Hosting Options

You can use Thrive in three primary ways - global hosted, self hosted or local.

Global Hosted mode is what you get when you go to the webapp. The Thrive company is hosting a central install of the Thrive software, and manages all the user accounts, infrastructure, data, etc. to make this happen. Your workspace is in the cloud. Since it's on the web, you can access it from everywhere, and every one of your devices. This is the simplest and most convenient way to use Thrive.

Self Hosted mode is when you handle running the software that makes up Thrive on your own infrastructure. Your workspace is still on the web, you can access it from everywhere, and from many devices. Follow the self hosting guide to learn more about how to achieve this and the tradeoffs you'll make.

Local mode is what you get when you download the CLI app and run it on your own computer. Your workspace lives on your machine, and is not accessible from anywhere else. Nobody else has access to your data, and you can take control of infrastructure needs yourself. This is an advanced/niche way of using Thrive, but I'm committed to making this thing work well too.