To grow your online business successfully, you’ll want to be sure you are using the right tools!
If done properly, marketing funnels are a great way to generate leads, and convert them to customers!
In this comprehensive review, we’ll be going over two of my personal favorites: ClickFunnels and Thrive Themes.
What is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is a marketing funnel builder that was created in 2014. After being founded in late 2014 by Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson, it now surpassed 100,000 active users in November of 2019!
Most people use this software to build sales funnels, but it’s not limited to just that. You can create membership sites, sales pages, up-sells, down-sells, auto-webinars, lead generation funnels and more.
There are loads of templates included for free after you sign up, so you’ll be able to pick them and customize to your preference!
When you use a powerful software like ClickFunnels, the opportunities are endless. The best part? You need zero technical experience to make it work. It has a simple drag-and-drop technology making it easy to use for beginners.
Simply put, ClickFunnels is the one-stop marketing automation tool you can use to scale your business, or start an online business!
In fact, they even offer a 14-day free trial so you can try out the software risk free.
What is Thrive Themes?
Thrive Themes was founded early in 2013 in a similar fashion to ClickFunnels. There was a marketer named Shane Melaugh and coder Paul McCarthy who ended up being a great match for each other.
After finding each other on a forum and then eventually calling each other on Skype, they would finally meet and decide that there was a gap in the market. With their skillsets, Thrive Themes was created.
Thrive Themes is a WordPress based collection of tools and plugins used to build things such as sales funnels, testimonials, countdown timers and more!
This is great for anybody looking to test the waters with marketing funnels, since you would connect it to your website.
What’s the main difference?
Now let’s go over the primary differences between ClickFunnels and Thrive Themes to make this easier to understand:
ClickFunnels is an one-stop marketing tool for building sales funnels to sell products and services online!
Thrive Themes is a website creation tool you can use with WordPress to build customized websites and sales funnels online!
If you already have a WordPress website, Thrive Themes will integrate with it. Since ClickFunnels has its own hosting, you wouldn’t need to own a website or pay for external hosting.
Now that we have a better understanding of these tools, let’s get into the specific details of each, and why you may prefer one or the other!
ClickFunnels Features
Sales Funnel Builder
Well, ClickFunnels is a sales funnel builder. Whether you want to create a webinar funnel, lead magnet, membership site, landing page, or anything else – you can.
That’s what makes this software so great. If you can imagine it, you can build it using their technology!
Want to sell digital products? You sure can. Want to sell physical products? You can as well! Looking to collect leads? Sure! How about a service? No problem either. As you can see, the opportunities are endless!
ClickFunnels is the true one-stop marketing funnel software!
Pre-built Templates
ClickFunnels comes loaded with prebuilt templates. As we just said, you can create almost any type of funnel or sales page with this software.
They have a ton of different templates you can personalize and customize to your liking! Inside of each specific type of page, there are 10-30 options to choose from.
Building funnels has never been easier.
Don’t like any of the templates inside? Well, ClickFunnels has this really cool feature that I know you’ll love.
It’s called Share Funnels.
Share Funnels gives all members an option of sharing their funnels. Let’s say you want to generate insurance leads for your business. Instead of building a funnel from scratch, you can contact other insurance agents who use ClickFunnels and ask for a share funnel.
This downloads that specific funnel directly into your ClickFunnels dashboard, so you can customize and use it!
Pretty cool feature that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
Actionetics
Actionetics is ClickFunnels autoresponder. This is exclusive to the Platinum plan, but a great feature if you upgrade! Instead of paying for an external autoresponder software, you won’t have to anymore.
This software helps you integrate follow-up funnels to make the most of your marketing automation needs!
Backpack
Backpack is another plan exclusive to their platinum plan. If you want to have your own affiliates selling your products, Backpack is a must!
This allows you to choose different affiliate commission structures, and other things to make sure everybody is getting paid out properly.
If you want to setup your own affiliate program, Backpack is a great tool you can use to run it!
Thrive Features
Thrive Architect
This is Thrive’s website building tool. With it, you can build homepages, landing pages, sales pages, blog pages, or anything else you can think of!
Additionally, adding buttons or other elements to your pages can be done with Thrive Architect.
Landing Page Builder
In addition to Thrive Architect, they have a tool dedicated to building landing pages and sales funnels
With their pre-built templates for building marketing funnels, you’ll be able to find anything you need here!
Thrive Themes
Thrive Themes is a collection of WordPress themes for your website.
As one of their more popular tools, these premium themes are excellent for any type of website.
Thrive Leads
Instead of using a third-party tool to generate opt-in forms, you can use Thrive Leads.
Whether you want to build a pop-up form or in-line form, they have you covered!
You even have the option to setup automations when somebody is about to leave the page, or is half way through. Quite a cool feature that I haven’t seen in many free options such as Sumo.
Plus, you can also see which of your forms are converting the best with their built-in analytics tracker.
Thrive Ultimatum
Thrive Ultimatum allows you to add a countdown timer to your sales page or website. Once the timer runs out, the offer will end automatically!
A lot of tools I’ve used will showcase a timer, but it won’t actually work properly.
Thrive Ovation
Ovation is a Thrive tool designed to let you collect and display testimonials you receive.
Whether it’s through Social Media or through a submission form, you can display these testimonials to build social proof using any of their templates!
This is a nice touch for Thrive Membership Tools.
Thrive Quiz Builder
The Thrive Quiz Builder is a great tool you can use to create quizzes on your website.
You have the ability to A/B split test, connect them to your offers, and use the responses to move users into different groups.
ClickFunnels Pricing
ClickFunnels has two pricing plans available. They have a startup plan, and a platinum plan!
With the Startup Plan, you will have the ability to create up to 20 funnels, 100 pages, and 20,000 visitors (per month). This plan costs just $97 per month, and it’s all you really need when starting up. Since it doesn’t come with a built-in autoresponder, you’ll have to purchase an external tool like GetResponse!
Next, is the Platinum Plan. This is the unlimited plan, so you can have unlimited funnels, pages, and visitors. The Platinum Plan is rather new, coming with FunnelFlix and other cool features inside.
It also includes the following tools – Actionetics (autoresponder) and Backpack (affiliate platform). At $297/m, you’ll have to decide if this is the right option for you. Typically, agency owners and freelancers can find these features beneficial!
If you wanted to sign up for a free trial of ClickFunnels, you can right here.
Thrive Themes Pricing
Thrive costs $30/m, which you pay quarterly. While this is significantly cheaper than ClickFunnels, you have to remember they don’t include hosting. You’ll have to purchase an external web hosting software such as Bluehost to run Thrive.
That plan will cover you if you have 25 or less websites (which I assume most of you do). If you own a marketing agency or do freelancing, you may want to sign up for the agency membership.
The agency plan costs $69/m, but you can use Thrive on unlimited websites!
Thrive is a great option if you have an existing WordPress site, and want to start messing around with marketing funnels.
You can sign up for Thrive Themes here if you are interested in getting started!
ClickFunnels: What I didn’t like
As an active user of ClickFunnels, there isn’t a lot I don’t like about them. I’m actually quite happy with everything they offer, and won’t be leaving anytime soon!
A few things to note that could be improved:
The Customer Support isn’t the best. While they are able to resolve most of my issues, it usually takes anywhere from 24-72 hours to receive an initial response to my support ticket. This can be frustrating at times, but at least they are able to fix most issues!
That’s all – I really have had no other issues with their software.
Thrive Themes: What I didn’t like
Like ClickFunnels, Thrive Themes customer support isn’t great. Since it’s a forum based support system, there is no way to track everything going on with your ticket. This is something that can use major work!
Additionally, while it may not be thought of as a bad thing, there’s too many features. On one side, it’s nice they offer so much. On the other side, it can lead to analysis paralysis. This is something that hurts entrepreneurs a lot in their online ventures!
ClickFunnels vs Thrive Themes: Conclusion
In conclusion, I’d choose ClickFunnels. This is the ultimate marketing funnel builder after trying many of the alternatives out!
What’s great about ClickFunnels is you can sign up for a 14-day free trial too. So you can actually test the tool prior to purchasing it!
Although I do think Thrive Themes is a great tool, it simply doesn’t compare to ClickFunnels. Since you’d have to purchase web hosting and build a WordPress site, it requires some technical skills.
With ClickFunnels, you get their drag-and-drop technology so you can build funnels way easier! No matter what your marketing needs are, it’s the best option in my eyes.
There’s a new funnel builder in town…
DropFunnels
Recently, we switched all of our funnels to DropFunnels. We’re saving over $50/m with more exclusive features! For a limited time, you can start a free trial using the button below.