---
title: "Smart Audience vs Manual Audience"
slug: "smart-audience-vs-manual-audience"
description: "Outlines the difference between a Smart audience and a Manual Audience"
tags: ["Smart Audience"]
updated: 2025-04-02T10:05:59Z
published: 2025-04-02T10:05:59Z
canonical: "docs.thrivelearning.com/smart-audience-vs-manual-audience"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.thrivelearning.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Smart Audience vs Manual Audience

Thrive offers two types of audiences: **smart audiences** and **manual audiences**. Both allow you to group users for content sharing and assignments, but they work in different ways.

## **Smart Audiences**

Smart Audiences use rule-based criteria to dynamically add and remove users based on their profile data.

### **Example**

If you want to group all users in the **Sales** department, you can create a Smart Audience using the **Department** field. This ensures that anyone with "Sales" in their profile is automatically included in the audience - without manual updates.

### **Key Benefits**

- **Automatically updates** as users meet or no longer meet the criteria.
- **Works instantly** when new users are created and match an existing audience rule.
- **Ideal for large groups** with common attributes (e.g., department, location, job title).

Smart Audiences are a powerful way to streamline audience management and ensure that the right content reaches the right users.

## Manual Audiences

Manual Audiences allow administrators to select and add users individually, rather than relying on rules.

### **When to Use Manual Audiences**

- When users don’t share a common profile value (e.g., a group of first aiders).
- When you need full control over who is included in an audience.

Although Manual Audiences require manual updates, they can still be used to share and assign content just like smart audiences.

Any learning material in Thrive, including courses, quizzes, videos, documents, external links, and user-generated resources. Content serves to educate, engage, and assess learners, supporting a wide range of learning experiences across the platform.