They existed even before 2019, B.C. (where B.C. stands for Before COVID), Online Course Platforms were already a thing. Even then, they were made for the same purpose, to create and sell online courses.

Back then, most courses were much more focused on niched things like leadership seminars, wholesomeness, and self-help classes. There were also classes and courses that covered normal topics.

These classes were designed to bring education to the most convenient and comfortable places.

People who are housebound for multiple reasons (e.g., childcare or health issues) can still learn and study even if they cannot go out. Due to its flexibility, people who are unable to attend school regularly due to scheduling conflicts or duties could still complete courses.

Everything else had to be shut down when the pandemic struck. However, people still needed to learn, and online course platforms and other eLearning platforms made it possible for a lot to continue their studies.

In the early times of the pandemic, the industry saw a 221% increase in new course creators on one Course Platform. This growth is probably shared throughout multiple platforms online.

Everybody from Entrepreneurs and solopreneurs to human resource professionals and proper educational institutions has used a course platform or two during the pandemic.

These platforms can also be used to make extra profits, as the pandemic showed. They say, “knowledge is wealth.” Online course platforms gave that maxim legs and provided people with an instrument to turn knowledge into wealth.

Nowadays, there are countless online courses people can partake in. From the usual life coaching stuff about making your life better to tutorial classes of the usual academic subjects like Algebra. Even to courses about making your courses more profitable.

Online courses are all the rage. The next question is how you plan to share the treasure you find in your head with the world.

For those of you who prefer a more visual experience, here is a video review from Ross Herosian on his YouTube channel Tricycle Creative. You can still read our article below to get a complete overview of Thinkific. It also compares it with some other competitors.

Thinkific: You’re Go-To Online Course Business Platform Thinkific vs Wishlist

The Thinkific Overview

Thinkific is one the most popular options for selling, hosting and building your courses.

One of the main reasons why Thinkific stands out is that you know they are doing this in a place of passion. It is clear that they are more concerned with providing the best learning experience possible to creators as well as their audience. They also understand that making money is important to maintain the business.

How could you not? It is one of few online courses platforms that offers a free full-service service. Yes, Thinkific has a free service that is as good as their paid lowest-tiered one.

This makes the platform perfect for newcomers as they get to experience what it’s like to build content and courses, as well as the overall flow and environment of the industry. Using the free plan allows users to glimpse what they are about to partake in without any investment.

This free plan has one limitation. You can only create one course. I find that this is sufficient.

Thinkific does not take any transaction fees when a user sells on the platform. All the profits go to the content owner.

Thinkific even makes sure that all profits are directly available upon being sold. This means course creators and content producers can immediately use their earnings without needing to wait for a quote, or reach a certain threshold before they can touch the money.

This is a testament to how Thinkfiic views its customers.

Useful Features

Let me start by saying that almost all online courses platforms have the same features. The course builder is first, followed by the website builder to create your courses and finally the marketing features.

They are all the same except for how they work and some other unique features. As such, we will be focusing on these aspects of Thinkific’s features.

Thinkific’s main focus is their ability to create course curriculum. The creation part of Thinkific’s features is the most important. They make sure that online courses are as engaging as possible.

Thinkific’s user interface is very easy to get into. It is intuitive and logical. It is easy to navigate. You can access all other features via a sidebar menu. They are properly classified to where they are, except for occasional hiccups. Thinkific vs Wishlist

This interface is perfect for users who enjoy performing analytics and monitoring performance. Everything is neatly organized and placed on the dashboard.

From the dashboard, you can see how well you are doing in revenue, student accounts and sign-ups, student course enrollments, and much more.

We can make the interface look a bit more appealing if we have to.

Thinkific is primarily focused on course creation, as mentioned previously. The platform makes course creation easy. Even in the free plan, Thinkific allows you to try everything the course creator can do.

This course builder also allows you to include a multitude of media types. These include content, quizzes, surveys, assignments, pdfs, and student discussion areas to allow peer-to-peer interaction.

Other highlights include scheduling of course content as well as some automation in terms of drip-feeding content.

As for the Marketing features of Thinkific, I’m afraid that is where the platforms fall pretty flat. Don’t get me wrong. It contains everything you need to market and promote your courses.

But that’s just about it. Thinkific’s market features compare poorly to its competitors. The most glaring aspect is that it doesn’t have a built-in sales funnel builder. Overall, checkout is quite clunky.

You can’t do much about it because it is so limited in customization.

Even email marketing features lag behind the competitor. Most of it is quite basic, and at most, you can notify your students of new courses or products, as well as send them their course progress and notify them about their course progress as well as updates.

However, not everything is bad, as Thinkific can integrate multiple third-party applications. Rather than band-aids, you can consider these third-party apps as bandages to fix some of Thinkific’s deficiencies in the marketing department.

For email marketing alone, Thinkific directly integrates five of the most popular email marketing providers, including ConvertKit, Active Campaign, Aweber, Drip, and MailChimp.

It makes sense considering the platform’s repeated promises to focus on course creation. It would be smarter to invest all resources in ensuring that they get the course creation part right, and then to hire third-party apps for the marketing part.

Thinkific Price

While I have already mentioned Thinkific’s Free Plan and how great it is, that plan is still limited and is a far cry from what Thinkific’s paid plans are. It’s not like the rest of the competition.

Thinkific is a lower-cost option that allows you to create unlimited courses and enroll unlimited students. This is in keeping with their mission to focus on education. Thinkific vs Wishlist

As such, if you want to use a more affordable plan and have many content ideas you think will sell, Thinkific should be one of the best matches for you.

Thinkific offers a more complex and customized plan, Thinkific plus. Thinkific Plus takes the best of Thinkfiic, makes it powerful, scalable and simple-to-use, and then adds more.

It still dedicates itself to teaching, lecturing, and supporting students.

You will need to contact the sales team of Thinkific Plus to request this upgrade. They will help you to get the best out of your platform. Lastly, you will also discuss with them the total cost of this upgrade.

Every Thinkific Plus plan has its own unique cost, so different Plus plans may have slightly different prices. One this is sure, though. Thinkific Plus will give you the features of the most expensive plan as well as these additional features:

• Unlimitted Products
• Unlimited Administrators
• 3+ Separate Thinkific sites
• Service Level Agreement 99.9%
• Dedicate Customer Success Team
• Check out multiple seats or a tiered pricing option
• Email White-labeling
• Only one sign on
• Bulk Selling App
• Enterprise API Access

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Thinkific Pros and Cons

Pros

• Thinkific’s free package is permanently free. This isn’t a glorified trial. You can only take as many courses as you like.

• Thinkific doesn’t charge transaction fees for any sale. Content creators own all earnings. These funds can be claimed and used by creators as soon as they are received in their accounts.

• Thinkific is flexible when it comes to payment options. They offer different payment options for different types and types of students.

• Thinkific’s premium plans remove the restriction on the number of courses. In fact, users can create an unlimited number of courses and enroll an unlimited number of students in these courses.

• Thinkific’s interface is one of the most intuitive. With most options logically placed and easily located. Users just starting can easily understand how things work in this interface.

• Speaking of easily getting the hang of, Thinkfic’s course builder is similarly easy to use. You can also choose from many course materials to make your course more engaging and exciting.

• In the name of engagement, Thinkific also gives you the ability to put incentives such as leaderboards, awards, and scores to motivate your students.

Cons

• Not everything in Thinkific’s tools are user friendly. You may need to take some time and read guides to learn how to use the tools.

• It is difficult to recommend Thinkifiic for those who are more interested in promoting the platform’s marketing capabilities. You will need third-party integrations to get a better experience.

• Although Thinkific has one of the most intuitive user interfaces in the industry, it can sometimes look dated and the experience can sometimes be more confusing than you expected.

• The platform lacks many customization options. It is possible to find websites similar to yours. Thinkific vs Wishlist

The Thinkific Summary

Thinkific is one the most popular online courses platforms on the market. I would easily recommend it to beginners and those looking for a more course-focused platform. Despite its limitations, it still competes with other more “advanced and feature-rich” platforms.

My opinion is that its greatest strength would be its commitment to providing the best course experience possible and a free plan. As for its weakness, Thinkfiic has already provided some kind of solution to it. Any problems with the platform can be fixed by integrating third-party services.

If you’re looking for the best online course creation software that builds courses from scratch. You can never go wrong with Thinkific.

Thinkific Versus Kajabi

Kajabi Overview

Kajabi is a widely used platform for running an online course business. Its main focus is on productivity and sales. It offers tools that simplify your operations.

Some of Kajabi’s highlights include automations, pipelines, email marketing, and a mobile app.

The platform allows you to sell a variety of products. Aside from courses, you can sell coaching, memberships, communities, podcasts, and other digital content.

Kajabi has many marketing features. It’s no surprise that they have sales funnels, email marketing, and automations. These features give the Kajabi platform users an easier time selling their products.

Kajabi is a rare product that can be described as an “all-in-one” platform. It’s a course-creation platform that offers more than just decent marketing features. It even has automation features that could help you focus more on marketing or creating than the menial tasks.

That said, not everything is good in Kajabi land. For starters, it has one of the more expensive platforms available in the market. Their lowest plan starts at $149 per month. These plans are not unlimited. In the case of the lowest plan, you can only sell 3 products.

Aside from that, Kajabi is not as feature-rich, especially in the gamification and community engagement department. These issues might require third-party integrations.

Kajabi Features

Kajabi claims to be one of the best platforms. Even more, they have one of the most expensive courses in the market. As such, it is only to be expected that the audience will have high expectations of the product. Thinkific vs Wishlist

So let’s take a look at how good Kajabi features are starting from the interface.

Kajabi’s interface looks very normal at first glance. It’s minimalist, clean, and modern. Most of the available features can be accessed through 3 to 4 clicks. The page also includes a search assistant that allows you to quickly locate the tools and features within the application.

Kajabi’s pages also load faster. It provides for a smoother experience and does not get in the way of your work.

Kajabi offers a variety of course creation options. You can create mini-courses, online or drip courses, as well as creating your own. These types can be customized to suit your specific needs. (i.e. For long courses with long content, short courses for product launches.

For easier building experience, Kajabi provides blueprints which are akin to templates. These “skeletons” can be used as templates, so you don’t have to worry about adding content.

These courses could be properly structured too into categories, subcategories and posts. It would be easy to organize your content in a neat and organized manner. They can be arranged according to their content and types. You can have text and slideshows in one place, and audio and video in another.

As for storage, Kajabi allows for cloud uploading from Dropbox and Google Drive so there is little to worry about.

Kajabi is a strong and comprehensive marketing tool.

Of course, it has the usual stuff of providing coupons in a flexible manner, which as we have established, is an old, tried and tested marketing strategy.

If you want to market through email, Kajabi has a powerful email marketing solution that is already built in the platform which has plenty of features in and of itself. You can even have email templates ready for the different functions you want it to.

Their pipelines are another conversion tool that they have. They can help you convert more customers to increase sales. These are easy to use, and the platform even provides templates that customers can easily access.

Kajabi offers a dedicated affiliate program to users who have a higher plan. It is a feature that makes the process overly easy and simple. It also organizes affiliate links as well as affiliates into its own category which it makes easier to find and track down.

I would say that the biggest problem for Kajabi is its lack of integrated payment solution. Instead, users will need to rely on integration from other payment gateways like Stripe, Paypal and BitPay.

This is entirely disappointing given how robus their marketing tools are as well as how good their checkout is at doing things like upsells, bump offers, and downsells.

Overall, while its not perfect, Kajabi offers a lot of features that are both geared towards marketing as well as course creation. As such, it is easy to see that these features are good for almost everybody who are serious about making an online business.

Potential users must be prepared to pay a high price for these tools.

Kajabi price

It is undeniable that Kajabi is among the most expensive service when it comes to the course creation market. The cheapest plan is $149 per month, and it doesn’t include unlimited courses. Thinkific vs Wishlist

However, if you think that Kajabi’s steep price as well as its more advanced features like automation is something you really need, then of course, it is the customer’s choice at the end of the day.

Kajabi Pros & Cons

Pros

• Kajabi, as its name suggests, is an all-in-one content creation and marketing tool. You can create courses using various tools, such as a drip or mini-course. Then, you can combine them with marketing automations to make sure they sell.

• Kajabi provides blueprints and templates to help you get started on your project.

• Kajabi lets you sell digital products such as coaching, webinars and communities. This is also a great place to do this.

• Kajabi also has a built-in assessment function that allows you to grade and observe your students’ performance. This feature is especially useful when used in conjunction with drip courses. Drip courses allow you to offer courses that are only accessible when the correct grades have been achieved.

• Kajabi’s accessibility is pretty good thanks to its mobile app, which students can use to access classes and lessons whenever and wherever they are. You can even set up notifications to receive alerts.

• Kajabi has a membership option that allows users create and sell membership options for their customers. This feature can be used by users to offer additional and exclusive content.

• Kajabi’s automation feature can automate the purchase of offers, post-completion of courses or memberships, assessment completion, as well as other tasks. To be more precise, users can use conditional filters.

• Kajabi’s marketing strategy is one of the most powerful among all the course-building and content platforms currently available.

• Kajabi’s Email marketing is one of the best in the business. It includes various email templates that can be used in different situations. Kajabi has the ability to automate email sequences using triggers or actions. Thinkific vs Wishlist

• Kajabi’s pipeline feature makes it possible to have various OVO funnel templates. The pipeline features automate the selling of the products and “funneling” your customers to where you want for better conversion rates.

Cons

• Kajabi’s price point is nothing to laugh at. It starts at $149 per month and does not even offer unlimited course creation. It only offers 3 products as well as 3 pipelines

• Kajabi doesn’t offer certificate of completion for courses, which some users would like to have as proof that they took the class.

• Kajabi has no page templates for designing landing pages, thank you pages, checkout pages, forms, and other pages. This means that users will have to create all pages from scratch using the page builder. It will be difficult for non-tech users and new users.

• Kajabi does not offer a guaranteed badge on the checkout page. Guarantee badges are a good tool for increasing conversions. Buyers are assured of the product’s quality by obtaining a guarantee.

• Kajabi has no local payment gateway. You must rely on Stripe and Paypal integrations to take payment from orders.

• Despite having some advanced features, there are still some features that Kajabi lacks, especially in the community department. There are no gamification or community engagement features.

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Kajabi Summary

Kajabi is undoubtedly a giant platform for course creation and marketing. They have the most advanced tools for marketing alone.

They provide the best marketing experience. Their pipeline and automation features can be the envy of other platforms and something users would want to have if they want the best rate of conversions.

Kajabi has its faults, however. For one, it lacks features that help you connect with your students and customers. These features allow you to create a great community. Thinkific vs Wishlist

Kajabi is also pretty expensive. People might find it difficult to justify buying a plan which can only host 3 products when there are cheaper alternatives that offer unlimited products.

Overall, Kajabi is a good creation platform with advanced marketing features. If you’re looking for a platform to market your products, Kajabi is the right choice. It might be a bit expensive, but Kajabi’s features can be worth it.

Podia Versus Thinkific

Podia Overview

Podia is another popular digital content-selling platform. It is also an all-in-one platform that has powerful marketing features. Online courses, coaching, webinars and community are just a few of the many products that you can sell through this platform.

Furthermore, Podia is one of the cheaper digital content-selling platforms in the market. In fact, it might be among the lowest prices. It does take a portion of your profit when you sell. This might be their way to offset the high price of its powerful features.

Podia is an excellent platform and tool, especially for business-oriented people like marketers and promoters.

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Podia Features

Podia offers a lot of features.

Podia’s interface is clean and minimalistic. The interface is easy to use and allows you to access all other features in just 3 clicks. It is so easy that almost no learning curve is required to use Podia’s interface.

This makes it very user-friendly. Accessing or reaching the information you desire or need is easy with no additional steps or terms. In fact, almost all of Podia’s functions can be accessed straight from the dashboard.

Podia allows you to upload files that will be used as building blocks for your lessons. A course can contain text, embeds and quizzes as well as coaching and files. With some imagination, you can create interesting lessons with the platform that is given to you.

That said, This course creator can be lacking in some parts. Podia supports only a few lesson types, which is a major difference to other platforms. Furthermore, it does not have a proper assessment feature to help you monitor student performance. Thinkific vs Wishlist

It also supports multiple platforms thanks to its powerful embed tool. Some of these websites include:

• Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion are video hosts.
• Music and podcast platforms such as s Spotify, soundcloud, and podbean
• Slideshow platforms such as speaker deck, presentation and google slides.
• Social media sites such as Twitter, TikTok and Pinterest.
• Form Builder websites like Google Forms, Typeform and Paper Form
• Github and Codepen are two examples of coding websites.

One of the more recent additions to Podia’s courses is the ability to give certificates. This certificate feature can be viewed as an incentive/prize to complete your courses. However, Podia only has one type of certificate for now. They cannot still customize and design your certificates.

Podia’s marketing focus is on the bag. You can use it to increase the effectiveness of your marketing. You can promote your products using tools like coupons, upsells, or pre-launch.

This makes Podia an excellent choice for marketers looking to sell products on a smaller site.

Nevertheless, not all things are perfect. Podia’s weak point is its email marketing. It only offers the basics. It allows you to send broadcasts and email campaigns but lacks some features, such as split testing and personalization fields.

Also, those looking for automation features have lost their luck since Podia’s is not as advanced as some of theirs.

For payment processors, Podia has a local payment gateway. That said, you will need to connect your bank account or PayPal account to payment processors. You can integrate with Stripe or PayPal for a simpler solution.

Checkout is possible for your audience using their credit cards. These usually are processed within 2 days and will be credited to your bank or PayPal account. Thinkific vs Wishlist

Podia Price

In terms of pricing, it is one of the cheapest there is in the market. What’s more, is that the platform has recently added its own free plan. Although it doesn’t offer much, this plan is a great way to learn more about Podia.

Podia Pros and Cons

Pros

• Podia’s strongest point is its clean and crisp UI/UX. It is very easy to use and has a non-existent learning curve. Users of all edges and tech levels will find it intuitive to set it up.

• Podia has many functions and can become a one-stop shop for all your needs. You can sell various digital products such as courses, memberships, webinars, bundles, community, and other digital downloads.

• Podia also offers a free plan that allows you to sell unlimited products and courses. This means that you can make as many pages as you like for your products and courses as long as there is energy.

• Podia allows you to upload unlimited videos for your content. This is thanks to the unlimited storage and bandwidth that the platform offers its users. This way, you don’t need to use Vimeo or Wistia.

• Podia has a built-in affiliate program for your audience that is only available for Shaker and Earthquaker plans.

• Although it only provides the basic functions, the email marketing tools built-in are sufficient to support campaigns and broadcasts.

• Podia supports a prelaunch mode as one of its marketing features. It can create buzz around your products and get early email customer conversions. Thinkific vs Wishlist

• Except for the free plan, Podia charges no transaction fee on sales.

• Podia has a new feature that allows content creators to give certificates, community, and quizzes. You can even create memberships in the community area.

Cons

• Their email marketing only provides the basic functions. Especially in its email composer, which lacks personalization fields. Other features that the tool does not have include templates, drag-and-drop editor and other features.
• There is a noticeable lack of course-compliance features in the platform
• Podia also does not have many customization features. Podia does not support custom CSS/HTMl customizations. Expect to have generic-looking websites when using Podia.
• Podia also has no landing page builders or funnels, which are important tools when considering Podia’s focus on marketing.
• Its free plan is severely lacking and will only allow you to host 1 product. There is also an 8% transaction charge.
• Podia does not have any course blueprints.
• Podia only supports a few lesson types. Podia does not support certain types of lesson, such as Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline.
• It has some good marketing features but it is still lacking others. These include cart abandonment, downsells and order bumps.
• Podia does not have a mobile app, which can limit its user base or access, given how much the world has depended on smartphones and tablets. Thinkific vs Wishlist

Podia Summary

Overall, Podia is an acceptable platform for hosting your content. This is pretty true especially given the price point it is offered.

Many people might believe that Podia is a value-for-money company. It isn’t true. Podia is more than what you pay. You can make impressive courses with enough creativity and great ideas and sell them for a fair price.

Despite some of its limited capacity, it is still an all-in-one platform. It is perfect for a lot of people. Content creators, teachers, marketers, and people who target marketers. Podia will be able to serve their needs if they need to.

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Kartra Versus Thinkific

Kartra Overview

Kartra is a completely different product to the ones listed above. Kartra is completely different to the other products in this review.

We offer a platform that allows you to sell your products, instead of creating courses. It is also a marketing platform.

In this vein, Kartra should not be treated as a separate website or your product’s website.

Instead, focus on the strengths of your site and sell products, memberships, and services.

Kartra can be used to create and sell digital and physical products. You can sell unlimited quantities of these products and many different types of products. It also allows you to choose from multiple pricing options, which will allow you to set a more flexible price.

Kartra Features

Since Kartra is a different beast altogether, we might focus on features not found in most course-building websites. In fact, there might not be a course-building site for Kartra.

As for the features, we already mentioned that Katra allows you to sell many products. Each account can sell unlimited quantities of products and offer them at any price.

To maximize the profits of its users, Kartra focuses on marketing and lead conversion. As such, one of their main features is funnel building.

Funnels are a way for sellers to get their customers to buy their products. While Kartra does not refer to funnels as campaigns, They function similarly. Thinkific vs Wishlist

Kartra makes funnel building relatively easy. You can build one from scratch if you already have experience in this field. Otherwise, you can have Katra do it for you through their plug-and-play campaigns that are from top industry experts.

You can share your personally-built campaigns with other Kartra members. You can even market and sell your campaigns and make money from them.

Kartra handles all the payment and billing processes needed, so you can focus on better funnels as you gain experience.

Kartra has powerful page-building capabilities. These features allow users to create product pages, checkout pages and opt-in pages. It even provides you with professionally designed templates to help you speed up the process or just start it out.

These pages can also be optimized for desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. These pages can be hosted on your domain, or on Katra.

They are not yet able to host the full functionality and features required for a website. Even Kartra feels it themselves, as they wouldn’t allow you to host those pages in your domain otherwise.

The marketing features are to be considered as Kartra’s shining jewel. In terms of email marketing, it has all the stuff that a good email marketing feature has.

It can send broadcast messages by SMS or email. This will require integration with all available SMS gateways.

Aside from that, Kartra also has automation which it can use to create email sequences. Drag-and-drop visual sequence builders make it easy to create them. Once you’re done, the program can run on autopilot.

Behavior-based automation is another feature that makes the platform unique. This powerful tool allows you to send emails based on the recipient’s behavior. This allows you to relax after all the work has been done.

Kartra Price

Kartra’s price is steep for a platform focused on marketing and lead conversions. However, depending on your needs, the price of Kartra’s plans may be worth it. Thinkific vs Wishlist

After all, Kartra has some advanced features that are not found in others.

Kartra Pros and Con

Pros

• External marketing integrations are not required. Kartra offers everything: integrated email marketing, sequence builder, automation, and all other features necessary to market your products perfectly
• Kartra offers an automatic translation feature for its checkout pages. It works based on the user’s geographic location. In this vein, it also supports different currencies.
• Kartar also allows you to drip content and vary access to different levels if you have a membership site.
• You can use A/B testing to refine your automated email responses as you set them up.
• Kartra includes an agency feature that can hold multiple client accounts. This feature allows you to manage multiple websites from one dashboard.

Cons

• Some might feel that Kartra’s pricing is too high for the quality of what they offer
• There are not unlimited integrations available with any of the plans.
• Kartra’s interface can be slow and frustrating at times. Thinkific vs Wishlist
• Even Kartra’s pages may load slowly
• For beginners, it can be difficult to understand the many features.

Kartra Summary

Overall, Kartra is a powerful all-in-one platform for sales and marketing.

There are many tools and features available that will allow you to create engaging and compelling promotions and products.

It is not a course builder, and certainly not a website creator. As such, If you use Kartra, ensure that you are doing so in conjunction with a proper website page maker. Kartra is quite expensive for the features it offers. This can be difficult to swallow.

But, it’s possible to get more for your money if you decide to take the plunge.

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Overall, Verdict Thinkific vs Wishlist

When you are interested in joining the industry, course builder websites can be very useful.

As with most markets and industries, there will be a lot of platforms that will offer the service that you need. For course building and selling, there are Thinkific, Podia and Kajabi (and a bit of Kartra), as well as other platforms.

In a market-like course building, these platforms will offer almost identical services. Their differences will be minimal at best. Some might be better than others in certain areas.

The key to finding which product you should use is to decide on the direction of what you want to do. And find the platform that is best aligned with that. Chances are, you will find that their features will be most useful to you.