Would you like to know whether Thrive Leads or Thrive Architect is the right tool for building your next opt-in form? Understanding how the two products divide the work will help you choose the right one for your list-building goals, especially now that form design happens inside an embedded Thrive Architect editor.
What Thrive Leads Handles
Thrive Leads is where you manage the business logic around list building: which Lead Group a form belongs to, when and where it displays, whether it is part of an A/B test, and how its performance is reported. My Forms, Display Rules, and Lead Reports all live inside Thrive Leads.
What Thrive Architect Handles
Thrive Architect is the visual editor behind every form’s actual design: layout, text, images, buttons, and other elements. When you open a form’s Design tab in Thrive Leads, you are working in a full Thrive Architect editor scoped to that form.
Why the Line Has Blurred
In earlier versions of Thrive Leads, form design used a separate, simplified editor with its own element set, distinct from the full Thrive Architect experience used for landing pages and posts. Now that form design happens inside an embedded Architect editor, the two tools share the same design surface. The practical difference is scope, not capability: Thrive Architect designs whole pages and posts, while Thrive Leads uses the same editor to design individual forms and manages everything around when and where those forms appear.
Using Thrive Leads to Add Opt-in Forms on Your Website
If you want to put opt-in forms anywhere on your website and see how well they perform, use Thrive Leads. My Forms organizes your opt-in forms and gives you several form types to choose from, including:
- Ribbon (a bar at the top or bottom of the page)
- In-content forms (embedded inside a post or page)
- Overlay-style forms such as popups and other ThriveBox types
Thrive Leads lets you control where each opt-in form shows up. For example, blog posts in one category could show one offer while a different category shows another, and your homepage could carry no form at all. It also gives you Display Rules to target forms to the right pages and visitors, plus A/B testing and Lead Reports to see exactly how each form is performing — something Thrive Architect does not offer on its own.
Using Thrive Architect to Build Lead Generation Landing Pages & Funnels
Thrive Architect is a tool for building pages on your website. It lets you create landing pages, add forms to collect leads or email sign-ups, and a lot more. With Thrive Architect, you can add a Lead Generation element to any page you build, along with lightboxes that appear when someone is about to leave or after a set time.
Unlike Thrive Leads, Thrive Architect does not let you target one form to show on many different pages at once — if you want the same lightbox or form on multiple pages, you have to add it to each page yourself. Thrive Architect is well suited to building lead generation landing pages, with hundreds of ready-made templates, but it does not offer the detailed per-form statistics Thrive Leads does, and it does not let you A/B test pages on its own; that requires Thrive Optimize.
Feature Comparison
| Thrive Leads | Thrive Architect | Thrive Architect + Thrive Optimize | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lightbox on multiple pages and posts | Yes | No | No |
| Timed lightbox per page | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Timed lightbox on multiple pages and posts | Yes | No | No |
| Exit Intent lightbox per page | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Exit Intent lightbox on multiple pages and posts | Yes | No | No |
| Scroll Mat | Yes | No | No |
| Screen Filler | Yes | No | No |
| Ribbon | Yes | No | No |
| Slide-in | Yes | No | No |
| In-content (multiple content pieces on one page, whether or not the page is made in Thrive Architect) | Yes | No | No |
| In-content (if the page is built using Thrive Architect) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Opt-in Widget | Yes | No | No |
| Yes/No opt-in forms | Yes | No | No |
| Multiple Choice opt-in forms | Yes | No | No |
| Precise targeting on multiple pages and posts | Yes | No | No |
| Landing page templates | No | Yes | Yes |
| A/B testing opt-in forms | Yes | No | No |
| A/B testing landing pages | No | No | Yes |
| Detailed statistics | Yes | No | Yes |
Choosing Where to Start
If you are building a form, whether a popup, an in-content opt-in, or any other form type, start in Thrive Leads » Templates. If you are building or editing a full page or post, start in Thrive Architect directly. Once you are inside a form’s Design tab, the element library, templates, and layout tools work the same way you already know from Thrive Architect.
That’s it! You now know how Thrive Leads and Thrive Architect divide the work of building your list. Next, see the difference between lightboxes in Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads for a closer look at overlay-style forms specifically.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need Thrive Architect installed to design a Thrive Leads form?
Since the Design tab embeds a Thrive Architect editor, Thrive Architect needs to be installed and activated alongside Thrive Leads for the form design experience to work.
Does the feature comparison table still apply after the redesign?
Yes, at a conceptual level — Thrive Leads still handles multi-page targeting, reporting, and A/B testing for opt-in forms in a way Thrive Architect alone does not. Some of the individual form-type names in the table (like Scroll Mat and Screen Filler) have been reorganized under the ThriveBoxes tab in My Forms; see the difference between lightboxes in Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads for the current naming.