Mobile-first builder · Ranked 33 of 33 in the index
Thunkable Review (2026)
A block and drag-and-drop mobile app builder with native publishing, widely used in classrooms and by first-time builders who need something forgiving.
3.1 / 5Last verified: · Next scheduled check: The quick answer
Assessed for 2026A teaching tool that is priced and gated like a production platform, and the gating is the story. You cannot publish a live app on the entry paid tier: live publishing starts at Builder and covers exactly one app, and unlimited live apps require Advanced. That makes the Free and Accelerator tiers evaluation-only, which is not how they read at a glance. Worse for anyone thinking long term, the vendor FAQ states that "you must maintain an active subscription for your published apps to remain active". Your shipped app is a rental. That is materially worse ownership than any code-exporting builder here and it is the whole explanation for the lowest code-ownership score in the index. Two more line items people miss: you still need paid Google and Apple developer licences, which are separate from the Thunkable subscription, and AI tokens expire at the end of every billing cycle rather than rolling over. As a way to teach app logic through drag-and-drop blocks, Thunkable remains genuinely good, and the classroom is where it belongs.
- Best for
- Education, prototypes and simple utility apps built by people learning to build at all
- Not for
- Commercial products, and anything with a serious data model
- Price from
- USD 18 / month, billed yearlyAccelerator plan, billed yearly. You cannot publish a live app below USD 37 a month (Builder, billed yearly), and even then only one. Unlimited live apps need the USD 99 Advanced plan.
- Free tier
- Yes
The ten axes
Every builder in the index is scored on the same ten axes with the same published weights. This is how Thunkable performed on our test briefs.
- Reliability16%
- 3.7
- Integrations16%
- 3.1
- SEO and GEO13%
- n/a, not applicable
- Design quality12%
- 3.2
- Agent performance10%
- 2.8
- Speed9%
- 3.3
- Value9%
- 2.7
- Scalability7%
- 2.7
- API and MCP access5%
- 2.9
- Code ownership3%
- 1.8
n/a means the axis does not apply to this tool. It builds internal software behind a login, a native store app or an API, so there are no public crawlable pages to test. The axis is left out of the overall rating and the remaining weights are renormalised, rather than the tool being scored down for something we did not test.
Every axis is scored from 0 to 5 stars. The percentage is that axis's published weight in the overall 3.1 rating.
The verdict
A teaching tool that is priced and gated like a production platform, and the gating is the story. You cannot publish a live app on the entry paid tier: live publishing starts at Builder and covers exactly one app, and unlimited live apps require Advanced. That makes the Free and Accelerator tiers evaluation-only, which is not how they read at a glance. Worse for anyone thinking long term, the vendor FAQ states that "you must maintain an active subscription for your published apps to remain active". Your shipped app is a rental. That is materially worse ownership than any code-exporting builder here and it is the whole explanation for the lowest code-ownership score in the index. Two more line items people miss: you still need paid Google and Apple developer licences, which are separate from the Thunkable subscription, and AI tokens expire at the end of every billing cycle rather than rolling over. As a way to teach app logic through drag-and-drop blocks, Thunkable remains genuinely good, and the classroom is where it belongs.
A block and drag-and-drop mobile app builder with native publishing, widely used in classrooms and by first-time builders who need something forgiving.
The dissenting view
One panellist argued that education tools should be excluded from a buyer index rather than scored against commercial platforms they are not competing with.
One member of the panel disagreed with the consensus. We publish the disagreement rather than average it away.
What it looks like
Pricing
Free plan with public projects: they sit in a public gallery for anyone to preview and remix. Accelerator is USD 18 a month billed yearly, but publishing a live app starts at USD 37 and unlimited live apps need USD 99.
| Plan | Price | Billing | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | monthly | Public projects in the gallery, anyone can preview and remix, Thunkable branding |
| Accelerator | USD 18 | monthly, billed yearly | Private projects, more screensCannot publish a live app. |
| Builder | USD 37 | monthly, billed yearly | One live published app, store publishing |
| Advanced | USD 99 | monthly | Unlimited live apps, higher limits, integrations |
We list the plans we could verify on the vendor's own pricing page. Where a plan exists but its price was not published in a form we could capture, the row says so rather than carrying a number we cannot source.
Feature by feature
The same eleven checks, run on every builder in the index.
| Capability | Status |
|---|---|
| Full-stack backend | Limited |
| Database included | Yes, simple data sources |
| Auth included | Yes, basic |
| Code export | No, and the vendor requires an active subscription for published apps to remain active |
| GitHub sync | No |
| One-click deploy | Live publishing starts at the Builder plan and covers one app, unlimited live apps require Advanced, and paid Google and Apple developer licences are required separately |
| Custom domain | Not applicable |
| Mobile or native output | Native iOS and Android builds |
| Team collaboration | Yes, paid plans |
| Public API or MCP server | Limited, REST blocks |
| Self-hosting the output | No |
What works / What does not
What works
- Drag-and-drop block logic is the clearest way we have seen to teach how an app actually works
- Genuine cross-platform output from a single project
- Large library of classroom-ready examples
What does not
- You cannot publish a live app on the entry paid tier. Live publishing starts at Builder with one app, and unlimited live apps need Advanced, so Free and Accelerator are evaluation-only
- The vendor FAQ states you must maintain an active subscription for your published apps to remain active, so a lapsed payment takes your shipped app down
- Paid Google and Apple developer licences are required and are separate from the subscription
- AI tokens expire at the end of every billing cycle and do not roll over
User reviews
Thunkable holds 11 star ratings and 2 written reviews. They are counted separately: every written review carries a rating, but most ratings arrive without one. Editor panel reviews are shown first and badged.
Community rating
- 5 ★36%
- 4 ★27%
- 3 ★18%
- 2 ★9%
- 1 ★9%
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- Editor panel
Every term, thirty students publish something they made
Rowan Fitzgerald@rowanfitzgerald
Secondary school teacher running a STEM club. My students ship apps every term.
The block editor means nobody is blocked by syntax, the documentation is written for learners rather than engineers, and it publishes real builds so the students can show their families. As a teaching platform I have not found anything better, and I have looked properly.
- Pros
- Genuinely forgiving. Excellent learning material.
- Cons
- Not competitive for anything commercial.
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- Editor panel
We built our first product here and paid for it later
Yara Haddad@yarahaddad
Startup operations. I inherit whatever the founders built and have to keep it alive.
It worked while we had two hundred users. At two thousand it was slow, we could not export anything, and integrating our payment provider properly was impossible. We rebuilt from scratch. If you are learning, ignore this review. If you are a company, do not start here.
- Pros
- Very easy to get something working at first.
- Cons
- No export and a hard ceiling that arrives sooner than you expect.
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Frequently asked
- Can I publish an app on the cheapest paid plan?
- No. Live publishing starts at the Builder plan and covers one app. Unlimited live apps require Advanced. Free and Accelerator are evaluation tiers in practice.
- What happens to my published app if I stop paying?
- The vendor FAQ says you must maintain an active subscription for your published apps to remain active. There is no code export, so this is the weakest ownership position in the index and the reason for the lowest code-ownership score here.
- Are there costs beyond the subscription?
- Yes. Paid Google and Apple developer licences are required separately. AI tokens also expire at the end of each billing cycle rather than rolling over.
Sources
Where these numbers come from
- Price
- Thunkable pricing page · 14 August 2026
- Axis scores
- Our own testing panel: six briefs, three runs each, eighteen runs per tool, scored against the published rubric · 20 August 2026
- Community rating
- Computed from the 11 star ratings held in our own database for this tool · 20 August 2026
Everything we read for this review
- Thunkable product site · 14 August 2026
- Thunkable pricing page · 14 August 2026