Review: Thrive

Overview

The last PFM tool I will review in detail, at least for now, is Thrive.  Thrive is…Orange!  Now in color psychology, Orange symbolizes energy, enthusiasm, ‘get-it-done’ attitude, and balance…which, for me, pretty much sums up Thrive!

Now this wouldn’t be right if I compared all other PFM tools to my previous cars and not Thrive, so here we go!  If you followed the other reviews, Yodlee was my first ever PFM and was compared to my first Jeep Wrangler.  Mint was the second PFM that I started using and was compared to my second Jeep Wrangler (traded that baby in for an upgrade! see below).  Wesabe was compared to my disel Jetta (I had to drive 50 miles a day, give me a break!).  Now Thrive…Thrive is my sweet new 4-door Jeep Wrangler that has most everything that I’ve asked for in a Jeep.  There are a few things that I still want, but I can wait for those.  For those of you who do not know, Thrive (like Mint) uses Yodlee as a back-end for data.  And this concludes my comparison of old Jeeps to PFM tools (about time!)

New 4-Door Jeep Green Wrangler <PIMP!>

Now about Thrive.  I actually stumbled upon Thrive months ago while browsing around PFM blogs.  The blog post I read was actually about Mint.  I was getting irritated with Mint and was reading up on reviews of Mint and Mint alternatives.  That is where I found a post with a comment by Matt @ Thrive.  Matt was describing how Thrive’s offering differed from Mint (and other PFMs).  Matt was then essentially stoned and caned like mad in this post, not only by users but also by Mint employees.  Now being a very rational, logical person, my initial thoughts were, wow this guy from Mint is being a real jag, this Matt guy didn’t deserve the beat down he just got…and what is this Thrive all about that it is prompting this reaction from a Mint employee?  Well let’s find out now, shall we…

Accounts

Thrive has the same account base as Yodlee, need I say more?

Support

I’m going to use a real world example here that a co-worker shared.  This guy was short on Quicken and was looking for PFM alternatives.  I rambled thru the various offerings out there and offered up my pick of Thrive.  He created a login and added his accounts and had a question/support request, so he used the help form to submit a request.  He received a response from Thrive Support in one hour!  Needless to say, he was blown away and is now long on Thrive.

My support experience has been nothing outside of outstanding.  The support and interaction with support is one of the main reasons why I am a huge fan of Thrive.  If you have ideas on how to improve Thrive, they listen and actually communicate back (that’s a new one).  If you want to you can even call Thrive or Tweet them about ideas.

User Interface

I’m a big fan of the Thrive UI.  Its easy to use, clean, and well laid out…and Orange!

Reporting

Thrive currently has no real budgeting features, however they do have something called Spending Goals.  Right now, at least on my dashboard, I have three goals as defined by Thrive showing my previous spending summary and a “goal” for what to hit this month.  While this may not be useful for some, I find it kind of cool since I really do not have a set budget and since budgeting was created by the devil!  (What!) 

A few other areas in reporting that are implemented by Thrive are:  Credit Compass, Financial Health Score, and Spending Summary.  Out of all of these I find the Spending Summary the most useful.  What Thrive does is shows you a graph of what you spent on a specific category during the previous months and lets you know if you’re spending more or less when compared to the same months. 

Now the one area in Thrive that drives me nuts in the financial health score, but that’s the perfectionist in me.

Alerting

(not my alerts, I never overdraft!)

Thrive does not have any relevant alerting features, at least in the sense of the way Yodlee and Mint provides alerting.  This is something that most PFMs are seriously lacking. 

Intangibles

Categorization

Although I really love the look, functionality, and freedom of Wesabe’s Tag Cloud and transactional tagging, Thrive’s categorization just makes sense.  That is another reason why I really dig this offering.  And the presentation of spending by category is simple and extremely easy to analyze. 

When starting with Thrive, I went thru all my accounts (about 20), all transactions (tons), and the only category or sub-category that I thought was missing was “Household Goods” (boring).  Can’t really complain there.  Another friend who I referred to Thrive had a similar experience.  In addition, he also stated that the total time required to tag his transactions a month dropped from over 1 1/2 hours to under twenty minutes!  That’s just crazy!

Psychology of Spending Money

This is where Thrive is really different.  They throw little hints here and there about your spending or saving which really gets you thinking about the what, why, when, where, and how of your spending.

I know I really want to buy a MoreBeer.com Beer Sculpture, but I know that my purchase rate and score will look like the image below.  One of these days I’ll buy that bad boy.  Maybe I’ll setup a savings plan for it!

 

Conclusion

Thrive is my favorite out of all the PFM tools on the market.  Functionality, support, accounts, UI, categorization…Thrive is tops in all of these areas.  Note that some of the features that are missing from Thrive are coming soon.  And if there are features that you feel are missing, drop them a line and let them know, they will more than likely get back to you before day’s end to collaborate more with you about your idea.

Ratings (1 to 5, 5 being highest)

Accounts	5
Support	5
User Interface	5
Reporting	3
Alerting	1
Intangibles	4