LeadPages Alternative: Thrive Content Builder

Creating and designing lead funnels for your products or services can be a huge challenge. Especially if you are not very technical and lack the ability to code.

That is why I always suggest to most business owners that they should either outsource this type of task to professionals, or use a landing page creation product to make this process easier.

In my last post, I showed you who’s using LeadPages in their business to collect more email leads.

LeadPages has certainly taken the internet marketing world by storm and is clearly the leader in adding squeeze pages and other optin-funnels to your site.

But LeadPages might not be for everyone. For one thing, you might not be willing to commit yourself to the LeadPages ecosystem and paying the monthly subscription fee.

Or you might want some more flexibility in designing your landing pages than LeadPages provides.

In this post, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite LeadPages alternatives, which is Thrive Content Builder from Thrive Themes.

There is quite a bit of overlap in what Thrive Content Builder offers and what LeadPages can do. So I’m going to give you an in-depth look at both products, and see how they compare with each other.

What is Thrive Content Builder?

Thrive Content Builder (TCB) is a Wordpress plugin for building highly converting landing pages, and is one of the flagship Thrive products. It can be purchased standalone, or accessible as part of the yearly Thrive Themes membership.

Once installed, TCB acts as an alternative to your standard Wordpress editor. So whenever you edit a new post or page on your site, you have to choice to launch the Thrive Content editor.

The Thrive Content Editor gives you a whole new interface to use. On the right hand side is a palette that contains numerous Thrive widgets that can be dragged and dropped into the editor.

By combining these widgets on the page, you can construct some really nice, high converting landing pages in a short amount of time.

Widgets include basic components like Text, Image and Buttons, to more advanced components like the Quote Share widget, Testimonial boxes, and Call to Action boxes.

There’s a lot of cool widgets available, and they enable you to build not only landing pages, but Coming soon pages (with the Countdown Timer widget), Sales pages (with the Pricing Tables and Feature Grids), and almost anything else you can think of.

Each widget has it’s own set of customization options, so you can change things like fonts, text size, colors, alignment and more.

Thrive Content Builder also offers the ability to build Thrive Lightboxes. These are opt-in popups which are comparable to the LeadBoxes that Leadpages offers. Thrive Lightboxes can be customized with the Thrive Content editor, just like any other post or page.

LeadPages vs Thrive Content Builder

Now that I’ve given you a better idea how Thrive Content Builder works, lets get into a more detailed comparison between the two products.

Speed of Landing Page Creation

The purpose of both LeadPages and Thrive Content Builder is to help you create, highly converting landing pages faster, without writing a line of code.

LeadPages is all about creating landing pages fast, although it sacrifices flexibility for speed.

Your basic LeadPages workflow is to select from one of the 90 pre-made templates and make some simple tweaks to the copy and change specific design elements like images and colors to match your brand.

The Thrive Content Builder also supports this same workflow. But it gives you a lot more flexiblity and choice in terms of how you want to place the different components on the page.

In terms of intutiveness and raw speed, I probably will have to give the edge to the LeadPages designer. There’s less of a learning curve involved, although a lot of that has to do with the fact that you are much more limited with what you can do with it.

Landing Page Templates

Templates are an important aspect of this sort of product as they provide you with a starting point from which to start from.

In terms of raw number of templates, LeadPages has Thrive Content Builder beat. At this time, LeadPages has almost 90 templates available to choose from.

TCB though, is quickly catching up. After updating to the latest version of the plugin, I was able to count 56 templates available to pick from.

Both products offers a wide variety of templates, not just squeeze pages. For example, there are templates for Webinar pages, Coming Soon pages, Product sales pages.

LeadPages does distinguish itself somewhat by offering landing page templates from well known marketers like Jeff Walker, Pat Flynn, James Schramko and others.

So you know you are leveraging the testing of people who have actually sent thousands of visitors to these templates to make sales and collect opt-ins.

Also, since LeadPages is a service, it is able to track the conversions of the different templates they offer. So letting you sort through landing pages by conversion rate is a nice, unique feature that they can offer.

Flexibility/Customizability

Customizability is where Thrive Content Builder really shines.

With LeadPages, you are very limited with the things you can change on a page. For example, you can change the placement of any elements on the page. This is why it is very easy to tell that a site is using LeadPages, because lots of people tend to use the same sets of templates. This is especially true of LeadBoxes which look very similar across every site that uses them.

TCB is way different in this regard. Its editor is way more flexible in terms of building your pages exactly as you want them. You can move things around, and tweak the look and feel of each individual element. You can even choose between a few different component styles which can radically change the look of your pages.

There is even a blank page template to start from which you can use to build a squeeze page completely from scratch if you wanted to.

The wide variety of Thrive widgets is also something that LeadPages can’t match and it makes Thrive Content Builder a better choice for a wider variety of situations.

For example, you don’t necessarily need to use TCB just to create landing pages. You could use it as part of your normal blog posts and just leverage a couple of components like the call to action buttons or table of contents element to give your content that extra pop.

Extras

LeadPages offers a wide variety of extras, although not everything is available for every subscription package. For example, as a LeadPages customer you get access to

• LeadDigits (Enterprise only) – Capture email addresses and phone numbers through SMS. Useful if your business takes part in conferences, concerts, or any offline place where you meet customers.
• LeadLinks – Allow subscribers to join another list or subscribe to webinar with a single click. No additional optin required
• Facebook integration – Easily publish your Leadpages in Facebook tabs.
• Lead Magnets – deliver your lead magnets directly from your LeadPages
• Split Testing – Collect data on which landing page is converting the best.
• Template marketplace – Create and sell your own LeadPages templates in the marketplace.

Thrive Content Builder doesn’t offer the same breadth of features that LeadPages does, as it is a much more focused product. But TCB really stands out by the way it is continually being improved over time.

Updates are very frequent and new features like Thrive Leadboxes are consistently being added. The Thrive Content Editor is much faster then when it first came out, and the number of new widgets and templates is nothing short of amazing. Compared to the initial version, TCB is like a completely new product.

If you are a Thrive Themes member, you will also get access to all of the Thrive products.

One of these is Thrive Leads which is another plugin that greatly expands your ability to collect emails on your site. You can create Lightboxes, slideup boxes, ribbon opt-ins, In-Post optins and more. Plus, it has split testing capabilities that are much more advanced than anything LeadPages offers.

Pricing

LeadPages uses a subscription based model, which can be somewhat confusing. You need to make sure you study their pricing table carefully to know exactly what you are getting. There are 3 different tiers, Standard, Pro and Enterprise and three different payment options, monthly, yearly and every 2 years.

Unless you are just testing LeadPages out, I would probably stay away from the Standard plan which runs for $37 a month. You don’t get a lot of features in this tier like split testing, LeadLinks or access to the affiliate program.

Pro accounts are $67 a month or just $40 a month if you pay annually.

Thrive Content Builder on the other hand is a one time purchase. For a single site license, you can get the plugin for $59 or pay $87 to use it on an unlimited number of sites. Both these licenses give you 1 year of support.

You can also get the Thrive Membership price which is $147 a year. This gives you access to Thrive Content Builder as well as every other Thrive product. This includes Thrive Leads which I mentioned above, the Thrive Themes club, and any other products that get released while you are a member.

I know a lot of people are hesitant to do monthly subscriptions, which makes Thrive Content Builder an attractive option.

Conclusion

If you want to run a successful business, then it’s in your best interest to collect as many prospective leads as you can. Email marketing is hands down the most effective way to drive traffic and make sales.

But to collect emails effectively, you need to develop your own set of lead funnels. Creating them by hand is difficult, which is why I suggest using products like LeadPages or Thrive Content Builder.

LeadPages is the clear leader in this category, but Thrive Content Builder is certainly a viable alternative.

If you are looking for a product that’s straightforward to use, and you don’t have to think about much, then LeadPages is certainly a great product to try. It has a thriving ecosystem and the templates they offer are second to none.

If you are looking for more flexibility and you want more control over how your landing pages look, then you should take a look at Thrive Content Builder. TCB is constantly improving, and new features are being added all the time.

Try Thrive Content Builder

Try LeadPages