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Thrivecart just launched something new and pretty huge!
If you’ve been a ThriveCart user for a while – or even if you’ve just been thinking about it – this is worth taking a look at.
ThriveCart has launched a brand new community and courses platform called Thrive Academy, and it’s a significant upgrade on what came before.
It’s jam packed with features that will to challenge other LMS platforms such as Skool, Circle or Kajabi and it’s also fairly priced. So even those who already have a community or membership elsewhere, it might be worth the switch for more bells & whistles at a better price.
I’ve been following this closely and I’ve pulled together everything you need to know so you can decide quickly whether this makes sense for you.
Let’s go.
Firstly, What Is Thrive Academy?
Thrive Academy is ThriveCart’s community first course platform for creators and online business owners who want to sell courses and build engaged communities – without paying Kajabi prices or stitching together half a dozen different tools.
The big philosophical shift is this…
Most course platforms treat the course as the product and bolt community on as an afterthought.
Thrive Academy flips that completely. The community is the product. Courses live inside it.
When your students log in, they don’t land inside an isolated course platform.
Instead they land inside your branded community space. Courses, discussions, Q&A, resources and announcements all live there together.
It’s much easier for your students to engage with you and each other. Plus there’s gamification layered in to help more students take action and get results when they implement what you teach them.
As one person in the launch chat described it: “It’s like Kajabi, Discord and Skool had a baby!”
And I have to admit, I’m pretty excited about it too. I’ve been wishing for more community but I didn’t want to add yet another tech tool to my stack and Circle & Skool pricing was off putting.
Who Is Thrive Academy For?
Thrive Academy is built for:
- Online course creators who want better student engagement and completion rates
- Coaches and educators building a learning community around their programmes
- Business owners currently juggling separate tools (Circle, Skool, Kajabi, Teachable) who want to consolidate
- Existing ThriveCart Learn and ThriveCart Learn+ users – these accounts are being migrated over
If you’re currently paying for a course platform AND a separate community tool AND a checkout platform, this is the one to look at seriously.
And if you’re currently just offering free courses without any community aspects, it might be worth looking at because in this era of AI, people are not usually buying your courses for content but instead for accountability, community, support and personal perspectives. All things you can offer using Thrive Academy that you can’t easily offer with a course only platform like Learn or Learn+
Why Community First Platforms are Becoming More Important
You may have noticed that self directed courses are becoming harder to sell.
In this era of AI, people are craving real human connection. Free content is easier to come by and there is a trust recession.
As a result, people are shifting towards wanting something with more human touch. Community. Support. Accountability. Personal feedback. So the real value for creators these days isn’t one-and-done course delivery. It’s ongoing community engagement.
ThriveCart’s existing Learn/Learn+ already has 24,000+ accounts and 13 million+ student enrolments. It’s not exactly a small platform. But ThriveCart’s CEO Ismail was honest about something at the launch: simply adding features to the old platform wasn’t going to achieve what they needed. This needed to be a community first platform that completely changes the way people learn and connect.
When you layer in community, support and accountability, people are more likely to get the work done. Which ultimately means they give more powerful testimonials. They come back to buy more. They refer their friends. And Thrive Academy is built with that in mind.
Read next | Thrive Academy vs Thrivecart Learn or Learn+
Thrive Academy Features: The Full Breakdown
Thrive Academy Community Features
Every community in Thrive Academy is built around ‘spaces’ – dedicated social sections like Q&A, announcements, course spaces, and resources. You get six built-in spaces ready to go out of the box, and the whole thing can be set up in under 10 minutes.
The 6 built in spaces are…
- Q&A – for member questions
- Announcements – for updates from the creator
- Course space – where courses live inside the community
- Resources – shared files, links, downloads
- Discussions – general conversation and threads
- Activity feed – the central community homepage showing everything happening
Students land inside your branded community – not a standalone course player.
The dashboard gives you a real-time take on how your community is working. Lesson completions, new enrolments, discussion posts and which courses are performing best.
Thrive Academy Course Features
The course builder has been completely rebuilt, not just upgraded.
Here’s what you get:
- Drag-and-drop course builder
- Built-in video hosting (this is a big one – no more Vimeo or Loom dependency)
- Multiple layout templates (sidebar, top menu, grid-based)
- Sophisticated drip content – time-based, date-specific, or progression-based
- Progress tracking, certificates, and bookmarking
- Course cloning and templates for rapid deployment
- Version control and rollback – not having this was one of the things that frustrated me with the Thrivecart Learn platform!
- Quizzes and interactive elements – this alone is a huge improvement from previous platform Learn & Learn+
- A ‘Blueprints’ feature – pre-built lesson templates you fill in rather than starting from scratch
- Light and dark mode
- Mobile responsive and WCAG accessibility compliant
One feature that will be popular… Previously with ThriveCart Learn you’d need to host videos on Loom, Vimeo or YouTube and embed them in. That extra step is gone.
Thrive Academy Gamification Features
One of the biggest problems with online courses is that people buy them, do the first module, and then completely disappear. Life gets in the way. The momentum drops. And before long they’ve forgotten they even bought it and it’s gathering digital dust!
Gamification is one of the most effective ways to fix that. When there’s a reason to come back – a streak to keep, points to earn, progress to track – people actually show up. It creates a Dopamine response and taps into the same part of your brain that makes you want to finish a Duolingo lesson before bed even when you’re exhausted.
Thrive Academy has gamification built into the community layer. Members can earn points and badges, track their progress, and participate in a more active, engaging environment rather than just passively consuming content. The activity feed makes engagement visible – people can see what others are doing, which creates a natural pull to participate.
It’s not gimmicky either. Done well, gamification isn’t about turning your community into a video game. It’s just creating small, satisfying moments of progress that keep people connected to what they’re learning and to each other.
For course creators, this matters more than ever. Completion rates are one of the biggest drivers of testimonials, results and retention. A member who finishes your course and gets a win is ten times more likely to stay subscribed, buy your next thing, and tell other people about you.
The fact that it’s baked into the platform (rather than something you’d need to bolt on with a separate tool) makes it a really useful feature.
Thrive Academy Commerce and Checkout
This is where Thrive Academy stands apart from other community platforms on the market.
Because it’s ThriveCart, the commerce layer is native. That means:
- ThriveCart’s industry-leading checkout pages
- One-click upsells and bump offers
- Full affiliate management
- All the sales optimisation features ThriveCart users already love
No other community platform – not Kajabi, not Skool, not Circle – has this level of checkout sophistication built in. This is a meaningful advantage over other LMS .
AI Features in Thrive Academy at Launch
Based on the official documentation, Thrive Academy’s confirmed AI features at launch include:
- AI quiz generation (available on Growth plan)
- AI analytics insights (available on Scale plan)
- Conversational AI tutor (Scale plan) – the roadmap features flagged in the launch webinar like the AI avatar and ChatGPT channel integration aren’t yet in the official docs, so I’ll update this section once I have hands-on access
The launch webinar also teased features like trainable AI sales and support agents, an AI teaching avatar, and ChatGPT channel integration – but these aren’t yet confirmed in the official documentation. Worth watching for, but I’d wait until they’re live before factoring them into a purchase decision.
Analytics inside Thrive Academy
This is something in Thrivecart’s Learn+ that I really thought was lacking and so I was very relieved to see that it’s being addressed in the launch of Thrive Academy.
Previously you could only see completion stats when you clicked into a students profile. But that doesn’t tell you how many students have completed your course. It doesn’t tell you if there’s one course where students are dropping off sooner.
But now you will get per-course analytics (completion rates, student progress), student overviews, and community-level dashboards so you always know what’s working and where people are dropping off.
You can also get access to CSV downloads in the Growth Plan which (presuming it includes all the data above,) means you can potentially set up follow up with members when their community engagement levels change – a thank you email or a well timed ‘just checking in style email!’ (Something you’ll be able to automate with the Membership hub that is included with my bonuses when you buy Thrive Academy via my affiliate link. )
Thrive Academy Pricing
This is a subscription model – which is new for ThriveCart, who are better known for their lifetime pricing on the main checkout platform. The recurring costs are needed to cover the infrastructure for a platform this size, which makes sense.
| Plan | Monthly Price | Key Details |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $37/month (If purchased annually) | Up to 2,000 members, up to 10 communities |
| Mid-tier | $67/month (If purchased annually) | More members, unlimited communities, expanded features |
| Top tier | $97/month (If purchased annually) | Full feature set |
Annual billing saves around 20% across all plans.
To put this in context: Kajabi starts at $143/month (billed annually) and Skool Pro is $99/month per community. Thrive Academy is significantly more affordable than either of those at comparable feature levels.
What’s Coming Next for Thrive Academy (The Roadmap)
ThriveCart were open at the launch about what’s still being built – and the roadmap is looking interesting…
- Thrive Pages – a new freeform and grid-based page editor
- Retention offers – the ability to show cancelling members a compelling offer directly in the customer hub (particularly relevant as click-to-cancel regulations tighten globally)
- Webinars – via their StealthSeminar acquisition
- AI sales and support agents – trainable AI that works across social media platforms too
- Design Studio – based on their Piktochart acquisition, with tens of millions of templates plus AI image and video creation
- Autoresponder and SMS – via their vBelt acquisition, bringing a unified email and SMS marketing system inside ThriveCart
- Customer enrichment – automatically learning more about your customers without them needing to fill in forms
So there’s lots to look forward to! It’s worth noting that no fixed timelines were given for these – but the acquisitions backing several of them are real, which makes them more credible than typical ‘coming soon’ promises.
The Thrive Academy Launch Offer For Existing Learn and Learn+ Users
For early adopter and existing ThriveCart users, there’s an offer of between 2- 6 months free on the top-tier plan (worth around $582).
Learn users get 2 months free plus 1 extra month if they share about it on social media. Learn+ users gets 4 months with 2 months extra for sharing.
Existing ThriveCart Learn and Learn+ users are being migrated across automatically when you sign up for a free trial.
You will get the opportunity to test everything out whilst keeping your Learn accounts still running. You can opt to continue using Thrive Academy for your courses without upgrading for the community features or you can upgrade once your free trial comes to an end.
Please note I am offering a bundle of bonuses for anyone who joins via my affiliate link and existing users are eligible for this. You just need to click this link before you upgrade.
My Take on the Thrive Academy Launch
I’m feeling pretty excited about this.
I’ve been a ThriveCart user for years. It handles all of my checkout pages, upsells, affiliate management, and course delivery. It’s the backbone of how I sell. So the idea of a proper community platform that integrates natively with all of that is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
The pricing though isn’t exactly cheap feels fair and compared to other platforms (which don’t offer quite as much as Thrive Academy is promising) feels more affordable.
The community-first architecture is something that really appeals to me. And the checkout integration is something no other community platform can (currently) match.
Do I think it’ll be perfect straight out of the gate? Probably not – it’s a brand new platform. But ThriveCart has 24,000+ existing accounts and 13 million+ student enrolments. They’re not figuring this out from scratch. They’re a mature team building on top of something that already works.
If you’re currently on Kajabi and not using all the bells and whistles, this is worth a serious look. If you’re on Skool and want better course delivery and checkout power, same. And if you’re on ThriveCart Learn already, the migration is happening anyway – so you might as well set yourself up properly from the start.
My Exclusive Bonus Package
If you sign up to Thrive Academy through my link, I’ve put together a bonus package specifically designed to help you get your community set up properly and hit the ground running.
Because the thing is – launching a community isn’t just about picking a platform. It’s about knowing what to put in it, how to onboard members, what numbers to track, and how to keep people engaged long after launch day.
That’s where my bonuses come in.
👉 See my full bonus package and grab Thrive Academy here →
Bonuses delivered on active paid subscription. Already signed up? Forward your receipt to leanne@passiveincomesuperstars.com to claim yours.
passiveincomesuperstars.com/thrive-academy-bonusTo claim your bonuses, click here to get Thrive Academy through my affiliate link, then forward your receipt to leanne@passiveincomesuperstars.com and I’ll send everything across.
And yes if you’re an existing Thrivecart user upgrading, you’re also eligible for the bonuses. Most will be available straight away but the Airtable hub will only be delivered once you convert to a paid plan. Email leanne@passiveicnomesuperstars.com with your invoice to claim yours.
Frequently Asked Questions About Thrive Academy
👉 Click here to check out Thrive Academy and lock in your bonuses
If you want help thinking through how to monetise your audience with courses and evergreen funnels, my Fearless Funnels course is a great place to start.
Drop any questions in the comments – happy to help you figure out if this is the right fit for your business.