ThriveCart Alternatives for the “fed up” and the “just looking”
Two people are reading this.
One of you is shopping for a course platform for the first time, and you’re checking out ThriveCart for courses. The other already has ThriveCart, built the course, and have gotten fed up with ThriveCart (last week was the last straw). You're not shopping. You're leaving.
You're both in the right place. Here's how to read the rest.
If you're shopping for the first time, you’ll want to skip down to the options and go check out the ThriveCart Learn full review. You don't need the ThriveCart teardown.
If you're leaving ThriveCart, read the next bit first. It's short, and then you get the same options.
If you're leaving, read this first
Option 1-the closest ThriveCart alternative
Option 2-for community
Option 3- for leaving
If You're Leaving and overwhelmed with ThriveCart alternatives (the short version)
You might be leaving because ThriveCart was kind of a Dick about the bugs last week and you lost sales (and sleep), or maybe you’ve been shopping around for awhile.
Either way, I put ThriveCart Learn through the same three questions I put every platform through:
Can you track something other than a complete click,
Can you build different paths for different people, and
How much friction is there between watching and doing.
It's fine to build in. The FAQ block and drag-and-drop are genuinely nice. But it can't track whether anyone did the actual work (only whether they hit complete), and faking pathways means writing HTML by hand.
If you want the whole thing with screenshots, that's the ThriveCart learn review. If you want to see how it stacks against all 16 platforms, that's the overview of why they’re all garbage.
You already know why you're leaving. So let's talk about where to go.
Your 3 Best Options for ThriveCart alternatives
Three options, depending on what you actually need. I've tagged who each one is for.
Option 1: The Lateral Move (systeme.io)
Mostly for the leaver. First-timers, this one's probably not your pick, jump to Option 2 (best for communities) or 3 (best for learning).
If what you actually liked about ThriveCart for courses was the building part, and the thing driving you out was everything around it, systeme.io is the closest move.
Same general profile on my three questions, and the builder works in a way that'll feel familiar fast, so you're not relearning how to make a course from scratch. (First-timer, that "feels like ThriveCart" thing means nothing to you, which is exactly why this isn't your option.)
Here's what makes it feel familiar.
The builder works in rows and columns, and you drag and drop the pieces you want, text, headline, buttons, image, video, audio, FAQ, raw HTML, into wherever you want them on the page. It's almost like a website page builder.
That takes a second to get used to if you’re new, but it will feel familiar to ThriveCart (and it's the reason I picked it: it gave me more control over the structure than most of the other tools). I usually just delete everything in the starter template and build from the bare page.
A few things that make it a genuinely easy switch:
You get one free course, unlimited students, no transaction fees. That makes it kind of a no brainer for validating an idea. You can get people in there and see what's working before you spend a dime.
There’s a lot to be said for reducing the amount of thinking you have to do. User interfaces that look and feel different take up some of our cognitive load (what we can hold in our brain at any given time). So this should reduce that AND you won’t have to think through how to reorganize shit (though, if that’s on the old to-do list, I’ve got course audits for that).
That’s all the good; here’s the bad and the ugly: it's got the same holes ThriveCart does.
Tracking still fails. It only tracks mark-as-complete. There are assignments and quizzes in there now, but I tested it, I submitted and approved three assignments and the progress bar didn't move at all. Then I marked four lessons complete and it jumped from 3% to 14%. So the platform has no idea whether anyone's actually doing the work. It's just counting complete clicks, same as ThriveCart.
Pathways get a conditional pass, and this is where it's actually a little easier than ThriveCart. You can turn any item on a page into an anchor using the advanced HTML attributes, which means you can build a whole pathway inside a single lesson.
It took me a couple tries to land on the cleanest version, and it's not perfect, but it's less fiery hoops than most, and it works really well on the student side. Click path two and it pops you right down to path two.
Friction gets a conditional pass too. The assignment tool exists but honestly isn't good enough, so I send people out to a workbook to do the actual work, which means extra clicks and not being able to consume the content and do the work in the same space. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's there.
I only know it's livable because my clients have been doing exactly this, going out to their get-shit-done book, doing great work, sharing it with me elsewhere, and the platform has no clue any of it happened.
One thing systeme.io does better than ThriveCart on accessibility: when I built a custom theme with my own brand colors, the poor color contrast issues dropped to zero. That's something you can actually control here.
systeme.io is for you if you want more control over the structure, a simple delivery, and the ability to test things out for free.
It's not for you if the reason you're leaving ThriveCart is the tracking, because you'll hit the same wall. Same for feedback loops, or keeping everyone inside one platform for the whole experience. Those all still mean leaving the platform to make it work.
So it's a lateral, not an upgrade. I have a more detailed review of Systeme.io as well. If ThriveCart's builder felt fine and you just want a smoother version of the same thing, this is the painless move. If tracking or feedback is what broke it for you, keep reading.
Option 2: The Community Pick (Heartbeat)
For both of you, if community is the point.
Straight up: on my three questions, Heartbeat review technically scores worse than ThriveCart but only because I could do workarounds in ThriveCart that I couldn’t in Heartbeat.
It made the list because those three questions measure the learning mechanics, and they don't measure community. If community is the thing you're actually building around, this is the pick. You just go in knowing what you're trading. Heartbeat also has more learning tools baked in.
What's genuinely good: the layout is ridiculously simple.
You drop into the community and the bells and whistles sit in the background where they belong. Course setup is easy, evergreen or cohort. And the assignment and feedback experience is the best I've seen anywhere in this series, submissions, past submissions a learner can actually look back on, real back-and-forth in the comments.
That's good learning design.
Where things fall apart:
Tracking learning actions, it fails. I really wanted this one to pass. Even after I submitted assignments and gave instructor feedback, the progress still said none. The good stuff is all there, it just doesn't count toward anything the platform actually tracks.
Creating learning pathways was also a no. It has the same permalink workaround as everyone else, clunky but it works.
Reducing learner friction gets a conditional pass: everything can live inside the platform, you can drop a voice note or an MP3, feedback happens right in there. It loses the full pass because you still have to hit a separate mark-complete button before any progress registers.
Heartbeat is for you if you're building community first and you want the course experience to feel integrated instead of tacked on. It's the strongest community platform in the series.
It's not for you if you need the platform to tell you when learning happened and how. It won't, because that was never the job it was built for.
Check out the full review of Heartbeat.
Option 3: The Learning Pick (MemberVault)
For both of you. First-timer who wants real tracking, and the leaver who left because of the tracking hole when using ThriveCart for courses.
If being able to track whether or not your course clients did something other than click complete was infuriating while using ThriveCart for courses, then this might be your pick.
It's the only platform in my whole series that passed question one.
You submit and mark complete in one step, and that work gets tracked as progress. On ThriveCart you can click complete all the way through without doing a single thing. On MemberVault, doing the activity is the thing that moves the bar. I did the activity on one path and it put me at 20% through, one of five steps done, because I actually did it.
A couple things that were great. The quiz questions aren't just multiple-choice regurgitation, you can set them to essay or accept a file, so people are applying the information instead of proving they memorized it.
And you can rename things, modules can be steps, lessons can be tasks, so you're signaling to your people that this is action, we're doing things, not just watching. Small, but it matters.
It passed question three too, friction. Content, activity, and submit all live on the same page. It's the lowest friction I saw in any platform in the series. You're not clicking out anywhere.
Where it falls down: no branching pathways built in (question two), so you're back to the same creative workaround, linking lessons into a pick-your-path. Fine, but it's a workaround. And I'll be straight with you, it's buggy. Feedback I left disappeared. Things changed day to day while I was testing.
The community feature is in beta and not ready. The bones are good, genuinely the most learning-intentional platform I looked at, best scorecard in the series, but if bugs make your eye twitch, know that going in.
MemberVault is for you if the course itself is the point and you need to actually see whether the work is happening. It's the fix for the exact thing ThriveCart can't do.
It's not for you if branching different people down different paths is core to your design, or if you've got zero patience for a tool that's still ironing out its bugs.
I’ve got a full review on Membervault as well.
Making a Choice (and Moving Away from ThriveCart)
Not a damn platform in my comparison was a clean win, every single platform failed something.
So “what to do” is the same whether you're shopping fresh or bailing on ThriveCart: know which problem you actually need solved, then pick the one that solves that one. Check out the reviews for all 16 platforms after you know what you need. Orschedule a strategy sessionand we can hash out what you need so you can make the choice once.