specifically for creating and hosting online courses. It is powered by an advanced technology platform called Fluid Engine. This platform makes it easy to include videos, images, audio content, and even downloadables in your courses. In other words, you can create attractive and appealing courses with its templates and a host of multimedia features.

Thinkific

Thinkific is well-suited for creating online courses as it comes with a student management system for gathering and storing the basic information of your students. You can also track their progress and based on their interest, upsell similar courses to them. Similarly, you can gather feedback from students to know which aspects you must change to make your courses more popular.

Verdict

Though both platforms are equally poised, Squarespace Courses has a slight edge with its beautiful designs. Another advantage is the sheer variety of products that you can offer on Squarespace. With this platform, you can go beyond just courses and add paid membership content, custom print-on-demand merchandise, and more.

Customer Support

Good customer support is an often overlooked feature, but one that’s essential when you run into a problem. It’s important to choose a platform with great customer support available 24/7. This way, you can quickly solve any problems you have with the platform.

Squarespace

Squarespace is well-known for its customer support. It provides 24/7 support through email and live chat. You can also send your concerns or problems through X (formerly Twitter) to get immediate answers. Besides reaching out to the customer support team, you can also get answers to frequently asked questions from its in-depth knowledge base. Video tutorials and a vibrant community forum are other ways to get the answers you want.

Thinkific

Thinkific also offers excellent customer support. You can look through video tutorials, case studies, and extensive documentation to better understand the platform before signing up on it. Thinkific has a vibrant and active community that can provide answers to your problems. Besides these materials, you can submit a ticket to the company. If you’re on the Enterprise plan, you’ll get an answer right away, otherwise, you’ll have to wait for some time before getting a response. While there’s no estimated time for response, it’s often about 24 hours.

Verdict

When you compare the two platforms, Squarespace and Thinkific both offer great customer service, so it’s a tie here.

Marketing Tools

Creating an online course is probably the easier part, but getting people to sign up for them and making money from it is the more difficult process. This is where you need a wide range of marketing tools that will take your beautiful offering in front of potential customers. Let’s see how both platforms help you in this process.

Squarespace

Squarespace comes with extensive marketing tools that provide all the support you need to sell your offering. With Squarespace, you can start email campaigns with its built-in email marketing tools. Similarly, its SEO tools ensure your design and content are optimized for search engines while the analytics feature provides insights into how visitors came to your website and information about their preferences. Using this information, you can tweak your marketing campaign to reach out to more potential customers.

Thinkific

You can sell your courses through the Market and Sell option on your dashboard. As soon you click this option, you can change the website design or checkout page to make it more optimized for SEO and selling. Furthermore, you can include discount coupons and other offers on your selling page. It also offers an affiliate program that you can leverage.

Verdict

Here too, Squarespace Courses is the outright winner because it offers far more tools for marketing. Besides the blogs that we discussed earlier, Squarespace natively offers email marketing tools that are not available on Thinkific. Even the analytics offered by Thinkific is not as extensive or useful as Squarespace. The only advantage of Thinkific is that it integrates with many marketing tools. But, Squarespace allows you to natively take care of marketing.

Scalable and Flexible

As your business grows, you want a website that grows with you. This means the additional resource allocation must happen automatically, without any time and effort from you. How does Squarespace and Thinkific scale? Let’s find out.

Squarespace

Squarespace offers unlimited storage and bandwidth even on its cheapest plan, so you can scale well easily, without even spending additional money. There are no transaction fees either in the higher plan, and no course or membership limits on any plan.

Thinkific

Thinkific also offers unlimited courses under all its paid plans. There are no limits on the number of students too. Such a flexible and scalable pricing option augurs well for businesses and content creators.

Verdict

Both platforms are winners in this category as they are designed to help businesses grow and scale without the hassle of adding more resources or moving to a higher plan.

Pricing

Pricing is a key consideration as the plans must be reasonably priced for the features they offer. In other words, the money you spend must add value to your business.

Squarespace

Squarespace Courses pricing includes the following options:

Squarespace Business Plan & Above: Basic Courses plan included at no extra cost with Squarespace Business ($23/month), Commerce ($27/month), and Commerce Advanced ($49/month) plans. Includes a 9% transaction fee for digital products sales and 30 minutes of video storage.
Squarespace Courses Starter (+$9/month): For an additional $9 a month, this plan includes a 7% transaction fee for digital products sales, 10 hours of video storage, and unlimited courses and memberships.
Squarespace Courses Core (+$34/month): For an additional $34/month on top of your base plan, this package includes a 3% transaction fee for digital products sales, 50 hours of video storage, and unlimited courses and memberships.
Squarespace Courses Professional (+$119/month): For an additional $119/month on top of your base plan, this plan includes no transaction fees, unlimited hours of video storage, and unlimited courses and memberships.

Thinkific

Thinkific offers a free plan plus three paid plans. The free plan is more of a trial run, as Thinkific limits it to just one course.

Thinkific pricing for paid plans is as follows:

Basic: $36 per month
Start: $74 per month
Grow: $149 per month

There are no transaction fees in any plan, including the free plan.

Verdict

Both platforms are reasonably priced and offer good value for your money.

Though the free plan of Thinkific may seem attractive if you’re just testing the waters, it doesn’t provide all the features to fully explore the functionality of the Thinkific platform. On the other hand, the starting plan of Squarespace is a better choice, even if you have to pay $16 per month because it allows you to get a hands-on feel of how this business of online courses can turn out for you.

Moving on to the higher plans, Squarespace can end up being a better choice in the advanced plans because they have a cheaper monthly subscription and no transaction fees. However, for the middle plan, which is the Core plan, there is a 3% transaction fee. When you compare this to the Basic plan of Thinkific, you are likely to save money with the Thinkific plan as there are no transaction fees. For example, if you have 100 transactions a month, each costing $50, you’ll end up making $5,000 on Thinkific and $4,850 on Squarespace. When you include the monthly subscription, your total profits will be $4,964 on Thinkific and $4,827 on Squarespace.

This is why if you expect more transactions, Thinkific’s basic plan is better. In all other cases, Squarespace’s pricing is more profitable.