Are you looking for an unbiased Thrive Themes (Thrive Suite) review? Then, you are in the right place!
In this blog post, I’ll be presenting you with the features that Thrive Themes has got to offer you, and also will help you decide whether the product is right for you or not.
Type | Conversion-focused WordPress products |
Starting price | $19/mo |
Products | Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Headline Optimizer, Thrive Apprentice, Builder Thrive Quiz |
Features | Conversion friendly themes Mobile responsive Fast loading times Asset delivery (Thrive Leads) |
Thrive product updates | Discover the newest product and feature updates of Thrive Suite – See all product updates |
Competitors | Elegant Themes (Divi) Elementor Beaver Builder |
Let me be honest with you.
I’m not using Thrive Themes as of now on my blog.
Why?
Attention: Last year or so, I shifted my website from Thrive Architect to Elementor. Because I wanted a theme builder badly (Thrive Theme Builder was not there) and also Elementor offered really awesome design features for me.
I decided to tradeoff advanced marketing features of Thrive Themes with the customization abilities Elementor comes with.
But as of now, things have changed rapidly. Thrive Themes has come up with its new theme builder, and Thrive Architect has also evolved greatly than before in terms of customization abilities.
But still, when it comes to design and customization – Elementor is the king. Because it supports 3rd party addons and ACF integrations, unlike Thrive Architect. You can refer to my Elementor review and Thrive Architect review if you want to make a better choice among them.
If you want to implement advanced marketing funnels right inside of WordPress, Thrive Themes comes with dozens of products that may be of use for you.
I’ll help you decide.
Thrive Themes – Pros and Cons
Pros
- Thrive Architect (with Thrive Optimize), Thrive Leads, Thrive Quiz Builder, all these products come with in-built A/B testing mechanisms.
- Their products integrate well with each other uncovering great marketing use cases. This is really their greatest strength. They have a platform-based business model.
- All Thrive Themes products offer great user interface and experience
- Thrive Themes has really good documentation, support videos, and their university. These resources really level out the learning curve.
- Their products work with all themes (long back some features were only meant for their themes)
- Thrive Themes Membership with a really good theme builder that allows you to design every aspect of your site. With this, you can tweak the aspects of the theme that were conventionally not easily customizable.
- All their products are feature-rich and features are carefully included considering real-life marketing applications.
- Their speed of implementation of new features is quite good. They roll out new features and updates every week or a two. Click here to see all the Thrive themes product updates.
- They have made it easy for your site to be GDPR compliant with features like “Explicit Consent Checkbox”, and more. As far as I can remember, they were one of the earliest ones to take GDPR seriously and educate us with their videos.
Cons
- Lacks payment processor integrations. You may need to use external payment cart solutions like ThriveCart, SamCart, or SendOwl.
- Thrive Leads is quite bulky and may slow down your site to some extent (they could consider adding modules to selectively activate/deactivate unwanted features). It’s quite a big downside and that’s why people consider OptinMonster more lately.
- No support for 3rd party plugins in the case of Thrive Architect. Maybe they can consider opening up their API for other developers to create custom plugins for adding more modules or features. This is one of the greatest strengths other page builders like Elementor, Divi, and Beaver Builder has.
- Their Thrive Apprentice (deemed as LMS), does not come with payment and membership features. You need to hook it up with some shopping cart solution and also membership plugin to consider it as a complete LMS.
Review of Thrive Themes Products
Thrive Themes has an entire suite of conversion-friendly products like Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Quiz Builder, Thrive Apprentice, Thrive Optimize, and many more.
When you purchase Thrive Suite, you will get access to all of its plugins mentioned above.
When it comes to themes, Thrive Themes used to have some themes like FocusBlog, Pressive, Rise, and many more. More recently, they discontinued their themes and replaced it with a theme builder.
Let’s dive in and review some of the key products of Thrive Themes.
Thrive Theme Builder
Thrive Themes’ newly introduced theme builder which allows you to easily and visually create or modify header, footer, blog post templates, sidebar, page layout, category pages, search pages, 404s, etc.
Long gone are the days, when you’ll get stuck with a theme that provided header, footer, blog posts, layout, and many more. With the theme builder feature that comes with page builders, you can get drag-drop control of potentially every aspect of your site.
Their theme builder plugin also comes with a companion theme called – ShapeShifter. This is the plugin they recommend to use with their theme builder for maximum performance and compatibility.
They have plenty of templates available for each site’s elements like header, footer, homepage, etc.
Their Theme builder integrates with Thrive Architect seamlessly to display you the theme builder elements, and allows you to make changes.
They also have dynamic content features, which allow you to easily insert dynamic content on the frontend. It comes really handy when building blog post templates.
Thrive Theme Builder has quite successfully addressed the issue of lack of design and customization options with Thrive Themes, which is inherently strong at the marketing side of things.
Thrive Themes is inherently good at the marketing side of things but is lagging behind when it comes to design and customization. But, its theme builder successfully addresses this concern.
As of writing this blog post, the Thrive Theme Builder was only available for Thrive Themes Membership subscribers. However, it may have changed at the time when you are reading this post.
Thrive Architect
It’s the next version of Thrive Content Builder. This is a WYSIWYG page builder for WordPress.
Compared to other page builder plugins, it has unique marketing-friendly features like testimonials, countdown timers, etc. It also comes with the Thrive Lightboxes feature enabling you to build popups using its drag-and-drop builder.
Thrive Architect integrates tightly with other products in the suite like Thrive Leads, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Optimize, etc.
If you want to implement A/B split testing functionality with Thrive Architect, you may also want to get Thrive Optimize (or use Google Optimize). It’s a dedicated plugin that helps you implement A/B split testing with Thrive Architect.
In short, this plugin helps in optimizing the content on the landing page for conversions. If you are running FB or Google ads to a landing page, it’s now the time to create variations of the landing page and check which one converts well.
If you compare Thrive Architect with Elementor, it lacks some features like popup templates, more modules, support for 3rd party addons, integrated theme builder, etc.
With Thrive Architect, you never need to worry about your site being unresponsive. All the elements beautifully scale up to match the screen size of any device.
If you have multiple columns in your content, then the columns stack on top of each other when the site is loaded on a mobile device with a narrow screen.
The font size is also responsive so that you won’t sacrifice the typography of your site on mobile devices.
In fact, the Thrive Architect comes in with a mobile and tablet website builder, that lets you customize how your website looks in mobile and tablet devices completely.
As Thrive Architect is focused around building marketing-friendly landing pages, it also comes with hundreds of landing page templates for you to choose from. All these templates are also carefully categorized for better user experience.
Using only Thrive Architect for landing pages doesn’t really outpace Elementor. The true power of Thrive Themes will only be realized if you use Thrive Architect along with some of their other products which I’ll discuss.
Thrive Leads
This is the best plugin to build your email list super-fast. It has more features than any other plugins like Optinmonster, Icegram, Ninja Popups, etc.
In fact, I recommend Thrive Leads to people who can’t afford OptinMonster. If you want to know the detailed comparison of these, I suggest you to read my Thrive Leads vs Optinmonster post.
The greatest strengths of Thrive Leads are:
- 7+ opt-in form types
- Asset delivery mechanisms for delivering eBooks or lead magnets without using your email autoresponder
- A/B split testing with traffic distribution and automatic winner selection feature
- Multi-state opt-in form for more conversions and properly segmenting the audience before adding them to the lists.
- Inbuilt analytics (you don’t need to make use of Google Analytics)
- Integrations with 35+ other products and services. It’s a lot.
There are different types of forms you can create with Thrive Leads.
You can also trigger any of these forms on click of a link or a button. This will be really helpful for you to implement “Content Upgrades” within your content for supercharging your lead generation efforts.
You also have hundreds of templates across different categories for each of these opt-in types.
You can set different triggers for the pop-ups to appear. Apart from these, you can also consider triggering the popups, when people click on any specific link on your blog post. Read my Thrive Leads review to explore more.
One downside you need to be aware of is that the Thrive Leads is quite bulky, and it does slow down your page load speed to an extent. But it indeed has the features to skyrocket conversions.
Thrive Ultimatum
Thrive Ultimatum is the best scarcity marketing plugin for WordPress. This enables you to show the countdowns and even lock down the offer after a specific duration.
There are many scarcity marketing plugins. But most of them won’t offer you true scarcity marketing. This means, with many plugins your visitors can still access your offer after the countdown is over.
But Thrive Ultimatum has something called as “Lockdown feature” that lets you create uncheatable and authentic scarcity marketing campaigns.
The countdown timers are extremely customizable as they come with various styling and options to include various elements.
If you are selling products and services on your WordPress site, and are not using any form of scarcity to sell them, it’s now the time to use a scarcity marketing plugin like Thrive Ultimatum and take your conversions to the next level.
Thrive Ultimatum comes with a really good number of countdown templates that you can use.
It integrates tightly with Thrive Architect and adds in more elements to it related to scarcity marketing.
There are many plugins in the WordPress market that implement pseudo-scarcity marketing, but Thrive Ultimatum’s advanced lockdown feature implements a true scarcity marketing mechanism.
You can refer to my Thrive Ultimatum review to explore all the features it has got to offer you.
Thrive Quiz Builder
Thrive Quiz Builder helps you implement a gamification strategy for your lead generation in the form of quizzes.
The two objectives of quizzes when it comes to Thrive Quiz Builder are:
- Email list building
- Social shares
If you are thinking of implementing quizzes for putting your email list building or social sharing on steroids, then Thrive Quiz Builder may be right for you.
Remember, Thrive Themes products are all about sales conversions.
Here are some of the features that Thrive Quiz Builder comes with:
- 4 quiz types
- Powerful analytics
- 3 types of quiz templates
- Badge editor
- Easy quiz builder
- Question weighing
- Dynamic results
- Optin gates
- A/B split testing
- 3 question types
- Setup wizard
- Mobile-friendly
- Quiz dashboard
Here are some quiz styles for you to consider.
Coming to the quiz building process, you will have a canvas with various questions and options arranged in the form of a flowchart.
You can add new questions, customize the options, etc.
You also have a detailed reporting feature, where you can analyze at what stage of quizzes the people are dropping out so that you can optimize or maybe run A/B tests.
Other products
Along with these popular products, Thrive Themes also comes with some more products like:
- Thrive Headline Optimizer: This is a great plugin for you to A/B split test the headlines on your website for click-through rate, time on content, and scrolling. You have detailed headline testing reports and also automatic winner settings. Thrive Headline Optimizer is highly recommended if you have a website with tons of direct visitors (you can’t test this in case of SEO traffic – as you don’t have control over the title). If you are having a news website, using Thrive Headline Optimizer can be really useful for you to know what headlines hook your readers in.
- Thrive Ovation: It is a great plugin to gather and display social proof on your website. It’s a great testimonial management tool, allows you to convert comments to testimonials, and also helps you gather social testimonials on autopilot. It’s a great plugin to put social proof generation mechanism on autopilot.
- Thrive Apprentice: It is a good LMS plugin if you want to sell your online courses with Thrive Themes. You need to note that it doesn’t come with any payment processors or access delivery mechanism. In that case, you may need to hook it up with SendOwl as Thrive Themes only suggests. And also, it doesn’t come with a content restriction mechanism. So you also need to make use of a good membership WordPress plugin like MemberPress or others.
- Thrive Comments: It is a really good plugin for managing and encouraging user comments on your blog. It comes with upvotes, downvotes, badges, and many other features to gamify the WordPress commenting process. I’ve reviewed Thrive Comments previously on my blog.
- Thrive Clever Widgets: It lets you display widgets on your blog in a contextual way by adding some conditions. With this plugin, you can display some widgets for some posts in some categories, tags, etc. There are various free alternatives for this plugin like Content-Aware Sidebars in the WordPress repository, so this plugin may not be of value for you. But indeed, this plugin is included as part of the Thrive Themes membership package.
Thrive Themes vs other products
I’m going to compare Thrive Themes with other products in the market like:
- ClickFunnels
- Leadpages
- Elementor
- Divi Builder
Thrive Themes vs ClickFunnels
Places where Thrive Themes excels:
- Thrive Themes is a suite of WordPress-based products, whereas ClickFunnels is a cloud platform.
- Thrive Themes membership costs you $19/month whereas ClickFunnels costs you $97/month.
- Thrive products are loaded with endless amazing features and products as described, and really blows ClickFunnels in this regard. But, it comes at a good learning curve.
Places where ClickFunnels excels:
- As ClickFunnels is a cloud platform, it’s quite fast. Whereas, with WordPress, the speed is determined by your host
- ClickFunnels comes with inbuilt payment integration (with 1-click upsell or downsell) and membership feature (in here Thrive Themes lacks). It also comes with even email and affiliate marketing in their $297/month plan.
- ClickFunnels is quite easy to use even if you are non-techie.
If you are on a budget, want advanced features and ready to use external shopping cart solutions like ThriveCart or SamCart, then go with Thrive Themes.
You can read more detailed Thrive membership vs ClickFunels comparison, here.
Thrive Themes vs Leadpages
Similar to ClickFunnels, Leadpages is also a cloud application. This means, Leadpages is quite fast and delivers better UI/UX.
The main features of Leadpages are landing page building and lead generation.
More recently Leadpages also introduced “Leadpages Checkouts” in partnership with Stripe that allows you to collect payments. Whereas in the case of Thrive Themes it’s not possible unless you use some external payments product.
Coming to page builder, Leadpages lacks many features like advanced scarcity marketing, A/B testing of popups, quizzes, and many more.
Along with that, Thrive suite comes at $19/month whereas Leadpages’ comparable plan costs you $48/month.
Thrive Themes vs Elementor
It all comes down to marketing-friendliness vs design-friendliness.
But after Thrive Theme Builder was launched, things have changed a bit but still, Elementor has an edge when it comes to design.
Places where Thrive Themes excels:
- Thrive products come with marketing-friendly features.
- Thrive Architect + Thrive Leads combo which would be a potential replacement to Elementor for you, both come at a single price.
- Thrive Leads offers more features than that of Elementor popups if you are wondering. The Elementor popups lack A/B split testing, asset delivery feature, sign-up segue, advanced reporting, multi-state opt-in form, analytics, and much more.
- Thrive products integrate well with over 35+ products, whereas Elementor integrates with limited products.
Places where Elementor excels:
- Elementor is the best page builder for designing pages according to the latest design trends.
- Elementor supports 3rd-party plugins like Crocoblock, Ultimate Addons for Elementor, Essential Addons for Elementor, and many more
- Elementor’s popup builder comes with good design-centric templates
- Elementor’s page builder feels quite modern and intuitive
Thrive Themes vs Divi Builder (Elegant Themes)
Comparing Thrive Themes with Divi is also like marketing vs design. But unlike Elementor, Divi has its user base who are looking to build beautiful corporate websites – especially for clients.
Similar to Thrive Themes’ Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads, Elegant Themes has its Divi plugin for page building and Bloom for lead generation.
Divi Builder excels in almost all areas where Elementor excels.
Their Bloom plugin lacks some features like Asset Delivery, Signup Segue, and others. It lacks front end drag-and-drop editing and also features like scroll mat, screen filler, ribbon (smart bar), PHP insert, multi-state opt-in form, multiple choices, two-step opt-in / thrivebox, and yes/no form type.
Pricing
If you want to get access to all their plugins and access to usage on upto 25 websites, the Thrive Suite costing $19/month is ideal for you.
This is still cheaper than comparable products’ plans like ClickFunnels at $97/month, or Leadpages at $48/month.
Thrive Themes discount and coupon availability: Thrive Themes does not offer any discount on any of its products. It also doesn’t run any deals on any other special occasions like Black Friday.
Support
Thrive Themes support team is very responsive. You can create support tickets for your queries right inside the dashboard.
One of its support team members usually responds to you within 24-48 hours or even less. They are highly knowledgeable and friendly.
Thrive Themes also has a support email address, where you can mail them the queries for faster response.
It also has video tutorials and a knowledge base where you can find solutions for your common problems. For some of the issues I faced, the knowledge base was good enough to solve my queries.
There are also some new training videos that are released every month on increasing conversions and designing landing pages.
So, once you are part of the Thrive community, you get access to all those training modules including the Thrive University.
FAQs on Thrive Themes Membership
What products do I get with Thrive Themes membership?
You will get Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, Thrive Ultimatum, and Thrive Optimize plugins with thrive themes membership.
Does Thrive Themes integrate with email marketing platforms?
Yes. All their products integrate with ActiveCampaign, Drip, Aweber, ConvertKit and many other email marketing platforms. They integrate with a really wide range of products.
Does thrive themes work with WordPress.com blogs?
No. They only work with self-hosted (WordPress.org) websites.
Can I get a refund?
You will get a 30 days money-back guarantee with all Thrive products.
What about the pricing? Is it a one time fee or recurring fee?
You can buy the Thrive Suite at a quarterly or annual pricing.
Wrapping up
Thrive Themes is a great choice for building conversion-friendly marketing sales funnel right inside of WordPress.
If you are planning to make use of only Thrive Architect on your site, you’d be better off with Elementor. However, you may need to consider their suite as their tools integrate tightly with each other to uncover great marketing use-cases
Compared to what you pay for tools like ClickFunnels, the Thrive Themes costs you really less. And also, as they are WordPress products the flexibility is great when it comes to design and customization.
Without Thrive Themes and their suite of products that come with their membership, you can’t simply imagine effective marketing funnel implementation in WordPress. But you need to keep in mind that Thrive Themes lack payment integrations and membership features.
I hope you found this review on Thrive Themes helpful.