What actually sends people looking
People rarely leave Thinkific because the software is bad. The reasons are more specific.
Some want the courses to live on their own domain, inside a site they already run, instead of in a separate platform with its own look. Some have grown tired of a subscription that rises as the school grows, or want to see where each part of the bill comes from. Others want the student list and purchase history in a database they control, so other tools can read it without an export step.
A few leave for the opposite reason: they want more built-in marketing, or a different course player. That is a different search with a different answer, and this page is only partly about it.
The real difference is where it runs
Every hosted alternative to Thinkific is the same deal with a different interface. You rent a place to run your school, and the vendor looks after it.
Learnomy is not that deal. It is a plugin for WordPress, so it runs on your own site. That means you need WordPress hosting, and you or your host keep WordPress, the plugin and your theme up to date. In return, nothing sits between you and your students. Your domain, your design and your database are all yours.
If that sounds like a job you would rather not take on, say so honestly to yourself before you move. A hosted platform is a perfectly good answer, and you may be better off picking a different hosted tool than switching models.
Choosing hosting is now your decision
On a hosted platform the hosting question never comes up. On WordPress it is the first real decision, and it shapes how the academy feels on the busiest day of a launch.
Look for a host that gives you a recent PHP version, daily backups you can restore yourself, a staging copy you can create with one click, and support that understands WordPress rather than only servers. Cheap shared hosting is fine for a small school and a poor fit for one that sells to a few thousand students at once. Ask the host what happens to a site under a traffic spike before you need to know.
Learnomy keeps courses, lessons and enrolments in its own database tables, the REST API pages through results with cursors, and CSV exports stream row by row instead of capping the result. That helps a large catalogue behave, but it does not replace a decent host.
Your domain, your design, your rules
Moving off a hosted platform gives you control over things the platform decided for you. Your courses sit under your own domain, next to your blog and your shop. The theme is yours to choose or build, and the course pages follow it.
Several of those rules are settings in Learnomy rather than code. You can rename the words the academy uses, for example calling students learners or instructors coaches. You can add your own questions to the sign-up form, turn off self sign-up for a members-only school, or make the whole academy private so that nothing is visible until someone logs in. There is an anti-spam question for registration, and it is off by default.
Nine languages ship with the plugin, with partial coverage, so if you teach in another language plan to translate the remaining strings.
What Learnomy covers and what it leaves out
The free plugin covers a lot of the ground a course business needs: courses, quizzes with six question types, certificates with a public verification page, memberships, coupons, instructor commissions and built-in Stripe and PayPal checkout. Pro adds content drip, cohorts, SCORM, xAPI, H5P and AI authoring for teams that need them.
What it does not have is just as important. There is no built-in email marketing, no funnel builder, no website builder, and no course marketplace where strangers discover your course. Those are normal parts of a hosted platform and you would replace them with other WordPress plugins or outside services.
For a side-by-side of the two products, see the two-way Learnomy and Thinkific comparison. This page is for the wider question of what else exists.
What you will need to rebuild
Because nothing is imported, it is worth listing what a Thinkific school contains, so none of it surprises you later. Think of it as four layers.
- Content. Courses, sections, lessons, downloads, videos and quizzes. These are rebuilt in Learnomy by hand, and lesson text can be copied across.
- People. The student list, which you move by bulk enrolment.
- Commerce. Prices, coupons and any subscriptions. Rebuild prices and coupons in Learnomy. Recurring payers need care, covered below.
- Pages. The landing pages and any custom design, which become pages built with your theme or page builder.
Write each layer into a checklist, and tick items off on staging. Give each item an owner and a date, even if the owner is you. A missing layer is the thing most likely to be discovered by a customer rather than by you.
Subscribers and payment plans
Students on a recurring plan are the sensitive part of any move, because a new site cannot take over an existing card on file by itself. Learnomy starts new subscriptions through Stripe or PayPal, and it has no way to import subscriptions from another platform.
The safest route is a gradual one. Keep existing subscribers where they are until their term ends, and send new buyers to the new checkout. When the old subscribers come up for renewal, invite them to subscribe again on the new site, with a short note and a coupon if you like. Cancel nothing until you are sure that each person has somewhere to land.
Check thinkific.com and your payment processor for how your subscriptions are held before you plan the cutover.
What moving from Thinkific involves
There is no automated importer. Learnomy brings in courses from LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS, and Thinkific is not on that list. Here is the route as it really is:
- Export your student list from Thinkific.
- Rebuild your courses in Learnomy. Lesson content is yours to copy across, but the structure is built by hand.
- Bulk enrol students into each course by pasting emails or uploading a CSV. Accounts are created for anyone who does not have one.
- For students who already finished, set the course to Manual Completion and mark them complete, which issues their certificate.
- For hundreds of courses or a large student base, script it through the REST API or the incoming enrolment webhook, or treat it as a custom migration.
A small catalogue is an afternoon or two. A large one is a project, and it is cheaper to plan it than to discover it halfway.
What it costs to run each side
A Thinkific school is one recurring line. A WordPress academy is several smaller ones, and the sum is what you compare. Count hosting, a domain you probably already own, a theme or page builder if you want one, an email tool, and Pro if you need drip, cohorts or SCORM.
Learnomy Free has no licence cost. Pro is annual or a one-time lifetime purchase, and the free plugin keeps running underneath if you stop paying. For Thinkific, take the current plan prices from thinkific.com on the day you decide, since they change.
Add your own time as a line item. A school that earns well can afford a developer for a day each quarter, and a small one may not. That honest sum is what tells you which side is cheaper.
Data, privacy and ownership
The student list, purchase history and progress of a WordPress academy live in your database. That makes you the controller of the data in the legal sense, so keep your privacy policy accurate, and be ready for export and erase requests.
Learnomy registers with the standard WordPress privacy tools. An export includes the learner’s records, and an erase request removes learner data and deletes certificates. Financial and audit rows are kept without a link to the person. For reporting, you can download students, transactions and subscriptions as CSV files at any time.
On a hosted platform, much of this is handled for you under the vendor’s terms. Read those terms, and read your own obligations, before you decide who should hold the data.
What a normal week looks like
For the person running the school, a normal week is a handful of short jobs. You scan new enrolments and any payment problems, grade essays and short-answer quizzes, and read the questions in the instructor inbox. A refund is a click in the transactions list, and a student whose card fails gets a grace period you can set.
Once a month you export the student list or the transactions as a CSV, and look at completion and revenue reports. Pro adds a weighted gradebook with its own export, and cohorts for classes that start and end on set dates, with a roster and reminders.
The only chore a hosted platform spared you is upkeep. Update the plugin on staging, then on production, and confirm that the backup actually ran.
A first thirty days that stays manageable
Move one course, not the school. Choose the course with the cleanest structure and the fewest students, so a mistake is cheap.
Week one, build it and buy it with the test gateway. Week two, enrol a small group of friendly students and ask for blunt feedback. Week three, fix what they found and add certificates. Week four, move the remaining students and open sales on the new site.
After that, the rest of the catalogue is repetition, and each course takes less time than the one before. Keep notes of the steps that worked, since you will use them again.
If the pilot course goes badly, that is a good result too. You learned it cheaply, on one course and a few friendly students, and you can stay on Thinkific without having moved anything that matters. Run the pilot before you cancel, and treat the cancellation as the last step, never the first.
What Learnomy does not do for you
Learnomy has no built-in email marketing, funnels or website builder, and no course marketplace. It has no built-in live video, so a live session lesson holds a join link and a schedule for a meeting tool you run yourself. There is no built-in single sign-on and no native mobile app, although a REST API with token sign-in lets a developer build one, and an installable web app mode is available in beta.
There is also no importer for Thinkific, as covered above. If a feature on this list is the reason you chose Thinkific, say so, and consider staying.
If you stay hosted
If you read this and decided a hosted platform is right, choose with a short list of questions, not a feature grid. What will the platform keep from every sale, and what is the processor’s fee on top? What does the student list export contain? Can you use your own domain? What happens to your pages if you downgrade?
Write the answers down from each vendor’s own site, on the day you check, because they change. Keep the page you copied them from, so you can show your reasoning to a partner or an accountant later. Our comparison with hosted platforms explains the trade in more depth, and the pages for Teachable and Kajabi cover two more of them.
Where this leaves the decision
If you want to stay hosted, choose among the hosted platforms by what you sell and how much marketing you want built in. If you want to own the site, the student data and the checkout, a WordPress LMS is the fit, and Learnomy is a free one to try.
If Thinkific works for you today and the only pull is curiosity, leave it alone. Install the free plugin on a staging site, build one real course, and decide from that.