About this Feature
With Thinkific Plus, you will start with one unique Thinkific Environment, where you can create your courses, build and brand your site, and begin to build or import your students onto. This environment is unique and specific to you and your business and not connected to any other Thinkific sites.
On your Plus Plan, you are able to create multiple Thinkific Environments as you need, depending on your current Master Services Agreement (MSA) pricing tier. Environments may be referred to as "URLs" on our older MSA's. These additional sites are completely separate from your original environment, for example, if your main Thinkific environment is "sportstraining.thinkific.com" but you had a client named ACME and Hooli, you could create:
- sportstraining.thinkific.com
- sportstraining-acme.thinkific.com
- sportstraining-hooli.thinkific.com
Each of these environments would be completely independent of each other, which allows your main environment to remain unchanged, and your client's ACME and Hooli to access/brand as they see fit.
Why would I need Multiple Environments?
You may choose to create an Additional Thinkific environment for many different reasons, and it is often dependent on your use case! We’ve listed a few common examples below of why you may need additional sites.
Business 2 Business Selling:
You can have multiple organizations on one Thinkific environment and still provide a unique experience for their students, from having organization-specific groups to duplicating courses. However, your client’s needs may require the full Thinkific experience to be branded for them, this feature becomes very powerful.
By having a Client unique Thinkific Environment, you can:
- Use their domain for the site URL
- Customize the site branding and colours to their brand
- Email white labelling
- Customize the automated notifications for their students
- Offer unique courses for their student's needs.
- And much more!
Looking to learn more about B2B selling on Thinkific? Read our Business to Business (B2B) Selling Guide
Different Use Cases
Are you trying to find the best user experience for different types of students on one environment? Are you wanting to make sure your internal employee onboarding is smooth, while ensuring you can still properly sell to your customers?
You don’t need to sacrifice the experience of either type of user! Creating an additional Thinkific Environment for your different use cases can help take away the challenges of accommodating all of your students.
For example, you could have two different environments for:
- Your first Thinkific environments may be for Internal Employee Training, which would use features like our SSO to add your employees into Thinkific, and then have Private and Hidden Courses
- Your second Thinkific Environment may then be used for Customer Education, and be set up as a Membership site to offer ongoing content to your Customers.
Multiple Languages
In some cases, you may be wanting to offer your courses to students in a specific country and would need to offer your full Student Experience in a different language. You can then have an additional Thinkific Environment created!
For example, your different sites could be named:
- sportstraining.thinkific.com (English)
- sportstraining-fr.thinkific.com (French)
- sportstraining-spa.thinkific.com (Spanish)
Want to know more about setting a Thinkific site in a different language? Read our How do I change the language of my site? Guide here.
Important Considerations
Having multiple Thinkific Environments can be very beneficial to your business, but before investing time and resources, keep the following in mind:
- Do I really need a separate site for what I’m trying to do? Ensuring a full separate environment is right for you is important, as it does add to your Thinkific ecosystem. For example, an extra Thinkific Environment may add to your overhead process, student support, and course creation process!
- Knowing how many URLs you have in your MSA Tier, depending on your current tier, you likely have access to a certain number of URLs, before committing to a new environment make sure you’re ready for a potential upgrade.
- Entire environments cannot be duplicated, only courses can be copied from Thinkific sites
- Consider what access is needed from stakeholders like partners/clients: perhaps Groups Analyst would be more appropriate
- User's logins are site-specific (ie a student on the main site will not have one on the Spanish or French site).
- Consider how you will manage version control and centralization of course material and student data (ie if you have 5 versions of course A, updating it in one site does not update across all)
Not sure what tiers you have? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager
How It Works
Setting up additional Thinkific Environments is very easy! Follow the steps below to have your new environment set up properly:
- Consult with your Customer Success Manager, they will discuss options in more detail and be able to help with resources and strategizing early on.
- Go to Thinkific.com
- Create a new Free Thinkific Account
- Use either a new or the same email address for the Site Owner account
- Send the new Thinkific URL to your Customer Success Manager, along with the email used on the account
- The Customer Success Manager will then go and upgrade the account to Plus for you, and inform you when it is done.
- Congratulations, you have a new Thinkific Environment!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I log in to multiple environments?
The Plus Portal allows our Plus customers to easily manage multiple learning environments by allowing them to quickly switch between the Admin Dashboards of each of their Thinkific Environments. By default, course creators with multiple environments must log in to each site separately, using separate login credentials for each, which can lead to frustration and wasted time — the Plus Portal simplifies this process by allowing you to create authorized links between your sites, and then move quickly between those sites without having to manage multiple URLs and login information.
How do I track all my students across multiple sites?
Since each environment is not connected, you will need to manually add your active student numbers together, to see your total active student count. Not sure how to find the active student number for a specific site? Read the guide on how to do this here