We have previously covered a number of leading opt-in form plugins available on the WordPress ecosystem. This year, we were introduced to Thrive Leads, the successor to the retired Hybrid Connect. Read more as we review the plugin after the break.
If you are keen to check out our review on the other products by Thrive Theme, here is our collection of reviews on Thrive Themes’ plugins
If you are looking for our reviews on the other opt-in form plugins, you may find them here
We have left out Hybrid Connect as the plugin has been effectively replaced by Thrive Leads. So, what are our impressions of Thrive Leads?
Introduction
Thrive Themes has been around since 2012. However, its founder, Shane Melaugh is a respected name on the WordPress scene and has been around with imimpact and SECockpit since 2010.
We were introduced to Thrive Leads sometime back when Shane and team decided to discontinue Hybrid Connect while giving us a huge discount to hop unto the Thrive Leads bandwagon.
The Thrive Leads plugin was not used nor installed till recently, as we were in the midst of creating Leokoo. This was to ensure that we had a site focused on WordPress reviews while maintaining our current site (TechGarage) for iPhone related news and reviews.
What Makes Thrive Leads Really Good?
Having done that, we installed Thrive Leads and found it to be really good. It has advanced features such as granular control over where each opt-in form would appear (including the post type, category, product category and many more)
We also love the fact that we could create multiple buttons and then configure the reaction to these buttons. Reactions is called as “events” under Thrive Leads and via an event manager, you can either switch the state of the lightbox (or pop up to some of you), close the lightbox or even trigger some fancy animation.
Thus, with the multi-step opt-in for Thrive Leads, you can be creative and have various kinds of opt-in forms including
- The ability to sign up subscribers to multiple mailing lists depending on their interest. This is crucial if you run a site that focuses on more than one niche
- The ability to create permission-based opt-ins. With permission-based opt-in, your conversion rates will increase
- Upsell various giveaways or mailing lists by redirecting after a certain event
Other types of Opt-in forms?
Other than the lightbox type of opt-in, Thrive Leads comes with an impressive seven more opt-in types. This includes the regular ones like slide-ins, ribbons (aka. hello bar clones), post footer and in content opt-in.
For ourselves, the lightbox, post footer and the ribbon opt-ins make Thrive Leads worth the price by itself.
Lifetime Updates
One interesting aspect of Thrive Leads and all plugins released by Thrive Themes for that matter is lifetime updates. While other plugins were moving towards yearly renewals, you only need to renew if you need support after 12 months. You can purchase licences for a single site or unlimited sites at a very modest price.
This gives you massive savings over its competitors, namely SumoMe, OptinMonster and Icegram (yet to be reviewed). The other plugins on lifetime updates include Ninja Popups and Monarch by Elegant Themes, which is next in line to be reviewed.
Weaknesses: Not perfect yet
While Thrive Leads thrives on the technical and innovative aspects of optin forms, they certainly lack in terms of looks. Having tested out the Bloom optin plugin by Elegant Themes, we found Thrive Leads’ designs looking like they were done by an engineer, rather than a designer.
Having said that, Thrive Leads continues in the vein of the boring look and templates that Thrive Content Builder has. Here’s to hoping that Thrive Themes improve on that bit.
Other than that, we found the odd bug whereby Thrive Leads kept popping up on the iPhone when we reloaded the site. This is certainly just a bug as we had configured it to load on a seven-day cookie.
Conclusion
Nonetheless, Shane and his team at Thrive Themes has done a great job in producing a quality product. Considering the fact that Thrive Leads does very well technically and comes with the lifetime, unlimited sites licenses; you can do very well by purchasing a copy for your WordPress site today.
Unless you have a particular preference for other Optin forms, Thrive Leads presents a very powerful plugin at the fraction of the price.
