Five Key Differences Between Elementor and Thrive Architect

Elementor and Thrive Architect are two of the top dogs in the WordPress page builder community. I have been using these two page builders very closely for more than a year. They are similar in many ways, but there are also some key differences between them. In this blog, I am going to discuss five key difference between Elementor and Thrive Architect. Hopefully, this blog will help you to choose one over the other.

1. Sliders

Thrive Themes, the team who developed Thrive Architect are strongly against slider/carousels. They say that Sliders kill conversions. You can watch Shane Melaugh, the CEO of Thrive Themes absolutely bash sliders in this video. He also used the “F” word! Anyways, they may be right, but if you are using Thrive Architect and want to have logo carousels, testimonial sliders, gallery sliders, then sorry! Tough luck! Sometimes sliders are so necessary that I have been using a seperate slider plugin called Slider Revolution, to insert sliders into Thrive Architect.

Elementor on the other hand have all sorts of sliders, carousels etc. They provide different types of sliders such as logo carousels, media carousel, full-width sliders etc.

So if you are a big fan of sliders, then better go for Elementor.

2. Custom Max Width of Elements

Thrive Architect, gives the functionality to a user to set a custom max width to any elements such as paragraph,titles, content boxes, buttons etc. In this way there is no need to use massive margins on both sides to adjust the width.

Elementor on the other hand does not have this option! To fix a simple button width, you have to use massive margins on both sides. So if you forget to fix the mobile and tablet versions, chances are that all of your contents will completely be squished by the huge margins and padding.

So you are a person who wants to make landing pages quickly, rapidly implement. Then you better choose Thrive Architect.

3. Theme Builder

Doesn’t matter how good Thrive Architect is, but still as of this current moment Jan 2019, Thrive Themes still doesn’t gives the users the ability to design custom headers and footers. Even though there is a custom header for landing pages, but that doesn’t continue to the blog archives, product pages, single blog posts etc.

Elementor on the other hands gives a user complete control. Elementor friendly themes such as Astra and OceanWP theme, lets Elementor take total control of them. But please note that you must have the pro version of Elementor installed for this, called Elmentor Pro. Given that you have Elementor pro installed, you can easily replace theme headers and footers with one’s custom made with Elementor. Not only that, but you can also custom design the blog archive page, single blog page, single product page and so on!

So, if you are looking to build a totally custom designed WordPress website. You want to have total design control over every single thing. Then better go with Elementor.

4. Free Version

Giving something for free or providing value for free is one of the strong factor for making someone buy your product. But unfortunately, Thrive Architect does not have a free version!

Elementor, on the other hand, have a free version. With that free version, it is possible to make an amazing looking static website. Just have a look at this simple but yet amazing landing page I made with the free version of Elementor. This is one of the reasons why Elementor became so popular within a very short time, over 1M users!

5. Pricing and Updates

The price of Elementor for a single site is $49 and on the other hand the price of Thrive Architect is $67 for a single site. Before you jump into any conclusion such as “obviously Elementor is cheaper”, wait!

Elementor will charge you every year to renew their licence. If you don’t, you will stop getting updates. Meaning you will stop getting new features and also not updating a plugin is a huge security issue for WordPress. Hence this cost will add up over time.

On the other hand, Thrive Architect will give you free unlimited updates and new features for life! Once you buy Thrive Architect once for $67, that is the only cost you will face for your entire life.

Conclusion

Both Thrive Architect and Elementor are awesome page builders. There are are more differences between them, I have only pointed out five majors ones. Hopefully in the future I will post a part 2 of this blog. I hope you have found this blog useful and I hope it helped you to decide to make your decision.

If you liked this post, then please do comment. Thanks!