Thrive

[Caren Hines]

Hello all,
My company has been using Onyx production house for years and we are getting ready to update our service contract.
My question is. They're offering a discount on Thrive, is it worth getting or should we stay with what we have.
If you recommend Thrive what are the advantages of it compared to just using Onyx 22.5
Thanks much!
Caren

 

[FrankW]

With Thrive, you are able to share your printers over multiple computers in the same network, because Thrive has a network licence. And it have a comfortable web interface. And some additional optional features like ColorCheck which is available with thrive only.

 

[Caren Hines]

With Thrive, you are able to share your printers over multiple computers in the same network, because Thrive has a network licence. And it have a comfortable web interface. And some additional optional features like ColorCheck which is available with thrive only.

Thx for responding Frank,
How does the colorcheck work? I know we play hell trying to match colors with onyx in general!

 

[ikarasu]

With Thrive, you are able to share your printers over multiple computers in the same network, because Thrive has a network licence. And it have a comfortable web interface. And some additional optional features like ColorCheck which is available with thrive only.

The only downside is you split your rips for each computer. So having thrive 221 for instance...you can install it on 2 pcs, but then each PC is limiting to ripping 1 file at a time... massively slowing down ripping if you're ripping multiple files. In theory Thrive is good, but their implementation of it sucks.


My thrive has 221. So I have 2 "rips" I can open onyx on one PC and have it rip 2 files at once .. or I can limit it to 1 rip, and open it on another PC as 1 rip as well.

I'm not going to trade 50% of my ripping 100% of the time, so I can occasionally use a rip on my laptop... I just use RDP.

IMO, thrive is great if you're a company with multiple printers and multiple users ripping and printing.... For 99% of the other shops, production house works just as well, and thrive has no benefits really.

I believe most, if not all the benefits of thrive are locked behind the advantage yearly sub as well....


They keep hounding us to update too, but it's not worth it. I have thrive at one location because it was a new install, and in day to day operations I've noticed zero difference between the two that would be make or break .. I think last time we checked it was 1k more to convert to thrive vs just upgrading our license to the latest.

 

[ikarasu]

Hello all,
My company has been using Onyx production house for years and we are getting ready to update our service contract.
My question is. They're offering a discount on Thrive, is it worth getting or should we stay with what we have.
If you recommend Thrive what are the advantages of it compared to just using Onyx 22.5
Thanks much!
Caren

How much is the upgrade?

Last time I checked...they wanted 4K to upgrade with 1.7K off...so it'd end up costing us 2.3K To upgrade to the newest version / convert to Thrive. Then our "Newer" license we did a convert from Flexi to Onyx...and that was only 1.9k. Cheaper to convert from flexi than to upgrade the license, which I found odd...

Personally I've decided to go subscription VS upgrading my my traditional license next time. $100 a month... 4 rips instead of 2, Onyx go plus isnt bad...the only downside is it only includes 2 printers and we run 4. But if you're using 2 or less printers, I think paying $100 a month for continual upgrades is worth it. Last I checked it was $1400 a year for the advantage plan that allows free upgrades... So cheaper to go on the monthly sub... Which also seems dumb, but I'm sure theyre doing it to push people into a monthly plan. (All my pricing info is CAD! Just incase it seems off).

 

[balstestrat]

Do you not need a license for every computer? Or you pay for.more rips?


My thrive has 221. So I have 2 "rips" I can open onyx on one PC and have it rip 2 files at once .. or I can limit it to 1 rip, and open it on another PC as 1 rip as well.

I'm not going to trade 50% of my ripping 100% of the time, so I can occasionally use a rip on my laptop... I just use RDP.

IMO, thrive is great if you're a company with multiple printers and multiple users ripping and printing.... For 99% of the other shops, production house works just as well, and thrive has no benefits really.

I believe most, if not all the benefits of thrive are locked behind the advantage yearly sub as well....


They keep hounding us to update too, but it's not worth it. I have thrive at one location because it was a new install, and in day to day operations I've noticed zero difference between the two that would be make or break .. I think last time we checked it was 1k more to convert to thrive vs just upgrading our license to the latest.

Now they always sell thrive 422 as a starter so you get 4 rips, 2 printers, 2 workstations.

 

[ikarasu]

Now they always sell thrive 422 as a starter so you got 4 rips, 2 printers, 2 workstations.

Interesting - I'm guessing they didnt discount it though, so its probably more than the upgrade to 221? Do you know the cost to upgrade from 221 to 422 roughly? I wish I had more than 2 rips because I constantly rip 100 files at once... and my CPU barely gets past 2% usage, having more rips would be nice... Its one of the main reasons we havent upgraded our work from production house as well... We have 4 rips on production house, so their quote was going to half our rips, and cost an arm and a leg... $750 per extra printer past 2 (We have 3 now, but use 4 often). So they wanted 2.3K to upgrade, then 1.5K to add the 2 additional printers...didn't even ask about additional rips since at that point it'd have been 3.8K on a "Deal" to upgrade, VS us spending 1.5K to upgrade to newest/ get advantage for a year.

If its not an exhorbant $500 per rip I may add a few more.... I dont "need" them for my thrive setup (My home / Epson one), but I never turn down more power

 

[balstestrat]

Interesting - I'm guessing they didnt discount it though, so its probably more than the upgrade to 221? Do you know the cost to upgrade from 221 to 422 roughly? I wish I had more than 2 rips because I constantly rip 100 files at once... and my CPU barely gets past 2% usage, having more rips would be nice... Its one of the main reasons we havent upgraded our work from production house as well... We have 4 rips on production house, so their quote was going to half our rips, and cost an arm and a leg... $750 per extra printer past 2 (We have 3 now, but use 4 often). So they wanted 2.3K to upgrade, then 1.5K to add the 2 additional printers...didn't even ask about additional rips since at that point it'd have been 3.8K on a "Deal" to upgrade, VS us spending 1.5K to upgrade to newest/ get advantage for a year.

If its not an exhorbant $500 per rip I may add a few more.... I dont "need" them for my thrive setup (My home / Epson one), but I never turn down more power

I think it's 2,2k

 

[jfiscus]

We couldn't see any real advantage of upgrading from regular Onyx to Thrive at our place unless we added a lot more printers.
We have three printers currently printing through Onyx, and subscribe to the Onyx Advantage yearly plan for unlimited upgrades as they roll out.

 

[FrankW]

Thx for responding Frank,
How does the colorcheck work? I know we play hell trying to match colors with onyx in general!

ColorCheck is not a tool for color precision, biut for color consistency. You save measured values from a test swatch for each print mode, doing additional measurements later, they will be compared and you will be warned if there is a deviation out of tolerance.

For color precision, you have to create own profiles with the profiler through media manager, or use the seatchbook function.

 

[FrankW]

The only downside is you split your rips for each computer. So having thrive 221 for instance...you can install it on 2 pcs, but then each PC is limiting to ripping 1 file at a time... massively slowing down ripping if you're ripping multiple files. In theory Thrive is good, but their implementation of it sucks.

If you have your printers on one computer only, it will RIP 2 jobs at a time too, as it will do with two separate computers. I don‘t see the difference. And it will assign the RIP-licenses dynamicly, as long as you do not configure the use of a maximum number of rips for each computer. And the RIP -license is on,y occupied during ripping.

 

[CanuckSigns]

We recently upgraded from thrive 12.2, I asked about upgrading to postershop and was told that it was $200 more expensive than thrive, not sure why.

The only reason we upgraded is because 12.2 started printing the summa barcode incorrectly for our f series cutter, so it wouldn't reliably read it, no idea why, onyx refused to help because the version was too old.

 

[ikarasu]

If you have your printers on one computer only, it will RIP 2 jobs at a time too, as it will do with two separate computers. I don‘t see the difference. And it will assign the RIP-licenses dynamicly, as long as you do not configure the use of a maximum number of rips for each computer. And the RIP -license is on,y occupied during ripping.

There isn't really a difference, that's why I don't think upgrading is worth it. If you need to use it on two computers, you have to limit one computer, or you have to make sure you close it before you open it on the second computer... Very situational.


At worst it should be that there is a central server and multiple computers can rip and queue up jobs etc, but the Central computer only rips two or however many licenses you have at a time... That would be a much better implementation.

Or, they could not be dicks and do artificially limit how many files you can rip at once.

Imagine if every app started limiting how many CPUs you can use at once, and you had to pay more to unlock the full potential of your computer... What they should do is license per computer, if I pay for thrive on two computers I should be able to rip however many items I want at once.... I understand having to pay for extra printers, but if I have a 20 core CPU with an SSD hard drive and my computer can handle ripping 10 files at once I don't see why I should be limited to two...

Sorry for the rant, but in my opinion their implementation of it takes away any benefits of having a network license, unless you have a very specific use case, or a ton of money to throw at unlimited rip processes... For the average user, average shop, paying the premium to convert over to thrive just isn't worth it. Especially when the main marketing is it is Network license and you can use it on any computer, but they never point out the limitations to it.... And then the customer buys it thinking they can open it on any computer they want, only to find out they didn't read the asterisk.

 

[FrankW]

There isn't really a difference, that's why I don't think upgrading is worth it. If you need to use it on two computers, you have to limit one computer, or you have to make sure you close it before you open it on the second computer... Very situational.

I think you havent worked with thrive until now, or dont understand it. You do not need to close anything: as soon as RIP-licences are available (dont rip a job currently) any computer in the network can use them. The only thing making sense is to limit the max number of RIP-threads per computer, to avoid that one PC would occupy all RIP-Threads available. Thrive dont have a dedicated Server too, except that the licence need to be activated on one computer, which should run for serving the licences.

The RIP-Engine in Onyx is Adobe APPE, Onyx themselves needs to pay licence fees for it. They are no „dicks“ just because they want to be paid for something they pay for too.

 

[Pauly]

With Thrive, you are able to share your printers over multiple computers in the same network, because Thrive has a network licence. And it have a comfortable web interface. And some additional optional features like ColorCheck which is available with thrive only.

*** only on the Gold advantage plan.

 

[ikarasu]

I think you havent worked with thrive until now, or dont understand it. You do not need to close anything: as soon as RIP-licences are available (dont rip a job currently) any computer in the network can use them. The only thing making sense is to limit the max number of RIP-threads per computer, to avoid that one PC would occupy all RIP-Threads available. Thrive dont have a dedicated Server too, except that the licence need to be activated on one computer, which should run for serving the licences.

The RIP-Engine in Onyx is Adobe APPE, Onyx themselves needs to pay licence fees for it. They are no „dicks“ just because they want to be paid for something they pay for too.

Either I'm doing something wrong, or my license is messed up then.

If I have onyx open on my PC, and go to install it on another PC... They zero it out to 0 rips during install and wont let me change it.

If I close onyx on my main PC, re-open it on my laptop, it goes back to 2 rips. I install it... it opens fine, but when I go and open it on my main PC... I get an error saying all rip licenses are in use.... even though I havent ripped a single thing on my laptop. If I close onyx on my laptop... I can then open it on my main PC.... Then when I try to open it on my laptop, all rips are in use, again if I'm not ripping anything.

If it worked your way, it wouldn't be bad. 2 Active rips makes sense - But at least on my system, the moment onyx is open... it assigns 2 rips to the open onyx, whether its using them or not... So you cant have onyx open on 2 PC's at the same time, even if you're not ripping something.

I've tried with 3 different computers incase one of them was messing it up, and it worked the same way on all 3...so unless my onyx key is somehow messed up, Not sure what I could be doing wrong.

 

[FrankW]

*** only on the Gold advantage plan.

As I have written, optional.

 

[FrankW]

I've tried with 3 different computers incase one of them was messing it up, and it worked the same way on all 3...so unless my onyx key is somehow messed up, Not sure what I could be doing wrong.

Strange. I thought it works more dynamicly, need to test it. But I‘m shure you can limit the number of RIPs reserved for one computer in the settings. I will check that.

 

[Pauly]

Strange. I thought it works more dynamicly, need to test it. But I‘m shure you can limit the number of RIPs reserved for one computer in the settings. I will check that.

this is how mine works too. we have 2 printers / 4 RIP engines.
If onyx is installed on 2 pcs with 1 printer/2 RIPS and running. The other PC with onyx can only run with the rescores not in use.
So say i changed 1 PC to use 2 printers/4 RIPS. then the other PC will say 0 and wont allow you to do anything.

But with thrive, you also have the web console where you can enter jobs though. That can run on as many web browsers as you want.

 

[ikarasu]

Strange. I thought it works more dynamicly, need to test it. But I‘m shure you can limit the number of RIPs reserved for one computer in the settings. I will check that.

Let me know if you figure something out, because the only way I could get it to work is limiting it to 1 rip per PC... then both can be open. But then it limits it to 1 rip per PC, even if only 1 is open...It doesn't "Reserve it" per say, it takes up a rip forever, whether the program is open or not... So you just halved how many rips and how fast your PC can rip files. So unless both of your PC's have a 100% uptime, you just lost productivity.... by a pretty significant amount.

I still think onyx is the best rip out there, but their implementation of the network license is pretty crappy and misleading.... Hence why if someone is on the fence and thrive costs more, I'd say sticking with production house isn't a big deal.