Thrive Apprentice is an LMS WordPress plugin part of the Thrive Themes suite of tools and allows you to create and design your online courses area on your website.

It means that you do need to purchase the whole Thrive Themes suite and be on WordPress!

It’s one of the most versatile WordPress LMS tools and has a true front-end visual editor allowing you to edit any part of your course you like!

No more being restricted to a rigid framework…

Now, what exactly can you do with Thrive Apprentice and how does it compare to other WordPress LMS?

That’s what we’re reviewing here:

Thrive Apprentice integrates perfectly with the other tools in the Thrive Themes and you’ll be able to easily do the following:

You’ll be able to manage everything through a very intuitive dashboard in your WordPress admin area:

Now, just as with any WordPress LMS plugin, understand that Thrive Apprentice does not replace the need for video hosting, an email marketing tool and a cart system.

Which are things you will need as a course creator.

What you will be able to do is to design the actual member’s area however you like, the login page, manage access restrictions, and a course store.

Courses Design & Tools

Thrive Apprentice makes your course design very easy to setup with Templates for: your school Homepage, Course Overview, Module, Lesson (video, text, audio), 

These templates can be edited anytime and will setup the frame around the content that you will then add to each course.

You’ll be able to use all elements of the extremely customizable front-end drag and drop page editor for these:

If you’re already using Thrive Architect in the Thrive Themes then you’ll be a familiar with this and already know it’s possibly the best WordPress page builder out there.

Of course you will also be able to use other tools of the suite like Thrive Quizz to create assessments or graded test in your course, or Thrive Comments.

User/Student Management

As mentioned before you’ll have to user a separate cart tool to handle payments and then integrate it with Thrive Apprentice to give relevant access.

This isn’t as complex as it sounds and is handled for each course in the Access Restrictions section:

Each new user automatically will then receive their logins via email with auto-generated logins and be sent to a Login page you can also design.

And that’s pretty much it, new students will then appear in the back-end of Thrive Apprentice where you can manually edit access, change password or remove users.

This is also where you’d import students in bulk if you’re switching systems for example!

Since payments are still handled through the external checkout system, any update to payments needed (cancelling subscriptions, updating credit card details, etc.) has to be handled there and not in Thrive Apprentice.

So be aware that you will have to juggle the 2 systems and this is not an all-in-one integrated solution which, to be fair, WordPress often aren’t.

Selling Your Courses

As mentioned before, Thrive Apprentice doesn't have a native checkout system where you could connect your Stripe or Paypal and sell directly from.

Although to be fair, that's the case of most WordPress LMS.

What you are able to do, is to create "Products" that can then be connected to one of the 3 possible external checkout system (SendOwl, ThriveCart and WooCommerce).

With each Product, however, there is no limit of what you can sell!

On top of selling the courses you've built in Thrive Apprentice, you can also a real membership site with different level of access.

Each Product can put any page, blog, or even partial content (part of a page) behind a paywall.

Better yet, you can setup conditional display rule to customize your content for each type of users, depending on what they've purchased or not

This will enable you to create very contextual upsells or cross-sells and truly customize the user experience of your courses and membership site.

Advanced Drip Feature

Thrive Apprentice 4.0 brought a lot of cool features to the tool, most notably the most advanced drip feature in the industry!

You can now setup your course or membership content to be released based on very specific triggers or any schedule you want

Namely, you can drip your content with:

The beauty of these Drip Campaign, is that they are de-coupled from any products and you can therefore assign them to different groups of students.

For example, if you accept student in cohorts, you don't have to duplicate your whole course (as you might need with other WordPress LMS), but simply create a new Drip campaign!

Thrive Apprentice Limitations

Now that we’ve covered pretty everything Thrive Apprentice does, let’s point out of a few of the limitations of this tool to see how it compares to other LMS and SaaS solutions (Kajabi, Teachable, etc.).

Limitation #2: You don’t have access to much student details. Most LMS will show you analytics like student course progress and other historical data, but that’s the case of Thrive Apprentice.

This can be limiting both from an instructional design perspective and marketing as a course creator.

These are the major drawbacks of the tool right now, which may be addressed in the future. If these aren’t major deal breakers for you then Thrive Apprentice could be a great fit!

This is definitely an area Thrive Apprentice excels at!

As with any tool of the Thrive Themes suite, a great importance is given to the aesthetics, ease of use and user experience.

You’ll have the ability to be guided by the Site Wizard, for each step one by one.

But setting up anything is delightfully easy anyway and you’ll have no hard time finding what you’re looking for.

On top of that, each template or content that can be customized and designed comes with a plethora of beautiful preloaded templates.

This makes everything so much easier and will enable you to get things setup in record time.

It also gives total control over the student journey and influences their user experience as well through the course and down to each individual lesson.

Again, the point of using such WordPress LMS tools is the total freedom you get, and Thrive Apprentice makes this accessible, even for tech averse users.

On this side of things, the platform does very well compared to other, clunkier alternatives like Memberpress or LearnDash.

Although you used to have to purchase the whole Thrive Themes suite in order to get Thrive Apprentice, you can now purchase individual licenses!

To see what other cool tools you’d also be getting check out our Thrive Themes review here.

$97 per year for 1 site which means only about $8 per month!

This is very affordable and you'd also be getting a great deal by getting the whole Thrive Themes suite and everything it has to offer.

It comes with any update made to the tools and additional features that are often added. There is also a 30 day money back guarantee with any Thrive Themes product.

Thrive Themes has updated their support and ditch the old Forum they used to have.

Now the support system is streamlined and very efficient.

If the Thrive University and extensive video tutorials and articles are not enough to help you get something done, you’ll have access to the live chat.

From experience the support is extremely knowledgeable and responsive.

They’ll let you know exactly what they’ve done and explained how they managed to fix the issue for you. No more trying to understand the tech gibberish!

Thrive Themes is a mature and long standing tool so you’ll also benefit from a large user base and fellow users.

A Facebook group exist to connect with them and share:

The company also creates a lot of helpful content through article and videos and will respect your inbox to only inform you of stuff you actually want to hear about (cool new features, pro tips,etc.)