Circle vs Thinkific
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentThinkific compared with Circle
Circle is a community platform with courses attached; Thinkific is a course platform with community attached. Circle at $89 gives unlimited members, twenty spaces, native events, and a far better discussion experience, but takes 2 percent of paid memberships and has weak assessment tooling. If people are paying to talk to each other, Circle. If they are paying to learn something and be certified, Thinkific.
Choose Circle if
Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax.
Choose Thinkific if
Course businesses and training providers who take teaching seriously, need real curriculum tooling with quizzes, assignments, and certificates, want a community attached to those courses under their own domain, and already have an email marketing platform they are happy with.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Circle | Thinkific |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $89 per month (Professional) (14 days trial) | $54 per month (Basic), or $40 per month billed annually (30 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing. | Flat monthly subscription across four published tiers plus a custom priced Plus tier, with limits on communities, spaces, admins, and video bandwidth, and a transaction fee that depends on whether you use Thinkific Payments or your own gateway. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days on Professional and Business | 30 days, full platform access, no sales call |
| Best for | Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax. | Course businesses and training providers who take teaching seriously, need real curriculum tooling with quizzes, assignments, and certificates, want a community attached to those courses under their own domain, and already have an email marketing platform they are happy with. |
| Setup time | A working community in an afternoon. Signing up, creating spaces, connecting a custom domain, and wiring Stripe are all self-serve and take a few hours combined. Getting the content and the onboarding sequence right is the part that takes weeks. | A day for a working school with one course and a community, a few weeks for a polished one. Domain, theme, first course, checkout, and a community with a handful of spaces are all achievable in an afternoon. |
| Learning curve | Moderate for the admin, low for members. The spaces model, permission layers, and paywall rules interact in ways that reward reading the docs before you build, and communities that improvise their structure usually rebuild it once. Members need no instruction. | Low to moderate. The course builder is the most approachable in the category, and the community concepts (communities, spaces, roles) are only three ideas deep. The confusing part is the plan matrix, not the software. |
| Platforms | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app, Branded iOS and Android apps on Circle Plus, Custom domain hosting | Web, iOS and Android via the Thinkific mobile app, Branded iOS and Android apps as a paid add on |
| Compliance | GDPR, Payment processing handled through Stripe | GDPR, PCI DSS via Thinkific Payments and Stripe, SOC 2 reporting available to Plus customers |
| Founded | 2019 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Remote-first US company | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (THNC) |
Strengths and limitations
Circle
Strengths
- The broadest feature set on a published price in this category: discussion, courses, events, live streaming, chat, payments, affiliates, a website builder, and native mobile apps all on the $89 tier.
- Unlimited members on every plan, so growth does not trigger a pricing cliff the way it does on Heartbeat or Bettermode.
- Custom domain and a white-labeled member experience from the entry tier, which is the thing free chat platforms fundamentally cannot offer.
- Native iOS and Android apps with push notifications keep engagement materially higher than a browser-only forum.
Limitations
- No free plan at all, which makes Circle a poor fit for a small free community and a hard sell for anyone testing whether a community is worth running.
- The transaction fee stacks on Stripe and is charged on gross, so a low-margin membership business pays Circle more than the subscription costs and cannot reach the 0.5 percent rate without a sales conversation.
- Branded mobile apps and custom SSO are both locked behind the unpriced Circle Plus tier, so the two things a maturing community most wants next are exactly the two things with no published cost.
- Admin and moderator seat caps of 3 and 10 on Professional are tight for a volunteer-moderated community and force an upgrade for reasons unrelated to features.
Thinkific
Strengths
- The best course tooling among the platforms in this category, with graded quizzes, reviewed assignments, prerequisites, certificates, cohorts, and per student progress reporting.
- A publicly traded company with audited financials, roughly $74M in trailing revenue and 276 employees, which is a materially different risk profile from a venture stage community startup.
- Communities is a real product now: spaces with independent permissions, post approval, read only spaces, a scoped moderator role, pinned posts, live events inside private spaces, and direct messages as of 2026.
- Entry price of $54 a month with unlimited courses, up to 10,000 students, and a custom domain undercuts Kajabi heavily.
Limitations
- Community limits are tight where it hurts: one community and five spaces on Basic, one admin seat, and unlimited only on a custom quoted plan.
- The 5 percent penalty for using your own payment gateway on Basic is punitive, and even Grow charges 1 percent, so payment independence is never free.
- Thinkific's own branding cannot be removed until the $219 Grow plan, which undercuts the white label promise at the price points most small businesses buy.
- No email marketing platform, no funnel builder, and a thin affiliate story, so the real monthly cost includes at least one more vendor.
Pricing compared
Circle
Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing.
- Professional$89
- Business$199
- Circle PlusCustom
For a community that is genuinely a business, Circle is fairly priced and hard to assemble from parts. Courses, events, live streaming, native mobile apps, a custom domain, recurring billing, affiliates, and search over unlimited history at $89 a month would cost more than that in separate tools, and the tools would not share a member identity. For a community that is not yet a business, Circle is expensive in a way the sticker hides: $89 plus 2 percent plus Stripe plus $99 of Email Hub is a real monthly commitment for a group that could sit on a free Discourse instance or a Discord server. The cutoff is roughly whether the community produces revenue. Above that line Circle is good value, below it the fee structure works against you.
Thinkific
Flat monthly subscription across four published tiers plus a custom priced Plus tier, with limits on communities, spaces, admins, and video bandwidth, and a transaction fee that depends on whether you use Thinkific Payments or your own gateway.
- Basic$54
- Start$109
- Grow$219
- Expand$499
- PlusCustom
Thinkific is fair value for a course business and poor value for a community business. At $54 a month the entry tier undercuts Kajabi by more than two thirds and gives you unlimited courses, up to 10,000 students, a custom domain, and a community, which is a lot of platform for the money. The catches are all structural rather than hidden: one community with five spaces, one admin, visible vendor branding until $219, and a 5 percent gateway penalty if you refuse to use Thinkific Payments. Where it genuinely wins is instructional depth. Quizzes, assignments, prerequisites, certificates, cohorts, and per student progress reporting are things Circle and Skool do badly or not at all, and if your product is education rather than access, that is worth paying for. Where it loses is everything Kajabi bundles: no email platform, no funnels, no affiliate engine, and a branded app that costs $199 a month extra.
Editorial verdict on each
Circle
Category LeaderCircle is the safe default for a community that is actually a business. Nothing else on a published price puts discussion, courses, events, live streaming, payments, affiliates, a custom domain, and native mobile apps in one product, and the company behind it is large, profitable, and shipping. Buy it if you are charging members and want the whole membership experience under your own brand without stitching five tools together. Do not buy it for a free community, because there is no free plan and the value proposition collapses without revenue to justify it. And go into the pricing with clear eyes: the honest monthly cost is the $89 plus a percentage of everything you sell plus Email Hub, and the exit cost is a discussion archive that will not move anywhere useful. Those are acceptable terms for a real membership business and bad terms for an experiment.
Read the full Circle profileThinkific
Thinkific is the most credible teaching platform in this category and a competent, deliberately limited community platform. If your members are students rather than an audience, the quizzes, assignments, prerequisites, certificates, cohorts, and progress reporting are worth more than the extra polish Circle brings to discussion, and the $54 entry price is a third of Kajabi's. Being publicly traded with audited numbers is also a real advantage over venture stage rivals whose roadmap depends on the next round. The reservations are specific and worth negotiating around: one community with five spaces and one admin on Basic, vendor branding you cannot remove until $219, a branded app that costs $199 a month extra, no email marketing included, and a 5 percent penalty if you insist on your own Stripe. Buy Thinkific to run an education business with a community attached. Do not buy it to run a community with some lessons in it.
Read the full Thinkific profileCircle profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Thinkific last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.