LMS Advisor vs Thinkific: selling courses or running exams?

Where the money flows

Thinkific’s commerce covers one-time purchases, subscriptions, bundles, group orders and gifting, and its pricing page adds coupons and payment plans. You put a course on sale, build its landing page in Site Builder, attach a community space, and purchase, enrollment and access all happen in one place. For a creator or a training company selling to the public, that is most of the job.

LMS Advisor does not do this natively, and we would rather say so up front. There is no checkout, coupon engine or subscription billing in the product. If you sell, you sell through WooCommerce: our plugin enrolls the buyer and signs them into the LMS with a token, so they never create a second account. That works well for teams who already run a WooCommerce store. For teams who don’t, it is extra setup.

Assessment is the biggest gap

Thinkific’s help center is clear about quizzes: multiple-choice questions with one or several correct answers, a quiz bank that draws a set number of questions per student, and no way to limit retakes yet. For timed, formal exams it points to Brillium, a third-party service you sign up for and pay for separately, and to the SimpleSim app, which Thinkific calls an exam preparation tool rather than an official exam solution. We found no proctoring in the Thinkific documentation we reviewed.

Assessment is what LMS Advisor was built around. Course quizzes support 10 question types and the standalone Test Center supports 13, including coding that runs against test drivers, image hotspots, and recorded audio or video answers. The question bank adds pools, difficulty levels and negative marking. Proctoring is set per exam: webcam snapshots, AI face monitoring, fullscreen lockdown, tab-switch and copy/paste logging, ID photo, device lock, virtual-machine detection and optional microphone clips with consent. Certification candidates get their own portal and one-time-code sign-in, so you never have to sell someone a course just to test them. See the assessments page for the full list.

Standards and sign-in for corporate buyers

Sell to companies and their L&D and IT teams will ask about SCORM and SSO early. On Thinkific, SCORM import is a Plus feature, and Tin Can and AICC content can be hosted with limited reporting. SSO runs over OpenID Connect on Plus, and Thinkific’s help article says SAML is not supported natively, suggesting a miniOrange integration on Plus instead.

LMS Advisor supports SCORM 1.2 and 2004, xAPI with a built-in LRS, cmi5, and LTI 1.3 as a tool provider, alongside SAML 2.0 SSO, SCIM 2.0 provisioning, passkeys and two-factor authentication. When a client’s IT team will only connect through SAML, that row usually settles it.

Community, website and mobile

Thinkific Communities give learners spaces, posts and events, and a course enrollment can grant access to a private space. Site Builder ships responsive themes for your homepage and landing pages. Learners can use the Thinkific Mobile app on iOS and Android, which does not support in-app purchases, and a Branded Mobile App is a paid add-on or comes with select Plus plans.

Our side is thinner here: a discussion forum rather than a community product, a learner portal rather than a website builder, and an installable Progressive Web App rather than store apps. Gamification and automated emails for learners who stall help with completion, but they do not replace a community people join for its own sake.

AI features

Thinkific offers Thinker, an AI teaching assistant that answers from your own content, and an AI quiz generator. LMS Advisor’s AI covers course and lesson generation, rewrite tools, question generation and bank audits, AI rubric grading that an instructor approves, and a branded AI Tutor. The admin picks Anthropic or OpenAI, or switches AI off.

Cost and hosting

Thinkific publishes its prices. On their pricing page (September 2026), Basic is listed at $54 a month and Grow at $219 a month when billed monthly, with lower annual rates, and Plus is custom-priced. It runs as SaaS. LMS Advisor pricing is quote-based and depends on who hosts it, learner numbers and modules. Self-hosting on your own PHP and MySQL server keeps the database, media and proctoring evidence under your control.