Thrive Architect is a premium page builder that fits right in with other premium page builders like Elementor and Divi. The user interface actually looks almost the same as Elementors, so what sets Thrive Architect apart from the competition? According to Thrive Themes, the company behind Thrive Architect, it’s the most conversion focused page builder out there and it’s a truly visual website building experience. Well, let’s dive in and see!

Thrive Architect user interface

So, like I said the user interface looks a lot like Elementor. That’s not a bad thing, because it’s one of the most user friendly interfaces I know. You have a sidebar on the left with all the modules in it, and Thrive Architect has about 40 of those modules which is a good amount and comparable to other premium page builders.

The modules are divided into two sections: “foundation” and “building blocks”. Under “foundation”, you’ll find the standard elements you always need to build a web page. So here you’ll find columns, paragraph (normal text), heading, image and button modules, and also a background section, content box and templates and symbols. 

Adding content sections in Thrive Architect works a little different from what I’m used to in Divi or Elementor. In those builders, you can just click on a plus icon under an existing content section to add another one. In Thrive, you have to add a background section module to do the same. That doesn’t feel as intuitive and will probably take a little getting used to.

Under “building blocks”, we find a lot of things that other page builders offer as well. For example, you have a progress counter, a countdown counter, Google Maps, custom code module,  tabs, testimonial, toggle, video, a post grid option, a contact form; just about anything you would expect from a premium page builder nowadays. But Thrive Architect also has some modules other page builders don’t have.

Some worth mentioning are: 

  • Facebook comments
  • A click to tweet box where you can put in a quote that can be easily shared on Twitter
  • Social share buttons, where you can choose between a few different styles
  • A newsletter signup module (to add visitors to external services like MailChimp, MailPoet etc.)
  • Star rating, that lets you add customizable stars to anything you want
  • Credit Card logo’s

Some are more useful than others; I really like the Facebook comments, click to tweet and social share buttons, but the star ratings look great but don’t put out any structured data so they won’t show up in Google, and the Credit Card logo’s are just images without any functionality.

 

Thrive Architect styling options

Every module has a good amount of styling options, which you can access by simply clicking on the element you want to edit. The styling options for that element will then show up in your sidebar on the left.

You can add borders (with border radius control), set an animation, add shadows (box, text and drop), set padding, margins and alignment and add a background with multiple layers (solid color, gradient, image, video and even some patterns).

So you can have a background image with a gradient overlay, add a pattern to that and then set the opacity for each layer, very cool! Everything works quite well and intuitive.

Most modules have some dedicated options as well, like font settings with a text module (with Google fonts, text transform, line height and letter spacing), and a few effects in the image module (grayscale, opacity and blur).

You can also set hover options for a number of modules, which work really nice too.

 

For sections, you can also set a shape divider. If you have multiple columns, you can just drag them to the desired width, which works really nice.

Thrive Architect also makes responsive design quite easy. At the bottom of the sidebar, you can see how your page looks in tablet or smartphone view. Most other page builders have this option as well, but in Thrive Architect, you can also adjust everything for that particular view. Most builders let you adjust the most important things, like the font size, width or the padding and margin, but in Thrive, you can also adjust all other styling options like colors and borders. Even though you probably won’t use those other options very often, the Thrive way feels more natural than others. Of course, you can also select if an element should be shown of hidden on any device.

Another really cool and conversion increasing feature is the Thrive Lightbox, which lets you design a popup window. You can put any module(s) in that popup, and choose to show it after a set time (for example, when a user has been on the page for 10 seconds) or when the user wants to leave the page (wait, check out this great offer before you leave!). 

Just like most other premium page builders, Thrive Architect lets you save any element to a library so use can reuse it somewhere else on your website. You can save anything from a single button to a complete landing page. You can also save something as a global element (Thrive calls those “symbols”). If you edit “symbol A” on page 1, those edits will also be pushed to “symbol A” on page 2, 3 and 4. 

Last but not least, Thrive Architect also lets you design your own header and footer. They act like symbols though, so you will have to manually import those headers and footers to each page. You can also put them in a template, but then you’ll still need to import that template to each individual page and post. 

Pre designed templates

So, Thrive Architect offers quite a lot of tools to transform your creativity into a working website. However, a fool with a tool is… well, still a fool. If you’re not a webdesign- and conversion expert, you probably won’t know how to make the most out of Thrive’s possibilities. 

That’s why Thrive offers a large collection of pre-designed, conversion optimized templates.  Those templates are divided into design sets; sets consisting of different page templates with the same design, or with the same function.

for example, there’s a design set for a fitness brand that has page templates for a homepage, newsletter signup page, confirmation page and download page. 
All those page templates have a similar design, with the same colors, so they match nicely together. 

There’s also a design set which has a few different designs for a coming soon page, and a design set that offers a few different home page templates (a restaurant home page, a construction company home page, a beauty salon home page etc.) 

Sounds great, right? It is, but most of those design sets are really focused on getting people to subscribe to your newsletter. 

 

Of course, that’s not a bad thing to have, but most small businesses have more need for other page templates like a contact page, an about us page or a products / services page.
Thrive architect doesn’t seem to offer any of those, like Divi does with it’s layout packs. Of course you can design them yourself with Thrive Architect, but it would be nice to have a good amount of those as well. 

Thrive Suite

In the past, you could purchase Thrive Architect as a separate product. However, nowadays Thrive Themes only offers a membership (called Thrive Suite) that gives you access to all of their products. So what’s included in Thrive Suite?

Thrive Theme builder

Your favorite extra product in Thrive Suite will probably be the Thrive Theme builder.

With Thrive Architect, you could only control your page content, but you couldn’t build your own header, footer, blog template, archive template, WooCommerce template etc. With Thrive Theme Builder, you can, and that’s really cool!

An important feature for theme builders is dynamic content, which means fields are populated with content from the database. That way, you can build a blog template and load the title, featured image and content for each blog post from the database.

Thrive Themes isn’t the first to develope a theme builder though; other builders like Elementor and Divi offer the same functionality too.

Other Thrive products

Like I said, there are more products in the Thrive stable. I already discussed the Thrive Theme Builder and Thrive Architect, but they also offer the following products: 

  • Thrive Leads is an advanced opt-in form builder to get more mailinglist members
  • Thrive Ovation is a testimonial plugin that can automatically gather testimonials from Facebook, Twitters, comments on your website and even automated e-mails
  • Thrive Ultimatum is a tool to show a time limited offer to each individual prospect
  • Thrive Headline optimizer lets you A/B test your titles and automatically select the best one
  • Thrive Clever Widgets adds conditional logic to widgets, so you can choose to show them only on certain categories, pages, templates etc.
  • Thrive Quiz Builder lets you make quizes for your visitors (but it’s actual goal is market research, let people share their results on social media and subscribe to your newsletter)
  • Thrive Comments enhanced the default WordPress commenting system with the possibility to like, upvote and share comments, and unlock badges.
  • Thrive Optimize is also an A/B testing tool, but for complete landing pages. This one is a little more expensive though, at $ 127,00 for a 1 site licence.

Pricing

Thrive Suite costs $ 228 per year ($ 19 per month). For that price, you can use all their products on up to 25 websites.

Conclusion

Thrive Architect is a really nice page builder that can definitely compete with other page builders like Elementor and Divi. Thrive Architect offers some nice modules others don’t have,
a good amount of styling options, layered backgrounds, great responsive design, the possibility to design your own header, footer and lightbox popups and a lot more. 
Especially combined with the other products in Thrive Suite, they offer a great product range.

However, the pricing is not that great in my opinion. Elegant Themes (the company behind Divi), offers a lifetime licence for all of their products for about the same amount. 
But with Elegant Themes, that’s a one time amount, including lifetime updates and support, and you can use their products on an unlimited number of websites. 
One of those products is Bloom, a plugin that offers the functionality as Thrive Leads (a little less extensive though) and Divi has a built-in A/B testing feature for any element.

The price is absolutely the only reason why I wouldn’t recommend it, because all Thrive products are at the top of their game. So if these tools are worth it in your opinion, don’t let me hold you back and go for it! 

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