Kartra vs. Clickfunnels — Comparison and Reviews

Are you trying to make an informed choice between Kartra and ClickFunnels?

Digital marketing tasks, such as the construction of landing pages and sales funnels, are easily completed with dedicated software. There are many options available to marketers and business owners, but Kartra and ClickFunnels usually rank high in comparative reviews. 

Credible sources like Statista claim that eCommerce is bigger than ever, with an ever-expanding share in overall global sales. Online sales make up almost 15% of all transactions, and this number is going to be even higher in the coming years. This makes digital stores a revenue generation option worth exploring. It means that a global online audience is the most prospective source for lead generation and conversion. 

Most businesses have caught wind of this, which has led to a boom in digital marketing budgets in the previous decade. The importance of online campaigns has gone from being an interesting novelty to becoming more crucial than television and print combined. A lot of funds and hard work are going into meticulous sales funnel design, lead generation software, comprehensive campaigns spanning all social networks, etc. 

The complexity of the contemporary digital marketing strategy has given birth to a software niche filled with platforms like Kartra and ClickFunnel. They are used to make the long-winded procedure of marketing an online product as simple as possible. Both options are similar in scope and intent, but they have a set of differences worth exploring in more detail before settling on one platform. 

The Basic Differences between Kartra and ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is an all-encompassing platform for online marketing. They provide their users with a set of tools for marketing any kind of product from zero to a professional website. You can design your product’s sales funnel easily and put the sales plan into action via an intuitive website builder. 

Kartra, at first glance, offers an almost identical set of features. They have the basic functionalities as ClickFunnels, which is why their marketing team is quick to boast of their product as a “ClickFunnels killer”. We will examine the merit of that claim in more detail below, but their core set of features is the same: tools for building sales funnels, website pages, and managing an online campaign. 

The platforms diverge in two extremely important details. Kartra’s pricing plan is initially more affordable but becomes more costly than ClickFunnels as your website grows. ClickFunnels does not have a progressive pricing plan that depends on the popularity of your website. The budget you need for the platform solely depends on what ClickFunnels plan you choose in the beginning. The range of integrations with third-party software that Kartra offers is also far narrower than that of ClickFunnels. This can be important for entrepreneurs who prefer a different solution for specific tasks than the ones embedded into the platforms. In summary:

• ClickFunnels—complete solution for sales funnel design and page building

• Kartra—same intent but less focused on integration and with a progressive pricing plan

ClickFunnels 101—Sales Funnel Focus

The main reason why ClickFunnels elicits so much popularity is their ease of use. The point of the platform is to aid small businesses and budget-constrained entrepreneurs in coming up with a professional sales funnel quickly. You can also use ClickFunnels to design perfectly optimized sales pages without spending a small fortune on seasoned web designers or experienced marketers.  

But before getting into the details on what ClickFunnels offers—what is the point of a sales funnel in the first place? This is a plan of the intended user experience on your product website, leading visitors from the first click on your link to making a satisfying purchase. In more complex marketing campaigns, the goal could be more limited—like getting people to sign up for a weekly newsletter, or provide personal information. 

A basic sales funnel consists of:

1. Landing pages—making an initial presentation of your brand to the website visitor

2. Content pages—providing more details through pitches for a specific product or service

3. Sales pages—making a concrete offer to the visitors

4. Checkout pages—designing the final checkout and transaction 

5. Bonus pages—making bonus offers to customers who have already made a purchase

Image source: medium

ClickFunnels Content Sharing

ClickFunnels allows businesses to create a professional-looking sales funnel with all of the abovementioned elements without the support of a digital marketing or web design team. A complete layman could easily use their visual interface to come up with a sales website ready for high conversion rates and lead generation. 

There are plenty of similar funnel builders on the market—Kartra included. What makes ClickFunnels a cut above the rest is its focus on content sharing. You don’t need to spend time working on your own sales funnel with this platform. ClickFunnels has a vibrant community and a marketplace for page and funnel templates, where you can simply find a pre-made funnel that suits your product. Using their visual editor to adapt the template to your brand is quite simple. 

Email Marketing

Any seasoned marketer would be able to tell you that digital marketing is less of art these days, and more of a science. There are a number of crucial metrics that webmasters need to keep in mind while optimizing their websites. These directly translate into sales and show if your product is going to be visible to the target audience through search engines and social media. 

Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of online marketing. The main source of lead generation has not changed much—a majority of people still opt in to newsletters and similar kinds of email marketing. That’s why white label email marketing solutions are used to manage massive online campaigns through the automatization of simple tasks. 

One of the main advantages of ClickFunnels is their awareness of the importance of email marketing. Their built-in Actionetics system for the automation of email management is good enough to remove the need for any additional software. 

Image source: creativestudioweb

Features of ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels has a simple pricing plan, particularly compared to the progressively more expensive Kartra one. They offer two distinct types of membership: a Startup one that sets you back $97, and a Full one that costs $297. The following features are available in both:

Some of these features are self-explanatory, but we’ll explain what they entail in more detail:

1. Website templates and themes—simplified website building with premade themes

2. Statistics tracking—easy-to-view website statistics important for search engine optimization

3. A/B testing—integrated split tests for the compatibility of different website elements

4. Membership websites—diversification of revenue for marketers via paywalls for content

5. Web hosting—domain name and hosting options provided by ClickFunnels

6. Visual editor—interface that allows for website and page design without coding skills 

7. Sales funnels—selection of premade templates for product-specific sales funnels

8. Email marketing—trigger-based automation for email responses

9. Page designer—themes for any type of sales page found in a funnel

Image source: homebiznetworks

Top ClickFunnels Features

This selection of features is impressive on paper, but plenty of them are present in Kartra and similar funnel builders as well. 

One of the things that makes ClickFunnels special is the visual editor. This is a feature that you will find in other competing platforms, but not at this level of quality. It is clear that the designers of ClickFunnels spent a lot of time making the drag and drop interface as intuitive as possible. 

The second standout feature is definitely the ClickFunnels content sharing marketplace. Designers can use it to sell their page templates to other people who don’t want to fiddle with the design. Marketers can use it to provide others with the option of buying a pre-built sales funnel. This is a particularly great option for those making bonus content for their own upsell pages. An industry professional pitching their own brand of white label marketing software could sweeten the offer with an affordable sales funnel template. 

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• 3 minutes to install
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ClickFunnels and Your Business

All businesses aim to create a fruitful online presence, whether through a sales website for a single product or an online store offering a wider selection of branded products. This can be a tough goal to achieve for small businesses—few of them can afford in-house marketing. ClickFunnels is there to give them an easy way into the world of digital marketing, without skyrocketing expenses. 

The software’s ease of use is a draw to even the most experienced marketers, particularly when combined with its content sharing capabilities. Plenty of freelance marketers want to have a diverse range of revenue sources. Many of them look to strengthen their brand by offering personalized software provided by Sell SaaS and similar companies. 

This sort of investment wouldn’t pay off if they needed to spend weeks or months designing a perfect sales funnel for their branded software. That’s why platforms akin to ClickFunnels are a great shortcut to immediate online sales. 

ClickFunnels Integrations

ClickFunnels and Kartra have plenty of similarities—but their capacity for integration is not one of them. Compared to the latter, ClickFunnels offers a far wider range of options for third-party tools, such as:

Kartra 101—Worthy Funnel Alternative

A superficial glance reveals a lot of similarities between Kartra and ClickFunnels. They’re both platforms for digital marketing. They both offer a similar range of tools—each platform is focused on making the construction of sales pages and funnels quick and easy. Still, they have a couple of crucial differences that validate the need for a separate in-depth look. 

Features of Kartra

Kartra, similarly to ClickFunnels, wants to provide an end-to-end service when it comes to digital marketing tools. They do not want any business needing additional software to pitch their products to customers online. Unfortunately, people that are not experienced in online marketing may find Kartra tougher to ease into than ClickFunnels. 

The main reason for this isn’t their range of features, but how they’re arranged on the platform itself. Instead of being focused on tasks, Kartra is goal-oriented—you need to envision the entirety of your sales presentation first and only then execute it. This is obviously challenging for small business owners not used to the intricacies of online marketing. 

Kartra offers features such as:

1. Video hosting—options for creating, editing, and hosting promotional videos

2. Section-based design—editing process that breaks down funnel pages into smaller sections, allowing for more creativity

3. Helpdesk and learning center—large assortment of video and text-based tutorials on how to effectively use Kartra

4. Intuitive interface—visual interface for building funnels and websites without any HTML or CSS knowledge

5. Email marketing—integrated software for automated responses

6. Membership portal—in-depth options for affiliate marketing and membership websites. 

White Label Software

• Create your own software
• 3 minutes to install
• Free to set up
• Sell monthly subscriptions
• AI products to resell
• Your own price, colors and logo

Get Started. It's Free.

Use of Kartra in Your Business

Kartra is a funnel and website builder that seems to be best suited for startups. ClickFunnels, comparatively, can be used by any small business or entrepreneur with a reasonable degree of success. Kartra’s pricing plan is set up with other companies in mind—those with limited initial budgets, but huge expectations in terms of revenue.

This is evident from their pricing, which does not differ in features, but the number of leads you can generate:

• Kartra Starter—$89 for all features and 2,500 leads

• Kartra Gold—$299 for all features and 25,000 leads

Kartra Integration

Kartra’s aim is to be the only place where you’ll need to go for any kind of digital marketing tool. While this is ClickFunnels’ goal as well, the latter also recognizes that many people want to choose their own software for particular tasks and offers a lot of integration options accordingly. Kartra offers a far more limited selection of third-party tools compatible with its platform:

• ​Braintree

• ​Kajabi

• ElasticEmail

• PostMark

• Authorize.net

• ​Ontraport

• MailGun

• Zapier

• ​Stripe

• ​SendGrid

Kartra Integration with WordPress

Almost every funnel and page builder out there offers some kind of WordPress compatibility. This is no surprise, as WordPress is still the premier choice among content management platforms. Kartra is no different in this case and offers a plugin that enables users to transfer Kartra pages and host them on WordPress.

Unfortunately, the official Kartra plugin for WordPress has a bug when it comes to responsive design—many of the pages aren’t properly displayed on iOS devices when translated to WordPress. There are unofficial community plugins that fix this issue, but it’s still a big minus. 

ClickFunnels vs. Kartra—How They Stack Up

All things considered, is Kartra the ClickFunnels killer it claims to be?

Not really, no. 

Their list of advertised features can seem quite similar, and Kartra was definitely designed to oust ClickFunnels from their top spot among myriad funnel builders. Unfortunately, the execution of Kartra’s features leaves something to be desired. The platform isn’t unusable by any stretch of the imagination, and their interface is quite intuitive. 

Kartra is a much newer platform compared to ClickFunnels, and it shows. There is a range of bugs sprinkled across its otherwise impressive list of features, somewhat spoiling the entire experience. 

The platform also diverges from ClickFunnels significantly when it comes to the target audience. Many small business owners probably wouldn’t be comfortable with the idea of constantly paying more for Kartra as their business and online traffic grow. ClickFunnels’ initial price may be higher, especially if you want all the features, but at least you know that’s as high as the price will go. 

White Label Software

• Create your own software
• 3 minutes to install
• Free to set up
• Sell monthly subscriptions
• AI products to resell
• Your own price, colors and logo

Get Started. It's Free.

Conclusion