Pros and Cons of Thrive – Is it Worth it? Guide & FAQs

If you create your own website to host online courses, it can be quite difficult to make one that’s attractive enough to convert visitors.

This is where Thrive Themes comes in with its easy-to-use website builder and conversion-focused approach. 

In this post, we’ll go over everything that Thrive Themes has to offer, provide you with some alternatives and also, determine whether it’s a good option for online course creators or not.

Quick Summary of Thrive Themes

The name, Thrive Themes, is quite misleading because one may think it’s only a theme builder for your website or a theme library. 

The truth is that Thrive Themes is an all-purpose toolkit that you can utilize to create your online course website from start to finish. 

It’s since been renamed to Thrive Suite to avoid confusion. 

It comes with plugins for many different approaches and enables you to create a website that will have a much better chance to convert potential customers.

The 9 plugins that are a part of the Thrive Suite membership include: 

• Thrive Themes
• Thrive Leads
• Thrive Architect
• Thrive Clever Widgets
• Thrive Headline Optimizer
• Thrive Ultimatum
• Thrive Ovation
• Thrive Quiz Builder
• Thrive Comments
• Thrive Optimize

Since Thrive’s business model focuses heavily on conversions from visitors on your website, it’s especially useful for online course creators like you who want to find buying customers.

While it’s true that not all of the plugins work as functionally well as others, the ones that do (mainly Thrive Themes and Thrive Architect) are arguably the best in the market. 

We’ll go over what each plugin does and how well it does it in the next section. 

Thrive Suite – Features and Benefits

Thrive Theme Builder

Thrive Theme Builder offers a wide variety of templates and themes to choose from that give your website an elegant and attractive look. 

It’s easy to use and furthermore, it’s highly stable and not prone at all to bugs or crashes.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads allows you to easily create opt-in forms in order to build email lists for the marketing campaigns of your online courses. 

It also gives you the option to split-test different forms to analyze which one works best for audience conversion.

Thrive Architect

Thrive Architect is Thrive’s website builder and its drag-and-drop approach is very easy to pick up even if you’ve never created a website before. 

There are many pre-built assets for you to choose from such as columns, ratings, pricing tables, icons, etc.

Thrive Apprentice

This is especially aimed at you since it’s a plugin that’s made to create websites to host online courses. 

You can use it to create the course experience you want and the plugin allows you to have as many premium as well as free online courses on your website as you want. 

Thrive Ultimatum

Thrive Ultimatum allows you to create attractive countdown timers for any limited-time offers you may have on your online courses. 

You can also use it to create ever-lasting countdown timers and limited offers for every new visitor that visits your website.

Thrive Ovation

Thrive Ovation makes creating attractive and elegant testimonials for your online course(s) much easier. 

Testimonials displayed on your website can play a huge role in converting visitors.

Thrive Quiz Builder

The Quiz Builder can be used to create better engagement as well as collect leads. 

Thrive Comments

As the name suggests, Thrive Comments allows you to better manage the comments section on posts on your website. 

It’s much easier to use than the standard WordPress system and you can even add an up-vote system to create further incentive for people to comment on your posts. 

Thrive Optimize

Thrive Optimize allows you to run A/B testing on different aspects of your website to analyze which approach works best to convert visitors.

You can use Thrive Optimize to determine what imagery, phrasing, and colors work best for audience conversion.

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Thrive Suite

Pricing 

You can choose to pay for Thrive Themes either quarterly or yearly. 

If you choose to pay quarterly, it will cost you $19 per month, if you choose to pay quarterly, it will cost $30 per month.

Thrive Suite also has a refund policy of 30 days if you’re not satisfied with their product.

We feel that options are quite generously priced for new online course creators.

User-Friendliness

Every aspect of the Thrive Suite is meticulously designed to provide the functionality to veterans as well as newcomers. 

Elegant and easy-to-navigate menus make all of the plugins within the Thrive Suite a breeze to use. 

Customer Support

The customer care for Thrive Suite has its pros and cons. 

As far as good things go, their customer care is incredibly responsive and provides detailed answers to any queries you may have. 

When it comes to cons, they only provide customer care through forums and text. If you want to quickly resolve issues through the phone, that’s not something they’ll be able to provide.

Thrive Suite – Pros and Cons

What we liked	What we didn’t like
• Responsive customer care via forums • Incredibly stable and rarely ever crashes • Easy to use • Budget-friendly • Focused on audience conversion which is perfect for online course creators	• No phone customer care • Some of their more specialized plugins aren’t as effective as their competitors

Thrive Suite – Social Proof

Customers who use Thrive Suite on a regular basis are quite loyal to the toolbox thanks to its ease of use and endless functionality. 

Many users appreciate the level of control it provides them when they create their website and also love how elegant and aesthetically pleasing all of its pre-built templates are. 

With all that being said, the main reason why so many people love Thrive Suite is thanks to its increased focus on audience conversion. 

Tools that help with A/B testing and website optimization within Thrive Suite are extremely popular among users.

Some of the reviews that we came across online had this to say: 

Similar to Thrive Suite (Recommendations)

#1: Best User-Friendly Alternative – Elementor Review 

Elementor is a simple to use drag-and-drop style page and website builder that you can utilize to create your online course website. 

It has a free version that you can check out to see whether or not it’s something that you’d be able to utilize effectively or not. 

Furthermore, it has over 300 templates to choose from for different types of website pages you may have such as: 

• Blog posts 
• A 404 page 
• A search page 
• An FAQs page 

And much more.

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Elementor

Pricing:

Elementor has a free version that you can check out and even its pro version only costs $49 per year which rounds out to about $4 per month. 

This is extremely cheap for the amount of value you get out of this dynamic website builder.

User-Friendliness: The theme and page builder for Elementor is superior to Thrive’s in many ways thanks to its easy drag-and-drop approach. 

Its easy-to-navigate menus make it very simple for novices to create websites. 

Customer Support: The customer care for Elementor is fairly responsive and they provided detailed solutions to all the queries we had throughout the time we used it. 

What we liked	What we didn’t like
• Great for adding custom assets such as CTA buttons, countdown timers, etc. • Can be integrated with popular third-party marketing tools • Huge library of templates to choose from • Extremely affordable • User-friendly	• The extra CSS, Javascript and div blocks that Elementor adds may slow down your website

Best User-Friendly Alternative

The best user-friendly alternative to Thrive Suite is Elementor. It’s extremely cheap as the Pro version costs only $4 per month. Furthermore, its menus are neatly organized so you have no trouble finding what you need. 

#2: Best Alternative with Social Media Integration – Divi Review 

Similar to Elementor, Divi features a drag-and-drop editor that you can use to customize your website in any way you want. 

If you’re not very experienced with website design, you can choose from their wide selection of templates for different types of pages. However, if you want more customization, there’s also the option for in-line HTML and CSS editing. 

It has tools to create sign-up and opt-in forms and it also provides you with detailed metrics to check how well your website is performing. 

You can also use it to add social media buttons for further engagement. 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Divi

Pricing: Divi’s most popular plan costs $89 per year which rounds out to about $7.5 per month. It’s not as cheap as Elementor but still leagues cheaper than Thrive. 

On the other hand, you can also pay $249 one time to get lifetime access to the tool as well as future updates. 

User-Friendliness: While Divi is definitely as user-friendly as Elementor and Thrive Suite when it’s working correctly, the problems arise when you run into bugs. 

Divi does tend to get buggy when WordPress updates roll around and that may cause frustrating issues that are difficult to solve. 

Customer Support: Divi’s customer care is quite helpful and responsive. They do their best to solve any issues you may have within 5 – 6 hours. 

What we liked	What we didn’t like
• Affordable • You can use it on an unlimited number of websites • Options for in-line editing • 100+ attractive templates  • Neat and intuitive user interface	• Working on larger pages can slow down the editor and even, cause it to freeze

Best Alternative with Social Media Integration

The best alternative with social media integration is Divi thanks to a plugin that comes with it called Monarch. In addition to aiding your social media campaigns, Divi is also intuitive to use and allows you to create dynamic web pages with ease.

Guide to Buy

It can be difficult to choose a specific theme and website builder because different types of builders are aimed at people who create different types of websites. 

For example, if you’re an online course creator, you don’t want to end up with a builder that’s geared mainly towards people who want to create forums or community websites. 

Some aspects that you can look towards to choose an appropriate builder to go for are: 

Pricing 

As an online course creator, you’ll most likely already need to pay for a wide variety of tools and services in order to create your product. 

Thus, since you may not have a lot of money to work with, you want your website builder to be as conservatively priced as possible. 

For new online course creators, we recommend that you don’t go for any website building service that costs above $40 per month. 

Stability

This is a common problem with many website builders in the market, especially the ones that are specifically catered to work with WordPress. 

With WordPress as well as other web development platforms, regular updates tend to roll out to fix or upgrade certain tools or features. 

This can often have unwanted consequences for any builder you may have used to create your website. 

It may cause certain sections of your pages to behave in an undesired way or in extreme cases, they may even cause your entire website to go down. 

Thus, do your research and opt for a builder that is stable, not prone to crashes, and handles updates on its corresponding web development platform well. 

User-Friendliness

The bottom line is that user-friendliness is something you want to look for in pretty much every tool you use when you create and sell online courses. 

This is because you want the majority of your time and attention to be focused on actual content creation for the course itself. 

If you have to spend hours of your time learning how to use your website builder, this is precious time taken away that could’ve been utilized to better your online course. 

Customer Support

No builder is perfect and you will definitely run into some issues from time to time that you will need help with.

That’s what customer care services are for and you should definitely conduct research to determine which builder has the best customer care team. 

Oftentimes, issues on your website may even cost you potential buyers. Thus, you want to look for a builder with a customer care team that is fast to respond to your queries.

Thrive Suite – Wrapping Things Up…

This brings us to the conclusion of our review for Thrive Suite. 

We’re definitely very impressed with everything Thrive Suite has to offer. Thrive Suite is particularly a great option for online course creators thanks to its increased focus on conversion. 

None of the competitors of Thrive Suite focus on audience conversion which is why it is most definitely a website builder option that stands out for online course creators. 

Furthermore, its ease of use makes it very simple for you to create your website even if you don’t have any prior experience. 

Lastly, it’s quite reasonably priced too when you look at the number of tools and functionality it offers. 

What do you think of Thrive Suite? Have you ever used it to create a website? Do you think some other builder is better? Let us know in the comments below.