Kartra vs ThriveCart: Which one Best Fits Your Needs? Detailed Review Below! (2021)

Find out whether Kartra is better than ThriveCart or not Below!

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The question of choosing between Kartra and ThriveCart arises when setting up an online business platform and looking for software to help you set up and run the website. Before making a choice, we need to analyze each software, its advantages, and shortcomings, and then make the decision.

Well, you’ve come to the right place, because here, we shall look into both Kartra and ThriveCart in detail, each of their features, and what they have to offer. At the end of this read, you will be able to make a wise choice that you won’t regret!

When looking to start a new online venture, Kartra is considered the perfect choice, mainly because of the extensive features it offers. It comes with everything you’ll need, including an email marketing and automation service, customer helpdesk, web templates for designing your web page, and a shopping cart feature. In short, with Kartra, you don’t need to look elsewhere, as it is a one-stop-shop for all your online business needs.

Apart from all of these, Kartra also offers sales funnels and campaigns, which we will discuss later. 

ThriveCart is a software that provides many features within itself but is more prominent for certain qualities than others. ThriveCart lets you create checkout pages that are attractive and help you turn your visitors into customers. An exciting feature is that it offers excellent marketing through emails and other social platforms, thus promoting your product.

A great feature of ThriveCart that its creators made sure to include is versatility. This means ThriveCart can be put into use in various platforms, utilizing its many features. A few of the areas where ThriveCart could potentially be used are membership platforms, payment processing pages, and webinar platforms. 

Other than marketing and page integration, ThriveCart can also be used to collect payments for products and subscriptions. They also raise your profits with the help of up-sells, down-sells, and bumps. We shall come into more of that later on.   

So, What Features Do Both Kartra and ThriveCart Offer?

1. Community Building and Queries

Every platform requires a strong community to strengthen the support that customers and clients need. This community must be equipped to clear every query put forward and provide efficient solutions.

Both Kartra and ThriveCart have excellent customer support systems that are responsive and efficient. Although they do not provide the live chat option, they are very alert to customer queries and answer them within 24 hours. They also have an active community on Facebook, where questions do not go unanswered. The ThriveCart community on Facebook also gives alerts about new updates in the software. 

2. Affiliate Management Platform

This is yet another feature that is offered by both ThriveCart and Kartra. An affiliate management center helps you manage and recruit your affiliates and make subsequent observations.

In Kartra, the affiliate management platform lets you host products in the Kartra marketplace and allows you to observe and view the affiliates’ interactions. It is sometimes found that the Kartra affiliate management center is confusing to use/master, especially when compared to the AMC of ThriveCart.

ThriveCart has an excellent affiliate platform where it’s easy to view and use. The programs can be accessed effortlessly, and overall, it is a very efficient platform.

3. Upsells, Bumps, and Downsells

After discussing two main features that look after customer needs and making their journey effortless, we shall look into a few features that provide you, the host, with benefits in terms of profits.

Two such features are bumps and upsells. You may wonder what bumps, and upsells are. Well, we’ve got all that covered!

Bumps increase your profit from each order, and when accumulated over multiple orders from customers, this might result in a reasonable profit. How is this made available, you may ask. Well, that option is usually left to the choice of the customer. A bump offer checkbox is present at the point of checkout for the customer, and a simple tick will earn you a small percentage of their spendings as a bonus. 

One-Click Upsell – Your customer has just placed an order and gone through with the purchase, and you provide an option for them to make a second order. This second-order can be placed with a single click, without entering their card details again. This makes it easier for customers to make their purchase, and an automated suggestion will be provided based on their interests.

Both ThriveCart and Kartra offer these features, and thereby bring us profits, even though small in the beginning.

4. Multiple Integrations

Today, integration is a vital feature that is essential for any platform. With website hosting platforms that support integration, you can increase the functionality and add more features to it.

Both Kartra and ThriveCart allow you to integrate multiple software into their platforms, adding benefits and efficiency. Although Kartra offers almost all the features you need, it is still friendly enough for integrating more feature software into it. ThriveCart, on the other hand, is not an all-in-one platform, and its makers have made sure that it compensates by supporting a wider variety of integrations.

5. A/B Testing

This is a method by which you test different versions of your pages and funnels and choose the best one. A/B testing is used by Kartra and ThriveCart to find the best version of their design and put that to use.

We have seen what both of Kartra and ThriveCart offer us, but what’s more important is what they offer exclusively, special features that are unique to them and make each of them stand out. That’s what we are going to see in the next section. 

Differences Between the Services Offered By Kartra and ThriveCart

1. An All-In-One Tool or a Specialized Checkout and Cart?

Kartra is a marketing tool suite, and it provides everything you need to start a business within a single package. And that is what makes Kartra attractive, the very flexibility it displays. Kartra can range from building pages to building funnels and taking care of the automation and email marketing.

ThriveCart is a specialized checkout page and shopping cart tool, and it can merely be a part of the chain of services that Kartra offers. It lets you build checkout pages and provides a great shopping cart, but it can not match up with Kartra when we look into the functionality and versatility as Kartra offers so much more.

This difference is also visible in the templates that they offer. Since Kartra has many areas within it, it provides hundreds of templates, funnels, and campaigns for those, be it a sales page, a checkout area, or a membership page. 

In this aspect, ThriveCart offers only a handful of templates as it functions only as a checkout page and shopping cart tool.

2. Checkout and Shopping Cart

When comparing these features in Kartra and ThriveCart, ThriveCart takes the lead because of its excellent shopping cart feature. The main benefit is that you can use the ThriveCart checkout feature on any webpage of your desire. In contrast, the checkout pages of Kartra can be utilized only within the pages created in Kartra.

This is a critical factor as ThriveCart provides a broader range and flexibility, whereas Kartra is restricted to its pages. 

3. Automation and Email Marketing

Kartra has an excellent email follow-up system and an automated email broadcast service. This means Kartra gets to your clients and potential customers with the leads in its acquired database, and you might think that’s pretty hard to top. But Kartra has something even better.

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing (BAM) is another one of the inbuilt features that come with Kartra. Imagine the scenario where you visit an online shopping platform. After a while of browsing, the next time you visit, you may find that they have recommendations based on what you viewed earlier. Or, they may remind you about a product you saw that’s about to go out of stock. All this is due to BAM. With this technology, Kartra collects the preferences of each customer and visitor and links it together to offer a personalized experience for each customer. 

This is one of the features that ThriveCart does not offer.

4. Membership Platform and Affiliate Center

Kartra offers a membership program for your customers, wherein they can track their progress, and you can also observe their interactions with your content. This is especially useful if you are building an online learning platform, as the users can see their progress in the course. You can place restrictions to provide content exclusively for members.

Kartra also has an affiliate management center through which you can recruit affiliates and manage the existing ones. You can observe various statistics and gage the acceptance of your service/product among people. This program also lets you showcase your products in the Kartra Marketplace, and also make instant payments through PayPal.

For ThriveCart, you will have to integrate a separate software for membership facilities as it is not built-in. Despite the lack of a membership platform, ThriveCart has an excellent affiliate management system, which we shall look into in detail.

The ThriveCart Affiliate Management program provides many beneficial features to the affiliates and helps you gain more affiliates due to the attractive program. A few of the best affiliate features are:

Profit Splits with Partners (JV Contracts)

With this feature, there is a fifty-fifty split on the profits earned from selling a product. You get one half of the profit, and your partner gets the other half, after the necessary fees and affiliates. 

Digital Bonus for Affiliates

This is yet another attractive feature with which affiliates can host their link for a digital bonus and receive an instant bonus when someone buys the product from that link. This is a great way to provide customers with an incentive and boost their conversions.

Coupon Codes for Affiliates

Affiliates get coupon codes that they may use for later purchases to get discounts. This is another way to maintain your customers and also spread the word about the offers and features you have that are beneficial for the users.

Now, we have a few features offered only by Kartra, and not available in ThriveCart. These make Kartra unique and ensure that all the essential areas are covered. 

1. Calendars – Schedule With Ease

Kartra offers a Calendar feature that makes scheduling events and booking appointments easier. It lets your customers/clients set up meetings with you on their own. This is yet another feature not available in ThriveCart, as it is just a shopping cart and checkout page builder.

2. Video Hosting

Kartra offers video hosting on its webpages, unlike other sites that require you to embed links from a third-party platform such as YouTube or Vimeo. You also have the additional benefit of adding call-to-actions and tags at any point in the video. This is an excellent feature if you’re looking for a platform to host online courses.

Although the video upload has some restrictions, it is an upper hand for Kartra as ThriveCart does not provide it. 

3. Helpdesk and Customer Support

Yet another attractive feature of Kartra is its helpdesk, which gets back to all your queries. Although it does not offer live chat features, it has a ticketing system for registering your questions, which will be answered within 24 hours. Instead of having to include a third-party for your helpdesk solutions, Kartra offers it within the package.

Cost and Pricing – ThriveCart

The cost is a determining factor for any product or service, helping us consider whether the offered features are worth the price.

ThriveCart has a one-time payment condition, that is, it is a single time payment for lifetime. This is great because, unlike other platforms, you don’t have to have a monthly expenditure. There are two plans, the ThriveCart Standard plan, and the PRO plan. We shall see the differences between the two. 

ThriveCart Standard Plan – $495

This single-payment for lifetime is a great deal, and the standard plan has almost all of the features mentioned above. The difference comes when we switch to ThriveCart PRO, which has a few additional benefits that may be valuable n maintaining the customers.

ThriveCart PRO – $690

The extra features offered by the PRO plan are as follows:

Sales Tax Calculation

The automatic sales tax calculator makes sure you charge your clients with the necessary taxes without inputting them manually. 

Splitting Profits- JV Contracts

As mentioned previously, the option to split profits between your partners is available only under the PRO subscription.

Business Projections

Gives you projections of your income and analyzes your performance.

Custom Domain Name

With the PRO plan, you can now have your URL’s custom domain name instead of the standard thrivecart.com. 

Saving your Subscribers

ThriveCart PRO offers the feature of contacting your customer in case of a failed payment or an expiry so that you do not lose customers. The main highlight is that this is done automatically and does not require your attention.

These are all features that make the ThriveCart PRO special, and you can upgrade to the PRO version anytime, with an additional payment of $195.

They also have a 30-day money-back guarantee so that you don’t have to continue with the subscription if you are dissatisfied with the service offered.

Cost and Pricing – Kartra

Kartra has a 14-day trial plan for $1. The following are the subscription plans available in Kartra:

Starter Plan

The starter plan comes at $99/month, with 1 custom domain, 15,000 emails per month, and 2500 contacts. With this plan, you can host up to 100 pages, build 2 membership sites, and sell 10 products for 50GB bandwidth. The bandwidth is a key feature that restricts the videos you host on your website. 

Silver Plan

The silver plan comes at $199 for 3 customer domains, 125,000 emails per month, and 12,500 contacts. You can host an unlimited number of pages, membership sites, and sell any number of products you want. The supported bandwidth is 125GB.

Gold Plan

The gold plan comes at $299, with the option of having 5 customer domains, 250,000 emails per month, and 25,000 contacts. There is no restriction for the number of pages and membership sites you can host and the number of products you can sell. The supported bandwidth is 250GB.

Platinum Plan

The platinum plan comes at $499 and offers 10 customer domains, 500,000 emails per month, and 50,000 contacts. The number of pages and membership sites you can host is unlimited. You may sell as many products as you want. The supported bandwidth is 400GB.

Coming to the Big question, Kartra or ThriveCart?

ThriveCart has the best checkout pages and cart facilities. Being a one-time payment for lifetime, it is undoubtedly the cheaper option here. If you’ve set up most of your business and are looking for checkout and shopping cart software, ThriveCart is the best out there at the best rate.

If you are just setting up, Kartra is what you need because ThriveCart is only a part of the entire system, and Kartra can offer you all you need.

Therefore, consider all the factors and features, analyze your need, and make a wise choice.