Canvas vs. Thinkific

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Canvas
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Instructure is an educational software company based in Sandy, Utah. It is the developer of the Canvas learning management system, which is a comprehensive software package that competes with such systems as Blackboard Learning System, SumTotal and Saba.N/A
Thinkific
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Thinkific Plus is a scalable learning platform that’s designed to be easy to use for teams and customers. Thinkific Plus offers enterprise-grade features that scale with the needs of enterprises, and the service includes a people seriously dedicated to helping users to reach their goals.N/A
Pricing
CanvasThinkific
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CanvasThinkific
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsMust contact vendor for pricing information.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CanvasThinkific
Considered Both Products
Canvas
Chose Canvas
This is much easier to use than Blackboard. Everything is easy to locate. The interface is clean and intuitive, which makes navigation smooth for both instructors and students. Assignments, grades, and messages are all centralized, reducing confusion. Setup is quick, and the …
Chose Canvas
Canvas is much more robust, has more features, and is more accessible. In canvas it can be specified to your specific organization and have its own domain which I do not think that Coursera can do. Coursera is good for sharing a single course or CEU but does not have the same …
Chose Canvas
Canvas is in the experience way better than Google Classroom. Canvas has a more robust agenda system that also allows adding in new personal deadlines. [Assignments] can be submitted past [the] deadline (if allowed),
Chose Canvas
Canvas is more secure, has a cleaner design, and has more features. For the features, they have in common canvas still stacks up against [Smart school] by going for the extra mile. Besidfor e that, [the] canvas looks a lot more [professional] than [Smart school]. I didn't make …
Chose Canvas
Canvas is a stronger platform. I used it as a teacher AND as a student in graduate school, and it is just the most put-together, professional version of a learning management system that I've used or seen. I do assume that Canvas is more expensive than its competitors, which …
Chose Canvas
I believe Canvas is worse than all of them. In my experience, it is harder to use, uglier to look at.
Chose Canvas
Moodle is open source and it is free. So we can implement our own server with Moodle very easily. But it is not very customizable. When we need a new feature, it is very hard to change as we do not have the ability to change. Canvas has been great help in this because we can …
Chose Canvas
Canvas is a powerful learning management tool that combines so many key elements of an actual classroom and allows teachers to mirror their classroom environment into a virtual platform. It is simply amazing what can be done on Canvas. Grading systems/analysis, progress …
Chose Canvas
Canvas takes the better parts of both Skyward and Google Classroom and combines them to work pretty seamlessly - grading, assignments, attendance, document/file sharing - all integrated into one platform. In addition, the internal communication feature makes communication …
Chose Canvas
Canvas was far easier to use, more feature rich, and much better supported. Teachers and students prefer it to the other solutions we've evaluated or used in the past. Anything that kids can use with minimal instruction is a major win for schools.
Chose Canvas
Simple design interface combines with powerful functionality within the platform.
Chose Canvas
How content is delivered using Moodle is not up to the mark when compared to Canvas. The user interface is clunky when compared to a much simple and easy to understand user interface that of Canvas. Configuring Moodle can be quite tedious if one comes from a non-IT background. …
Chose Canvas
I was not part of the team that selected Canvas, however, I used Blackboard as a student and very little as a staff member. Blackboard was especially difficult in navigating organizations or shared sites. I used it to organize mandatory training for students in one of my …
Chose Canvas
Canvas has some unique features that are superior to Google Classroom, but I prefer Google Classroom because of its ease of use. It does have some of the same problems as Canvas though in terms of assigning work to particular students.
Chose Canvas
I have not used any other platforms for this type of experience. I appreciated the thorough introduction that was offered to onboard onto the platform. It made it easy to use right off the bat.
Chose Canvas
Canvas surpasses Blackboard not only visually, but technically as well. It offers more customization options, as well as more features for students and teachers a like in regard to grading, notifications, and uploading files. It also seems to stream videos more successfully, …
Chose Canvas
Canvas is a pricey option, at least when compared to something open source like Moodle. Personally, I don't feel that Canvas has the same ability to customize as Moodle. However, the customer support from Canvas makes it stand out. With an open-source platform, it might be …
Chose Canvas
Canvas is more cost-effective when compared to Blackboard Learn. Canvas has lately worked on features improvement especially in the grade center, for example, moving columns around like an Excel sheet, a feature not found in Blackboard Learn.
Chose Canvas
The Canvas interface is easier for students to use and navigate. It is also cleaner so students enjoy using the tool more than Sakai. Canvas was easier for our IT department to implement. Training faculty on how to use Canvas was easier than Sakai. The analytics in Canvas are …
Chose Canvas
Canvas's ease of use and ease of administration were huge deciding factors in the decision to use Canvas as our preferred LMS. We found that on average Canvas took 1/3 the clicks to accomplish the same tasks as Blackboard, and the structure of data in Canvas is far superior to …
Chose Canvas
I believe Canvas out does all of these because of its robustness. It allows for more design opportunities including HTML and HTML5 and has many built-in features that are not offered by all of the other LMSs. Some of those features are discussions, assignments, pages, quizzes, …
Thinkific
Chose Thinkific
I think Thinkific is way better than Udemy. The Udemy platform was not user friendly, they require you submitting for approval before you can even upload a course and have so many restrictions. They never even approved my course, nor did they email me as to why. The support is …
Chose Thinkific
Squarespace and Intuit Mailchimp
Chose Thinkific
I prefer Thinkific over Kajabi because I found Kajabi to be less organized for teachers to keep track of everything that needed to be uploaded.
Chose Thinkific
Thinkific is the only product like this I have ever used;
Chose Thinkific
I believe that the rates and the over all set up and view are better than both. I also like the separation site. Having your own custom site is so much better for business and being able to create landing pages as well. It’s a great value
Chose Thinkific
Affordable, efficient and highly effective!
Chose Thinkific
I’ve used both platforms and found Thinkific to be far more intuitive and flexible than Teachable. The layout of the dashboard feels cleaner and more user-friendly, which makes managing courses a smoother experience. I particularly appreciated the level of control Thinkific …
Chose Thinkific
I don't have experience with other platforms, therefore my opinion is limited. However, a big reason I went with Thinkific was that an organization I did leadership development for used it to create their own course. I liked the experience and wanted to replicate it for myself. …
Chose Thinkific
We used Academy of Mine before Thinkific - for us it was a horrid expereince - terribly clunky interface, customer support lacking, horrid fornt end experience for learners, even worst backend experience for users.

We evaluted many others, but our priority was conenction with …
Chose Thinkific
Better than Absorb and TalentLMS but, in my opinion, worst than LearnWorlds.
Chose Thinkific
combination of course, community, landing page, billing, marketing, analytics. reputable, Canadian based, allows SCRM
Chose Thinkific
I inherited Thinkific when I stepped into my role. But my colleagues chose Thinkific because it offered a good balance of commerce-ready, user-friendly interface, and tiered pricing plans
Chose Thinkific
Thinkific feels much more modern.
Chose Thinkific
We ended up choosing Thinkific over competitors because of the ease of use to initially get started. The pricing and packaging were favorable for our use case and needs, and the customer support was strong as we were initially getting started with a few challenging items such …
Chose Thinkific
This review is only for the course building functionality. We moved to Articulate 360 for the course building portion of the program because it's way more feature rich and have been please with it's capabilities. We've yet to investigate other LMS options because we've been so …
Chose Thinkific
We used a training platform called Rise. While it was a good platform to build and host courses, it gave us zero room for custom options and or branding. Thinkific allowed us to create our own branded website to house courses, and hide content based on where they are in their …
Chose Thinkific
Thinkific is much better than Skilljar, which why we decided to migrate. First, the payment structure is not MAU-based, which is great. AI integration is much better, and I can generate captions for my courses using AI, which wasn't possible with Skilljar. Also, Skilljar didn't …
Chose Thinkific
Workramp is paid per user and also a platform fee, making it a less financially viable option
Chose Thinkific
I think that Thinkific has a lot of the same features as many other products, except these features are all found in one central location (for the most part) vs having to use several different apps and platforms. While there are some things that other platforms do better, like …
Chose Thinkific
Thinkific Plus stands out for its simplicity and intuitive user interface, making it much easier to teach and adopt, especially for non-technical staff or partners. While comparable platforms offer similar features, Thinkific’s ease of use significantly reduces onboarding time …
Chose Thinkific
Thinkific Plus was better or similar in user accessibility, ability to easily create new content, usability for internal administration, had all the essential features we were looking for plus many additional features, and had the highest satisfaction ratings from our students …
Chose Thinkific
We migrated from Teachable to Thinkific because we had multiple issues with the Teachable platform. We had issues with purchases going through correctly and with people getting the content they were supposed to get. We did not have these issues with Teachable. While LearnDash …
Features
CanvasThinkific
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
Canvas
9.8
Ratings
18% above category average
Thinkific
-
Ratings
Course authoring9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Course catalog or library9.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Player/Portal9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Learning content9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile friendly9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Progress tracking & certifications9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Assignments9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Compliance management9.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Learning administration9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Learning reporting & analytics9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Social learning9.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Gamification9.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign On (SSO) Enabled Learning9.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CanvasThinkific
Small Businesses
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.6 out of 10
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Schoology Learning
Schoology Learning
Score 9.7 out of 10
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Schoology Learning
Schoology Learning
Score 9.7 out of 10
Articulate 360
Articulate 360
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CanvasThinkific
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.3
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.5
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CanvasThinkific
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a school you can let teachers easily create new deadlines which [automatically] get shown in the calendar. Teachers can also [temporarily] hide deadlines [until] they've given the explanation about the tasks. [Besides] that the teacher can also choose what should be uploaded, should it be a link, file, pdf, link,...
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Thinkific is well-suited if you want to host an online course and have a variety of materials, such as videos, PDFs, and assignments. A plus is that you can host a community linked to your course, making it easy to give feedback.
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Pros
  • Learning management - Even as the educational landscape rapidly shifts due to current events, Canvas is a great LMS for providing a consistent learning environment for students.
  • Mobile accessibility - Students can access their courses on Canvas from a variety of devices, including their smartphones.
  • Rich content - Instructors have the ability to create dynamic and engaging content for their courses.
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  • Enables course creators to deliver high quality courses very fast
  • Offers unlimited hosting for videos included in the subscription price
  • Provides an easy to use administration interface that's powerful and accessible
  • Easy to scale subscription tiers on B2C plans, cost effective highly scaleable B2B plans (Thinkific Plus) ideal for companies who want to start a customer education program
  • Amazing support and account management team - great mindset and people in the teams.
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Cons
  • Their integration with Big Blue Button was a bust for distance learning. Would be great to see them collaborate with Zoom or Google Meets.
  • Their "feature request" process is slow and cumbersome at times because it relies on user "up votes" to get ideas addressed by the developers.
  • They seem to have a lot of turn-over with their staff. We get a new Customer Success Manager far more frequently than with other vendors.
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  • I would add some more blocks for page design to have more options as to what I can do, like a proper gallery where you can open and close images.
  • I would expand the text options within specific blocks, like being able to hit enter inside a text box and having my paragraphs separated if I wanted to.
  • Adding new integrations would be awesome, so you don't have to pass through Zapier. Maybe a ClickFunnels integration?
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Likelihood to Renew
Several factors contribute to my "10" rating. First, our university just made an enormous switch to Canvas, after we were with Blackboard for almost a decade. So garnering buy-in was critical, and not something we took lightly. After nearly 18 months (start to finish) of training faculty, educating stakeholders, and migrating courses, I am not looking to make a change again anytime soon. But I am happy with the result and the product overall and that is also demonstrated in my rating.
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We will continue to use Thinkific for our company pieces of training. Until we are able to create our own in house portal, this is an excellent source to have a learning management software tool that is easy to use and easy to implement without much technical training to administer
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Usability
The functions in Canvas are well integrated and consistent across the application, and mostly intuitive. Overall navigation and setup is streamlined through integrated features and navigation. The feedback we've gotten from our program participants is that it is easy to learn to use. It also integrates well with third party software like Google Docs and Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing software
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Under Site Builder, when trying to add a new section, so many templates appear; however, preview is not shown, which makes it super difficult and time consuming to identify a template that suits the purpose. Customization of certification designs is a bit difficult too. There are limitations to the type of quiz questions I can create - for example, there's no option to have fill in the blank questions.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
I've never had any issues with accessing Thinkific but I can see when it has been a problem for others. When I get updates on when they are doing maintenance to their platform I tend to make sure that is not the day I plan to be working on my school so as not to get frustrated
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Performance
No answers on this topic
When it comes to the performance of Thinkific for me I find that it's good but could be better. I tend to think that the larger the files and videos you upload on your courses may add to the impact of it's uploading (not sure if that's actually true or not). But overall the performance of Thinkific via my tablet and desktop is very good when I have a fast speed broadband speed
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Support Rating
I do not personally use Canvas support since we have a central office that helps us. However, our central office always has the answers we need and are always able to solve our issues - so I would assume that get great support from the Canvas team on their end. They also offer great training, which uses materials directly from Canvas
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I rate Thinkific a ten because of its excellent customer service, ease of use, high-quality product, fair price with excellent ROI, and because they keep making improvements. Using Thinkific solved the problems of piecing together our course with various WordPress plugins, iframes, and payment processing software. It's easy to create a course website for people who can't write code.
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In-Person Training
The training sessions were broken down into several days as well as different levels depending upon the knowledge of the user
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No answers on this topic
Online Training
The online tutorials and videos are very clear and addressed the issues/questions that I had about using the system.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Once you purchase and sign the contract there is nothing to install or hardware to buy. You can almost immediately start using it and have courses up and going within weeks. We signed in December and had pilot courses online ready to go for the start of school in January
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The implementation period took time like it would in earning and using any new tool. It was more about being organised, having better time management processes in place and having people you were able to reach out to if you were every able stuck. The other key ting with the implementation period was giving yourself a realistic time scale to get the job completed.
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Alternatives Considered
Canvas is in the experience way better than Google Classroom. Canvas has a
more robust agenda system that also allows adding in new personal
deadlines. [Assignments] can be submitted past [the] deadline (if allowed),
this isn't allowed by Google [Classroom], If you're too late you can't
submit anything anymore. In Classroom [assignments], presentations/theory, and [announcements] are all put in 1 feed instead which gets confusing way
faster.
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I think Thinkific is way better than Udemy. The Udemy platform was not user friendly, they require you submitting for approval before you can even upload a course and have so many restrictions. They never even approved my course, nor did they email me as to why. The support is not there like it is for Thinkific. Also, with Udemy, it feels like you are competing with so many people because they are given other options in comparison to you vs on Thinkific, it truly is your own. You do your own marketing and when people come to your landing page, it is all they see. They can't venture off of it to go to the next person who is on Thinkific. I love Thinkific and tell everyone to get on it. People say to me they want to know my ROI before they decide to invest in it. They want to know that it actually works.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
The opportunities to scale your online course business with Thinkific is endless. They provide a great range of plans with features, integrations and support to suit the needs of any business as different levels. The key here is knowing where to start with the budget you have and then knowing when it's time to scale up and the tools and resources it will require.
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Return on Investment
  • Teachers have consolidated their content onto one platform which has decreased reliance of students on so much support staff assistance to access content.
  • Canvas has helped make technology transitions more seamless for the school community.
  • Once teachers have set up their page, Canvas really takes care of it all- they have much more time to focus on content creation and synthesis rather than the actual learning management system.
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  • pre thinkific vs post thinkific launch for sales training, our sales reps are getting their first solo sale on average 0.6 days faster. Before it was 5.7 days on average to sell by themselves, now it is 5.1 days on average accross 1500 sales reps that have completed the training since launching the training in May 2024
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