Pensight

Pensight focuses on helping online businesses sell and deliver digital products, whether that’s downloads, courses, coaching, membership and more.

It’s been used by over 30,000 creators and offers an intuitive platform to handle this part of your business.

Note that Pensight isn’t an all-one-platform which could also handle your website and funnel needs for instance.

But we’ll break this down in more detail in this honest review.

We’re also going to compare the platform to other competitors and help you understand where it shines and where it lacks.

As mentioned, Pensight is probably not going to replace everything for you, even only for the fact that there is no website builder and the only pages you can build are sales pages (more on that later) for a specific product.

That being said, let’s break down everything the platform does offer, starting with a brief highlight of the most important features:

Product & Courses

Probably the main function of Pensight is to both handle payment of your digital products but also their delivery.

So if you sell a course, you’ll be able to host it on the platform, or send the digital download or host the group coaching session,etc.

There is a wide variety of products Pensight allows you to sell and deliver:

• Digital Products: downloads, ebooks, file, single video,etc.
• Online Courses: self-paced video, audio or text curriculum
• Community: a private, forum-like feed for members
• Coaching Session: through a calendar and pre-paid booking system
• Group Session: group coaching or events
• Video Q&A: Customized video answers for clients

Each of these products have their own parameters.

For instance, setting up a new online course will let you build a curriculum:

This is fairly straightforward and basic in a sense, you’ll simply create Sections, and Lessons, each lesson containing your main piece of content: video, text, image, audio or file.

But you can have as many of these in a single lesson and build it block by block:

A few other options you’ll have is to enable comment or not and allow people to see a Lesson for free as a preview of your course.

Each section can be dripped over time to students as to stagger their learning.

Pretty simple but also maybe a little limited if you’re looking for a bit more from an educational point of view.

For example there are no learning tools available such as quizzes, certification, assessment, or other similar features that other e-learning competitors offer.

The customization of the layout of the course is also limited and you can’t change very much about it:

That being said, the branding color and theme can be applied and looks relatively good out of the box.

Another product type to take a look at are coaching sessions (individual or group).

Pensight has a native scheduling and booking system you can configure.

You’ll be able to synchronize your calendar, create different availability schedules and assign them to a product.

Just like you would with a tool like Calendly or Acuity (although not as advanced).

You can even get SMS reminders for your appointments.

As you're creating your coaching product, you can choose to use the native Pensight video chat or your own (like Zoom).

These coaching sessions can be for 1:1 coaching but also for group coaching at a specific date and time.

These can also be set as recurring if you have a group coaching program with a weekly session for instance.

Each product can have its own sales page which you can fully customize:

This is a somewhat basic page builder but could look good if you put in the time.

But it’s surely not as flexible as a proper website software would allow for.

In fact most people using Pensight probably use a separate platform for their page and funnel needs.

The last product type to highlight here is the Membership product.

To be more specific, this is more of Community with feeds for your members.

This is basic but can be great to have a private place for your members to interact with, very much like your own Facebook group.

Your post can include video, images and file and can be scheduled out in the future.

Note that there is no limit on the number of Products you can create on any plan.

Checkout & Affiliate

Each Product is set with a price and you can choose it to be a single payment, a payment plan, a recurring subscription or a Pay-What-You-Want.

You’ll have to connect a valid Stripe account in order to take payments.

This will also allow you to take advantage of the integration with Klarna and Affirm, which are buy-now-pay-later tools. Google Pay will also be a payment option.

The checkout itself will be tied to your sales page and appear as a popup.

There isn’t too much you can customize about it but often this part of your funnel is more about simplicity.

You can of course create sales pricing and coupons.

Something to add in your checkout is an upsell, which Pensight makes relatively easy with a built-in tool:

Lastly, you do have the option to create an affiliate program and set a commission for referrals anyone brings you.

Emails & Automation

Pensight has a built-in email marketing system that allows you to send both email broadcasts but also automated sequences.

You can create these using the native templates and then customize them with the block builder:

Note that there is no limit on contacts or email sending in any Pensight plan.

Automation work similarly but will be started by a trigger of your choice:

These aren’t very advanced but should be enough for most users. Limitations include things like A/B testing or If/Then functionality which don’t exist right now.

Automations can also be set directly in your Product as “Smart Actions:

This means that you can also create Forms and collect contacts emails, which can then be organized in Segments in Pensight.

Overall this feature is fairly basic but very handy, especially without the limit and allowance that most other competitors' platforms enforce.

Other Features

Let’s now highlight a few other interesting features the platform offers:

Testimonial Request: Pensight makes it very easy to collect testimonials from clients. You can either send them a link manually for them to post them but they will also be automatically prompted to do so after a product purchase.

Chat: After a purchase, a new chat will automatically between you and the client for a 1:1 communication channel directly within the platform.

Product Widget Embed: If you don’t want to use the Pensight sales page, you can also embed the Buy button directly on your website's page and make the whole purchasing process seamless.

If there’s something that a newcomer like Pensight can bring that older platforms sometimes lack, it’s a modern and clean design.

And that’s something very well executed, through both the backend and frontend user experience.

The UI is clean and colors are used to draw your attention to the important parts of the platform:

It’s really flawless in the back-end but as mentioned through this review there is a certain lack of customization when it comes to the student experience.

The lack of a robust page builder and different layout for the online course can be frustrating.

Although overall everything looks really good out of the box and Pensight is probably one of the easiest such platforms to learn for beginners.

Now let’s talk about pricing, it’s important to understand what you’re getting so don’t skip our Feature section!

You can get started with Pensight on a 7 Day free trial.

Then you’ll have the choice between the following paid plans:

Most people will just need the Pro plan, the only reason to get the Biz plan is if you want some extra support and coaching.

This is a very competitive price, especially considering all of the email marketing features included.

As of right now, there is no limit or allowance on Products or email list size (only during your free trial).

This is very much against the grain of most other online course platforms out there where each plan unlocks a new cap on these things…

Just for that, Pensight can be a strong addition to your tech stack if all you need on the side is a robust website builder.

Pensight is based in the UK, and their support team is available mostly during UK business hours.

There are 4 ways to get support:

• Help Center: this is your standard support article library to start learning about the platform or specific features.
• Live Chat: During business hours this is probably the quickest way to get a response if you have an urgent query.
• Phone: also a quick way to get some help
• Email: probably better for less urgent questions or if you want to keep a thread open

Note that there is no Facebook community or other official groups to hang out with fellow Pensight users.