Leaving Thinkific? Move the courses too.
Thinkific is the deepest course platform you can rent, and many owners already run their marketing site on WordPress. Here’s what moves, what it costs, and when to stay.
Danica LouweUpdated 5 min readIf your business runs on Thinkific’s quizzes, assignments and cohorts, staying may be right. Move if the page builder, the caps or the fees are holding you back. Users and progress export, and the courses are rebuilt in LearnDash. Nothing is turned off until the new site has taken real money.
Thinkific is the best course engine you can rent. The rest of the business lives somewhere else.
Thinkific has the deepest LMS in the category: quizzes, assignments, certificates, cohorts, learning paths. Owners start looking at the door when the page builder cannot make the sales page they want, when the community cap or the student cap bites, or when they are paying a fee for using their own Stripe. Many of them already have a WordPress site for the marketing; the courses are the last thing on the other side of the fence.
The page builder, and the second site
Thinkific’s page builder is limited, so owners build sales pages on WordPress, Webflow or Framer and connect them back. Two systems, two logins, and a seam at checkout.
The fee on your own processor
Thinkific Payments charges 2.9%. Using your own Stripe or PayPal adds a Thinkific gateway fee on top of the processor’s, which varies by plan. Thinkific says its automated sales tax tools are free with Thinkific Payments.
The caps
One community on Start, three on Grow, ten on Expand; 2, 6 or 15 admins; 10,000 current students on every plan below the custom Plus tier. The API, webhooks and removing Thinkific branding start at Grow ($164 a month on annual billing); SSO and SCORM are Plus only.
The migration that stalls
“We have moved all our courses to a new platform, but finalizing it takes more time than we thought.” Moving the courses is the easy half; wiring access, payments and the first 14 days is where owners get stuck.
First we test whether you should move at all.
If the LMS depth is what your business runs on, Thinkific may be the right place to stay. We answer these before anything moves.
- What is actually hurting: the page builder, the fees, a cap, the two-system seam, or a course business that needs a better funnel rather than a new platform.
- What Thinkific gives you back: users and progress as CSV (good). Course content is rebuilt, with videos re-uploaded from your own copies.
- Which LMS features you use: quizzes, assignments, certificates, cohorts, SCORM. Each one maps to LearnDash or does not; we list it.
- Your real monthly number: the plan, the fee on sales, the branded app if you have it, against hosting, LearnDash and the hours to run it.
- Where your marketing site already lives. If it is WordPress, the move is the courses and the checkout, not the whole business.
- The stay-put answer. If our answer is stay, that is the recommendation, and you have lost nothing.
What comes with you, and what doesn’t.
Comes with you
- Users, as a CSV
- Course progress, as a CSV
- Your own video files
Rebuilt or left behind
- Course content
- Quizzes, certificates and drip
- Cohorts, which become LearnDash groups
If you move: courses into LearnDash, everything on one login.
Nothing is turned off until the new site has taken real money and let real students in. The order below is the one we use on every course-platform migration.
- 1
Export users and progress, inventory the courses
Thinkific’s CSVs for students and progress, your own video files, and a list of every course, chapter, quiz and certificate. The unused courses do not move.
- 2
Rebuild the courses in LearnDash
Same names and order so links in old emails keep making sense. Quizzes, certificates and drip rebuilt; cohorts become LearnDash groups.
- 3
Wire payments and access, then test the chain
Stripe or PayPal into the membership or shop plugin, tags into the CRM, the access rule on every course. A test purchase, a failed card, a cancel, as a student on a phone.
- 4
Import students, re-apply progress, send one email
Users created from the export with their courses attached; completed lessons marked from the progress CSV. One “set your password” email, in batches, with a reply address a human reads.
- 5
Run both for one billing cycle, then close Thinkific
Subscriptions move at renewal so nobody is double-charged. Old Thinkific links redirect. Then the plan, the fee and the add-ons stop.
How owners describe it
“Because Thinkific’s native page builder is limited, we want our front-facing sales pages built on a dedicated, high-performance platform… and seamlessly connected to Thinkific’s checkout and CRM systems.”
“We have moved all our courses to a new platform, but finalizing it takes more time than we thought and it takes time from what we should work with.”
Watch it done
The plain-English version of hosted platform versus your own WordPress LMS: what you rent, what you own, and the questions to ask before you move a single course.
Questions owners ask
Do my students lose their progress?
Thinkific exports users and their course progress as CSVs, which is better than most platforms. Lesson-level completion can be re-applied in LearnDash for students who were mid-course; the course content itself is rebuilt, with videos re-uploaded from your own copies.
I rely on quizzes, certificates and cohorts. Can WordPress do that?
Yes, with LearnDash: quizzes, assignments, certificates, drip, groups for cohorts. Thinkific’s LMS is the deepest in its category and we say so; LearnDash is the WordPress equivalent and it is the one we build on.
My sales pages are already on WordPress. Is that most of the move?
Half of it, and the common starting point: many owners already run the marketing site on WordPress and only the courses on Thinkific. Moving the courses puts checkout, courses, community and email on one login, which is usually the real reason to move.
What happens to Thinkific Payments and my sales tax?
Payments move to your own Stripe or PayPal through a membership or shop plugin; you pay the processor’s fee only. Thinkific’s automated sales tax comes with Thinkific Payments. On WordPress a tax plugin or your accountant takes that over, and we flag it in writing before the move.
What if the answer is to stay on Thinkific?
Then that is what we tell you, in writing: stay, and fix these three things. If the LMS depth is what your business runs on, staying is often right.
