Thrive Themes : Full Review, Testing, and Presentation (2024)

What is Thrive Themes?

Thrive Themes has existed since 2013 and they have been built into one of the most reputable and successful WordPress site and theme plugin companies on the market.

To be honest, without Thrive Themes, I don't think I would be where I am today as an online entrepreneur. I built a portfolio of websites (including this one) and made over a million dollars from my business. Thrive Themes was the main thing that allowed me to create websites of quality without having knowledge in computer development.

In this post, I am going to give a comprehensive review of Thrive Themes as a whole after using the platform myself.

Features

At first glance, the suite of conversion-focused tools can be a bit daunting, but I'm going to break it all down so that you can easily and simply determine which successful plugins will help you reach your marketing goals.

Let's take a tour of the Thrive Themes suite of WordPress tools and plugins.

Thrive theme creator

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $97/year for one site)

Thrive Theme Builder is a flexible and easy to use WordPress theme to create a WordPress site.

Not to be confused with Thrive Architect, which is a plugin and content editor, this theme creator was released in early 2020 and does so much more.

With it, you'll be able to visually create and edit any aspect of your home page, content pages, including headers, footers, blog post templates, sidebars, layouts, layouts, page layouts, search pages, search pages, search pages, category pages, 404s, and more.

This means you no longer have to settle for the page elements that come with the theme. With this tool, you can drag and drop different elements to give your page the look you want and customize it entirely according to your needs.

Fun fact, the website you're on right now was created with Thrive Theme Builder and while I'm biased, I think it's pretty successful.

Things I love about Thrive Theme Builder:

• This is a dedicated theme, not a page-building plugin or a workaround.
• The theme builder integrates seamlessly with Thrive Architect and other Thrive products.
• There are pre-designed sections for each area of the site. It makes it easier if you are not a graphic designer.
• Each element and each model is designed to meet the needs of mobile users.
• All features are 100% customizable in order to create a pixel-perfect site.
• It has built-in speed tools/recommendations to make the theme fast.
• They offer a number of customizable page templates that you can choose from to get started quickly.

Things I don't like about Thrive Theme Builder:

• It only comes with one theme: Shapeshift. However, you can still create dozens of different sites using the design elements and page templates, and even create your own theme from scratch if you want to.
• Hard to understand at first because there are so many features available.

Thrive Architect

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $97/year for one site)

Thrive Architect is a next-gen WordPress page builder that's ideal for marketers and business owners whose primary focus is on marketing.

For those who don't know, Thrive Architect used to be called Thrive Content Builder. I'm not exactly sure why they decided to change their name from Thrive Content Builder to Thrive Architect, but Thrive Architect is much more feature-rich than its predecessor.

This visual editor is really the foundation for the entire Thrive Themes suite of tools. It's the main editor you'll use to build or edit your sales pages, landing pages, lead generation forms, and more.

It offers a ton of flexibility and power compared to the default WordPress editor and has plenty of pre-designed landing pages to choose from. It will help you turn your pages and blog posts into unique, responsive, eye-catching, and high-converting pages that your audience will love.

Thrive Architect gives you total visual control over the appearance of your website and any blog post, without the need for you to learn HTML or CSS coding. Everything on the platform is of the “drag and drop” type.

As with any software, there is a certain learning curve when using Thrive Architect, but it's certainly worth the effort to be able to create exceptional, professional websites without having to deal with CSS or PHP code.

For me, that was the main reason why I found Thrive Themes and why I went with them. I didn't realize how useful all of their other tools were, but it was this one that convinced me to give them a chance.

Things I love about Thrive Architect

• It's all easy to use. What you see is what you get
• Includes 40+ sets of landing pages and each set includes 2-3 landing page templates.
• Thrive Themes offers great support to help newbies learn how to use the tool.

Things I don't like about Thrive Architect

• It may slow down the speed of your pages a bit, but that's the case with any page builder on the market because it adds extra code.

Thrive Leads

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $97/year for one site)

Thrive Leads is a tool you can use to build your email lists. Everything you may need to attract and entice readers to sign up for your email list is included, making it a very powerful tool.

You can display the forms using the various options. For example, you can choose a pop-up opt-in form or include it in your sidebar widget and have it only trigger on mobile or desktop. There are a ton of different display options for Thrive Leads.

In addition, it allows you to measure performance and perform split tests. You get reports that give you in-depth information about how your email marketing strategy is working, so you know how to improve it.

This is a huge advantage, as you can test different tests or visuals to see what will convert the best and provide you with more email subscribers.

Things I love about Thrive Leads

• Over seven different types of opt-in forms.
• It offers asset delivery mechanisms for distributing e-books and lead magnets without using an autoresponder because you can do it directly on your website.
• Convenient A/B split trials, with traffic distribution and automatic winner selection functions.
• Analytics to easily understand the conversions of your opt-ins.
• Integration with over 35 other marketing products and services (and integration continues over time)

Things I don't like about Thrive Leads

• Currently, it's not possible to track clicks as a conversion. It's a bit boring if you want to have a popup and then have the “click” be measured as a variable. You can get around this problem with link shorteners, but that's probably what I like the least.

Thrive Quiz Builder

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $97/year for one site)

Online quizzes are viral marketing tactics that are very popular on social media, or interactive elements on your own website. They're also great list-building tools.

However, the problem with creating quizzes is that it often requires expensive tools or custom programming.

Thrive Quiz Builder has everything you need to build exciting quizzes for your audience. You can give different readers different calls to action and, based on their responses, you are in a position to offer them specific opt-ins that will allow you to segment your list.

Using this tool, you can create quizzes that are quite impressive to boost your list-building efforts or to attract significant traffic to your blog posts. Additionally, you can also use quizzes as surveys to gather more information about your audience.

Things I love about Thrive Quiz Builder:

• Thrive Quiz Builder offers various types of quiz questions.
• It includes powerful A/B split testing and analysis features.
• It is simple and easy to use, even for beginners.
• The Thrive Quiz Builder dashboard also includes a badge editor.
• All quiz templates are mobile-friendly

Things I don't like about Thrive Quiz Builder:

• The number of quiz styles is limited.

Thrive Apprentice

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $97/year for one site)

If you want to start offering online courses, then Thrive Apprentice will help make your job easy. This plugin solves the problem of organizing and displaying digital courses on your WordPress website.

It helps you create elegant course pages and allows you to easily organize them into modules and chapters. You also benefit from comprehensive progress monitoring functions that allow you to track everything from your WordPress dashboard to understand how your students are progressing.

Thrive Apprentice works with all other themes and integrates easily with all major membership site themes and plugins. It also has deep integration with SendOwl to make sending emails in conjunction with the course even easier.

Things I love about Thrive Apprenticeship:

• Thrive Apprentice is very easy to use, even for beginners.
• This is a very cost effective solution as there is no need for a subscription.
• There are no transaction fees associated with the delivery of the courses
• You have total control over the creation and marketing of your digital courses.
• Large, convenient user interface to manage everything in one place

Things I don't like about Thrive Apprenticeship:

• There's no way to deliver content, it's all or nothing for courses.
• No shopping cart functionality
• No gamification options, which would be great for keeping students active.

Thrive Comments

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $47/year for one site)

The presence of comments on your WordPress site can help encourage user engagement. By adding fresh and relevant content to the pages of your site, you are also helping to boost your efforts to SEO.

With this tool, you're essentially replacing the default comment system on all blog posts and unlocking a lot more possibilities, including the Positive vote, opt-in functions after leaving a comment, etc. This will help you make your feedback an important part of your overall conversion strategy.

For example, when blog readers post a comment, you can give them a call to action to share the blog post or join your mailing list. These are just a few of the ways you can use Thrive comments to turn your blog comments into a powerful marketing tool.

If you want to see this tool in action, go to the bottom of this post and leave a comment. You will see how I used it myself.

Things I love about Thrive reviews:

• Thrive Comments helps you improve the user experience and generate more leads.
• It makes your comments section more interactive and engaging
• The plugin includes a ton of features to boost your conversions with engaged viewers.
• It is very reasonably priced and offers great value.

Things I don't like about Thrive reviews:

• There are very few style options for the feedback form.

Thrive Optimize

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools)

Thrive Optimize is designed to allow you to A/B test your website pages to optimize your conversion rates.

A/B testing allows you to send traffic from your website to two different versions of the page: the original page and a second where something, such as the call to action text or the page title, has been changed.

You can track conversions so you can see which page is performing the best and make the winning page your default. You then repeat the test by changing another item. This constant process of improvement is essential for creating landing page templates on your site that convert like crazy.

It integrates directly with Thrive Architect, which allows you to perform comprehensive split testing and track conversions from your WordPress website.

Things I love about Thrive Optimize

• Features of A/B testing surprisingly simple but super effective
• You can run an unlimited number of A/B tests and page variations.
• Attractive interface and detailed reporting options
• Settle and forget with the automatic win feature
• Easily integrates with Thrive Leads, allowing you to test opt-ins by email.

Things I don't like about Thrive Optimize

• Thrive Optimize only works with WordPress pages and is linked to Thrive Architect's page building interface, so you need to have both tools to use it.
• Can only be used for WordPress pages (not articles)

Thrive Ultimatum

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $97/year for one site)

Thrive Ultimatum is a smart, customizable, and easy to use plugin that allows you to use scarcity to sell your digital products.

I can tell you from personal experience that scarcity works, I use it in my own business. For some reason, people don't take action until they know they're about to miss something.

This tool allows you to launch fixed date campaigns for limited-time offers, automatically recurring campaigns to make your scarcity campaigns repeat, and it also offers the ultimate permanent update system that gives all users their own deadline.

Things I love about Thrive Ultimatum

• A robust solution to help you increase conversions and sales
• There are tons of flexible and versatile design types
• Thrive Ultimatum includes locking features for exclusivity.
• It offers varied design states depending on the time remaining on the offer.
• They offer a countdown feature that you can embed into pages.

Things I don't like about Thrive Ultimatum

• Thrive Ultimatum requires Thrive Leads integration for even better functionality.
• Cannot be used to insert times into emails or other CMS platforms like Shopify/Clickfunnels, etc.

Thrive Ovation

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools or $47/year for one site)

Thrive Ovation is a testimonial management plugin that helps you gather social evidence, such as customer testimonials that play a big role in helping persuade your prospects.

The system is automated to gather customer testimonials and display them in an engaging way on your website pages to help you get better conversions.

Social proof is an important part of your marketing, but many website owners don't ask for testimonials on their sites. Also, if they get a testimonial, they don't store it or use it in the most efficient way.

If that's the case for you, then Thrive Ovation could be the perfect tool for you. With this plugin, you will be able to automate the collection of testimonials on your website. You will also have an easy way to manage and organize everything from your WordPress dashboard.

You can post testimonials anywhere on your site. Simply drag and drop them onto any page, and you can even display them dynamically.

Things I love about Thrive Ovation

• Thrive Ovation is a very easy way to capture, manage, and display testimonials on your website.
• It offers you the possibility to import testimonies via social media.
• The plugin comes with fully customizable page templates.
• It allows you to add additional questions to the capture forms.

Things I don't like about Thrive Ovation

• You need to buy Thrive Architect or the Thrive Themes membership in order to take advantage of the best features of this plugin.

While these are my favorite products at Thrive, there are a few other small products worth mentioning:

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Thrive Headline Optimizer

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools)

The Thrive headline optimizer plugin allows you to perform A/B split tests on your titles in order to boost the click rate on the pages of your own website. It also helps boost other metrics, including scroll depth and time spent on the page.

Generally speaking, the Thrive title optimizer is designed for large websites or blogs that have a lot of traffic and want to split test the effectiveness of their internal titles in keeping visitors on the site.

Thrive Clever Widgets

($19/month for one year or $90/quarter for all tools)

This plugin allows you to add certain conditions in order to display the widgets contextually on your blog post. With this tool, you will be able to display different widgets for different items. You can vary them by categories, by tags, etc.

Overview of tools

When you buy Thrive Suite, you get full access to all of their tools, and you can use them on up to 25 websites. The tools include everything I just mentioned above.

However, in February 2022, Thrive started offering the option to re-purchase individual tools for a single site at an annual cost. These rates have been taken into account in each of the items listed in this review.

In summary, here's what you get with the Thrive Suite:

• Access to all plugins
• You can use them on a maximum of 25 websites
• Technical support as long as your membership is active
• You will also have access to Thrive University which offers numerous in-depth tutorials.

I personally decided to buy the full suite when I started using the platform and have been happy to pay for it ever since.  

For all the tools you get and the benefits they bring to help you manage your online business, it's definitely worth the price, in my experience.

It's worth mentioning that Thrive also offers an agency subscription for $49/month, paid annually. This allows businesses to have full access to their suite of tools for up to 50 websites in total.

Alternatives

There is a lot of competition on the market when it comes to WordPress page builders. Themes and landing pages to plugins and front-end page creators, you'll find tons of other options at your disposal.

In this section, we compare Thrive Themes to some of their top competitors. Each of them is very believable and offers its own set of unique features.

1. Elementor

Elementor is very similar to Thrive Architect and Thrive Theme Builder. It's a great tool that you can use to build your entire theme.

The Pro version of Elementor costs $49 per year, and while that's a great deal, Thrive Themes offers much better value when you get the membership along with all the other tools to help with marketing.

With Elementor, you can do a great job designing your WordPress website, but Thrive's theme builder has a lot of similar features - while also providing you with a comprehensive suite of market-focused tools.

While Elementor excels at all of the latest design trends, Thrive excels at providing products with built-in marketing features. If you get the Thrive Architect and Thrive Theme Builder combo (what you do with the membership), it could be a great replacement for Elementor.

Additionally, Elementor's pop-ups lack A/B testing, analytics, and more, while Thrive offers advanced reports, multi-state signup forms, resource delivery features, and much more.

2. ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is one of the leading all-in-one third-party tools for creating highly optimized websites. It is a powerful, fast, cloud-based platform with built-in payment integration. It also includes one-click up and down sales.

ClickFunnels also includes a membership feature, which is something Thrive Themes doesn't have. It also comes with affiliate and email marketing solutions in the $297 monthly plan.

If you're on a budget and want advanced features ready to be used with external shopping cart solutions like SamCart or ThriveCart, then Thrive Themes is the option for you.

Priced at $97/month, it's easy to see why a lot of people choose Thrive Themes over ClickFunnels. Joining Thrive's entire suite of tools only costs $19/month. Plus, with Thrive themes, you're using WordPress, which means you're in control of your creation and marketing, and you're not locked in anything.

With ClickFunnels, on the other hand, you are totally dependent on the cloud-based platform and you don't have total control of your site.

While ClickFunnels has the advantage of being super fast and easy to use, which is great for non-techies, Thrive Themes products are loaded with amazing features at a lower cost — making it a no-brainer for marketers who want an all-in-one solution at an affordable price.

3. Leadpages

Leadpages is another cloud application that is very similar to ClickFunnels. It's very fast, has an intuitive user interface, and provides a great user experience overall. The main functionalities of this platform are the creation of landing pages and the generation of leads.

Recently, Leadpages introduced “Leadpages Checkouts” which allows you to collect Stripe payments. With Thrive Themes, that's not possible unless you integrate external payment products.

When it comes to the page builder, Thrive Themes has a lot of features that aren't available in Leadpages, including advanced rarity marketing, quizzes, A/B testing, and reporting features, and much more.

Additionally, Leadpages costs $48/month while Thrive Themes membership for all tools costs only $19/month.

These are just a few of the page builders that are available as alternatives to Thrive Themes.

As you can see, each of these would be a great alternative, but in general, they are not equal in terms of functionality.

I always recommend Thrive membership because none of these tools can beat it in terms of value for money.

None of them have the suite of tools that Thrive Membership has.

For a very low monthly fee, you have access to all the tools you need to create high-converting website pages and turn your site visitors into leads and paying customers.

Pricing

In February 2021, Thrive Themes stopped offering one-time purchases of its software and customers must now purchase all or none of the Thrive Suite tools.

What do you think of this change?

I think that makes sense. Buying one Thrive Themes tool at a time only gives you certain features. When you have the whole suite of tools, there's so much you can do that you probably haven't even thought about.

When you buy Thrive Suite, you get full access to all of their tools, and you can use them on up to 25 websites. The tools include everything I just mentioned above.

So how much does Thrive Themes cost?

The cost is $19/month paid annually ($228) or $90/quarter. You can Learn more about their rates by clicking here.

Customer Support

You can get support from Thrive Themes by submitting a support ticket for your questions from your Thrive dashboard.

There's no chat option, and if the support team is knowledgeable, they usually respond within 24 hours, which is slow and can be frustrating if you're in the middle of a project.

That said, they are very knowledgeable and friendly and will work with you to resolve any issues you may encounter.

Thrive Themes also has a large forum where you can submit your queries. However, I feel that it is difficult to search and find problems that have already been resolved.

FAQs

Is it easy to deactivate Thrive Themes products?

All Thrive Themes products are feature-rich and carefully designed with real life marketing applications in mind. While it's very easy to leave Thrive products if you want to, it can be painful to do so because they have so many features and are linked to so much of what you do on your website.

Do Thrive Themes products integrate with other platforms?

All Thrive Themes products integrate well with other tools, WordPress plugins, and services - from email marketing to webinars, to other marketing tools.

Third-party integrations include:

• ActiveCampaign
• Drip by drop
• Aweber
• ConvertKit
• ... and many more.

You can get the complete list of integrations on the Thrive Themes website.

Final Verdict

Thrive Themes is a comprehensive package that gives you all the tools you'll ever need to build a very beautiful, high-converting website and I hope my review helped you understand that.

With this set of tools, you'll be able to create beautiful websites and landing pages with a high conversion rate, all without writing a single line of code.

You will no longer have to mix your WordPress themes and plugins for the right page elements to work together and you will have a global solution for your online business's blog and marketing needs.