I’m generally not enthusiastic about Thrive Themes, even though I’m an affiliate.
Why is that?
Well, Thrive Themes has a LOT of pros and some people love it. For me the cons are too much to deal with, and removing the negatives that go along with Thrive makes me happier.
Pros
- Thrive is extremely feature rich. It’s literally a full suite of tools and software that’s unmatched. You get insane capabilities including but not limited to:
- Themes for any kind of site.
- Leads – email lead generation, aka Popups and Optins.
- Architect – Page builder with landing pages. I use this for sales pages.
- Headline Optimizer – A/B testing for headlines.
- Ultimatum – Evergreen sales plugin that adds scarcity.
- Quiz Builder – Create your own quiz for viral content.
- Comments – Comment management system.
- The tools and features work together well.
Cons
- Terrible customer support. It’s a forum based support system and it’s very slow. This is worst issue and it’s why I normally don’t recommend Thrive. The last time I tried to get support, it took a few days to even get a reply.
- Too many features. It’s just complicated to use all these features. It can lead to “analysis paralysis” because of the decision fatigue.
- Slow if you use the features that are available. I had a simple page that used the Architect, and it loaded a little slow. Hmmm. So I just copied and pasted the content over to a regular blog post with standard formatting versus the front end editor, Architect. The post loaded in about half the time and the size of the page went down dramatically. It’s a bloated piece of software.
- Monthly fees – It’s about $20 to $30 per month depending if you pay monthly or annually. This may or not be expensive for you. Thrive offers a FULL suite of tools and if you were to get the services separately (say a theme, a landing page, and lead/optin software) it would be a lot more expensive. But with the poor and slow customer support, it’s hard to justify the cost.
My conclusion is that if you really like the themes from Thrive and just 1 or 2 of the other products, it’s probably the right choice for you.
I got terribly frustrated using the older version of Thrive Architect (Thrive Content Builder), but I still use it because the landing page & sales page capabilities are sufficient. When it works, it works well. I lose it when the bugs surface and I can’t get support, but that’s admittedly rare.
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