Instapage vs. ClickFunnels, what software to go with?
After doing some research and reading a handful of articles, you might still be undecided on what to go with. Most reviews only cover essential features that anyone can read on the official pages.
Or perhaps they’re biased towards one or another due to affiliate revenue they can generate.
That’s a little annoying.
Thus, we’ve decided to do in-depth research and test out Instapage and ClickFunnels.
This comparison guide will provide you with tangible takeaways to know what software to choose for building perfect landing pages for your business without mentioning a single affiliate link.
We’ll compare the two tools by the following criteria:
- Ease-of-use (how easy it is to use the software and onboard)
- Unique features (whether a platform offers something no other tool does)
- Customer Support (their speed and efficiency)
- Ability to make perfect landing pages that convert
- Pricing
*We will show the results in the comparison table we prepared below and at the end of the article*
As a bonus, we’ll compare these tools to GetResponse to measure which software is the best pick for your use case.
TL;DR
- Choose Instapage if:
- You’re an enterprise with an advertising team and a higher budget running paid ads and are looking to increase ROAS. Most of the features are tailored for this target audience, but of course, pretty much everyone can use Instapage.
- Choose ClickFunnels if:
- You’re a coach, consultant, SMB, solopreneur, and you’re looking to create impressive sales funnels and landing pages that will help you convert an audience into customers. You’ll love the fact that you can quickly run A/B tests, experiment, build different landing pages and funnels, and execute ideas rapidly.
- Choose GetResponse if:
- You’re looking for a marketing automation solution that lets you create landing pages with a heavy emphasis on email marketing. Unlike with Instapage or ClickFunnels, none are close to GetResponse in terms of automation capabilities, range of features, and overall polished experience you’ll have a hard time letting go of. By far, it’s the most cost-effective solution out there.
If you’re short on time, no worries. We’ve prepared a comparison table to quickly summarize critical differences and score them based on the criteria mentioned above.
| Evaluations | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Feature Score | 4.5 | 4 | 5 |
| Customer Support | 5 | 2 | 5 |
| Ability to create perfect landing pages | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Pricing | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| TOTAL SCORE | 4.3 | 3.6 | 4.8 |
| Pricing | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard plan | $199/mo | $127/mo | $15/mo (for 1.000 subscribers) |
| Medium plan | Custom pricing (personalized and flexible) | $157/mo | $49/mo (for 1.000 subscribers) |
| Pro plan | – | $208/mo | $99/mo (for 1k subscribers) |
| Maximum plan | – | Custom pricing (personalized and flexible) |
| Use cases | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Advertising teams that want to increase ROAS with personalized landing pages and collaborate from within the tool. | Solopreneurs, consultants, etc. who want to create landing pages to promote and sell their products. | SMBs who want an all-in-one solution to create beautiful landing pages with a heavy emphasis on email marketing. |
| Features | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page builder | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ease of building a landing page | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Landing page customization options | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| Sales funnel | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Email marketing | No | Yes | Yes |
| A/B testing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | 120+ | Plenty | Plenty |
| Hosting | Hosts for you, Amazon cloud services | Hosts for you | Hosts for you |
| Tracking & analytics | Great | Great | Great |
| Automation | Decent | Decent | Great |
| Popups | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Instapage – for enterprises that want to increase ROAS with personalized landing pages
Instapage is one of the leading landing page building software on the market. With 15,000+ customers in over 100 countries, it’s most commonly used for increasing sales with beautifully designed landing pages.
The first thing to understand about Instapage is that it’s not aimed at solopreneurs or SMBs. Most of the cool features are aimed at bigger, established companies and advertising teams that utilize cool features like:
- Visual collaborations between teams.
- Global blocks for making more significant changes to hundreds of pages at once.
- Built-in heatmaps that require a larger number of visitors and experience to use.
- 1:1 ad-to-page personalization, a helpful feature if you’re running Google ads because the increased page relevancy increases your quality score, pushing your ad spend down.
- Advanced conversion analytics.
- And more.
While their drag-and-drop page builder is intuitive enough for anyone to use, you should be running paid ads to make the most out of this software.
Reasons to choose Instapage
- Range of features for experienced marketers with higher budgets or advertising teams – Visual collaborations, global blocks, 1:1 ad-to-page personalization are just some of the features that experienced teams can utilize to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
- Advanced personalization – Being able to match your ads 100% with the landing page can bring your advertising to a more considerable level. It will provide better ROI as well. End-users also love seeing hyper-personalized landing pages because they feel their needs were addressed.
- Plenty of customization capabilities – With over 500+ layouts built and tested for conversion, you won’t have difficulty implementing design ideas.
Reasons not to choose Instapage
- High pricing – Again, if you’re an enterprise or have an experienced marketing team that wants to optimize for post-click conversions, then, by all means, this app is for you. But, if you’re just looking to build landing pages, there are far cheaper alternatives. Keep in mind you’ll likely need to use their somewhat pricey custom plan.
- Not an optimal onboarding experience – Plenty of users have reported having lost a lot of time figuring out how to solve their particular problems and wished there were better tutorials, videos, or just about anything that can shorten the learning curve.
- Requires an additional email marketing software if you’re sending out emails – Unlike with ClickFunnels, you’ll need a 3rd party email marketing software to handle this for you. For most experienced marketers, this is not an issue as they’re already utilizing something. Thus a simple integration does the job.
Instapage pricing
Again, starting at $199 per month, it’s increasingly evident that this tool is not for early-stage businesses.
While the Optimizing package offers core features like:
- Landing Page Builder
- A/B Testing
- Heatmaps
- Conversion Analytics
- Various integrations
The Converting (custom) package will have everything in Optimizing, plus:
- 1:1 Ad-to-Page Personalization
- Real-Time Visual Collaboration
- Editable Global Blocks
- AMP Pages & Experiences
- Ad Spend Conversion Attribution
And a lot more.
As many other reviews have pointed out, their pricing is steep. With changes over the years, their focus is increasingly on enterprise clients who can utilize their unique features and afford the higher price.
We believe that if your organization is generating more significant revenue and can justify the price, it should be looked upon as any other solid business investment.
ClickFunnels – for entrepreneurs that want to generate leads through optimized sales funnels
ClickFunnels is one of the fastest-growing SaaS Marketing Platforms in the last decade. By now, you’ve probably seen at least one exciting ad by their CEO Russell Brunson.
One incredibly unique thing about ClickFunnels is its community. Not only is it a large, active, and beneficial community, but there’s also a certain warm and welcoming feeling you’ll get if you’re an entrepreneur just starting.
On a side note, many people will try to sell you ClickFunnel services through affiliate links to earn a profit, regardless of whether it’s the right pick for your business because of their affiliate programs.
Think of ClickFunnels as your complete, all-in-one sales funnel builder. ClickFunnels can internally manage pretty much every aspect of your sales process.
- Landing page builder? Check.
- A/B testing? Check.
- Affiliate management? Check.
- Email marketing via integrations? Check*.
- SEO management? Check.
- SMS messages? Check.
- Reports, subscriptions, integrations, etc.? Check.
Internal email marketing capabilities only in the Platinum plan.
Reasons to choose ClickFunnels
- Plenty of high-converting landing page templates – Not only do they provide a range of landing page templates, but they also have an active community that creates custom templates and shares them with everyone else.
- Very easy to use – Because it’s so easy to use, you can quickly A/B test different landing pages, experiment a lot, and just see what works.
Reasons not to choose ClickFunnels
- It lacks customization that designers will appreciate – With ClickFunnels, you have only 35 elements to choose from when building your website. Additionally, the template you choose can limit your customization options.
It is excellent for beginners who want to promote a course, a free guide, for example, or a membership product, but if you’re looking for something more complex, you might want to look elsewhere.
While their customization is not bad, you’ll likely still have a landing page that looks similar to any other ClickFunnels page.
- Customer support could be better – ClickFunnels doesn’t provide live chat support. In fact, when we created a ticket, we received a reply after 15 hours (despite their claim of 24/7 customer support). Not bad, but not impressive either. On the other hand, many users have reported terrible customer support experiences with a general rule of thumb to not rely on them whatsoever.
- It lacks fancy features – We’ve previously stated that they offer a solution for pretty much an entire sales process, but there are a few things we would love to see. ClickFunnels is currently missing features such as a chatbot, email sending, transactional emails, autoresponders at the base package, different analytics, and advanced automation workflows.
- Relatively expensive compared to competitors – Compared to GetResponse, LeadPages, or any similar alternative, you’ll be paying a slight premium and won’t get the full benefits you would expect from a different email marketing provider.
- You can’t host ClickFunnel pages outside of their ecosystem – This can sometimes pose slight risks of campaigns being ineffective during rare maintenance sessions or updates, but it also locks you into using ClickFunnels to utilize the created pages.
ClickFunnels pricing
ClickFunnels pricing starts at $127/mo (billed annually) as they don’t offer a free version. However, there’s a free trial offer available, letting you play around with the tool for 14 days before making the decision.
The basic plan essentially provides you with:
- A maximum of 20 funnels
- 1 domain
- 1 user
- 3 courses
- 1,000 students
While great for beginners, everyone who’s serious about making money with ClickFunnels and launching funnels at scale will have to opt for the ClickFunnels Pro plan to enjoy:
- 100 funnels
- 3 domains
- 5 users
- 15 courses
- 10,000 students
The downside is that it comes at a steep price of $157 per month (billed annually).
Instapage vs. ClickFunnels: brief feature comparison
While both software offers unique features to the table, let’s compare the essential features first, head by head.
Which is better for creating landing pages?
Are you selling a course, ebook, info products, ecommerce products, etc.?
If so, ClickFunnels takes the winner here.
Its landing page builder is created for non-tech entrepreneurs who want to focus on sales and marketing and not waste hours creating landing pages.
With hundreds of templates to choose from, there is a heavier emphasis on closing sales, more apparent than with Instapage.
But, if you have a larger team, if you handle landing pages for clients, if you want something that doesn’t scream “Buy me now!”, then Instapage is the better solution for you.
Their landing page templates are more up-to-date, modern looking, optimized for conversion, and aren’t as intrusive as ClickFunnels.
Their visual editor is also incredibly intuitive and easy to use and offers a range of customization options to create a completely unique design that fits your branding.
Note: Another fantastic landing page builder is GetResponse. It enables you to create eye-catching landing pages in minutes. Just drag and drop elements—no need to mess with custom CSS, margins, or padding.
Additionally, it’s template rich – GetResponse has an extensive database of templates for entire sales funnels, dedicated landing pages, email automation, social media ads, and other things. You can have a fully functional website with complete marketing automation in less than 1 hour – way faster and with more functionalities than ClickFunnels or Instapage.
Who can help you create better sales funnels?
When it comes to funnel creation, ClickFunnels offers clear advantages and advanced features compared to Instapage.
ClickFunnels makes it surprisingly easy to build sales funnels even if you’ve never made them before. Their landing page builder is intuitive, and they offer a range of templates that you can replicate and adjust to fit your branding, messaging, and product.
All you have to do is follow the beaten path they carved out, fill out the information and play around with customization using their drag-and-drop landing page builder to execute the strategy.
Note: GetResponse excels in helping you create perfect sales funnels (Or choose from 30+ pre-built templates).
Its landing page builder is also drag-and-drop, and it offers 30+ pre-built templates to choose from. With its native email marketing capabilities, you really can’t go wrong with GetResponse.
Besides, GetResponse also supports you with all the features necessary for making a perfect sales funnel:
- Paid ads creator to bring traffic
- Landing Page builder
- Signup forms to capture leads
- Email Marketing solution to nurture leads
- Abandoned cart emails/upsells
- Popups
- And everything else needed to convert a prospect into a customer.
ClickFunnels vs. Instapage: which is better for A/B testing?
Both Instapage and ClickFunnels have in-built A/B testing tools that help you better understand which pages perform better.
It’s as simple as duplicating existing pages, making adjustments, and redirecting a % of users to the new landing page.
Going with either one will not leave you disappointed and should be an afterthought to other features that they offer.
Instapage vs. ClickFunnels: which has better integrations?
Instapage has around 120 integrations available, making it a better deal if you’re looking for a tool that integrates with pretty much everything.
ClickFunnels also boasts a large number of integrations so that you won’t be missing out on anything.
Both tools have integrations with the most popular email marketing tools, including GetResponse.
It’s best to check the integration lists to make sure your tools are on the list.
If we had to pick, Instapage would be the winner.
Note: GetResponse has over 150 integrations available, so it’s another excellent choice if you’re looking for a marketing automation and sales funnel tool with email marketing and landing page building capabilities.
Who handles hosting better?
Instapage hosts your landing pages on Amazon cloud servers, meaning there’s little downtime, and generally, you can expect no issues at all.
ClickFunnels also hosts landing pages for you, but since it’s not Amazon-based, some users have reported that during rare occasions of updates/maintenance, your landing pages can be “down,” resulting in potential loss of sales.
This is extremely rare but worth mentioning in this comparison. Such downtime could delay A/B testing or experimentations you’re looking forward to that day.
If good hosting is your priority, go with Instapage.
Note: If you create landing pages with GetResponse, you can use your own domain (free of charge) but the hosting of your files is handled by GetResponse (also free).
ClickFunnels vs. Instapage: which has better tracking and analytics?
Again, both platforms offer many tracking and analytics features, but for the sake of choosing, Instapage is the winner.
The tracking and analytics that Instapage provides are top class. It gives more profound insights into what works on your landing pages and what doesn’t. Information you get should be used to make intelligent changes and grow your business with a more significant ROI from paid ads.
From the heatmaps feature to tracking metrics like the number of visitors, the number of conversions, conversion rate, cost-per-visitor, and cost-per-lead, are just a few that you’ll find more in their built-in analytics dashboard with real-time data.
Note: GetResponse works hard on providing one of the best analytics and tracking systems for email campaigns, PPC campaigns, landing page performance out there. It also seamlessly integrates with all key analytical tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
If email marketing is an essential component of your overall marketing strategy, and you want it tightly integrated with your landing page builder, GetResponse is the way to go.
What about automation capabilities?
Both Instapage and ClickFunnels offer various automation capabilities based on the core features they provide.
ClickFunnels offers email automation features, while Instapage simply enables you to make any changes to plenty of pages very quickly. Instapage automation features mostly revolve around increasing your ROI on paid ads with personalized landing pages and general relevancy.
There is no clear winner as both automation capabilities revolve around the core product.
Note: GetResponse has advanced marketing automation capabilities that help you create cool email sequence workflows, but also there’s lead scoring, activity tracking, and scalable autoresponders, segmentation, and even cart abandonment.
A scoring system, for example, helps you visualize which leads are more valuable than others.
GetResponse detects when someone submits a sign-up form, opens an email, or clicks a link.
You can assign scoring points to any of those actions at the level of specific sign-up forms, individual emails, and particular links.
You can also assign negative scoring points for those who do not take those actions within a time frame.
Read this to learn more about its automation features.
Comparison of Instapage vs. ClickFunnels vs. GetResponse
| Evaluations | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Feature Score | 4.5 | 4 | 5 |
| Customer Support | 5 | 2 | 5 |
| Ability to create perfect landing pages | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Pricing | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| TOTAL SCORE | 4.3 | 3.6 | 4.8 |
| Pricing | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard plan | $199/mo | $127/mo | $15/mo (for 1.000 subscribers) |
| Medium plan | Custom pricing (personalized and flexible) | $157/mo | $49/mo (for 1.000 subscribers) |
| Pro plan | – | $208/mo | $99/mo (for 1k subscribers) |
| Maximum plan | – | Custom pricing (personalized and flexible) |
| Use cases | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Advertising teams that want to increase ROAS with personalized landing pages and collaborate from within the tool. | Solopreneurs, consultants, etc. who want to create landing pages to promote and sell their products. | SMBs who want an all-in-one solution to create beautiful landing pages with a heavy emphasis on email marketing. |
| Features | Instapage | ClickFunnels | GetResponse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page builder | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ease of building a landing page | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Landing page customization options | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| Sales funnel | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Email marketing | No | Yes | Yes |
| A/B testing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | 120+ | Plenty | Plenty |
| Hosting | Hosts for you, Amazon cloud services | Hosts for you | Hosts for you |
| Tracking & analytics | Great | Great | Great |
| Automation | Decent | Decent | Great |
| Popups | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Instapage vs. ClickFunnels vs. GetResponse. Which is the perfect tool for you?
Choose Instapage If:
- You’re an experienced marketer running paid ads, and you want to increase your ROAS while reducing costs through more relevant/personalized landing page experiences at scale. Additionally, if your advertising team needs built-in visual collaboration capabilities that speed up the workflow, then Instapage is surely for you.
Choose ClickFunnels If:
- You’re not an enterprise but a solopreneur, SMB, consultant, e-commerce specialist, etc., and you sell anything from courses, digital products/services, books, then ClickFunnels is for you.
It enables you to test various ideas out rapidly, create MVPs and prototypes without wasting time on the technical parts.
Choose GetResponse If:
- You’re looking for an an email marketing solution that helps you create beautiful landing pages that convert, entire sales funnels, live chats, lead magnets, pop-ups, and webinars. GetResponse even integrates well with your PPC campaigns and enables you to perform world-class email marketing campaigns.
Start a free GetResponse account. No credit card required.
Author’s note: This comparison is accurate on June 2023. We do our best to keep it as accurate as possible, and we check it on a regular basis, however, if you want to acquaint yourself with the offer of our competitors, you should check it at their official website or contact their representatives.