First Look At Thrive Automator: Will This Solve The Long-Standing Issue With Thrive Suite?

UPDATE: Do I still recommend Thrive Themes? For my updated thoughts on Thrive Themes and Thrive Suite, click here.

I’ve been a big fan of Thrive Themes for a long time. Before they even had all the plug-ins they do now, like Thrive Automator.

I’ve recommended Thrive Suite to many people. I’ve used it on client sites. It is an amazing package and, to this day, I think it is the best “bang for your buck” investment you can make. The amount of capability you get for one simple price is amazing.

But, there’s always been an issue…

And that issue was integrations.

Thrive Suite, as you might expect, works well with itself. The various components of the Suite all work together very nicely. Not only that, but Thrive works with a lot of different CRMs (even FluentCRM!), some membership plugins, etc.

But, it wasn’t that hard to run up into the integration issue with Thrive Suite.

Thrive Suite has always been way more close-natured. It didn’t have the necessary hooks and APIs to allow third-party tools to work with it. It was not extendible.

The addition of Thrive Automator shows they’re paying attention.

In terms of Wordpress Automation, we’ve already got way more mature tools such as AutomatorWP and Uncanny Automator. Both of these tools are very mature and have a LOT of integrations.

In comparison, Thrive Automator barely works with anything. Yet.

The thing with AutomatorWP and Uncanny Automator is that they don’t work with Thrive Suite well at all. Again, that’s because Thrive Themes has always been a closed, black box.

Thrive Automator will fix this. It will work with Thrive tools very well. Obviously.

The tradeoff is that the product is very young. Still in beta. And we have to wait for it to have enough triggers and actions available to be much use.

If you just want to do simple actions between Thrive tools and your CRM, you’ll be fine. For instance, adding a tag to their subscriber profile in your CRM if they complete a course in Thrive Apprentice. No problem!

For anything Thrive Suite has already worked with, Automator should work, too. For instance, if you’re using WooCommerce to sell your courses that you host inside of Apprentice, you’ll be good to go. Automator already has several WooCommerce triggers built in.

The part I’m interested in is this…

If this is indeed as they say, finally external developers will have an easy onramp to make their tools work closely with Thrive Themes products.

This is a big deal.

I’m not sure this platform is going to make Architect or Theme Builder as flexible as, say, Elementor. After all, Elementor has long been open to all kinds of third-party integrations and blocks. You can add all kinds of cool stuff to Elementor. And I rather doubt they’re going to suddenly open up Architect like that, but I’ll be the first to sing their praises if they ever do. 🙂

Quick Look Inside Thrive Automator

Thrive Automator is available as part of Thrive Suite. So, you can install it via their Product Manager plugin.

Once it is there, you can create your first automation.

First, you’ll select a trigger. This is the event which will be used to make something else happen.

What triggers you have available to you will depend on what you’ve got installed. Also, more triggers will appear in this list as time goes on and more developers create their integrations.

Next, you say what will happen when that trigger occurs.

Now, filters are where you can set conditions for the trigger. For instance, if you were to use the “User logs into account” trigger, you could use a filter to ensure the action only occurs if it is an ADMIN that logins in.

A delay, of course, sets a time delay on the action. So, if you wanted to wait a few minutes to do the action once the trigger occurs, you could.

Then, you’ve got the Autoresponder options. These work with the CRMs that you set up as API connections in your Thrive Dashboard.

You can add multiple steps to your automations.

Once you save one, you get a little little interface.

The interface reminds me a lot of Thrive Leads and. how it lists groups and shortcodes.

That’s about the extent of it. Pretty straightforward.

Looking Ahead With Thrive Automator

So, it is obviously pretty early. It isn’t even out of beta yet.

But, this looks promising.

It looks like it will finally solve a big frustration with Thrive Themes. I’ve always found it annoying how difficult they were about working well with outsiders.

Well, apparently they’re changing their tune.

It is nice to see.

It is obviously early so they’re a lot it won’t do yet. We’ve gotta wait for third-party developers to do their thing.

In the meantime, I don’t see a lot of harm in running it alongside something like AutomatorWP. If you absolutely have to.

You can learn more about Thrive Automator here.

Need hands-on help with your site or some personal hand-holding with your Thrive site? That’s always an option. 🙂 Keep in mind, PRO members get a big discount.