Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi and the Australian alternatives

The American course platforms will happily sell you a dream in US dollars and a checkout that thinks GST is a personality setting. Thinkific, Teachable and Kajabi are not scams. They are competent products built for a market that does not have TAFE, does not say “invoice” the way we say it, and does not quietly ask where the student data sits. Australian sole traders buy them anyway, then spend a Saturday reconstructing a tax invoice that a bookkeeper in Ballarat will accept.

This is a map for the creators hub, not a ranking you can auction. Rankings go stale the week a plan is renamed. A map still works when the homepage has a new gradient. Learners have a companion map on the platforms hub. This one is for people who have to run the classroom.

If you are still arguing with yourself about the price of the course, fix that first in pricing for the Australian market. A beautiful LMS will not save a $2,000 product that is a $197 job.

What the three American names actually are

Thinkific is the one many Australian practitioners land on first. Courses, drip, basic quizzes, a checkout, a site that looks like a site. It is not trying to be your entire company. That is a compliment. The admin is learnable on a Sunday. The design is fine if you do not chase every theme.

Teachable sits in the same band and has, over the years, been the one with the more opinionated checkout and the more American sales energy. People move between Teachable and Thinkific the way they move between banks: after one bad afternoon, not after a strategy retreat. Check the current fee on paid plans versus the “we take a cut of sales” offer. A cut looks friendly until you have a good month.

Kajabi is the suite: courses, email, landing pages, pipelines, the lot. It is priced like a small staff member. If you already have a list, a course, and a need to send emails that are not a separate Mailchimp tab, it can be rational. If you have one workshop and a hope, it is a very expensive cupboard. Australian buyers of your course will never know you paid for Kajabi. They will know if the lessons load.

All three will take a credit card. All three can look professional. All three will show you help articles written for people whose tax authority is not the ATO.

There are cousins — Podia, LearnWorlds, Circle with courses bolted on, the LMS hiding inside a community tool. The rule does not change. If the marketing site cannot tell you, in one screen, what you will pay in AUD, what the student pays in AUD, and who is the merchant of record, you are not buying a platform. You are buying a weekend of support emails.

AUD, Stripe and the GST surprise

Show Australian dollars. This should not be a paragraph. It is a paragraph because creators still launch with a US$ checkout and a “sorry, conversion!” in the confirmation email.

Connect Stripe Australia if the platform allows it and you are the merchant. Then the money lands in an Australian bank, the student sees a familiar card statement, and you have a prayer of a clean invoice. Some platforms insist on being the merchant of record. That can be simpler for a first sale and worse for a student who wants your ABN on a tax invoice this week. Ask, in writing, who the student is contracting with.

GST is not a plugin you sprinkle. If you are registered, the price the human sees should be inclusive, and the invoice should split the GST out the way an Australian invoice does. If the platform’s tax engine is built for US sales tax and European VAT, test a real purchase from an Australian card. Do not trust the demo. The Australian Consumer Law piece is about refunds and claims. Checkout is where those obligations start being real, because a messy receipt is the first document in a complaint.

Platform subscription prices move. Treat any dollar figure you saw on a comparison blog in 2023 as folklore. Convert the current US plan at a slightly unkind exchange rate, add GST if you will claim the subscription, add transaction fees, add the cost of the extra “remove branding” tier. That last one is not vanity. A “Powered by” footer on a $2,000 government-facing course is a small, avoidable embarrassment.

Refunds have to be possible in the same system you charged. A platform that makes refunds a ticket to a US helpdesk on a California Friday is a platform you will meet again at 4pm on a Melbourne Thursday when a student wants out.

Moodle and WordPress are not failed startups

Before the American suites arrived, Australian training already had classrooms.

Moodle is how a large slice of universities, TAFEs and public-sector agencies still think. It is ugly until it is not, powerful until you drown, and cheap until you pay someone to keep it patched. For a solo teacher with one commercial course, Moodle is usually too much hospital for a paper cut. For a small RTO that already lives there, adding a paid short course inside a known LMS can be wiser than opening a Kajabi tab your compliance person has never seen.

Hosted Moodle from an Australian partner costs money and buys you a phone number in this timezone. Self-hosting Moodle because it is “free” is how a director of a five-person training shop becomes an unpaid sysadmin. Be honest about which person on the team is that sysadmin. If the answer is “nobody”, it is not free.

WordPress plus LearnDash, Tutor LMS, Lifter or a similar plugin is the other local habit. You already have a site. You already have a theme that almost works. You can take payments through Stripe. You can, in theory, own the stack. You can also spend the build budget for the course on plugin conflicts and a checkout that fails on Safari.

WordPress is a good choice when someone on the team already maintains WordPress without drama, and when you need the course to live on your domain next to the consulting offer. It is a bad choice when the course is the first time you have logged into a dashboard and you believe YouTube will carry you. The hours you spend fighting a cart are hours you are not marking the artefact.

Neither Moodle nor WordPress will write your emails for you. Kajabi’s pitch is that it will. If email is the business, price that labour separately. Do not let a suite become the reason you never send the week-three nudge.

Local LMS, data residency and the buyer who asks

Government, health, education and some corporates will ask where the videos and the student records live. They will not always ask politely. They will sometimes put it in a tender that a Thinkific homepage cannot answer.

Data residency is not a vibe. It is which country the disks are in, who can be compelled to hand them over, and what happens to a recording of a nurse discussing a real ward. American platforms typically store in the United States or in a region you can pick if you are on a plan that admits regions exist. Some will talk about Australian CDNs for the video and US databases for the rest. Read that sentence again.

If your students are ordinary consumers buying a $197 communication course, a US host is the market default and not, by itself, a scandal. If your students are public servants, patients-adjacent, or children, you need a written answer. An Australian-hosted LMS — Moodle, a local product, or a vendor who will sign the sentence — is how those deals proceed.

“Local LMS” in this country is a mixed bag: Moodle partners, smaller Australian platforms, the LMS inside a larger HR system, the unglamorous tools councils already log into. They rarely have a Kajabi-grade landing page. They often have a procurement form. If you sell to organisations more than to Instagram, demo what the buyer’s IT person already understands.

Privacy policies written only for California are a tell. So is a support chat that cannot say whether backups leave the country. You do not need to become a privacy lawyer. You need to not shrug when a hospital asks.

This is not legal advice. It is the observation that “we use a reputable US platform” is an answer for a barbecue, not for a contract.

What a solo teacher actually needs

Most people reading this need:

• A place to put lessons in order, with a progress state that is not a lie.
• A checkout in AUD that produces an invoice a sole trader can file.
• An email the student actually receives, including the week they disappear.
• Quizzes or assignment upload, not both on day one unless you will mark.
• A way to refund without a diplomatic incident.
• Captions on the video, not a promise to “add later”.

They do not need, on day one: an affiliate portal, a mobile app, a drip of twenty-seven bonus lessons, a community they will not moderate, or a sales pipeline with stages named after animals.

Pick the smallest platform that does the first list. If that is Thinkific or Teachable, good. If that is a WordPress plugin you already understand, good. If that is Kajabi because you are genuinely replacing three tools, do the arithmetic twice. If that is Moodle because your buyers live in Moodle, accept the aesthetics.

Migration is the cost nobody puts on the sales page of the platform. Export the videos and the student list as if you will leave. You will, one day. The creators who cannot leave are the ones who built the course out of the platform’s unique blocks.

A small RTO should ask a different first question: does this sit beside our student-management system without creating a second legal record of the same person? Two databases is how someone is enrolled, refunded, and still receiving “come back” emails in July.

A short working checklist

Before you pay the first month:

• Current plan price converted to AUD at an unkind rate, plus transaction fees, plus the unbranded tier if you need it.
• A test purchase from an Australian card that produces a GST-sensible invoice, or a written reason why not.
• A written answer to “who is the merchant?” and “where does the student data live?”
• A refund you have actually clicked, once, on a dummy sale.
• A plan for captions, assignments and the week-three email that does not depend on a feature you have not opened.
• An export path for video and users.
• A comparison with Moodle or WordPress that is about your team, not a Twitter argument.

If the demo is mostly funnels, you are being sold a marketing suite. If the demo is mostly the student view on a phone, you are being sold a classroom. Buy the classroom first. The creators desk will still be here when you want to argue about themes. Themes do not finish courses. Checkouts that do not humiliate an Australian buyer are a start.