ThriveCart vs WooCommerce: Which Option Is The Winner?

Selling your products online has huge benefits, and it’s important to take advantage of this!

You have the ability to reach more customers and automate certain sales processes.

Two popular solutions that can help you perform these tasks are ThriveCart and WooCommerce. 

Today, we’re going to compare both of them to help you find the best option for your business.

ThriveCart vs WooCommerce: Key Differences

The key difference is that ThriveCart is a hosted platform, while WooCommerce is a plugin for the WordPress CMS. As WooCommerce is hosted on WordPress, this means you will have to purchase hosting separately and install WordPress, whereas with ThriveCart you don’t. ThriveCart also has much better checkout tools. 

Both offer great features to help business owners of all sizes sell their products online. 

ThriveCart vs WooCommerce: Overview

	ThriveCart	WooCommerce
Website	thrivecart.com	woocommerce.com
Founded In	2015	2011
Pricing	Starting at $495	Free, but other costs will be required to run well.
Trial?	N/A	N/A
Money-Back Guarantee	30 Days	N/A
Overall Rating	9.5/10	8/10

What is ThriveCart? 

ThriveCart is a shopping cart solution founded by Josh Bartlett in 2016. 

It is designed to help businesses increase their revenue with their conversion-focused checkout tools.

Despite not having officially launched yet, ThriveCart has become one of the best shopping cart solutions on the market. 

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce was founded in 2011 by James Koster.

It’s a simple and powerful eCommerce platform that comes in the form of a WordPress plugin.

BuiltWith reports that as of January 2020, a total of 3,876,748 websites use WooCommerce.

Which Has Better Features? 

Let’s take a look at which platform has better features and will help you sell more products.

ThriveCart Primary Features

Here is a list of ThriveCarts primary features:

• 1 Click bump offer
• 1 Click upsells
• Embeddable Cart
• Funnel builder & Templates
• A/B testing
• Affiliate Center
• Webhooks
• Auto-follow up
• Autoresponder integrations
• Coupons
• Customer hub
• Detailed Analytics
• Discount URL
• Dunning/Auto-retry
• 2 Factor Authentication
• Two-step cart
• Instant affiliate payments
• Link tracking
• Membership integrations
• Modal Cart
• Predicted sales
• Product upgrades
• Automatic receipts
• Retargeting
• Digital sales tax calculator
• Subscription management
• Secure URLs
• Advanced Trials (for example $1 trials)
• Unlimited Carts
• Video carts

Despite this list being pretty huge, these are just the main features ThriveCart has to offer.

These are just the main features.

WooCommerce Primary Features

As I did mention earlier, WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress.

This means that it, of course, won’t come with as many features as ThriveCart.

Here are the features WooCommerce has to offer: 

• Sell products
• Add unlimited product variations
• Manage orders
• Manage Inventory
• Highlight products
• Customer accounts and guest accounts
• Shipping management

Keep in mind, WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. 

WordPress has quite a lot of features such as the plugin and theme store. As you are using WordPress if you use WooCommerce, you will of course get access to these too. 

It’s worth noting that most of the features that ThriveCart has to offer are not even available in WooCommerce with the plugin store. 

However, you can embed your ThriveCart checkout into WordPress with ease!

ThriveCart Pricing

As mentioned earlier, ThriveCart hasn’t officially launched yet.

For this reason, the plans are lifetime deals at this moment, but in the future, they are expected to start at $99 per month.

Here are the lifetime deals available right now:

• ThriveCart Lifetime Deal $495
• ThriveCart Pro $690

The difference between the standard ThriveCart and ThriveCart pro is that only the pro version comes with these features:

• Affiliate Center
• Subscription Saver Functionality
• Automatic Sales Tax Calculator
• Intelligent business projections
• JV Contracts
• Advanced User Management
• Client Usage rights
• Customer domain name functionality

If you are going for ThriveCart, you should consider the pro version as getting all these features separately will cost a lot more than $200!

Or, there would also be a lot of time and spreadsheets involved in trying to do all these calculations manually. 

WooCommerce Pricing

WooCommerce is a free plugin, but to run it you need some other paid components.

Here are some components which you will usually need to run WooCommerce effectively:

• Good hosting $10-30 per month
• Page Builder ($49 per year)
• Theme ($40-$100)
• Other plugins ($100-$500)
• Speed Optimization Plugin ($50)

If you want a super basic store, then you might not need any fancy plugins.

But, usually speaking, there will be a lot of added costs when running WooCommerce.

Just make sure that you are taking these into account because often people forget all the added costs of WordPress. 

Why You Might Want To Choose ThriveCart over WooCommerce

ThriveCart may be better for you if:

• You are serious about selling your products and want to make the most out of them
• You are looking to save time with automatic tax calculations
• You need affiliates to run your business
• You need advanced coupons
• You don’t like all the technical aspects of having a self-hosted solution
• You don’t like  hidden costs
• You don’t like subscriptions
• You are looking for embeddable checkouts that you can add to any other page

One thing to note is that you can embed ThriveCart’s checkouts into pretty much any page on the internet.

If you wanted to have a self-hosted solution with WordPress, you could embed ThriveCart’s checkouts there too. 

Why You Might Want To Choose WooCommerce over ThriveCart

WooCommerce may be better for you if:

• You want a self-hosted solution
• You don’t need all the bells & whistles, ThriveCart has to offer
• You want to run a blog too (WordPress is perfect for that)
• You’re used to WordPress
• You want to build an eCommerce store
• You need the order management tools inside of WooCommerce

Who Wins Overall? 

I wouldn’t say that there is a definite winner between these two, as both are great for their own purposes. 

ThriveCart offers a comprehensive checkout platform that helps marketers make the most out of every single sale. 

WooCommerce on the other hand offers a great platform that specializes in eCommerce but also has the flexibility to be used for other types of stores. 

It depends on what suits your business best, but I would consider the ThriveCart lifetime option that’s currently available since you’ll be saving hundreds of dollars each month getting them at a one-time fee!