Are you in a dilemma about which shopping cart platform to choose between Thrivecart and SamCart?

If so, I am here to help you make a better choice between the two.

Today in this post I am going to review ThriveCart vs SamCart in-depth and compare the features with its competitors.

Let’s get started.

Where ThriveCart excels over SamCart?

• ThriveCart provides one-time signup whereas with SamCart you need to pay the monthly recurring charges.
• ThriveCart’s lifetime deal is affordable whereas SamCart’s higher plans cost more and are not easily affordable. SamCart’s lower plan lacks most of the useful features and hence not worth your money.
• ThriveCart has some useful features like digital sales tax calculation, link tracking, predicted sales, and mobile payment options which are lacking in Samcart.
• ThriveCart offers a two-step cart option whereas SamCart lacks this.
• ThriveCart supports ApplyPay and Google Pay payment options whereas SamCart doesn’t support these.

Where SamCart excel over ThriveCart?

• SamCart acts as a membership site platform whereas ThriveCart lacks this feature.
• SamCart’s user interface is really better than ThriveCart’s bit less refined interface.
• Templates provided by SamCart are more in number than ThriveCart.
• SamCart offers a free trial which is lacking in ThriveCart.

ThriveCart vs Samcart: In-depth comparison

Overview

ThriveCart is an all-in-one platform that you can use to sell your digital and physical products, market your services, and much more.

SamCart is also an online shopping cart platform but unlike ThriveCart here you can create and sell the membership sites along with products and services. SamCart is one of the best membership site platform you can consider.

Both ThriveCart and SamCart allow you to create funnels but this is not as powerful as ClickFunnels. You can just create the basic funnels with some customization options.

Interface

Compared to ThriveCart, SamCart’s interface is good. With both the platforms, the features are neatly categorized and are arranged logically.

If you are a beginner, SamCart provides you with live and recorded demos to assist you. This is not the case with ThriveCart.

Design and customization

SamCart comes with an intuitive drag and drop builder for you to customize the product pages, funnel pages, and memberships.

It has several widgets like a countdown, FAQs, testimonials, progress bars, etc along with basic elements.

ThriveCart’s builder looks quite outdated and its user interface needs improvement. It offers elements similar to SamCart.

SamCart also provides some template collections for the call to action, guarantees, header area, etc. You will not find this type of block in ThriveCart.

These collections are a group of several elements and using these saves a lot of time in adding each element manually. Using these blocks improves productivity.

ThriveCart just comes with various guarantee seals templates for you to choose from.

Unlike ThriveCart, SamCart allows you to optimize the pages for mobile devices. This is really a good feature as mobile users are increasing nowadays and optimizing the pages for mobile devices increases conversions.

Products

With ThriveCart you can create and sell both digital and physical products. Just click on to create a new product and select the type of the product you are creating.

Then you need to set the product URL, pricing options, integrate the payment gateway, and invite the affiliates to promote your products.

You can also add either the physical or the digital product as the bump offer. Adding a bump offer helps you market more products thus achieving higher conversions.

Creating products with SamCart is the same as ThriveCart. Just click on a new product and fill in all the essential details like name, price, description, etc.

Here you can select the payment type as recurring weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.

In the next step, you can select the product type, upload the image, and set the coupons. Compared to ThriveCart, SamCart features are very well arranged.

Coupons

Both ThriveCart and SamCart allow you to provide coupons for your customers. Offering coupons encourage them to buy more and is a great way to convert them as your long time customers.

In ThriveCart, head over to coupons and create a new coupon there. Then you need to set up the coupon code, and the discount.

With ThriveCart, you can set three types of discounts like fixed price, percentage, and free shipping.

You can apply the coupon for all the products, or on specific products, also you have the option to enable or disable them at any point in time.

The coupon options available in SamCart are similar to ThriveCart. With SamCart, you can provide a one-time coupon or a recurring coupon.

Checkouts

ThriveCart provides only four types of checkout templates like standard, sales cart, embeddable, and pop out. On the other hand, SamCart comes with plenty of templates.

These templates look highly professional and you can even preview them before choosing the one.

You can customize these templates with its editor and integrate them with payment gateways.

Funnels

With both ThriveCart and SamCart you can create sales funnels with minimum marketing options.

Click on to create the funnel and then enable the sales funnel for the product you want to create. With both SamCart and ThriveCart, you can add up to 5 upsells and 5 downsells.

ThriveCart allows you to use the same upsell for multiple funnels and also copy the same page setup and the content from other funnels. This is a huge time saver.

In SamCart, you will find the funnels under upsells. Give the funnel name, description, and start creating the funnel.

You can split test the upsell funnel pages with SamCart but this is not possible with ThriveCart as you can only split the various elements in a page.

A/B testing

You can split test the various page designs with both SamCart and ThriveCart.

With ThriveCart, you can split test:

• Different prices
• Pricing options like the recurring fee, one-time fee, or pay as you wish.
• Payment options (PayPal & Stripe vs. just Stripe)
• Payment button color
• Countdown timer vs. no countdown
• Logo vs. no logo on top
• Test which testimonials work best
• Testimonials vs. no testimonials
• Checkout overall design (2-step vs. 1-step, etc.)
• Test which bullet points work best on the checkout page
• Test two bump offers against each other
• Two boxes shot images testing against each other
• Which fields you should collect on the checkout
• Custom fields on checkout vs. none

Unlike other platforms, ThriveCart allows you to split test almost every aspect so that you can know which one works best for you.

SamCart offers this feature only with its higher plans. Here, you can split test the pages and also the upsell funnels.

Marketing features

Both ThriveCart and SamCart allow you to provide 1-click transactions, upsells, downsells, or bump offers. Also, you can offer a percentage-based or fixed fee discount.

You can keep these coupons activated or deactivated over a certain period of time. This is really a helpful feature in which you can make use of promoting the products during special or seasonal events.

Also, you can send the behavior-based emails based on the triggers you set like when the cart is abandoned, payment declined, credit card expired, etc.

Unlike Kartra, ThriveCart and SamCart lack dynamic OTOs and behavioral adaptive marketing features.

Email marketing and automation

Unlike their competitors like Kartra or Kajabi, both SamCart and ThriveCart don’t have an in-built autoresponder and automation tool to send the emails and follow up sequences.

You need to make use of external integrations in order to achieve this.

You can set up the behavior-based triggers based on the activity of the customers.

The trigger options available in ThriveCart are more compared to SamCart. To set up these triggers you need to have activated the 3rd party integration.

Affiliate management

Both these platforms come with the built-in affiliate program.

ThriveCart allows you to enable or disable the affiliates for individual products.

Select the product for which you need to invite the affiliates, then set up the commissions and other affiliate options.

You can provide either the fixed fee or percentage-based commission.

Setting up the affiliate center with SamCart is similar to ThriveCart. In SamCart, you can make the affiliate links private if you want only certain affiliates to promote the products.

The sad thing here is SamCart’s affiliate feature is not available in their lowest plan. To access this feature you need to go with higher plans.

Integrations

ThriveCart has excellent integration with various webinar platforms, email marketing softwares, membership site platforms, payment gateways, CRMs, and automation softwares.

Similarly, SamCart also integrates with various automation softwares, membership site platforms, payment processors, and page builders.

You can make use of Zapier and webhooks integration to connect with any of your favorite apps.

But remember webhooks integration is available only in higher plans of SamCart.

Reporting and analytics

ThriveCart gives you detailed reports with various analytics like:

The best thing is you can compare the reports of two products over a certain period of time.

Its dashboard will display various stats like sales stats, recurring stats, and refund stats in the form of beautiful graphs.

You can disable the stats that you don’t need to analyze and enable it at any time you want.

With SamCart, you can analyze the sales reports by date, products, subscriptions, traffic, and much more.

You can also analyze the reports for upsell funnels also, which is not possible with ThriveCart.

Compared to ThriveCart, SamCart reports are easy to understand. You can export the reports as a CSV file.

You can also get the affiliate sales report with both these platforms.

Pricing

ThriveCart is running a lifetime deal at $495 which is the best deal you can avail.

ThriveCart premium plan costs $95/mo and $1950/year, which is huge. So its lifetime deal is the best way to go if you want to save money.

On the other hand, SamCart is a premium platform with pricing that starts at $49/mo.

This lowest plan lacks most of the important features like custom checkout fields, multiple payment options, webhooks integration, cart abandonment, A/B split testing, affiliate center, dunning management, etc, and hence not worth it.

If you want to access all these features you need to go with its highest plan that costs $199/mo. This is really huge and is not affordable easily.

If you need more marketing features at an affordable cost I suggest you go with Kartra (review). It just costs $99/mo and comes with excellent features. If you go with annual billing Kartra provides a 25% discount which is a good deal to go with.

Also, if you are more interested in building advanced funnels to take your business to the next level, you can consider the platforms like ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels is a big brand in the industry and its main focus is on funnel creation.

Along with these three premium plans, SamCart has one more plan that is an Enterprise plan costing $399.99/mo.

It includes features like:

• Dedicated Account Manager
• Subscription Migration Support
• Product Roadmap Prioritization
• Custom Reporting & Exports
• Launch Reviews
• Technical Setup Support
• Multiple Sub Accounts
• Much more

Both ThriveCart and SamCart don't come with any transaction fees.

FAQs on ThriveCart vs SamCart

Conclusion

If your main focus is on product selling, then ThriveCart is the way to go. ThriveCart’s main selling point is its one-time payment option.

But if you also want to sell the membership sites, SamCart is the best option.

Also, if you are a beginner or if you want to save huge amounts, then I suggest you go with ThriveCart’s lifetime deal.

If you still think these platforms cost high you can go with some cheaper alternatives like Podia.