In today’s digital-focused world, just about every business entrepreneur needs a good form of marketing software. Digital marketing is one of the most effective ways for brands to connect with consumers these days, and if you generate leads online, you will need to have good sales funnels.
To find the best funnel software, we have compared two popular options with our Kartra vs ClickFunnels review. Our deep analysis of the two different products goes into detail to find out which option comes out on top.
Through our Kartra vs ClickFunnels review, we explored these features:
- Email Automation
- Webpage Building
- eCommerce Checkout Page
- Membership Sites
- Affiliate Management
- Split Testing
- Customer Support
- Pricing
- Unique Features
Both of these competing software options share many of the same tools and functions. However, they are also completely unique in their own ways.
So, are you looking for the best funnel software for managing your business’s online marketing activities? Take a look at our review below.
Kartra vs ClickFunnels Overview
Both Kartra and ClickFunnels offer a 14-day trial version of their software for new users. The first thing you will notice is that the ClickFunnels trial is completely free, while Kartra offers theirs for $1.
Kartra was started by professional marketers in 2018 and is widely used across the industry. The product offers excellent value for its functionality and has been focused to provide a solution for many sales funnel and business challenges.
Kartra is an all in one marketing and sales funnel software platform that features various funnel templates for the industry. The software includes a number of unique features that you just can’t get from other options.
The “all in one” aspect of Kartra really does reign true. This software can be used to build webpages, automate emails, manage affiliates, and way more. For anyone looking to manage their site or digital marketing strategy, Kartra provides a kind of one-stop-shop to give you all the tools that you need.
ClickFunnels is much the same in many ways, and unique in others. ClickFunnels was started in 2014, making it the longest-running of the two. They also offer a comprehensive marketing and business management platform.
This is achieved through their high converting funnel templates that are widely used across various businesses. ClickFunnels is a very user-friendly option, and it is particularly good in its payment and email systems. These are easy to absorb into your business.
ClickFunnels offers many of the same features as Kartra. It also offers some unique tools that make it a good choice for all levels of sales and marketing.
Ultimately, both software options are very similar. As they both compete for the same users, knowing which option is best for your business is important. We will unpack the specifics of each one in more detail below to find the winner.
Feature by Feature Comparison
When comparing Kartra vs ClickFunnels, the choice that you make should really come down to the individual features.
Both software options offer many of the same ideas but how these can be integrated into your business is what matters.
Their features are also wide-ranging, meaning that they can appeal to all sorts of businesses. So if you are looking for marketing software that will work best for you, it’s best to consider the individual features first.
Email Automation
Email automation is a significant feature in the world of digital marketing. This is one of the main features of both platforms.
Both Kartra and ClickFunnels have powerful email targeting and automation tools for reaching your desired clientele. Both have been thoughtfully designed for bringing in more sales.
Kartra Mail is an advanced, intuitive email tool that allows you to completely customize the mail that you send out to perfectly match the receiver. This is achieved through user-based automation and personalization features to appeal stronger to the client. A personalized email is a big focus in marketing, something that can bring significant value to any business.
What we like about the Kartra email platform is that you can easily track your email marketing strategy. The software keeps a record of every time someone clicks and opens your email.
You can then set certain parameters on your customers, that allows an automation system to follow up with them. Kartra covers all bases of an email marketing strategy. It can automate and send mail and follow-ups, provide insightful analytics, and manage all subscriptions, amongst other functions. This is certainly one of the best features of Kartra.
Actionetics is the email automation tool by ClickFunnels. Actionetics is one of the most comprehensive email customization tools thanks to the wide-spread of data that it uses. This tool actually taps into Facebook, Google, and Twitter to generate more data on your clients.
This means that with a single email address, you can find out your client’s interests, preferences, profiles, and income. This gives you a huge amount of valuable marketing data for email customization.
Of course, this tool also tracks all email integrations and is done at a more intensive level than Kartra. Probably the best unique addition is that ClickFunnels actually rates and ranks your clients based on their interactions and suitability to your business. This allows you to rank who is most valuable to your email marketing campaign.
Comparing Kartra vs ClickFunnels is tricky here. Sure, ClickFunnels seems to offer a more comprehensive and data-driven email automation feature but, you have to pay for it.
This feature is only available in the more expensive pricing plans, while Kartra’s offering can be used over all of their plans. Kartra’s email software is still incredibly powerful, and more accessible.
Webpage Building Tool
For any business online, your website is what matters most.
While businesses would traditionally hire a web developer to take care of all things related to the site, you can now use integrated software tools to do this. This is one of the main selling points of both ClickFunnels and Kartra.
Editing and creating a high-quality website is a far easier process with both of these products. Both allow you to choose from various website templates which means that you don’t need to understand code to create your own site.
Let’s start with Kartra’s web page building tool. This is a really simple way to build a site. All you do is choose between two different modes in the editor. These are columns or components.
The column is where you choose a section of the website in a column form, and customize it to suit your website. The component is where you will edit the content found in these sections.
When you start to build a new site with Kartra, you just choose a template and edit and personalize it as you go. This is really easy for anyone to do, even if you have no background in this field.
There are also plenty of ready-to-go elements to include in your webpages, such as pricing tables and testimonials. Simply choose the template you like and Kartra puts it together seamlessly.
Kartra is a fantastic tool for anyone that doesn’t have much (or any) web building experience thanks to its simplicity. ClickFunnels is a bit more detailed though and is more attractive to those that really want to target their sites with a bit more detail.
Instead of just a broad template approach, ClickFunnels lets you specify the industry, the type of funnel, and what your lead goal is for that page. Once you select these, the web page builder produces a more optimized result.
Once you have set up your specifics and chosen a template, ClickFunnels works much the same as Kartra. You also choose between columns and elements which are easily customizable. These are arranged a bit more thoughtfully with ClickFunnels using color coding and rows to make it easier.
Between the two options, ClickFunnels offers a superior tool for creating and editing websites. Both products are very user-friendly for all levels of tech-savvy, and both produce a great website thanks to the excellent templates.
The difference comes in the more detailed customizations and optimizations that you can achieve with ClickFunnels.
eCommerce Checkout Page
You have used your marketing software to build a website, run email campaigns, and ultimately bring new customers to your checkout page. Now that they are here, it is essential to close the sale.
A good checkout page makes all the difference in a successful online business, and it is one of the biggest areas where websites lose customers. Both Kartra vs ClickFunnels offer a checkout page service to try to generate more successful leads. Which one is best?
ClickFunnels has numerous templates that can be easily branded to fit into your business. These templates are easy to pick, customize, and implement into your site. This area of the checkout page is much the same as the general website editor tool.
The important part comes down to the way that you can track and manage your sales. The software automatically recovers any abandoned carts, it allows you to add and manage subscriptions, payment plans, specials, coupons, and more.
Basically, you are in total control of keeping track of your checkout page sales and matching it to any promotions that your business might be running.
There is one big thing that sets ClickFunnels apart though. This tool supports third party payment gateways and products. There are more options and products that you can choose from here to customize your checkout page. Some of these options include:
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Android and Apple Pay
- EasyPayDirect
- Recurly
- Keap
- NMI
- Net
- JVZoo
- Clickbank
- Warrior Plus
Kartra also offers a completely customizable checkout page through its many templates available.
Just like ClickFunnels, you can also manage all of the sales, carts, promotions, coupons, and anything else you would need in an online store. This is fully compatible with all of the other features of Kartra.
All of these important areas of the checkout page match that of ClickFunnels. However, the option of payment gateways is much more limited. You can only choose between PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, and Braintree.
In terms of creating the checkout page and managing sales, both options can be considered equal. But ClickFunnels wins in this category thanks to its larger range of payment gateways and better third party support.
Membership Sites
Both platforms offer integrated membership, allowing you to build membership sites for another income generator. As long as you have the content, you can use both Kartra and ClickFunnels to easily upload and manage this.
Kartra Membership offers the easy management of membership websites, all hosted on the same Kartra servers. This is easy to manage, with Kartra saving and generating passwords automatically. The tool offers seamless uploads of all kinds of files to these sites.
A great feature of Kartra here is that you create different levels of access for members. You can get bronze, silver, gold, and diamond tiers to better manage the content. You can also send and upload content based on time.
With the Kartra integrated membership feature, you can enjoy some of the following perks:
- Integrated audio and video hosting
- Customer tagging
- Third-party hosting
- Progress tracking
ClickFunnels offers membership funnels that are based on simple templates, and really easy to manage. Compared to their web page builder, there is not as much room for customization though.
Membership sites through ClickFunnels are easily integrated. They can also be reused with the clever share funnel tool. There are also accessible and registration pages available for membership in the builder.
Creating membership sites is easy to manage and integrate with ClickFunnels. Unfortunately, this software does not offer integrated video and audio, something that can be a real downfall for businesses wanting to host course creation. There is also no progress tracking feature, which would need to be distributed to a third party.
Overall, Kartra comes out best for membership sites. It offers an intuitive framework for easily creating membership sites, tracking their performance, and uploading content. The video and audio integration is a big bonus.
Affiliate Management Tools
Affiliate sales are an important part of many businesses online. Both Kartra and ClickFunnels offer comprehensive affiliate management tools to help you close more sales and grow your business.
Kartra offers a simple solution for affiliate management through its global setting. This puts you in charge of all your affiliates over all of your products. PayPal instant payments can be set up to make sure that the commission is paid as soon as the sale occurs.
If you do not want to just rely on the global setting, you can also manage individual products through the product setting. With this, you can add tiers of commission, tag any affiliates to schedule payments, or add any new affiliate programs on the checkout page.
This is an easy, effective, and broad affiliate tool. If you are sending proposals to new affiliates, you can even create a questionnaire to send out to prospective new business partnerships.
So, how does ClickFunnels compare? ClickFunnels has a tool called backpack that allows you to gain complete control over your affiliate programs. This includes adding new affiliate programs, dishing the affiliates out of any funnel, and tracking affiliate clicks.
ClickFunnels has another appealing feature in the form of a sticky cookie. This is a type of incentive offered to affiliates, where they can earn on their regular product, as well as commission on future purchases made by the same customer.
All in all, Backpack looks like the ideal affiliate management solution. It provides flawless affiliate integration with your funnels and offers a complete set of management and data over all your affiliate programs. There is a catch though.
Backpack is only available as an upgraded product on the more expensive ClickFunnel plan. Because of this, we have chosen Kartra as the more appealing affiliate management tool. It offers a complete management solution available in its simple product offering.
Split Testing
Split testing, or A/B testing, is particularly important for growing online ventures. This is a feature that allows you to monitor the performance of your pages, and run tests on these different pages. Both Kartra vs ClickFunnel offers a handy split test feature.
Let’s start by looking at ClickFunnel. The split testing option can be done in two ways. Either, you can use a template page, where there are various templates available, or you can duplicate an existing page. The traffic percentages in the test can be fully adjustable.
ClickFunnel provides a page dedicated to statistics for this. This includes all of the basic data that you would need for comparing and managing A/B test results. A downfall of using ClickFunnels is that their tests, although effective, do not offer particularly insightful data for proper analysis.
The test produces a confidence score in each page being compared side by side. This is pretty basic to manage, as the confidence score indicates the better page. It is up to you to manually choose the winner though. When the end result has been generated, the losing page is archived automatically.
Kartra performs split testing differently. You can either use an outsider URL or use your in-platform pages for running the test. The testing can be done over four pages at one time, and they offer useful visitor data for each page.
Finding the winning page can be done in two ways. Either you can set a milestone that automatically selects a test winner once hit. The other option is to just manually pick the winning page yourself, like ClickFunnels.
Each page involved in the test has a very insightful data sheet for analytics. This includes graphs, stats, and detailed specifics of each page’s performances. If you want to take a deep dive into this testing, then you have loads of valuable information available.
Kartra definitely takes the top position in this category. Both options can run effective, easy A/B testing. However, Kartra just manages to deliver more in terms of its analytical data and results pages.
Support Team
Being able to offer good customer support is a feature that should never be overlooked in software. Although many people don’t consider customer support when they are looking for a new product, it can have a significant impact on your business.
Kartra offers three features for dealing with customer support:
- A free training program that helps any new users learn all the ins and outs of the software. This can be very helpful for large businesses training new staff.
- A live chat that deals with any support questions and issues.
- A Kartra Facebook group for answering any customer queries.
ClickFunnels offers online tutorials and FAQ pages, as well as providing a Facebook group for any questions. ClickFunnels received some negative feedback in this regard from many previous users.
Customer support, therefore, goes to Kartra. They offer a pretty comprehensive training and support option to make sure that all of their users can get in touch for any support queries with ease.
Pricing and Plans
Kartra
Kartra offers four different versions of their software:
Starter
This is the most basic package. It allows for up to 2500 leads and includes all of the basic features that you would want from a simple funnel software. This costs about $100/month
Silver
The next step up offers 12500 leads per month. Besides having a greater amount of use on all the previous features (most are unlimited where the starter version is capped), you also get access to Kartra Agency included. Silver costs roughly $200/month
Gold
Gold offers up to 25000 leads per month, 5 custom domains, and no limits on the other Kartra features. There is also access to Kartra Agency included. This costs around $300/month
Platinum
This is the most premium Kartra offering. You get up to 50000 leads per month, unlimited features, up to 10 custom domains, and access to Kartra agency. This costs about $500/month
It is also important to note that choosing an annual billing option on any of these plans offers greater savings.
ClickFunnels
There are three options available:
ClickFunnels
This is the basic, general version of the software. You get 20 funnels, 100 pages, 1 sub-user, 3 payment gateways, and 3 domains. All of the basic funnel software is included in this option. This costs around $90/month
ClickFunnels Platinum
Then there is quite a jump up to the next version. Platinum offers unlimited funnels and pages. You can get 3 sub-users, 9 payment gateways, and 9 domains. This version also offers follow-up funnels, priority support, and weekly peer review hackathons. This costs roughly $300/month
TwocommaclubX
This is the most premium funnel software plan. It offers unlimited funnels and pages, 10 sub-users, 27 payment gateways, and domains, as well as superior support. This option goes for an estimated $2500/month.
Unique Features
As we have seen, Kartra and ClickFunnels are similar in many of the same ways.
Beyond the main features that we have explored below, each option also includes certain unique features that cannot be found in their competitor. These are listed below:
Kartra
Calendar
Kartra features a calendar app with four different options for better time management
Heatmap Analytics
Heatmap software is essential for getting a deeper insight into customer engagement data. Kartra has this included, while it has to be added on separately with ClickFunnel.
Video
You get video hosting through Kartra Video – a useful tool
Helpdesk
A very easy to operate ticketed helpdesk system for any software queries
ClickFunnel
Auto-Webinar
ClickFunnel includes a useful webinar tool for uploading engaging video content. This needs to be added separately with Kartra
Free Trial
ClickFunnel offers a 14-day free trial for its software, This can be incredibly useful for anyone not sure about the software.
ClickFunnels vs Kartra: The Bottom Line
Our in-depth Kartra and ClickFunnels review has revealed that both products offer an effective sales funnel and digital marketing solution. While they share many similar features, you will need to find the most suitable product for your business.
Overall, we had to deem our winner Kartra. This newer software includes a greater list of features and functionalities for an all-encompassing sales funnel and business management tool. There are great automation capabilities, and many useful small features to make operation easier. Oh, and it’s better priced.
ClickFunnels is a well-loved platform that suits many businesses. They provide seamless sales funnel integration, and excellent data and analytics. But when compared to the additional Kartra features and functions, we would have to place this option as the second best.
This completely depends on your business though. Kartra can be seen as a more extensive business management tool, while ClickFunnels offers more for sales and leads.