Clickfunnels vs Leadpages…which is better for collecting leads, growing your business, and most importantly – increasing your bottom line.
Read on to find my comprehensive answer to this one…
In the interest of full disclosure, This Is Trouble earns a referral bonus for anyone that purchases through some of the below links inside this Leadpages review. These are the best publicly available offers that we have found for these programs. Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone. You can read the full disclaimer here.
Clickfunnels Vs Leadpages: The Money Is In The List
You might have heard of this phrase. Well, it’s true. It’s so true that you need to make a recording of yourself repeating it and listen to it throughout the night to help it sink into your mind.
The money is, indeed, in the list. Every online entrepreneur should be focusing on collecting emails and keeping their subscribers engaged.
But I’m not exactly a fan of, “It’s important because I say it’s important”. So why, exactly, do we want a mailing list? To build campaigns. What are the perks of having email campaigns?
- Email marketing is the definition of direct outreach – every person receives a personalized message. Email campaigns feel like an interaction much more than a banner or even a blog post does.
- You need email anyway. You can decide to take a social media hiatus (for all the mental and physical benefits… seriously, you should try it, it boosts your productivity like nothing else). But you do need email for work so you will check it more often and give it more importance.
- Finally, email campaigns are 100% customizable – an email is a space that doesn’t come with many restrictions. Add videos, have links to events, make it sing or sparkle, or whatever. Emails give you a lot of creative freedom.
There are many other reasons, too, obviously. But if you’re still wondering, yes, email marketing will stay relevant in 2019 (and beyond). If anything, it will grow because it has the perfect combination of three things you need – a personal connection, importance, and creative freedom.
All the fancy social media strategies can’t beat a good email campaign.
Trying Out Different Tools
How do you collect emails?
- You could buy them from a database
- Ask your clients directly (i.e. if you’re a store, have a flipchart with a sheet for people to physically enter their details)
- Use a landing page
Landing pages, pop-ups and other opt-in forms will appear on your website. The point is to remind people that are already interested in you that they can stay in touch.
Buying emails can work for mailing lists…is a terrible idea in almost every case. They don’t have a personal connection. Even if some database suggested they might be a part of your niche, it’s still not likely that they will open an email from a company they don’t know.
The best list-building tools are the ones that capitalize on connection. You want your pop-up to appear once the visitor has scrolled around the site for a little bit. Or, you could add an incentive like an e-book or a webinar. With the right strategy, there is no better tool for building your email list than landing pages…
Coding?
Not all sunshine and roses in landing page land. Creating a pop-up or a lead page from scratch can be frustrating. If you have zero experience with coding, the whole thing becomes nearly impossible.
I’m all for DIY but when it comes to lead generation, there needs to be a better way:
Your time is valuable.
You will need to test out a few different options for landing page creation. This means either investing hours into making options from the ground up… Or doing as most people do and using a tool.
Clickfunnels and Leadpages are two of the most popular options for creating lead-generating pages. Whether that is through pop-ups, landing pages, or alert bars, they make it happen. In this Clickfunnels Vs Leadpages review, we are looking at their similarities, specific pro’s and con’s, as well as choosing the best option for your business.
What Is LeadPages?
Leadpages is a landing page building tool that doesn’t require any coding. They integrate with Email Service Providers (ESPs like ConvertKit, my favorite) to capture leads for your email list. It takes just about five minutes to create a page… Which is pretty much unbeatable.
Churning out lead pages is the main purpose of this tool. No surprises there, it’s literally called LeadPages. For a full list of features:
- Mobile-friendly templates and lots of them
- Drag-and-drop customization (but I’m not going to lie, some people have had issues with their drag-and-drop tool)
- A/B testing option for all opt-in forms and landing page variations (helps you get real-life stats on what makes you the most conversions)
- Integration with all sorts of different third-party software, including email service providers but also Webinar platforms and much more!
- If you don’t have an ESP chosen just yet, lead notifications will send the data straight to your inbox. I’d still recommend that you link MailChimp or your favourite ESP as soon as possible, though.
- SMS opt-in campaigns
- Robust analytics to help you assess the performance of your landing pages
- Two-step opt-in forms
- HTML template creation (a.k.a. you no longer have to rely on the pre-made templates but code your own) and custom CSS to fine-tune your template’s design
- Simple and easy to install WordPress Plugin
- Publish the landing pages to your own domain (makes it load faster and look more legit)
- Double Opt-in option
- Embed different media into your lead pages
Clickfunnels Feature List
Now that you know a bit about LeadPages, let’s look at Clickfunnels, too. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the actual Clickfunnels vs Leadpages very soon!
ClickFunnels is a software for building sales funnels. A well-designed sales funnel makes a lot of money but building one can involve a lot of technical know-how. This is where ClickFunnels comes it. It was created back in 2014 by Russell Brunson and it’s currently a $100 million-a-year business.
They are nearing 70K active members and seem to be constantly growing. ClickFunnels lets you build all sorts of sales funnels (with the upsells, the marketing pages, and all the other bells and whistles):
- Lead pages (not to be confused with Leadpages)
- Email opt-in pages and pop-ins
- Webinars
- Membership sites
- With one of the services -an affiliate program (but you have to pay more for that)
The idea behind ClickFunnels is bigger than LeadPages. They aim to give you all the tools for creating and marketing your online product (to be honest, it doesn’t even have to be an online product, though most people use it for webinars) with minimal coding.
Both LeadPages and ClickFunnels are beginner-friendly and they don’t require hiring a developer. In theory, both should be equally accessible to a complete newbie and an online business guru. That’s why ease-of-use and customer support will be a major point in comparing the two options.
People use both ClickFunnels and LeadPages with great success. ClickFunnels has even created a sort of “entrepreneurs club”- the 2 Comma Club of entrepreneurs that have made over 1 million dollar funnels using the site.
Ultimately, though, which gives you better quality and value for your money? Let’s find out!
Template Selection And Customization
Both Leadpages and Clickfunnels come with ready-made templates. These are already designed and ready to go. Depending on the exact page you choose, there are different things you can customize. You can, obviously, always change the text that appears on the pop-up. The photos and fonts are also customizable.
When it comes to moving things around, both boast a drag-and-drop approach.
Leadpages has faced some backlash on this one. Even though their tool works in theory, more and more people are complaining of things not looking right and of how difficult it can be to design things the way you want them.
On Clickfunnels, the drag-and-drop editor is a new update and it has been getting equal parts of love and hate. Much like Leadpages, it does work but not always in the way that you expect it to.
In the case of Clickfunnels vs Leadpages, I prefer the latter. For me at least, their customization tool is much more intuitive and it runs smoother than what Clickfunnels offers. However, this may not be the case for everyone. Ultimately, how easy or hard it is to make something work depends on your experience working with it.
However, I do believe Leadpages has an easier learning curve and it is better suited for beginners.
Unsurprisingly, this means I recommend Leadpages over their competitor, even if the drag-and-drop editor seems similar (at least in theory)
That being said, both Clickfunnels and Leadpages have three features that are super important for beginners:
- Drag-and-drop
- No coding
- Mobile and tablet-friendly
Leadpages Has More Template Options
With over 200 different templates, Leadpages is the definite winner in this domain. Sure, Clickfunnels has been catching up recently. To me, though, their templates look much more similar to one another, thus giving you less actual choice.
The Leadpages templates are slick and efficient. They even let you sort them by conversion rate (you can only trust this stat to a certain extent but still). Leadpages all the way, when it comes to template options. There are tons of ideas and one of them is much more likely to fulfil your needs.
Standard Editor
The Standard editor is one of the surprising perks of using Leadpages. Unlike the drag-and-drop customizable templates, the standard templates only let you change the photos and text.
This has one huge con – very, very little customization.
But it also has more pros than you expect. By just changing the pic and the copywriting, you’re getting the most out of the template… And you’re not dealing with the unexpected consequences of adding and removing widgets.
Drag-and-drop is the ideal we all aspire to. Meanwhile, though, the standard editor of Leadpages helps you create visually stunning lead pages within minutes. It’s the most time-effective way of going about lead generation. You are restricted on what you can do because most of the work is already done for you.
Since time is money (it’s not a cliché, you can actually spend time on making money instead of spending it on frustrating lead page design), this is a huge perk. Well, perk in disguise but anyway.
Sub-Accounts
Yet another aspect where Leadpages wins. Unlike Clickfunnels, it has legitimate sub-accounts. This might not concern you if you’re just making landing pages for yourself. But as soon as you have to work with other people, you will appreciate the option.
On Clickfunnels you have a funnel linked to just one account. You can send a link to your sales funnel…but that’s not really a sub-account option. Instead, the creation of the link means the whole funnel gets copied and attached to the other account (the one you’re sending it to).
Thus, if you want to collaborate with others on creating sales funnels, you would have to share passwords. The “sometimes this means confusion and crashing” aspect aside, this is simply not safe.
By featuring actual sub-accounts, Leadpages wins a lot of points in my book.
I realize this is not relevant to everybody. For small niche sites, you are likely to be running your business by yourself. You would not have to share accounts or create sub-accounts or anything like that because you simply would not need it.
However, as soon as you have to do collaborative work, you would thank me for recommending Leadpages. It makes the process smoother and easier for everybody. Since working with others is already time-consuming, you want your tools to work for you and not against your productivity. Leadpages all the way on this one.
ClickFunnels Vs Leadpages: How Much Are They?
Pricing is important. Sure, you get what you pay for. However, if you are just starting out with online business, it’s normal to consider costs. In the beginning, every dollar counts.
So, if we are just talking pricing, Leadpages is cheaper by over 50%.
The lowest price for a subscription to Clickfunnels is over $90 already! This is significantly more than the cheapest Leadpages plan, which you can get down to $25/month – granted, it’s reasonably barebone.
What The Basic Package Includes
For both Clickfunnels and Leadpages you have different plans that include different features. The most basic (and cheap) option is $97 per month on Clickfunnels. It includes:
- Up to 20 funnels
- With up to 100 pages total
- Up to 20,000 visitors (which is a lot but still a limited number)
- 3 custom domains
- A/B Split Tests (big one because the basic Leadpages plan does not include that)
- Email Integrations for all major ESPs
- Pop-up opt-in forms and one-click opt-in
- Advanced Funnels – including ones specifically designed for sales, webinars, and hangouts
- Unlimited number of members
- Order pages
- Upsell and downsale pages
- Sharing your funnels (but remember, this is not like sub-accounts, it only copies the funnel to the other account)
This is a pretty extensive list, right? Well, for 97$ per month it better be.
The advanced plan on ClickFunnels will set you back almost three times that. At 297$ per month, the Etison Suite plan is practically three-in-one. It’s based around ClickFunnels but also includes Actionetics – your integrated email service provider, and Backpack which lets you set up your own affiliate program.
This is obviously not an option everyone will take advantage of. If you are at the point of setting up affiliates, I doubt you would be reading this article in the first place. Still, as far as affiliate program builders Backpack is pretty slick. It comes with all sorts of handy features like a one-click setup, separate affiliate-only area and various sign-up and management options.
Leadpages Standard Package
For the Leadpage basic pack, you get:
- Unlimited pages, traffic, & leads
- No limits on pop-ups
- Alert bars (the kind that pop up on top of the page)
- All of the templates (which are 200+ and all of them are mobile and tablet-friendly)
- All the standard integrations
- Free hosting on your lead pages
- Link up the pages to your domain (but you can only connect one domain!)
The disadvantage here is that you don’t get A/B testing with the basic package. This sucks because it’s the very best way to test out which lead page works best. You set up two options and the software collects stats on which performs better. Unfortunately, that is only available with more expensive packages (btw, these are still cheaper than ClickFunnels).
The Standard package customers also only get email technical support. I don’t think this is very fair, even if the customer support team is very responsive and efficient.
ClickFunnels Vs Leadpages: Customer Satisfaction
Since both of these are supposed to work for non-tech-savvy people, customer service is important. Problems come up, you want to count on the customer service people to solve them.
Unfortunately, there have been many complaints about Clickfunnels’ customer support system. One person even described having to approach the team during an event to show them the problem… And still not getting a lasting solution!
Sure, it’s machines, things break and Clickfunnels can’t take responsibility for every single mess up. This is where customer service should come in, though. When they give generic troubleshooting advice or completely flee the problem, that is problematic and it’s an area where a company that asks for nearly 100$ for membership should improve on.
On the other hand, Leadpages has the problem of providing different customer service options to different customers. I understand how marketing agencies (that pay for the Advanced plan) would get priority phone service. But what I don’t understand is why chat is only an option for Pro members.
Either way, when it comes to the simple quality of customer service provided, Leadpages is the winner.
Clickfunnels Vs Leadpages: Similarities
It’s not all one versus the other in this. In some aspects, both providers offer similar quality.
They all have a training course or webinar option integrated. The Leadpages weekly group coaching is pretty dope. They give you live tips and ideas on improving your campaigns. It’s not completely original advice but it is useful and tailored to your own experience.
Clickfunnels features instructional videos and tips from its’ creator. It’s always nice to see a personal touch so they get a bonus point for that one.
Both companies are similar when it comes to third-party integration, too. They seamlessly integrate various different applications and solutions.
When it comes to marketing automation, same thing, both Leadpages and Clickfunnels are doing pretty well!
Clickfunnels Vs Leadpages: The Final Verdict
For us to find out who wins in ClickFunnels vs Leadpages, it is important to know that Clickfunnels and Leadpages are not the same thing. Clickfunnels is completely integrated for providing you with online product creation and marketing tools. They are, arguably, pretty good at what they do, even if they leave much to be desired in terms of advanced functionality, support and value.
Clickfunnels is a good option if you want to create a webinar or another online product to sell. They are not the cheapest or the highest quality product you can choose for either of these areas.
When it comes to creating landing pages, though, Leadpages is definitely my favorite. I have to admit that my review was biased. Leadpages is what I personally use. I even did a Leadpages review (and it starts with my ten reasons for choosing the service). But I truly do believe that you shouldn’t recommend anything that you wouldn’t use yourself. I’m not using Clickfunnels, I’m using Leadpages. Comparing the two, Leadpages is the winner in 99% of the landing page creation aspects… Thus, Leadpages it is!
Do you agree?
Completely disagree?
Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think.
PS: You can take a LeadPages trial by clicking here.