Thinkific vs Mighty Networks: A Definitive Comparison (August 2023)

I’ve been using both Thinkific and Mighty Networks for a while now — they’re great platforms for creating and selling online courses but take very different approaches.

Thinkific is a powerful, but user-friendly, course creation platform that lets you easily design and deliver engaging courses. It’s packed with features to help you create beautiful course pages, manage your students, track their progress, and integrate with third-party tools.

On the other hand, Mighty Networks is a community platform that primarily helps you create a social network around your niche. Its online course feature lets you create lessons, integrate them with your audience, foster discussions, and offer memberships. However, its course creation features come with limitations in monetization and in-built integration options.

Since they have entirely different approaches to online learning, I’ll compare Thinkific vs Mighty Networks in the following use cases:

1. Course Creation
2. Community Engagement
3. Monetization
4. Integrations
5. Price

Let’s get right to it.

Thinkific	Mighty Networks
Price
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers a free plan. The packages start at $36/month. 20% discount with yearly payments.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ The packages start at $33/month. 20% discount with yearly payments.
Course Creation
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Organizing course modules and sections is easier. Includes unlimited themes and templates to create a course. Supports videos, text, surveys, PDFs, and audio.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ A variety of templates makes creating courses quick and easy. Supports quizzes, audio, video, text, and more.
Community Engagement
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Limited community features. Only includes reviews and comments. No native app or network feature.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Has many more community features like events, polls, chats, and more. Offers a native app and social network for your community.
Monetization
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers versatile monetization features like subscriptions, bundles, and one-time payments. Supports PayPal and Stripe.	⭐⭐⭐ Dynamic monetization features like memberships, one-time payments, and subscriptions. Only supports Stripe.
Integrations
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Integrates with over 20 native apps. Allows custom APIs to integrate other apps, including Zapier.	⭐⭐⭐ Doesn’t have native app integrations. Relies on Zapier to integrate with other apps.
Best for
Any course creator looking to provide top-notch courses and manage their students.	Any community builder looking to create a niche social network and offer a course for a membership.
Try free for 30 days	Try free for 14 days

What is Thinkific?
“Build your course business with confidence”🎓

Thinkific is an all-in-one platform that allows you to create, design, market, sell and manage courses. Greg and Matt Smith founded the company in 2012, intending to help entrepreneurs create courses and sell them even without any tech skills.

Thinkific has a remarkable course builder with a drag-and-drop editor. You can create a course curriculum from scratch and add lessons and chapters. You can also choose from the six available templates and personalize them. Additionally, it offers tools that help you in marketing automation and student management. You can monitor student progress and issue certificates after they complete the course.

Thinkific is ideal for course creators looking for control over the customization of their course and student management.

What is Mighty Networks?
“Power your community brand” 👥

Mighty Networks is an online course platform and a community builder. Gina Bianchini, Tim Herby, and Thomas Aaron founded it in 2017 to help people build communities around their passion. Since then, it’s grown to over 10,000 creators and a whooping 3+ million members, making it one of the largest platforms on the market.

Mighty Networks has remarkable community features — it lets you create polls, events, groups, and more, to help you connect people within your niche. In addition, you can charge membership subscriptions and offer courses to your network. The platform also has tools to help you reach your target audience, segment them, and ultimately monetize the community.

Mighty Networks is great for everyone looking to build a community, granted they can afford the premium pricing model.

Thinkific vs Mighty Networks: Course Creation

Thinkific is a well-rounded course-building tool, while Mighty Networks works better when integrating a course into your existing community.

Thinkfic’s course builder is more comprehensive and easier to use than Mighty Networks.

Thinkific is a well-rounded course builder that you can use to build modules and course sections. The lesson formats include video, quizzes, audio, text, and more. If you have files or content from other sites, you can embed or upload them seamlessly.

Some of the standout features of Thinkific are its unlimited themes and templates. You can choose a color, image, or font, add it to your course page, and be done with the design. If you’re tech-savvy, you can write custom code.

Mighty Networks, on the other hand, has a course builder that any creator can use to build lessons and sections of a course. Like in Thinkific, formats like videos, quizzes, text, and audio are supported. You can also pull your content from other sources and embed or upload it to your course builder.

A ton of templates will make creating your course quick and easy. You can pick a template color, image, and font and custom-brand it to your course pages. And like with Thinkific, if you have coding skills, you can write custom HTML/CSS code to fully personalize the look.

Mighty Networks’ content drip is ideal for date-sensitive content delivery, and Thinkific’s drip is for giving access to content based on the student progress.

Now, there are various ways you can build courses on Mighty Networks. If you want to offer it as a freebie or through paid subscriptions, it’s all possible. The best part is that you can upsell the course for additional content.

With Mighty Network’s content drip functionality, you can set the content release based on your own rules. It might come in handy when trying to build buzz around your community before releasing the content.

Mighty Networks’ student progress management is remarkable. It simplifies enrollment, group creation, and certification. As for monitoring the progress, student activity and performance reports are easily accessible and visually supported for better understanding.

So, if you’re a course creator looking for a platform to merge your course with your online community, Mighty Networks is literally made for you.

Thinkific lets you create mini, evergreen, or flagship courses and gives you the option to upsell them. In addition to that, this platform also allows you to monitor your student progress, enrollment, and more. There is also an option for viewing student performance and activity.

So, if you’re a course creator looking to have complete control of course delivery and design, you will find Thinkific ideal. Its many features will give you the best chance to create a top-notch course, if you’re eager enough to get through them all.

Winner: Thinkific, since it’s an all-in-one course builder with many features. Mighty Networks comes in handy if you want community integration.

Thinkific vs Mighty Networks: Community Engagement

Mighty Networks communities are very well developed. In contrast, Thinkific has more limitations.

Thinkific allows for the creation of events within a community space.

Thinkific’s community features include comments and reviews. You can turn those on or off for each course and moderate them as needed. So, to encourage your students to interact with each other, you can spark a conversation in the comments.

You can also create spaces for different discussion topics within the community. Members can create text, post images, or files in the discussion spaces. The best part is that you can bundle the community around your course, create special events, or sell it as a standalone product.

Unfortunately, there are no native social apps for Thinkific. The only way to communicate through apps is via Discord or FB groups. It demands that your online community be tight-knit to your course.

Mighty Networks has better-developed community features compared to Thinkific.

Mighty Networks is an ideal online platform for creating communities around your niche. It packs tons of features that you can use to create content, polls, events, and more for your members.

Mighty Networks comes with in-built social networks for a community. But the best part is that you can upgrade your community to a custom mobile app. Now, that’s exclusivity!

Winner: Mighty Networks is ideal for community building because it offers more built-in features, which are next level.

Thinkific vs Mighty Networks: Monetization

They both offer monetization features, but Thinkific enables more payment gateways than Mighty Networks.

Thinkific packs better monetization features, compared to Mighty Networks which offers only one.

Thinkific will appeal to most course creators because it has adaptable monetization features for selling courses. You can use the platform to monetize access to your community, such as affiliate networks or membership site subscriptions.

A standout thing about the Thinkific monetization feature is that it integrates with many popular payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and more. Plus, you can build a checkout page and integrate checkout tools like Shopify, if you’re familiar with e-commerce.

Mighty Networks provides flexibility with monetization, but not with payment options.

Course creators will find Mighty Networks to have a workable monetization feature to use when selling their courses. The platform offers various ways to monetize their communities, such as one-time memberships, subscriptions, bundles, one-time events, and more.

Unfortunately, Mighty Networks doesn’t offer many payment options — it only integrates with Stripe. However, if you are tech-savvy, you can create a checkout page and integrate tools like SamCart.

Winner: Thinkific, since it gives you more payment gateways but that’s the only area it outshines Mighty Networks on monetization.

Thinkific vs Mighty Networks: Integrations

Thinkific integrates with more native apps, unlike Mighty Networks, which solely depends on Zapier.

Thinkific comes with 20+ in-built apps making integration easier.

Thinkific has native integrations with 20+ apps. Some of them are Zapier, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and more. The good thing is that you can integrate it with third-party tools through APIs or webhooks. If you want to engage your community more, Thinkific allows embedding courses to your custom blog site. And then they have a Thinkific app store, for a plethora of additional integrations with various apps — everything from marketing tools to business operation tools.

Mighty Networks uses third-party tools like Zapier for app integration.

Mighty Networks has no built-in integrations like Thinkific. Instead, it solely depends on Zapier to integrate it with other applications. The good thing is that using APIs can also simplify the process. Also, if you have a WordPress website, Mighty Networks lets you embed your online courses into it, so you can further depend on your own existing tech stack.

Winner: Thinkific, since it has in-built integrations that make it easier to work with, and you can customize anything through webhooks or API.

Thinkific vs Mighty Networks: Price

Thinkific is better suited for small communities, while Mighty Networks is ideal for medium to large communities.

Thinkific offers a free plan, Mighty Networks a free trial.

Thinkific offers a free plan with no time limit. The good thing is you don’t need credit card information to sign up for the free plan. The plan gives you access to one course and a community, unlimited student capacity, and a course builder.

Mighty Networks doesn’t have a free version but offers a 2-week free trial only for the business plan. You don’t need to put in credit information to sign up for the trial period. 14 days should be enough to try out the tools and see if it would work for you.

Mighty Networks offers pocket-friendly plans, while Thinkific delivers better-rounded features.

Thinkific’s pricing plans are cheaper than Mighty Networks’, but they limit the number of community admins to two.

If you want to increase the limits, subscribe to the Plus plan, a custom package. It suits established creators that need advanced course creation, lead nurturing, and sales tools. To access the plan, you must fill out a custom quote request form. But you do get to trial it free for 30 days.

Mighty Networks limits the community admin’s scope of work, where they cannot edit settings or courses in the Community plan. You must subscribe to the Business plan ($99) to permit your admins to edit course lessons.

Winner: Mighty Networks offers affordable plans ideal for small businesses that need unlimited students with zero transaction fees.

Thinkific vs Mighty Networks: Pros & Cons

Thinkific is best for course creation and delivery, while Mighty Networks is best for community building and networking.

Thinkific Pros	Thinkific Cons
✅ Robust course creation features	❌ Limited community features
✅ Website builder for building complete websites with custom domains, landing pages, sales pages…	❌ No built-in live events
✅ Flexible pricing options
✅ Reliable hosting and security
✅ Integrates with many tools
✅ All-in-one course platform

Mighty Networks Pros	Mighty Networks Cons
✅ Robust community features	❌ Limited payments options
✅ Chat & messaging (incl. direct messaging, groups)	❌ Wouldn’t recommend to complete beginners
✅ Customizable branding and design
✅ Supports multiple membership tiers
✅ Mobile community app (Android & iOS)
✅ All-in-one community platform

Final Verdict: Thinkific vs Mighty Networks

Thinkific works best as a course platform because its strengths lie in course creation and delivery. Meanwhile, Mighty Networks works best as a community platform with community building and networking.

Choosing between Thinkific and Mighty Networks depends on your goals, needs, and preferences. Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages, so you must consider them carefully.

Thinkific offers a superior course experience for instructors and students, while Mighty Networks offers a superior community experience for hosts and members. In my opinion, you should:

Use Thinkific if:

• You want to create professional-looking online courses.
• You want to have full control over your pricing and revenue.
• You want to have reliable hosting and security for your courses.
• You want to integrate with many tools and services.

Click here to get started with Thinkific

Use Mighty Networks if:

• You want to create vibrant online communities.
• You want to host live events and groups within your community.
• You want everything to look according to your branding and design.
• You want to offer multiple membership tiers and benefits.

Click here to get started with Mighty Networks

Still looking for a better fit? We compared many other great learning management systems like Kajabi, Podia, LearnWorlds, Teachable, LearnDash, and more. We found one for every team, budget, and use case. Check out our comparisons!