What is the difference between Thrive and an open-source content management system?

Thrive is a proprietary content management system that we have developed to meet the needs of our clients. We have focussed on keeping the system simple to use, while giving it the power and flexibility that is needed for great looking sites. Thrive is highly extensible, with many well-integrated applications available to add features and functionality such as mailing lists, image galleries and slideshows.  We can also build custom applications that integrate with or extend Thrive itself to meet your needs – as we built it, we’re the experts! We charge a licence fee to cover the ongoing development of Thrive.

An open source CMS is built by a community of developers who are donating their time. There are no licence fees associated with open source software, but there are implementation costs. Open source CMSs are often extensible, with different applications being written by different developers. The quality of extensions can be variable, and the extension you need may not be available. Open source CMSs are often very powerful and very difficult to use.

We would encourage you to consider the total cost of ownership over the lifespan of the website. This includes licence fees, implementation and support costs, the cost of staff time. In offering Thrive, our goal is to provide a better experience for you and your customers rather than to try to compete on price against free products.