Back in 2014, I remember being so impressed when a product called Thrive Content Builder came out.

It was this really cool WordPress page builder that allowed you to customize your posts and pages in ways that had never been done before.

Sure, these days, a drag and drop builder isn’t anything special. But back then it was pretty unique and it made Thrive Content Builder stand out.

And what I loved about it was that it allowed you to make your site look different from all the other WordPress sites out there.

Thrive Suite Review

Last Updated: Feb 20, 2021
Initially published: Feb 16, 2021
Product rating: 4.6 / 5.0

tl;dr Summary

Thrive Suite is a collection of plugins that will help your WordPress site convert more visitors into leads and sales.

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At the time, Thrive Content Builder was the flagship product of a membership called Thrive Themes.

Thrive Themes always felt like an odd name. Yes, the company did create some themes in the beginning. But it wasn’t really their main focus.

Over time they started adding new, innovative plugins to their membership. With a focus on helping your website convert more of your visitors into subscribers and buyers.

Fast forward seven years later, and Thrive Themes has finally decided to rebrand itself. They are now called Thrive Suite and it comes with a brand new pricing structure.

In this Thrive Suite review, I’m taking a look at all products that currently make up Thrive Suite, and I will show you the ways they can improve your website.

Here’s what I’m going to cover:

What Is Thrive Suite?
What Are Some Of My Favorite Things About Thrive Suite?
What Are The Annoying Things About Thrive Suite?
A Look Inside Thrive Suite
Thrive Suite Pricing
Final Verdict
Thrive Suite Pros and Cons

Convert more visitors with Thrive Suite Today

What Is Thrive Suite?

You’re probably already familiar with Thrive Themes, the company behind the popular plugins like Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads.

Thrive Suite is the evolution of their popular membership program, which includes every plugin they make.

So what’s changed?

Well, up until very recently, you could purchase the majority of Thrive plugins independently for a lifetime price of $67 for a single license, or $97 for a 5-site license.

Moving forward, the membership has been rebranded as Thrive Suite. And it is now the only way to get access to any of the Thrive products.

Pricing remains the same, $90 quarterly, or $228 annually — giving you a 25-site license for each plugin by default.

What Are Some Of My Favorite Things About Thrive Suite?

Good thing #1: Thrive Suite’s plugins are still industry-leading

In terms of raw features, Thrive Themes has long been one of the big players in advanced marketing tools for WordPress.

Thrive Architect (formerly Thrive Content Builder) was one of the first front-end, drag-and-drop WordPress page builders on the market that actually felt fluid while still being incredibly easy to use.

Thrive Leads was one of the first lead capture plugins to offer such a wide variety of form types, triggers, and display rules. It also gave the ability to split-test different form types (which had never been done before).

Thrive Comments was one of the first comment plugins to completely transform the discussion area of WordPress posts by introducing an upvote system similar to popular social media networks.

While it could be said that Thrive Themes isn’t quite as cutting edge these days when it comes to new products, their existing library is still very respectable when stacked up to alternatives.

Good thing #2: It’s a (mostly) complete ecosystem

When it comes to building websites, it’s no secret that an integrated ecosystem can provide a better experience than a fragmented, piece-by-piece approach.

Thrive Themes certainly isn’t the first company to attempt an all-in-one solution to websites, but they are one of the few companies to do so with an unwavering focus on a specific audience:

Marketers who use WordPress.

What this means is, if you happen to be the target demographic, you have access to a collection of tools that provide virtually everything you need under one roof.

Need a high-converting landing page? Use Thrive Architect.
Need to capture email addresses with popups? Use Thrive Leads.
Need to run a scarcity campaign? Use Thrive Ultimatum.
Need to host training courses? Use Thrive Apprentice.
Need to poll your audience? Use Thrive Quizzes.
And the list goes on…

I say “mostly” because, like any ecosystem, some Thrive Suite users will experience a few gaps here and there — though likely nothing that can’t be filled in with third-party solutions.

For example, a membership plugin and checkout plugin have been requested by the community for many years, and still don’t exist for whatever reason.

Good thing #3: They are constantly improving

One thing that you get to know as a Thrive Suite customer, is that they are constantly making improvements to their products.

Whether it’s rebuilding a product from scratch (ie. Thrive Content Builder to Thrive Architect) or just adding new features to existing products, Thrive Suite is always evolving for the better.

Like clockwork, every month you’re going to get an email and blog post announcing all the new things that have been added to Thrive Suite.

This has been going on for years, and it really gives you the confidence that the team stands by and supports their product. They even have a separate development timeline page that details all the changes they have made.

What Are The Annoying Things About Thrive Suite?

Annoying thing #1: It’s expensive for one or two plugins

Let’s say you’re only looking for a one-off solution to build landing pages? Or perhaps you need something to run popups on your site?

Well, tough luck.

With Thrive Suite, you’ll have no choice but to purchase the entire collection on a recurring membership in order to use the one or two plugins you actually need.

That means you either accept that Thrive products are significantly more expensive than before, or you switch your entire marketing stack over to the Thrive Themes ecosystem.

You know what they say, there ain’t no deal like a lifetime deal.

Annoying thing #2: Thrive products are still buggy at times

Thrive Themes has had some occasional issues with high-profile bugs.

In fact, it got so bad a few years ago that “de-thriving” became a thing in many marketing communities, as people transitioned away from the page builder in favor of more stable builders, like Elementor and Oxygen.

These days, the problem has largely been addressed with many of the serious issues ironed-out in current versions of their plugins.

With that being said, if you spend any time in the unofficial Thrive Themes Facebook group, you’ll know there’s still the occasional case of user frustration as things just… break.

I’ve experienced this on a few occasions as well. Although usually, it has to do with some sort of plugin conflict on my site.

Fortunately, Thrive support is pretty decent and will help you identify and fix these sorts of issues.

A Look Inside Thrive Suite

At the time of this review, Thrive Suite is made up of 10+ conversion-focused WordPress plugins, each covering a different facet of website building and marketing.

Let’s take a deeper look into these plugins below.

Thrive Architect

Thrive Architect started life as a widely-loved WordPress page builder (Thrive Content Builder), before evolving into what it is today; an advanced landing page and theme builder.

The builder comes with a boatload of landing page templates for pretty much every type of landing page you can think of, all of which can be customized to fit the overall look and branding of your site. Personally, I use Thrive Architect to build out most of my affiliate product bonus pages.

What’s more, the editor itself is still one of the best in the business, giving you full design control over columns, rows, widgets and typography. It also has seamless integration with other Thrive Themes products.

The theme building aspect is a relatively new addition to Thrive Architect, and one that relies on the new Shapeshift theme to work. This makes it more of a theme editor rather than a theme “builder”.

Once installed, the theme can be heavily manipulated by Thrive Architect, including headers and footers, and dynamic content such as archive pages, single post layouts, and more.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a popup and lead generation plugin that leverages the Thrive Architect builder. It’s used to capture email addresses through various form types, such as full-screen overlays, slide-ins, inline forms, and traditional lightboxes.

This was one of the first plugins to allow for cross-type testing of forms, opening the floor to split-tests that were previously extremely technical and expensive to run. It also gave us some of the first versions of multi-form states and asset delivery.

Unlike most competing lead capture tools, Thrive Leads lives and functions directly inside WordPress, where it provides a deep level of reporting across all of your lead campaigns.

I personally used Thrive Leads for many years on this site, and I can credit it for generating thousands of leads to my email list.

Thrive Ultimatum

Thrive Ultimatum is a marketing scarcity plugin based on the “FOMO” sales tactic, which has been increasingly more popular online thanks to platforms like AppSumo.

The plugin adds a styleable countdown element (once again leveraging the Thrive Architect editor) to your website that actually enforces limited-time sales — operating as a fixed-date, automatic, and evergreen scarcity campaign.

The latter is particularly useful for those who want to assign individual countdown timers to individual visitors. Ultimatum pulls this off using URL parameters and browser cookies to track users across different devices.

Fun fact: Rumour has it that Thrive Ultimatum is one of the least popular plugins in the entire Thrive Suite, hence its lack of development since its initial release in 2016.

Thrive Apprentice

Thrive Apprentice is an e-learning plugin that allows you to upload modules and lessons to a course environment, containing text, images, videos, and various other files for students to progress through.

If you’ve ever used a platform like Udemy, Teachable, or Thinkific, you can think of Thrive Apprentice as the WordPress-based, self-hosted alternative — giving you the most control over your courses, free or paid.

Like almost every other plugin in the Thrive Suite, this is built on the Thrive Architect editor using a dedicated set of templates to display courses, modules and lessons, and they all look great.

It’s worth noting that Thrive Apprentice is not a membership plugin and doesn’t offer any e-commerce functionality. Though, it does have an integration with SendOwl at a small monthly expense.

Thrive Comments

Thrive Comments turns your WordPress post and page comment section into an engagement-driven discussion, largely based on a Reddit-like upvote system.

Enabling this on your site doesn’t only transform the appearance and sort order of your comment section, it also gives way to interesting features like comment special offers, comment auto-linking, and even gamification to incentivize users to return to the conversation.

The other aspects to this are the backend improvements, particularly when it comes to moderating unsavory comments, assigning comments to colleagues or virtual assistants, or getting in-depth reporting on discussions across your site.

It’s one of those plugins that you (or your audience) won’t fully appreciate until you’ve experienced it, but it’s fair to say this is as deep and feature-rich as any Thrive Themes product you’ve come to know.

I’m actually using it to power the comment section of this site, so leave a comment to give it a try!

Thrive Ovation

Thrive Ovation is a WordPress plugin that allows you to efficiently collect, store and display testimonials across your site in order to boost conversions.

You can collect testimonials through dedicated landing pages with embedded Thrive Ovation forms. A link to this landing page can even be automatically distributed to new customers, automating the entire “testimonial gathering” process.

These testimonials are then stored in your WordPress database and made available in the backend of your WordPress dashboard, which is where you can delegate specific pages and positions to display them.

Displaying these testimonials can be as straightforward or as conditional as you like, using shortcodes to assign the position of testimonials, and dynamic rules to place the appropriate (or updated) testimonials in those exact positions.

Thrive Quiz Builder

Thrive Quiz Builder is exactly what it sounds like, a tool for building engaging quizzes directly inside WordPress.

Built on the Thrive Architect framework, this plugin allows you to create complex quizzes through a dedicated setup wizard (no coding required), allowing you to incorporate multiple-choice questions that branch out to different pathways.

Questions can be in the form of text or images, and answers will be recorded all the way through in order to show a dynamic results page, complete with an assigned score and call-to-action. Badges are also used to drive social media shares, and it works surprisingly well.

Thrive Quizzes even has a lead generation aspect built into it, forcing visitors to input their email address in order to see their results. Leads can also be self-segmented using the answers they chose throughout the quiz.

Thrive Optimize

Thrive Optimize is a plugin that works alongside Thrive Architect to allow for A/B testing, meaning you can use it to compare landing pages against each other with zero coding knowledge.

As usual, Thrive Themes attempts to push the boundaries of what’s possible with WordPress, so instead of limiting a test to two pages with a single conversion goal, Thrive Optimize will allow you to test unlimited page variants with multiple conversion goals.

Other features include custom traffic distribution, automatic winner settings, and the ability to run an unlimited number of split-tests at the same time.

The only catch is that it only works with Thrive Architect, so if you have landing pages built with other page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Divi, well… you’re out of luck.

Thrive Headline Optimizer

Thrive Headline Optimizer is another aptly named plugin, this time to split-test the headlines for your blog posts titles.

WordPress only allows a single title for pages and posts, but being the most important factor when it comes to clicks to your article, it doesn’t make sense to settle on one idea and call it a day.

This plugin extends WordPress by providing multiple title fields that will rotate out and track the resulting clicks in order to identify the best-performing headline.

The biggest drawback for Thrive Headline Optimizer is that it doesn’t track clicks from a search engine results page (like Google), so you can’t test meta titles in the same way. The clicks have to come from your blog archives.

Thrive Clever Widgets

Thrive Clever Widgets allows you to turn your static sidebars into “smart sidebars” by applying conditional logic to the sidebar content.

The logic works on a page-by-basis, so you can show the exact content you want on the exact page you want to show it. It does this using WordPress categories and tags, as well as WordPress post types.

Like every Thrive Themes product, Clever Widgets is optimized for speed, and it claims to have no impact on the loading time of your webpage. This is because the plugin will only load the relevant content, regardless of how many conditions you have set.

Granted, this is probably the least spectacular plugin in the Thrive Suite today, but if you don’t already have this functionality as part of your website, there’s certainly no harm in making use of it as a Thrive Suite subscriber.

Thrive Suite Pricing

Thrive Suite has a very simple pricing model. It’s $228 per year if purchased annually. Or $360 per year if purchased quarterly.

With your membership, you get access to every single plugin that Thrive Themes offers. And you can use these plugins on up to 25 sites.

You also get access to Thrive Theme Builder and Shapeshift theme. Plus you get full support and free updates while you’re a paying member.

If you choose not the renew your Thrive Suite membership, your plugins will still continue to work. However, you will lose access to support and updates.

Final Verdict

Will Thrive Suite increase the conversions of your WordPress sites? I believe it will.

I’ve been a Thrive Suite member from the very beginning and I am a big fan of most of their products.

I’ve collected thousands of emails on this site with Thrive Leads. And I’ve used Thrive Architect to design many of the pages on this site. You can even see Thrive Comments being used in my comments section below here.

So I know their tools work, and the value they can bring to any WordPress blog.

If you want your site to start converting better, then I would suggest giving them a try.