ThriveCart Learn Review: Is This The Best Online Course Platform?

Most people know ThriveCart as a lifetime shopping cart software solution. But relatively recently, ThriveCart released ThriveCart Learn—a built-in LMS tool that expanded its functionality significantly.

With ThriveCart Learn, you can now create and sell online courses from within the shopping cart platform—no third-party integrations required!

And what’s especially cool about this is that ThriveCart Learn is included for free with a standard ThriveCart purchase. So for a one-time payment, you get both a comprehensive shopping cart solution and a powerful online course builder for life! 

And you don’t need to pay any monthly fee to retain access as with other online course platforms.

The question is: How does ThriveCart Learn compare to its competitors?

Can it hold its own against dedicated course platforms like Thinkific and Teachable? And how does it compare to Samcart’s Courses app?

That’s what we’re going to find in this in-depth ThriveCart Learn review. We’ll be looking at the course creation process in ThriveCart Learn, highlighting some of its standout features, exploring the pros and cons, and more.

Let’s get started!

ThriveCart Learn Demo Video

What is ThriveCart Learn?

ThriveCart Learn is a learning management system (LMS) and online course builder that’s built into ThriveCart and seamlessly integrated with all the other tools available on the platform. 

If you buy ThriveCart, you can use ThriveCart Learn for free to:

• Create your online course curriculum
• Set up your membership site infrastructure
• Build customized login pages and registration pages for your students
• Manage students who are enrolled in your course
• Drip-feed course content to your students
• Create automations based on student actions
• And more!

Note: In case you didn’t already know, ThriveCart itself is a hosted shopping cart platform that makes it easy to create stunning checkout pages, upsells, bump offers, and streamlined, funnel-based checkouts that maximize your conversions. 

ThriveCart Learn vs ThriveCart Learn+

While ThriveCart Learn is included for free with ThriveCart, you also have the option of upgrading to Learn+ for an additional one-time fee of $195. Here’s how Learn and Learn+ differ:

Learn is the standard version that includes all the core features you need to manage your online business, including the drag-and-drop course builder, drip-feed feature, student management section, etc.

Learn+ is a premium upgrade that unlocks additional pro-level features that can take your courses to the next level. These additional features include the ability to create course bundles, add extra sub-users for your team members, create advanced automations, link your custom domain, etc.

How To Create a Course in ThriveCart Learn

ThriveCart Learn is incredibly intuitive and easy to use, and the course creation process is super straightforward. Here’s how to create a basic course:

Step 1: Sign up and log in to your account

First, you’ll need to sign up for ThriveCart here. Once you’ve done that, log in to your ThriveCart account, and you’ll be brought to the main dashboard. 

In the top right corner, click the Learn button to open the tool.

Step 2: Set up your first project

In the ThriveCart Learn dashboard, you’ll see four tabs. From the My Courses tab, click New project to get started. Projects are essentially folders that you can use to keep your courses organized.

Once you’ve created a project, click Create course to start building your first course.

In the next window, fill out your course details. You’ll need to add a course name, description, author name, and logo. 

Then, click Create my course to continue to the next step.

Step 3: Build your course structure

Next, we’re going to create the basic structure for our course. In ThriveCart Learn, course content is organized into lessons and modules. Each module contains multiple lessons, and your course can have multiple nodules. 

You can drag modules and lessons into your course from the Course Elements section of the sidebar on the left.

As you add modules, you can choose who you want to make them available to. For example, you might make all modules accessible to all students enrolled in the course or make certain modules exclusive to students with a specific tag.

You can also change the name of each module or lesson and clone or delete modules here.

Once you’ve finished creating the structure of your course, you’re ready to start creating the content.

Step 4: Create your course content

Hover over any lesson in your course and click Edit to open up the drag-and-drop course builder. 

It works like any other drag-and-drop page builder: you can drag in elements like headers, images, bullet points, videos, buttons, etc., from the left and customize the layout, colors, and other styling options. 

There’s a real-time preview window on the right where you can see what your student will see. 

Once you’re finished creating your lesson content, click Publish. You can also save it as a draft to come back to later.

Step 5: Choose your course options

Once you’ve finished building your course content, click Next to go to the Course options screen. 

Here, you can do things like link your course to a custom domain, choose what happens if a student’s subscription payment fails, etc. There are a couple of other more advanced features on this page too, which we’ll explore later. 

Once you’re done setting your options, click Save & exit, and you’ve finished creating your course! 

You’ll be brought back to the My courses page, where you can see an overview of your new course. 

You can also edit, clone, or delete it from this page. Cloning comes in super useful if you want to create a bunch of similar variations of your course without having to start from scratch each time.

Step 6: Add customers to your course

Now your course is ready to go; the final step is to start making sales and enrolling students! You do this through the product’s Fulfillment tab.

First, navigate to Products > Create product > Digital. Then, set the options, pricing, and checkout features like you would for any other product on ThriveCart, and continue to the Fulfillment tab. 

From the Fulfillment tab, you can choose what happens after the customer purchases the product. In this case, we want them to be able to access the course, so from the dropdown, you’ll want to select Add them to my membership site. 

Open the Select your membership platform dropdown menu and click ThriveCart Learn. Below that, select the ThriveCart course you want the customer to have access to and the success page you want to send them to after they finish their purchase (e.g. the course login page).

That’s all there is to it!

How Do Students Access the Course?

Once your students make the purchase, they’ll be brought to a success page complete with a registration form where they can create their login details. 

They’ll also be sent an email with a link to the course login page. If you want to send them a login URL manually, you can copy it from your dashboard:

Once they’ve logged in, they’ll be able to access the courses they’ve purchased from their student dashboard area.

ThriveCart Learn Review: Key Features

Now that we’ve covered the basics let’s look at what else you can do with ThriveCart Learn and explore some of its highlight features. 

Course Delivery Options

Thrive Learn lets you choose how you want your course to be delivered: Instantly or dripped.

Selecting Instant means customers will have instant access to your entire course as soon as they make a purchase. 

Selecting Dripped lets you schedule the delivery of your course material in stages so that they get access to it bit-by-bit, rather than all in one go. This helps keep users engaged and can provide an incentive for them to keep renewing their subscriptions.

If you select dripped, you can choose how you want to schedule content delivery. For example, you might choose to drip out a new module or lesson every day, week, or month or on a specific fixed date. 

Alternatively, you might set it up to unlock a module or lesson after each rebill or after a trial period ends.

Advanced Sequences

If you upgrade to Learn+, you can use ThriveCart Learn’s Advanced Sequences (course rules).

Course rules allow you to implement simple if, then workflows that deliver new content and bonuses/rewards to students who meet certain criteria. 

To get started, click Create advanced sequence from the course builder, then click Create rule.

After that, you can choose the condition (the trigger) for the rule and select what you want to happen (the action).

For example, you might use advanced sequences to set up an automation sequence whereby if a student uses a certain type of coupon, a tag is applied to their account, or they’re given access to a specific course. 

Or you might set it up so that when a student completes a module, they’re given an award. There’s a lot you can do with it.

Behavior Rules

Behavior Rules are another neat automation feature you can access from the Course options page. You can use it automatically perform actions based on student behaviors. 

For example, you can use Behavior Rules to automatically add new customers to a certain email sequence in your autoresponder or to your mailing list. 

You can also use it so that if a new module becomes available to a student, they’re automatically emailed with a notification about it. Or, if a student completes a lesson or module, you can automatically email them to congratulate them. 

A lot of the things you can do with behavior rules happen in third-party integrations in tools like Slack, Drip, Google Sheets, and ActiveCampaign.

Course Upsell

Another cool feature of Thrive Learn is the course upsell feature. It’s a neat way to maximize your revenue through FOMO marketing.

On the Course options page, just toggle the Display this course to students of my other courses setting on to start upselling courses.

Once you do that, your existing students will see the other available courses that they haven’t bought yet inside their member’s area. You can also set it up so that if students click on one of those courses, it sends them to a sales page.

Bundles

Bundles is another feature that’s only available to ThriveCart Learn+ users. It enables you to sell multiple courses at once by grouping them together in one product bundle.

To create your first bundle, go to your ThriveCart Learn dashboard and click the My bundles tab, then click Create new bundle. 

Choose your bundle name and select which course you want to be included. You can then sell it just like an individual course by selecting it from inside the product’s fulfillment settings.

Student Management

You can also access the My student’s area through the dashboard. Here, you can see the total number of active, paused, and disabled students that are enrolled in your courses. 

You can manage students individually, filter your list by tags, and import students manually. If you’re already using another platform like Teachable and you want to migrate your students over to ThriveCart Learn, just export your student list as a CSV and import it on this page.

Sub Users

From the My team tab, you can also add additional team members as sub-users on your account and control what they can do with flexible user permissions. 

For example, you can choose whether or not a specific team member can create, edit, and delete lessons or courses and whether or not they can see your student list, etc. You can also limit their access to specific projects.

Again, you can only add additional ThriveCart users if you upgrade to Learn+. If you’re a small independent course seller, you probably won’t need it. But if you’re running a larger knowledge business, it’s pretty essential.

Customizable Registration & Login Pages

When your students sign up for your course, they’ll be taken to a registration page where they choose their password. And when they’re ready to start learning, they’ll be taken to a login page.

The problem is that the default registration and login pages on ThriveCart Learn are pretty boring—and they don’t include your branding.

Fortunately, you can customize your student’s course registration and login page with the drag-and-drop editor and put your own twist on it. 

Just go to the Course options tab from your course settings, then click the relevant buttons to launch the drag-and-drop editor. 

The page editor looks more or less the same as the course builder (which we looked at earlier when exploring how to create your first course). 

You can drag and drop elements in to change the way the landing page looks, then publish it when you’re ready.

Bonus Deliveries

One last feature I wanted to mention is Bonus Deliveries. This is a game-changing feature for affiliate marketers who are promoting affiliate products through the ThriveCart platform. 

It lets you offer your online courses as a free bonus when customers make a purchase through your affiliate links. 

So, for example, if you’re part of the ThriveCart affiliate program, you might build a course on how to use ThriveCart and offer it as a free bonus to customers who sign up for the platform through your affiliate link. 

Then, once they purchase ThriveCart, they’ll automatically receive access to your course, too, for free!

ThriveCart Integrations

It’s easy to hook ThriveCart up to all the other tools in your tech stack. It offers tons of supported integrations with popular marketing and sales software, including:

• Mailchimp
• Activecampaign
• Drip
• Hubspot
• Thrive Architect
• Teachable
• MemberPress
• ClickFunnels

Plus many more!

ThriveCart Learn Pros & Cons

Now we’ve had a chance to explore ThriveCart Learn’s features, here are what we think are the platform’s biggest strengths and weaknesses.

ThriveCart Pros

• Easy to use. One of the best things about ThriveCart Learn is how easy it is to use. The UI is refreshingly simple. Everything’s neatly laid out and seamlessly integrated, and the drag-and-drop builder makes course creation a breeze.
• Drip feed options. We appreciate how flexible ThriveCart is when it comes to course delivery. You can set it up however you want and drip feed course content at specific intervals, dates, or based on other triggers.
• Excellent value for money. ThriveCart is unbeatable in terms of value. You get more for your money than any other tool we’ve seen. Lifetime access means no recurring fees, and you get the entire ThriveCart shopping cart toolkit and Learn for an affordable one-time payment.
• Simple automations. ThriveCart makes the process of setting up automations easy, even for beginners. There are no complicated flow charts; you just choose what you want to happen and when you want it to happen. 

ThriveCart Cons

• No video hosting. Unfortunately, ThriveCart Learn doesn’t offer video hosting. If you want to add a video to your course, you’ll need to upload it to a third-party hosting platform like YouTube or Vimeo first, and then copy-paste the embed code into the video widget on Learn.
• Not as many advanced features. ThriveCart Learn does the basics really well, but it’s missing out on some more advanced features that dedicated LMS platforms like Thinkific benefit from. We’d have liked to have seen some community features, such as the ability to create a forum in your member’s area for students to interact and the ability to conduct live lessons.

ThriveCart Learn Pricing

ThriveCart Learn is included with a standard ThriveCart Lifetime Account, which costs just $495 (one-time).

That might seem expensive, but it’s actually excellent value if you plan on using it over the long term.

For comparison, the basic Teachable plan will cost you $348 per year. If you plan on using it for 2 years or more, it’s already much more expensive than ThriveCart’s starting price.

If you plan on using it for 10 years, it’ll cost you over 7x as much as a ThriveCart Lifetime Account.

And with ThriveCart, you don’t just get access to Learn, but the entire ThriveCart shopping platform (read our review of it here).

The closest competitor in terms of features is Samcart. Like ThriveCart, it’s a shopping cart platform and built-in online course feature (Courses). 

However, unlike ThriveCart, Samcart doesn’t offer a lifetime account—only monthly and annual pricing plans. The lowest-price tier on Samcart is $39/month billed annually, so over the course of a year; you’ll end up paying close to what you’d pay for a lifetime ThriveCart account. Over 2 years, it’s already much more expensive than ThriveCart.

ThriveCart also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you’re not satisfied, you can request a refund.

If you want to unlock advanced features like bundles, advanced sequences, and additional sub-users, you can upgrade to Learn+ for an extra one-time payment of $195 (you get ThriveCart Pro with this lifetime deal option).

ThriveCart Learn Review: Final Verdict

On the whole, we were impressed with ThriveCart Learn. 

It might not have as many cutting-edge features as dedicated platforms like Thinkific just yet, but it still has everything most course creators need, and it’s incredibly affordable. For the price, there’s no better option.

Naturally, the tight integration with ThriveCart is ideal if you already use the platform for your shopping cart. And it’s super easy to use, which makes it a great choice for beginners.

If you’re running a small knowledge business selling online courses that aren’t too complicated and you only have a limited number of students, the standard version of ThriveCart Learn should be more than sufficient for your needs. 

But if you have a more complex course setup and need advanced automations, or you have hundreds of students and need to add more team members to help you manage everything, you will want to upgrade to Learn+. 

If you’re still not sure about this product after reading our ThriveCart Learn review, you can try it out risk-free with the 30-day “pays for itself” refund guarantee. Make sure you check the small print before you sign up to other online course platforms as well.

Good luck!