SamCart vs ThriveCart

If you are down to SamCart and ThriveCart, you have already narrowed the field well. These two are genuine rivals, not opposites. Both are creator checkouts built to sell courses, coaching, memberships and digital products, and both carry the same headline features: order bumps, one-click upsells, split-tested checkouts and an affiliate program. The question is not which one is a cart and which one is not. It is which cart fits how you sell, and how you want to pay.

The honest answer is that the feature lists are close enough that price and payment model decide it for most people. SamCart is a monthly subscription that leans hard on lifting the value of every order and defending recurring revenue. ThriveCart made its name on a licence you buy once and keep. Get that fork right and the rest falls into place.

The one question that decides it: how do you want to pay?

Settle this before you compare a single feature, because it is where these two actually differ. SamCart is priced like software you rent. Core is $79 a month and Pro is $199 a month, with 25% off if you pay annually. ThriveCart is priced like software you own. Its long-standing draw is a one-time lifetime licence you pay for once and never renew, and in 2026 it added monthly plans as well, Standard at $37 a month billed annually and Pro+ at $67 a month billed annually.

Run the math over the life of the business, not the first month. If you plan to sell for years, ThriveCart's buy-once licence is far cheaper than $199 a month forever. If you would rather not put a lump sum down, or you want the option to walk away after a slow quarter, SamCart's monthly plan spreads the cost and asks for no commitment. Neither is wrong. They are two answers to the same question about cash flow.

SamCart: the conversion checkout

SamCart has sold checkouts since 2014 and says more than 75,000 businesses and over $8 billion in sales have run through it, so capability is not in doubt. Its whole design points at one goal: raising the value of every order. Order bumps add a companion product with a single checkbox at checkout. One-click upsells charge the same card again after the first purchase, with no re-entry of card details. A/B testing races two checkout pages against each other. Subscription Saver retries failed renewals and runs dunning, and cart abandonment emails chase stalled carts. SamCart reports up to a 98% lift in average order value when a seller runs bumps and upsells together.

Two catches matter. First, the price and where the good parts live. Core at $79 a month gives you unlimited pages and products, the AI page builder, a courses app and cart abandonment emails, but order bumps, one-click upsells, A/B testing, Subscription Saver and the Affiliate Center are all on the $199 Pro plan. SamCart as it is usually pitched is realistically a $199 tool. Second, the friction long-term users report is billing, not the software. Unexpected renewals and slow refunds show up across Trustpilot and BBB records, and SamCart's own help docs confirm that cancelling through the customer portal stops future charges but does not refund money already taken. Read the renewal terms before the trial ends. On payments it runs standard processors, SamPay, Stripe and PayPal, with SamPay at 2.9% plus 30 cents and no added platform fee, so it is not built for the high-risk categories those gateways decline.

ThriveCart: the cart you buy once

ThriveCart built its reputation on the same class of cart and a pricing model SamCart does not offer. Its checkout carries order bumps, one-click upsells, split-tested pages and an affiliate centre that course and digital-product sellers lean on, now wrapped in a landing-page builder and a bundled Academy for hosting courses. It connects Stripe, PayPal or Authorize.Net and charges nothing of its own on top of the processor's fee, so what you pay to sell is just the gateway rate.

The lifetime licence is still the reason most people choose it. You pay once and the cart is yours, which over a few years undercuts any monthly plan. What ThriveCart delegates is the money side. Payments run through the single processor you connect, so a declined card has no fallback account. Its own failed-payment reminders, subscription analytics and deeper reporting sit on the Pro+ tier, and how hard a failed renewal is retried is really the processor's job: Stripe's smart retries try several times, PayPal retries then suspends, and Authorize.Net does not auto-retry at all. Disputes are left to whichever gateway took the money, so ThriveCart brings no chargeback tooling of its own. Like SamCart, it cannot serve high-risk categories, because the gateways behind it ban them.

Pricing: a monthly plan versus a licence you own

These two do not compare on a sticker. SamCart charges a flat monthly fee, $79 on Core or $199 on Pro with 25% off annual, and gates the features it is known for to Pro. ThriveCart can be bought once for a lifetime licence, or paid monthly at $37 or $67 billed annually, and adds no fee of its own on your sales. Both leave the processor fee, roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents on Stripe, and the tax filing to you.

Over one year, ThriveCart's monthly Standard plan at $37 is less than half of SamCart Core, and its lifetime licence pays for itself against SamCart Pro inside the first year for most sellers. What SamCart's higher price buys is a more polished conversion suite and Subscription Saver working out of the box, which matters more to a subscription business than to someone selling a one-time course. Price both on how long you plan to sell and how much you value paying once versus month to month. We verified these figures with each vendor in September 2026; check the current pages before you buy, because checkout pricing moves.

The shared limit for a paid-traffic seller

There is one reader both carts quietly rule out, and it is this site's core reader: the direct-response media buyer running their own offers. Two things decide it. Neither tool takes high-risk business, because the gateways behind both decline those categories, so a restricted offer is a non-starter on either. And neither routes a charge across several high-risk merchant accounts you hold. SamCart Pro can route across the standard processors you connect, but those processors decline the categories a direct-response buyer often sells, and ThriveCart uses only the one processor you attach. For a buyer whose margin depends on spreading volume across accounts and catching a soft decline on a second one, that missing routing is the gap that sends them looking past both.

A third path: keep your own accounts and route across them

ElasticFunnels is built for that buyer, and it closes the gap both carts leave. It is not a plain checkout, it is a funnel platform whose hosted checkout is one part of a larger system: it builds the pages, splits them under one URL so your ads never reset their learning, hosts the checkout with order bumps and one-click upsells, and keeps the CRM, the orders and the ad-spend reporting on one record. On the payment side, the part that matters against these two, its checkout routes each charge across the NMI and Stripe merchant accounts you connect, including high-risk accounts, and cascades to the next eligible account when one soft-declines, with subscription dunning and save offers built in. That multi-account routing is the thing neither SamCart nor ThriveCart can do. It opens with a 14-day free trial and asks for no card.

The honest limit is that ElasticFunnels is newer than either SamCart or ThriveCart, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against, so until you run real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word for how the routing and the reporting hold up. That newness touches the proof, not the feature set: the pages, the same-URL testing, the checkout and the account routing are all there to use from the first day. Scope it honestly, too. It is a full funnel platform priced from $97 a month, not a $37 cart, so a creator who only wants a checkout for a single course is buying pages, a CRM and attribution they may not need, and for that seller SamCart or ThriveCart is the smaller, better-fitted tool. Keep ElasticFunnels on its own line of the decision rather than treating it as a tiebreaker between the two.

Which one for you

You sell subscriptions, memberships or coaching and want the checkout to defend recurring revenue: SamCart. Subscription Saver, one-click upsells, A/B testing and the Affiliate Center are the tools that lift order value and chase failed renewals, and month-to-month billing suits a business that would rather not commit a lump sum. Budget for the $199 Pro plan, because that is where those features live.

You sell one-off products or courses and want to pay once: ThriveCart. The same class of cart, a lifetime licence that undercuts any monthly plan over a few years, and no fee of its own on your sales is the setup a creator with a settled catalogue wants. Accept that dunning sits on Pro+ and that disputes stay with your processor.

You run your own paid-traffic offers across merchant accounts you hold: look at ElasticFunnels alongside them, with the newness caveat above in mind, because multi-account routing and same-URL testing are the things neither cart offers.

Between the two, SamCart takes our default pick, because the reader down to these two is usually shopping for a checkout that actively sells harder and holds onto subscriptions, and SamCart is built more single-mindedly for that. ThriveCart is not the weaker tool. For a seller who wants the same class of cart for a price they pay once, and who is happy to run their own processor and handle dunning on Pro+, ThriveCart is plainly the better value, and it is the one we would pick to keep costs down.