I've been inside ThriveCart Academy since the day it launched. Here's my honest verdict on what it does well, what it doesn't do yet, and who should actually use it.
ThriveCart Academy is ThriveCart's new course and community platform, replacing Learn and Learn+. It launched in May 2026 — and it's no longer a separate purchase: it's now bundled into every ThriveCart subscription. It's an ambitious product. It's also unfinished in places. Both are true, and knowing which parts are which is how you make the right call for your business.
I've been using ThriveCart since 2017 and was one of the original 15 Certified Experts on the platform. I signed up for ThriveCart Academy within minutes of it going live. Everything in this review comes from actually using it.
ThriveCart Academy is built on two foundations. Understand both before you go any further.
The first: it's a course platform at its core. Your students land in a community feed when they log in, but the architecture, the toolset, the gamification, and the entire student experience are built around course completion and course engagement. The community is there to support the learning. That distinction matters when you're comparing this to Circle or Skool.
The second: it's ThriveCart-dependent, and structurally so. If you don't use ThriveCart as your checkout, the platform is missing its most important capability. Paid access, product mapping, funnel integration, affiliate management: all of it runs through ThriveCart. Without that connection, you'd be managing access manually for every purchase.
For the right business, both of those things are exactly what you want. The sections below tell you whether that's you.
One more thing worth noting: ThriveCart Learn and Learn+ are being deprecated. Existing Learn and Learn+ users are migrating to ThriveCart Academy. This migration isn't optional. The question is how to set it up right.
The integration is structural, and it's why ThriveCart Academy works the way it does. Purchase-to-access is automatic. Your products, your funnels, your affiliate program all connect natively. No Zapier, no webhook, nothing to configure. If ThriveCart is already your checkout platform, adding Academy is the obvious next step.
If people are primarily paying for structured learning, ThriveCart Academy is built for that. The course builder, the assessments, the student notes, the gamification engine: all of it is organized around course completion. Community-first businesses have better options. Course-first businesses don't have a better-integrated option at this price.
This is the use case I'm most excited about. Coaches running group cohorts around a course will find ThriveCart Academy purpose-built for how they work: separate community per cohort, the same course content surfaced inside each one, Q&A and gamification to drive participation without the coach carrying every conversation. ThriveCart's CEO has confirmed 1:1 and 1:many live events on the roadmap. When they ship, ThriveCart Academy becomes a serious contender for any coaching business that wants everything in one place without complex setup.
ThriveCart Academy is configured out of the box. Purchase connects to access automatically. No Zapier, no workflow to configure. For business owners who want to spend time teaching rather than maintaining infrastructure, that simplicity is the selling point.
Selling courses alone is harder than it used to be. Information is more available than ever, and that's not changing. The businesses that do well build real engagement around their content: questions that get answered, communities where students show up and help each other. If your plan is to sell a course and walk away, no platform changes that. ThriveCart Academy is built for the engagement model.
If people are primarily paying for access to each other, to discussion, to events, and to the community experience rather than structured courses, ThriveCart Academy isn't the right tool. The community layer is solid but it's designed around courses. Circle is the right answer when community is the product.
ThriveCart Academy doesn't have native live event infrastructure at launch: no office hours, no built-in workshops, no live rooms. For event-driven businesses, that gap is real. Circle and Skool both have native live events now. ThriveCart Academy has them confirmed on the roadmap. If you can't wait, look elsewhere for now.
If ThriveCart isn't your checkout platform, the integration that makes purchase-to-access work doesn't exist. You'd be granting access manually for every purchase.
ThriveCart Academy launched early and some of that shows: email notifications were still rolling out at launch, billing management inside the platform is pending, there's no Zapier or API access yet. If you need a fully baked platform today, wait six months. If you're fine growing alongside a platform being actively built, the timing is fine.
I went into ThriveCart Academy skeptical. I've watched enough platforms launch with big promises and ship something that needed another year in the oven. What I found was more nuanced: impressive in some areas, underdeveloped in others. Here's what earned the thumbs up.
Building a course in ThriveCart Academy is clean and intuitive. You get multiple navigation layouts, drip scheduling options, certificates, quizzes, and a proper media library for managing your assets. One feature I don't see enough anywhere: the ability for students to take their own notes inside a lesson.
I've worked with hundreds of course creators and the question comes up constantly: can my students take notes inside the platform? On most platforms, no. Here it's yes, and it's implemented well.
Video hosting is worth calling out separately. The Scale plan includes unlimited 4K video storage. At launch, there was a 500 MB per-video upload limit that made that promise feel hollow (I called it out publicly at the time). That limit has since been patched to per-plan limits. That should have shipped day one, but it got fixed quickly, which says something about how ThriveCart handles early-adopter feedback.
Course creation overall: two thumbs up. This is what the platform was built for.
I'm usually the first person to dismiss gamification as gimmicky.
On most platforms it is: points and badges that don't change behavior and don't reward anything meaningful.
ThriveCart Academy's implementation is different. You name your points system. You set exactly which actions earn points: answer a Q&A question, accept an answer, complete a lesson, log in on a streak. You create badges with rarity levels attached to specific achievements. You can weight community participation and Q&A engagement more heavily than passive course consumption. That last part is what makes this worth paying attention to. Most gamification systems reward watching videos. This one can reward actually helping other people. I wish Circle had it. I mean that.
The Q&A space is the most immediately useful thing in ThriveCart Academy's community layer. A member posts a question. Others answer. You accept the best answer, which marks the thread solved and awards points to whoever helped. It's transactional in the best sense: someone has a question, they get an answer, the answer gets validated, everyone moves on. I've wanted this inside Circle for years. It shifts the dynamic: the community starts answering questions, and the creator isn't carrying every conversation. For anyone running a course-driven community, that change matters more than it sounds.
You can create a space group for a specific course, with its own Q&A, announcements, resources, and discussion, as a dedicated hub for that course's students. It's a micro-community within the broader community. Students aren't scrolling a feed to find content relevant to their course. They have a home for it.
For cohort businesses, the ability to create multiple separate communities sharing the same course content is a real structural advantage. One cohort a year for a program? Each cohort gets its own community — siloed, contained, focused — while drawing from the same course content. You're not rebuilding the course for every cohort. You're creating the right container for each group.
ThriveCart Academy launched in May 2026, and it launched early. Some of that shows. If you're evaluating it, read the list below. These are items confirmed on the roadmap. Accurate expectations are how you set a platform up for success rather than get frustrated two weeks in.
This is the biggest gap. No native office hours, no live rooms, no built-in event infrastructure. For community operators running regular live programming, that's a real limitation today. ThriveCart's CEO has confirmed live events are coming: both 1:1 and 1:many formats. When they ship, the platform's position changes substantially, especially for coaching and group cohort businesses.
The only integration right now is the native ThriveCart connection. There's no Zapier integration and no API key. ThriveCart's Zapier connection on the checkout side has been solid for years, and bringing it to Academy is a stated priority. Until it ships, automation outside the native ThriveCart ecosystem isn't possible.
At launch, manually inviting a member produced no email notification. Notification controls were marked "coming soon" in the platform at launch. This is the kind of thing that should have shipped day one. It's being addressed. If you're relying on automated onboarding emails to welcome new members, verify the current state before you launch.
You can't manage your ThriveCart Academy subscription from inside the platform yet. Minor inconvenience: you have to manage it through ThriveCart. Worth knowing.
Your community currently sits at the domain connected to your ThriveCart account, which is your checkout domain. Per-community custom domains are confirmed on the roadmap. When they ship, white-labeling the experience becomes fully clean.
The short version. For the full breakdown — every feature, a complete comparison table, and a decision framework for each platform — I've written a dedicated page. This section gives you enough to orient the decision; the comparison page gives you everything else.
My ranking for a course-first business: Circle and Skool lead on community depth and live events. ThriveCart Academy leads on course integration and checkout sophistication. HighLevel is below ThriveCart Academy for this specific use case. That order shifts when live events ship. Coaching and cohort businesses in particular should watch the ThriveCart Academy roadmap closely.
"Circle if community is the product. ThriveCart Academy if courses are."
Circle is the most polished community experience available. Native live events, best-in-class access controls, a community design philosophy where the discussion and the people are the product. If your members are primarily paying for each other and for the community experience itself, Circle is the right call. ThriveCart Academy is ahead on course depth, assessments, and video storage at Scale. The gap between these two closes further when ThriveCart Academy's live events ship.
See the full Circle hub →"ThriveCart Academy if you own your billing. Skool if you want discoverability."
The pricing math is different now: ThriveCart Academy comes bundled with ThriveCart (from $47/mo), so you're getting the community platform on top of your checkout rather than paying a standalone community bill like Skool Pro ($99/mo). The meaningful differences: Skool processes payments through its own system, so your subscribers are in Skool's account, not in your Stripe account. If you ever leave, your billing relationships don't come with you. ThriveCart Academy's subscribers are in your Stripe account.
"ThriveCart Academy is better when courses and community are the primary product."
HighLevel's community and course features work, but they were built around HighLevel's other tools. You configure workflows to connect checkout to community access. In ThriveCart Academy, purchase-to-access is automatic.
See the full HighLevel hub →I've written a dedicated breakdown of ThriveCart Academy against Circle, Skool, and HighLevel — every feature mapped, a complete comparison table, and a platform-by-platform decision framework.
Academy isn't sold on its own anymore — it comes bundled with ThriveCart. So the real question is which ThriveCart plan you're on, because that decides how much Academy rides along with it. My recommendation is straightforward.
The community tier you get on ThriveCart Standard. Fine if you're just testing the interface or don't need affiliates yet — but the member cap and missing tools will get frustrating quickly if you're building something real.
This is the one I point almost everyone to. Pro+ is the ThriveCart plan most serious sellers want anyway — it's where the affiliate center and advanced subscription tools live — and the Academy Growth tier that comes with it (10,000 members, unlimited communities, 500 GB of video) is more than enough community platform for the vast majority of businesses.
The Scale feature set — white-label branding, unlimited 4K video, unlimited members — now lives in ThriveCart's custom-priced Enterprise tier rather than a fixed monthly plan. Honestly, I don't recommend going there. By the time you'd need a custom enterprise contract, you've usually outgrown what ThriveCart does best, and anyone serious about payments at that scale will want a more dedicated platform. Almost everyone is better served on Pro+.
I went through ThriveCart Academy start to finish on launch day: every setting, every feature, every place where something impressed me and every place where something fell short. If you want to see it in action before making a decision, this is the walkthrough.
More ThriveCart Academy videos are coming as new features ship, particularly when live events launch and when Zapier integration becomes available. Subscribe to the channel if you want those updates as they come out.
ThriveCart Academy for courses: yes. The course creation experience is strong, the student-facing features are well thought out, and the native ThriveCart integration removes the one friction point that plagues every other course platform: configuring access. If you're a ThriveCart user with a course-driven business, this is the move.
ThriveCart Academy overall: yes, with accurate expectations. This is a V1 product being actively built. The roadmap is credible: ThriveCart's CEO has confirmed live events, the team has shipped fixes to real problems quickly, and the platform's foundations are strong. If you're a ThriveCart user who's been waiting for a reason to consolidate your course and community stack, that reason is here. If you need a fully finished product, give it six months.
The course and community platform built for ThriveCart users — now bundled into every plan. Pro+ is the one I recommend for most people.
Get ThriveCart AcademyEight years of ThriveCart — the platform, the plans, the history, and my complete verdict.
ThriveCart HubFull comparison against Circle, Skool, and HighLevel — every feature, a complete table, and a decision framework.
See the ComparisonNot sure if ThriveCart Academy is right for your specific situation? That's exactly what these calls are for.
Book a CallThriveCart's course and community platform, launched May 2026. It replaces ThriveCart Learn and Learn+ with a fully integrated social learning environment built around courses, with the community wrapping around the learning experience. It's no longer sold separately — it's bundled into every ThriveCart plan: Standard ($47/mo) includes the Academy Starter tier, Pro+ ($87/mo) includes Growth, and the custom-priced Enterprise tier includes Scale.
ThriveCart Academy now comes bundled with ThriveCart — it's part of the same subscription, not a separate product you'd connect from the outside. That bundling is the whole point: purchase-to-access works automatically through the native checkout integration, with no Zapier, no manual access grants, and no workflow to build. Getting ThriveCart is how you get Academy.
The comparison changed now that ThriveCart Academy is bundled with ThriveCart (from $47/mo) rather than sold standalone — you're getting the community platform on top of your checkout, where Skool Pro ($99/mo) is a standalone community bill. The meaningful differences: ThriveCart Academy processes payments through your Stripe account, so your subscribers stay with you if you leave. Skool uses its own payment processing, so your billing relationships stay with Skool. ThriveCart Academy has a more capable course builder and stronger checkout integration. Skool has a discovery network and cultural ecosystem ThriveCart Academy doesn't. For the full breakdown, see the comparison page.
Yes, and it gets better for coaches specifically when live events ship. The multiple communities feature already lets you run separate cohorts in their own contained environment while sharing the same course content across all of them. The Q&A system drives participation without the coach being the only one answering. And 1:1 and 1:many live events are confirmed on the roadmap. If you need live events today, Circle or Skool have them now. If you can wait, ThriveCart Academy is worth watching closely.
Both are being deprecated. Existing Learn and Learn+ users are migrating to ThriveCart Academy. This isn't optional. ThriveCart Academy is a substantially more capable platform than what it replaces, and because it's now bundled into every ThriveCart plan, you're not paying extra for it — it comes with your subscription. For anyone who was actually using Learn or Learn+ to deliver courses, the move is worth making.
Since Academy is bundled with ThriveCart, this comes down to which ThriveCart plan you're on. For most people it's Pro+ ($87/mo), which includes the Academy Growth tier — 10,000 members, unlimited communities, 500 GB of video — plus the affiliate center and advanced tools most sellers want anyway. Standard ($47/mo, includes Academy Starter) works if you don't need affiliates yet. The top Scale feature set (white-label, unlimited 4K, unlimited members) only comes with ThriveCart's custom-priced Enterprise tier, which I don't recommend — at that scale you've usually outgrown ThriveCart. For almost everyone building something real, Pro+ is the plan.