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Thrive Architect Review: Builder Pros and Cons

In our series of WordPress page builder reviews, we have already covered a lot of popular choices. Some of those include Divi, Brizy, and Elementor to name a few. Now it’s time for our Thrive Architect review.

In this Thrive Architect review you will find out a lot about this great plugin. You’ll learn about its features, pricing, and how it compares to other builders from the drag & drop family. Eventually, you will know whether or not it is a good choice for your site. Keep on reading!

Thrive Architect Review

What Is Thrive Architect?

Made by ThriveThemes

Thrive Architect is a WordPress drag & drop page builder plugin, developed by ThriveThemes. It is their most popular builder plugin. However, they are also working on a new one, called Theme Builder.

This company’s primary focus is digital products that improve the sales process. They are famous for their Landing Pages and ThriveLeads plugins. Since improving the sales process is such a key area for them their builder has different goals as well. They also make several other products such as:

  • Thrive Clever Widgets
  • Headline Optimizer
  • Ultimatum
  • Ovation
  • Quiz Builder
  • Comments
  • Optimize plugins and more!

All of these plugins have value, and are liked by the WordPress business community.

A True Frontend Builder With A Legacy

During our Thrive Architect review we found that it is similar in some ways to other drag & drop builders. It aims to provide an easy-to-use interface for creating beautiful and functional websites without entering any code.

This approach is suitable not only for beginners but for experienced developers too. Drag & drop builders allow pros to create pages quickly. Later on they can fine-tune everything, and polishing it via code wherever needed.

Because most people prefer this type of site building, WordPress decided to add a drag & drop builder into the 5.0 update. Because of powerful drag and drop builders like Thrive Architect we now have Gutenberg as a part of the core.

Thrive Architect is a newer name on the market. However, this plugin is an upgraded sequel of the Thrive Content Builder, which was a fairly popular choice back in the day when WordPress was younger. As a matter of fact, Thrive Content Builder was the first visual (frontend) page builder available for WordPress. So although fairly new, Thrive Architect has a pedigree and is full of time-tested features. These features have worked, and been tested on thousands of websites.

Thrive Architect Builder is a standalone plugin, and fully compatible with all WordPress themes. But, unlike many other popular site builder choices, this one doesn’t have a free option, not even a limited one. That is something that will put off many potential users who are on a budget, but more on that later.

Thrive Architect Review: How Does it Work?

Inline Editing

Being a drag and drop builder, Thrive Architect is naturally inclined towards beginners. But, what makes it even easier to use is that it allows you to edit inline.

Most other builders call themselves “frontend” but use popups or sidebars, which can be both confusing and annoying. But not with Thrive Architect. Here you just click and edit right on the spot. The same is with moving, you just drag and drop the elements exactly where you want to place them.

Thrive Architect Styling

This is a What You See Is What You Get editor. Like other WYSIWYG builders, you don’t need to constantly switch to preview and check how your site looks. With Thrive Architect, everything is as-is. The site’s visitors will see it exactly the same as you do while building the page.

Thrive Architect takes over the complete WordPress dashboard while you are using it, which allows you to build pages front-end. Besides the obvious benefit of not having to switch back and forth between the builder and previewing, this also gives you a lot of space to work. You can even hide the side panel, giving you the full look.

Using Elements

To browse through element categories, you use the sidebar. There you will find groups of conversion-focused elements such as:

  • Call-To-Action buttons
  • Testimonials
  • Countdown Timers
  • Lead Generation Forms and more

All these are the reason why Thrive Architect is one of the favorite landing page builders out there. It really makes it easy for you to start converting visitors to customers, pulling them through the sales funnel. Of the builders we have reviewed it is clear Thrive Architect is the most focused on this process.

Thrive Architect Builder

But, to make sure it is not only about sales, Thrive Architect has dozens of regular elements which you can use on any type of pages. These include:

  • Text and Image boxes
  • Menus
  • Dividers
  • Post grids
  • Styled lists
  • Social share buttons
  • Progress bars
  • Star ratings
  • Google Maps, as well as custom code fields.

Thrive Architect also has a rich icon library built into it, unlike its predecessor, which is a big plus. Adding icon shadows and background patterns is there too.

Flexible Layouts

Everything you create in Thrive Architect is fully customizable, and you can freely move it around. You can place your elements wherever you’d like. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t use columns. That is an option which you can utilize through the “Background section”. Because of its flexibility, Thrive Architect is suitable both for building simple, and complex layouts.

Thrive Architect Gif

Thrive Architect Templates

Thrive Architect lets you create and save custom templates, which you can reuse later. You can add tags to your custom templates, which will allow you to search for and find them much easier. The search option was not available within the previous Thrive builder. You can preview, organize and delete your created templates, but only from the backend editor, which is a bit of a bummer.

Thrive Architect Templates

Unfortunately, Architect doesn’t support global elements, which is a big drawback. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, global elements give you an option to edit only a single element, but with effects on all elements of the same type on your whole website, thus making any future changes much easier. This is pretty much a standard in the page builder industry. All major competitors have this option.

Thrive has 274 landing page templates which will enormously help in building your site quickly. That combined with sales-oriented elements is the main reason why Thrive Architect is loved by businesses. It replaces dozens of plugins, by offering everything in one great package.

Thrive Architect Template Gallery

Advanced Effects

Thrive Architect has plenty of eye-catching and attention-grabbing tricks to leave the visitors of your site breathless. You can use hover effects, full-width layouts, customize fonts, combine text with image backgrounds, and style everything to the finest detail. Plus, you can spice things up with animations and dynamic content.

And the best of all, everything you create in this awesome builder is fully mobile responsive. Your sites will look equally great no matter what size the screen is. You can instantly preview it in mobile and tablet mode right through the builder as well. There is also an option to tweak all elements on smaller screen sizes. Because of this there is no need to duplicate and show/hide content specifically for this purpose.

Thrive Architect Mobile View

What Happens When You Delete Thrive Architect?

Unlike plenty of other page builders which leave sites in ruins, locking the content upon uninstalling, Thrive Architect will leave everything looking quite clean. This is a big plus. It lets you test this plugin without fearing it will completely mess up the content with random code scattered around. This is much like Elementor, a page builder very similar to Thrive Architect. Read the next section to find out other similarities between the two.

How Does Thrive Architect Stack up Against Other Builders?

Sales oriented

What makes Thrive Architect Plugin completely different from other popular page builders is its primary focus – sales.

This builder’s main purpose is the conversion from visitors to customers. In fact, we can say that most other Thrive products aim for the same goal. Pushing people down your sales funnel, capturing leads, attention, and making them pull out their wallets is the goal. That is the goal for most business related websites out there. So, if this is something that you are looking for, Thrive Architect might be perfect for you.

Thrive Architect Sales Pages

Elementor’s Upgraded Brother From Another Mother

Now, the closest cousin of Thrive Architect in our opinion is probably Elementor. You can easily see the similarities just by comparing interfaces. Thrive Architect borrowed the interface style from Elementor, upgrading it, and putting its own stamp on it.

And don’t get us wrong, this is a good thing. Elementor works and looks great, and we like the “don’t fix it if it ain’t broken” approach.

But, Thrive Architect allows more inline editing, which is especially noticeable when editing text. Thrive also lets you choose where you want to put your sidebar, left or right, plus you can completely hide it (or even expand) it, enabling you to see your page in its full glory.

But, one major difference between Elementor and Thrive Architect is that the later doesn’t have any free versions. This is a huge negative in my opinion. It hurts potential new users from exploring what Thrive has to offer, especially with free options out on the market.

Different Than Divi

If you are looking for an all-in-one solution, and you have a bunch of websites to maintain, Divi is a better option than Thrive Architect. We say this primarily because it has that Lifetime option. The lifetime option lets you install Divi on as many websites as you want.

But, if you own a business, and you want to create a great looking lead driven website, Thrive Architect could be for you. With dozens of landing pages that will help you attract customers and boost your sales, there is no better page builder option than Thrive Architect. And it is quite affordable, which you will find out in the next section.

Thrive Architect Pricing

Like we highlighted before, Thrive Architect doesn’t have a free plan. But, if you decide to pay for it, ThriveThemes won’t rip you off. There are three pricing plans:

  • Monthly membership – $19/mo – up to 25 websites, unlimited support
  • 5 license pack – $97 – up to 5 websites, 1 year of support
  • Single licence – $67 – 1 site, 1-year unlimited supportThrive Architect Pricing

As you can see, prices are affordable, especially if you need one, or up to five websites. If you don’t renew the subscription after the initial year, you won’t lose your content. However, you won’t get any future updates either.

During our Thrive Architect review we compared it to other builders in terms of pricing. When compared to other builders like Divi and Elementor, prices are competitive. Still, both of those builders have free versions. Additionally, Divi has their “Lifetime” option which provides far more value. Their lifetime plan gives you unlimited updates on an unlimited number of sites and all Elegant themes products for a flat fee of $249. This is hard to beat for any builder out there, not just Thrive Architect.

If you only have one site, and want to boost business sales, Thrive Architect Single Licence is an awesome option.

And although Thrive Architect doesn’t have a free version, it does have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Buy a one-year license, and try it on your site. You will have a month to decide if you like it or not, and you risk nothing. We also recommend trying all of the free builders out there out before purchasing one.

Thrive Architect Review: Conclusion

As you can see, Thrive Architect is a terrific builder, with an abundance of features in it. We like how the company’s primary focus is increasing sales. As someone who has several online businesses I like their sales driven approach taken in almost every product they make. Thrive Architect is no exception, and 274 landing page designs witness to that.

Yes, Thrive Architect has some flaws. However, all builders do. Overall, it is a great package and a powerful ally that will help you create a high-converting sales strategy. The best of all is that it is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

And although it doesn’t have a free plan, Thrive Architect is not expensive and is well worth trying out. Think of it as a business investment— the number of awesome landing pages and conversions you will make using this builder will definitely make it well worth the money in the shortest time possible. I’d recommend at least checking it out more for yourself.

Our final score for Thrive Architect is an 8.5 out of 10 stars.

I hope that you found this Thrive Architect review to be helpful. Do you currently use thrive architect or have you ever used it before? We’d love to hear your own Thrive Architect review below in the comments section!

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