Kartra vs Thinkific 2026: marketing platform or course platform?

Kartra and Thinkific both let you sell an online course, which is why they end up on the same shortlist. They get there from opposite directions. Thinkific is a course platform that added selling and marketing tools around the course. Kartra is a marketing platform that added memberships to its funnels, email and checkout. This compares them plan by plan, works out what the fees do to your bill, and says plainly who each one is for.

The short answer

If you teach for a living and the course itself is what you sell, Thinkific is the better fit. Quizzes, assignments, certificates, live lessons, communities and drip schedules are all part of the product, and every plan includes unlimited courses. It also has email automation and a checkout with order bumps, which is enough marketing for many course businesses.

If the course is one product inside a bigger marketing machine, Kartra is the better fit. Its funnels, tag-based email and SMS automation, checkout, affiliate program and helpdesk all share one contact record, so a page visit or a purchase can drive everything that happens next. The course area is solid, but it is not where Kartra puts most of its effort.

What each platform is built for

Thinkific calls itself a learning platform, and its plans read that way. They are organised around courses, communities, digital downloads, coaching and memberships, with selling tools added on top: a native checkout, order bumps, coupons, abandoned cart emails and email automation. You can build a whole site on Thinkific, or connect it to a website you already have and use it only for the learning side.

Kartra is built around the customer journey. One account covers landing pages and funnels, email and SMS, checkout and payments, membership sites, video hosting, webinars, calendars, a helpdesk and an affiliate program. The value is that every tool shares one contact record, so a purchase can tag a contact, start a sequence, unlock a course and credit an affiliate in one step.

One is a school that learned to sell. The other is a sales machine that learned to teach.

That difference explains most of the comparison below. Thinkific wins where the student experience matters. Kartra wins where the marketing does.

Pricing compared

Both platforms have four tiers, and the prices are closer than most people expect. The difference is in how each one grows. Kartra prices by contacts, so every lead on your list counts towards the limit. Thinkific allows up to 10,000 current students on every self-serve plan and does not price by email list size.

Thinkific is slightly cheaper at every matching tier, and its annual discount is bigger: Thinkific says annual billing saves 25%, while Kartra quotes savings of up to 22%. Kartra also has custom Enterprise pricing. Thinkific offers a branded mobile app as an add-on at $199 a month.

The bigger difference is the contact limit. A course creator with 8,000 email subscribers and 300 paying students needs Kartra Growth at $229 a month, because Kartra counts every lead. On Thinkific the same business could stay on Basic or Start, because the limit counts current students, not subscribers.

Transaction and processing fees

Both platforms have one plan that can take a cut of your sales, and both can be avoided.

On Kartra, the Essentials plan charges 5% of every sale and subscription rebill, invoiced monthly, even if you pay for the plan annually. Starter and above charge no Kartra fee. You still pay your payment processor its normal rate on every plan.

On Thinkific, there is no platform fee when you use Thinkific Payments, its built-in processor, which Thinkific prices in line with Stripe from 2.9%. If you connect Stripe or PayPal instead, Thinkific's help centre lists a third-party gateway fee of 5% on Basic, 2% on Start and 1% on Grow, applied to creators in the US, Canada, the UK and the EU, on the first $1 million of sales each year.

The lesson is the same on both sides. Kartra Essentials is a place to build, not to sell, and on Thinkific the processor you choose matters as much as the plan. Our Kartra review covers the Essentials fee rules in full, including how refunds are credited.

The cost of the features you actually want

The cheapest plan is rarely the one you end up on. This is the cheapest plan on each side for the features course creators ask about most.

For a course-first business, Thinkific gets you the teaching tools for less. For a marketing-first business, Kartra includes funnels, SMS, payment plans and a helpdesk that Thinkific either puts on a higher plan or does not offer.

Course building and the student experience

This is Thinkific's home ground. Its drag and drop course builder handles video lessons, quizzes, in-course discussions and drip schedules on every plan. Start adds completion certificates, assignments, course compliance tools that stop students skipping ahead, private and hidden courses, and live lessons through Zoom. Grow adds an exam environment through Thinkific's Brillium integration. If your students need structure, proof of completion or graded work, Thinkific has more of it.

Kartra delivers courses through membership portals. You can build multiple access levels and grant or remove access automatically when someone buys, cancels or picks up a tag. Essentials allows one membership or course, and Starter removes the limit. Kartra's pricing page does not list completion certificates, and its pages disagree on whether surveys and quizzes start on Starter or Growth, so check the current plan details if assessments matter to you.

Email, funnels and automation

This is where Kartra pulls ahead. Its email and SMS sit in the same system as your pages, checkouts and memberships, and automations can react to a page visit, a purchase, a video watched, a form submitted or a tag applied. Kartra includes 100 pre-built campaigns with pages, emails and automations already wired together, a funnel mapper to plan the journey, and advanced automations from Growth.

Thinkific lists email automation with ready-made templates and pre-built sequences on every plan, plus landing pages, a site builder, abandoned cart emails and analytics integrations. That covers welcome sequences and course launches well. It does not list a visual funnel builder, SMS or tag-based automation across the whole business, and many Thinkific users connect a dedicated email platform through its app store as their marketing grows.

Checkout and selling

Both platforms include a checkout with order bumps and coupons. Kartra's checkout connects to Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Square and Authorize.Net, sells one-off products, subscriptions and payment plans, and supports upsells. Its affiliate program, which starts on Growth, credits partners automatically from the same checkout.

Thinkific's checkout, which it calls TCommerce, runs on Thinkific Payments and includes order bumps, gifting, coupons and abandoned cart emails on every plan, and TCommerce adds smart card retries for failed payments. Payment plans, subscriptions, memberships, bundles and after-purchase upsells start on Start. PayPal as a payment option starts on Grow, and group orders for selling seats to companies also start on Grow.

Communities, coaching and memberships

Thinkific includes a community on every plan, with spaces, threaded replies, member profiles and live events, and Grow raises that to three communities. Basic allows five coaching or webinar products, and Start removes the limit and adds bookable calendars and Zoom sessions. Paid memberships, where students pay monthly for a course library or community, start on Start.

Kartra does not list a standalone community feature. It covers the business side of coaching instead: booking calendars from Starter, webinars, a helpdesk with support tickets from Growth, and live chat on Professional. Membership portals handle recurring access, and the checkout handles the subscription billing.

Ease of use

Thinkific is easier to learn. The admin is organised around products and students, the course builder is straightforward, and Thinkific adds AI help such as a course outline generator. Most creators can publish a first course quickly, and the 30 day trial gives plenty of room to do it.

Kartra takes longer because there is far more of it. Understanding how tags, lists, products, memberships and sequences connect is the real work, and the first funnel takes much longer than the fifth. The pre-built campaigns help, but expect to spend a good part of the trial learning how Kartra thinks.

Can you use Kartra and Thinkific together?

Yes, and the split is logical: Kartra for pages, funnels and email, Thinkific for course delivery. The two connect through Zapier rather than a native link. Thinkific offers Zapier triggers on every plan and Zapier actions from Grow, and Kartra's Zapier access needs API access, which starts on Growth and has to be requested.

That makes the pairing expensive, at $229 for Kartra Growth plus at least $54 for Thinkific, and it splits customer data between two systems. It makes sense for an established business that already relies on Kartra's marketing and wants a better learning experience. For most creators, picking one is simpler and cheaper.

Which should you choose?

If none of those fits cleanly, ask one question: is your hardest problem teaching students or finding them? If it is teaching, take Thinkific. If it is finding and converting them, take Kartra.

Common questions