This is a Guest Post by Seth Jared.
Back in 2019 when I was first researching “Kartra vs clickfunnels,” I thought my head was going to explode. I was searching for the right platform to run my online business. I had been using WordPress with Thrive Themes and Wishlist Member along with Clickbank, and it was getting too complex.
I wanted to change over to an all in one platform with more marketing tools, that would provide a sales funnel builder, membership sites, email marketing, a page builder, etc. etc. etc.
So I began to do research. And I went down the rabbit hole of articles and Youtube videos explaining which was the best all in one platform, which had the best sales funnel builder, quoting features and sharing the same pricing tables that each platform had on their websites to begin with!
How This Kartra vs. Clickfunnels Review is Different
I am not going to share any more charts and comparison tables to make your head spin. Frankly I don’t have the energy to make them, and there are plenty of other Kartra vs clickfunnels articles and videos out there doing just that – taking the basic pre-made copy from both websites and repackaging them to you, so they can make a nice sale via an affiliate program.
I’m simply going to break down the most important aspects of the differences between these two platforms in plain English, based on my own personal experience.
Which Platform Is Better For Your Online Business?
Now right off the bat, I’ll come clean and let you know I am a Kartra user and have been since 2019. So you probably know which way I am leaning, but I would like to illustrate exactly why.
FYI I have also used Clickfunnels, back in 2014 when it was brand new. I loved the concept behind Clickfunnels, and years ago it really was cutting edge.
However, in my experience running a six figure online business since 2016, my opinion is that there are definitely many aspects of Clickfunnel’s approach, features, and pricing you should be aware of that just don’t make sense today.
I won’t make you read 50 paragraphs before I get to it, I’ll jump right into it.
Clickfunnels Does Not Provide Email Marketing (unless you pay a LOT)
Funnel building is pretty simple. You create nice looking landing pages, capture people’s email addresses, then follow up with them. You can also lead people to purchase digital content like an online course with membership sites encrypting your valuable content. Inside their members area, Clickfunnels even provides some nifty email marketing charts to help you visualize this.
Yet on the main landing page for Clickfunnels, they have an incomplete definition of a funnel.
The funnel here goes: “Landing Page, Sales Page, Collect Money.”
“Add to Email List” is sort of an afterthought on the side.
Sales funnels aren’t really sales funnels if there’s no follow up email marketing. Then it’s just sending people to a web page and letting them disappear.
You probably know that people need to be nurtured, communicated with, and followed up with at least 7 times before making a purchase.
The problem is, the basic Clickfunnels plan of $97/month does not include email marketing. And that’s really reflected in the diagram above.
You have to either purchase your own email marketing tools like Aweber, GetResponse, ConvertKit, etc. or you can be upsold to Clickfunnel’s “premier” membership level called “Clickfunnels Platinum”.
The Platinum level, which includes email marketing, costs $297/month. They call this “Follow Up Funnels .”
That’s incredibly steep, especially when you consider that a service like Aweber or Getresponse’s starter plan is usually around $20 or $30 depending on how many leads you have .
Kartra vs. Clickfunnels Pricing Transparency
Now the crazy thing is – you will be hard pressed to easily find any kind of breakdown of Clickfunnel’s pricing or features in any detail. Here’s a shot of Clickfunnel’s landing page. The only option is to sign up for the trial.
When you sign up, you’re greeted with this:
Whoa! $297 a month?! Buy me dinner first!
If you start to think $297 a month is too steep and begin to close the window, and exit popup is triggered with this message:
A downsell prompt.
So you see? You are already in the funnel – it’s like Neo realizing he’s in The Matrix. But there’s no explanation of the difference between “Clickfunnels Basic” and “Clickfunnels Platinum.” You have to get into their system first.
On the other hand, Kartra’s landing page features a link to this Pricing Chart.
Which just lays out all the functions and pricing of their platform. You’ll also have the chance to sign up for a $1 14 Day Trial.
Back to Clickfunnels –
Once you have signed up for Clickfunnel’s free trial, if you haven’t selected the $297 a month option they will try to upsell you on that hard.
Here’s their pricing comparison, which you can find via a Google Search – and other than funnels and pages, it doesn’t provide much detail.
The “Platinum” level includes a ton of extra things you do not need, like additional payment gateways and more training videos. Why would that be worth $297/month? Maybe that is why they don’t have a transparent and clear pricing table available on the front page.
Kartra vs Clickfunnels Features & Pricing Differences
At first glance, it would appear that Kartra and Clickfunnels both do pretty much the same thing.
They both provide a web page builder, web form creator, opt in forms, and create membership sites to deliver your content. They both allow you to integrate payment gateways like Stripe and Paypal to receive payments.
The landing pages and membership sites are pretty much the same. I mean, you can go nuts reading review after review but if you want to know which interface, which landing pages, which templates you prefer, you are better of just trying them both.
This is a sample Clickfunnel page:
This is a sample Kartra page:
Grant Cardone uses Clickfunnels:
Robert Kioyaski, author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, uses Kartra.
Karta’s opt in forms look like this:
Clickfunnel’s opt in forms look like this:
Very similar looking!
But when you actually examine the pricing and features, the difference becomes really evident. It’s kind of like the difference between this Swiss Army Knife, which is like Clickfunnels:
And this Swiss Army Knife, which is like Kartra:
They are both Swiss Army Knives, they are both good products. But on a purely practical level, Kartra just has more features.
When you sign up for Clickfunnel’s Basic Plan, you are essentially getting the aforementioned web page builder and membership site functionality.
Kartra has a different approach.
Kartra’s Starter plan is $97/month and also includes the web page builder, web forms, and membership sites. It’s all explained on their Pricing Page.
But you also get integrated email marketing, email marketing automation, video hosting, and an affiliate program tracking feature in case you promote your product via affiliates.
Kartra also lets you created quizzes and surveys, calendars, and provides on platform analytics.
When you sign up for the $1 14 Day Trial, you get access to all the features including the email marketing and automation.
The pricing is determined primarily by how many resources you will be using. When you are just starting out, you likely do not have 2,500 leads and likely only need 50 videos, 100 pages, and 50 GB of bandwidth, and to send out less than 15,000 emails.
After your business has grown and you have more than 2,500 leads or need more bandwidth, the Silver Package kicks in at $199 month. This is still less than Clickfunnel’s “Platinum” plan. And from then on, you get unlimited pages, bandwidth, and emails.
The only time pricing increases is when you get many more leads, which should mean your business is making more money. So for example when you get to 12,500 leads or 25,000 leads then the pricing increases.
That’s one of the main reasons I initially picked Kartra over Clickfunnels. It wasn’t even close. But there was a little more to it.
Why I Switched My Entire Business to Kartra
So I’d like to get a little more in depth about my business and my experience with Kartra. So I’ve been running an online business teaching people how to get jobs in digital marketing since 2016. For years I ran a simple 4 part video course as my lead magnet, then got people onto my mailing list and followed up with them.
I was using WordPress with Thrive Themes. This was my old squeeze page.
When I signed up for Kartra, I found it pretty easy to recreate my old squeeze pages using their landing page builder. This is what the new page looked like:
It was easy to replicate the old design, and I actually thought it looked better.
There were two big problems I had with my old setup that caused me to seek out an all in one platform. I felt like I was jerry rigging together my entire business.
- I was using WordPress and the Thrive Themes Plugin for my site design, Aweber for email marketing, and Wishlist Member to protect my content. Linking all of these things together was a pain, and I wanted a more streamlined solution. I also wanted to play with email marketing automation but Aweber did not provide that.
- I was using Clickbank to process payments, and Clickbank was great but charges a whopping 7.5% fee on all sales. But I made most of my sales via affiliates, so I need some all in one solution that would provide affiliate tracking as well.
My first instinct was to use Clickfunnels, because in 2019 it had already been around for 5 years. The problems were two fold:
- No integrated email marketing
- No affiliate tracking option
Now, I’ve mentioned this before, but that was really a huge deal. WordPress and Thrive Themes were essentially allowing me to build good landing pages for almost nothing. I just had to pay my hosting fees and had already paid a one time fee for Thrive Themes web page builder. Clickfunnels was going to be charging me $97 a month for basically the same thing.
Now when I found out about Kartra, I was skeptical but signed up for the trial. I thought it was just another Clickfunnels knock off.
But immediately, I could see a difference. After I rebuilt my landing page and sales pages, my entire sales process in Kartra, I began to transfer over all of my email marketing follow ups as well.
I had always wanted to run split tests and get better analytics and data for my email marketing. I also wanted to try out some email marketing automation options. I couldn’t easily do that with Aweber or any of the other consumer level email marketing platforms out there. And I wasn’t about to pay Infusionsoft $2,000.
My Experience with Kartra Sales Funnels
After transferring my entire online business over to Kartra, I began to experiment with their marketing tools. This is what the Kartra Email Editor looks like – it allows you to visually create email follow up funnels and even incorporate automation and split tests within emails
This is a shot of the Kartra email sequence builder:
And as you create emails, you can make up to 4 variations to split test, changing subject lines and content:
I was finally able to do proper split testing between two different versions of my funnel. I provided a four part video series at the time, and I was always wondered if giving my customers all the videos at once was better or worse than the conventional wisdom of a “4 day drip” video course. In other words, give them the videos instantly, or one video a day for 4 days.
I was easily able to take my initial email follow up sequence, clone it…add in a couple of extra emails…
create 3 new pages hosting the videos separately, like this one:
then create a split test. (B Version was the 4 part test).
I ran all of the organic and affiliate traffic to this split test. Kartra tracked everything, and allowed me to see that in fact yes, the 4 part drip feed performance was better – though they ran for different periods of time.
I was also able to see this from the Sequence point of view. Because Kartra handles all the email marketing directly, it also has detailed analytics about what subscribers open what emails and which sequences and clicks lead to sales. You can see some of the numbers for the 4 part vs regular test I did:
I eventually changed from a video series to a webinar. I was able to test to make sure that was profitable as well – I split test the new webinar vs. the old video series for a while and you can see the webinar brought in more revenue than the video series.
From a payment processing/sales standpoint, both Clickfunnels and Kartra are very good at working with Stripe and Paypal payment gateways to process payments. In 2 years I’ve had a very good experience with order pages and Kartra’s processing of customer payments.
Clickfunnels Analytics…?
Clickfunnels does provide some sales Analytics: It’s not very robust.
So they just tell their customers to integrate Google Analytics, which is ok for tracking visitors but cannot provide the same kind of detailed insights on email engagement, CTRs, or sales as a truly all in one platform that is handling all of that data.
Whereas the Kartra built in Sales Analytics looks like this:
I am not one of those people who likes to share a lot about the specific earnings of my business – but I wanted to show this Sales Analytics screen from Kartra. You can see detailed charts about revenue, refunds, month over months earnings, etc.
Because Kartra is a fully functioning CRM I can get a detailed breakdown of each customer’s behavior – all the pages they’ve have interacted with, all their sequences, emails they have opened, and of course payments.
Kartra vs. Clickfunnels Affiliate Tracking
One of the other things I mentioned is that rather than paid marketing campaigns, I promote my online business primarily via an affiliate program. This means I have partners/influencers who review or talk about my training program to their audiences, and I pay them a commission if one of their referrals purchases.
One of the reasons I stuck with Clickbank for so long, even though they had these crazy 7.5% fees, is because they had awesome affiliate management. My affiliates literally just had to insert a link and Clickbank did everything – tracked cookies, visitors, did all the payouts, taxes, dealt with refunds, etc.
But after a few years I realized I was paying way too much for this service. So when researching the features of a new platform, affiliate management was a huge issue.
I discovered that Clickfunnels actually did offer affiliate management via their “Backpack” option at the time, which was also $297 a month. Again that seemed really steep. Kajabi also had this feature but was starting out at $200 a month and I didn’t really like their templates.
Kartra proved to be a great solution again. Even at the $97/month starter plan level, I got affiliate management and tracking options. I was able to create a dedicated affiliate login for my affiliate to sign up like this:
The affiliates are then prompted to sign up and fill in their payment info etc.
And I was able to provide them all with general and custom links, and the system would track if a new sales came from that affiliate. The only drawback is that I now have to manually pay my affiliates, but I kind of celebrate doing that every month as an acknowledgement of all the people we’ve helped with the program and the joy of spreading the wealth.
Kartra Video Hosting
When I changed my business over to Kartra in 2019, I had another problem to deal with: video hosting.
Note: if you’re running any kind of online training, make sure to protect your videos. Making them “unlisted” on Youtube still allows people to share the links. Wistia and Vimeo have better security, but I ended up going with a company called Sprout Video, which has been great. I pay more than with Vimeo but I like their video player better.
When I signed up in 2019, Kartra did have video hosting but the bandwidth was only about 5GB which isn’t a lot of video hosting at all if you have a lot of people watching videos.
However in the last couple years, Kartra suddenly changed their pricing so that anyone in a Silver plan or above gets unlimited video hosting. This is an insane deal. And frankly I have been too lazy to take advantage of it because I have about 100 videos and don’t really want to take the time to change them over.
But if I had signed up today, Kartra’s unlimited video hosting would be saving me between $70-$110 a month.
I can’t compare this to Clickfunnels because they don’t offer video hosting. Consider the fact that if you use Clickfunnels you are going to have to find a secure place to store your videos if you don’t want people copying them.
Another wild thing about Kartra’s video hosting is that it allows you to do a ton of automations and tricks you don’t get with Youtube or really any other video host. You can tag subscribers based on how much of a video they completed, then add them to a separate list or follow up based on behavior. This is “automation” and I’ll explain that a little more in a moment. You can also add in Calls to Action Overlays right on the video or even pop opt in forms right on the video.
You also get detailed analytics on your videos, with visitors, engagement, how long people are watching the video, if they are clicking the call to action.
Clickfunnels 2.0?
In September 2021 Clickfunnels announced a new release of their sales funnels software which is supposed to come out in Jan 2022. While there are changes being made, it doesn’t change the fundamental value proposition – the email marketing is still not included in the basic plan.
Just to be clear, they are not adding in real additional features, they are actually finally upgrading components of their software that were very out of date.
For example they are touting the fact that the code on the site will make it faster – well it wouldn’t need to be if the system and code had been updated earlier.
They also appear to finally be adding in some additional form of analytics.
But I am not sure how detailed this is going to be.
Finally they are adding some new SEO friendlier options to be able to blog with your site. Frankly, that is one area where Kartra really stinks, so that could be an improvement. Kartra’s coding is such that it is really hard to do any quality SEO on your site, but then again most people like me use a blog, affiliates, or paid traffic to bring people to our funnels.
Karta vs. Clickfunnels Sales Approach
Both Kartra and Clickfunnels are run by marketers, and obviously they both want you to buy their product. But the Clickfunnels culture and vibe is so overhyped and aggressive, it drives me nuts.
When you get to the Clickfunnels website, you are actually entering a very slick funnel yourself. Like I mentioned before, there is no transparent pricing option and you are going to be bombarded with very pushy sales copy from the get go.
This is some sample copy from their Clickfunnels Backpack upsell to get Affiliate Management capabilities (which come with every level of Kartra):
I’m a salesman dude, I don’t need you using this cheap emotionally manipulative copy to push me into a long term investment in a software platform. This is not how I like to run marketing campaigns, personally.
Kartra is also a marketing company and they of course want to persuade you to buy their product, but they do so in a more straightforward manner by providing pricing from the beginning and don’t push you into a funnel process or do a bait and switch with upsells.
Once again, to point this out, right on the front page of the Clickfunnels it showcases “Follow up funnels” as a key feature then casually mentions very quietly “when you upgrade to Platinum” failing to mention that platinum is $297 a month.
Kartra vs. Clickfunnels Founders and Culture
Clickfunnels and Kartra were both founded by huge names in the internet marketing world.
Clickfunnels was founded by Russell Branson, and Kartra was founded by Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsaime. Russell Branson is famous for his success marketing his funnels and his products. He’s kind of like the Tony Robbins of funnels.
Andy Jenkins sadly passed away a couple years ago. Before that he was known for creating Webinarjam and Everwebinar, and a number of high converting online courses.
Some people love Russell Bransom, but I have found him to be in the vein of marketers who drastically oversimplifies and overhypes the money side of online marketing to make sales. That is reflected in the culture of Clickfunnels, which does have a wildly successful Affiliate Program.
In fact one of the reasons that Clickfunnels is STILL so popular is because it encourages people to hype it up and sell it on to other people. When you have an army of skilled marketers promoting your funnel building platform to many newcomers who don’t really understand the ins and outs of online marketing, it’s easy to make sales.
I’m always wary of any program that puts too much emphasis into its affiliate program. It’s similar to MLM or those online courses where you don’t actually learn anything, you just try to bring new people in. They talk about ethics a lot, but I think that is really just posturing. This just isn’t my kind of culture, personally.
Now that said, I’m a huge believer in affiliate marketing, I just think it should be done the right way. The people who market Kartra aren’t monks, I just find there’s a lot less hype and big promises around it.
That said, I will disclose that I am in fact an affiliate for Kartra myself. I also have an affiliate account for Clickfunnels, but have not used it in a few years since I started to form these opinions.
Like I said, back in 2014 Clickfunnels was cutting edge and offered something nobody else was doing. Today, it has failed to modernize.
Kartra Isn’t Perfect By the Way
One thing I should mention is that my experience with Kartra has not been perfect, but I would say I have been about 85-90% satisfied. And Kartra is always adding new features and updating their software. I don’t think any software or system is 100% perfect. Here’s an example.
One thing that really annoyed me about the email marketing editor was the fact that you could not save your emails while you were writing them. You had to close the editor and click “done”. Now of course you could save your pages anytime, very easily, but emails could not be saved ever. So you had to be very careful not to accidentally close your browser OR click on a hyperlink. I actually wrote to the tech support team about this.
Late last year, they introduced a save feature so that won’t happen anymore.
There were also little hiccups here and there. The Affiliate payout system doesn’t account for merchant fees so the numbers are always a little off.
Occasionally, a page would glitch up, but support would get back to me within a day and help me debug it.
But nothing that has made me regret my choice to move.
Kartra vs. Clickfunnels Support
Kartra support is very good, and responsive. Before Covid it was super fast, and since then it is not quite as fast, but I always get detailed responses to my support tickets within a day. There is also a great Facebook Group full of other Kartra users to ask questions that are not tech support.
I am one of those annoying customers who contacts support with tons of questions. I’d say 95% of my questions are about functionality. In my most recent email, I asked if Kartra could provide an advanced button to toggle different pricing tables in the same iframe – something really complex that no all in one platform can do.
I also couldn’t remember one of the tags I kept seeing on my leads was placed, and the support rep kindly showed me the tracking link that had the tag on it.
You can see they usually respond within a day of getting the ticket.
Clickfunnels also has a Facebook Group and support -but one thing I noticed in their upsell page is this:
So it looks like at the $297 level, you get “Priority Support”. That’s all well and good, but I think it’s another sneaky way of pushing people into the higher ticket program who don’t need it. Why not provide everyone with the same level of support like Kartra?
It’s also not clear exactly what this means in terms of response time – is the normal response time 2 days and you get help in 1 day, or less? I don’t know.
Unlike Kartra, Clickfunnels does have the option for VIP Phone Support.
All you have to do is be in their “Two Comma Club” (i.e. be making at least a million dollars a year) and pay $2,497/ month. Sounds reasonable for the average customer to me, right? (Pardon my sarcasm, this is just part of Clickfunnel’s hyped up culture that irks me).
Kartra vs. Clickfunnels Behavior Based Automation
One last thing I wanted to mention was that Kartra includes a ton of behavior based automation features, while Clickfunnels does not without their Platinum level. I added this section to the end because this is really such an advanced feature set that many marketers may not use it in their marketing campaigns, but the ability to utilize these features is awesome.
Automation basically means that you can customize your email sequences to track and monitor visitor behavior and execute customized tasks depending on what people do.
For example – let’s say you want to target only the most engaged members of your funnel.
You can create automation rules if someone completes a video or opens an email, or clicks on a link, or visits a checkout page.
In my webinar funnel, I tag visitors based on if they missed the webinar, watched past the halfway point or left early, and I send out custom emails according to this behavior .
So the software scans each email and if it the lead has this tag I designated, it sends the email, and if not it skips that email and goes to the next one.
You can create a special sequence for only the people who are really reading and responding to your funnel and focus on them. I also have a Cart Abandonment Sequence – if someone visits my order page and starts to check out then stops, they get a separate email from me asking what is up.
There’s a million different things you can do with automation and frankly it’s a bit overwhelming.
But bear in mind software like Infusionsoft, which still costs thousands of dollars, is basically doing the same thing as what Kartra does.
Kartra vs. Clickfunnels: The Decision is Yours
At the end of the day it’s your business and it is your call. I know I have a strong opinion, and I hope that didn’t put you off. I just know how hyped up and oversold Clickfunnels is and I’d like for people to at least consider things from the perspective of features and pricing before signing up.
If you are still on the fence I definitely recommend taking both platforms for a test drive with their respective 14 day trials. But again, remember that when you’re in your trial phase you will need to integrate a lot of 3rd party tools with Clickfunnels whereas with Kartra you will not.
As I said before, I am an affiliate of Kartra. Most articles or videos you’ve seen are made by affiliates by either one or both platforms, and they don’t always disclose it.
If you found this article valuable and would like to use my affiliate link, I’d appreciate it. I get a small commission if you buy, at no extra charge to you. But it’s your call.
This is my Affiliate Link to get a 14 Day $1 trial of Kartra.
This is a non affiliate link to Kartra’s home page.
This is a non affiliate link to Clickfunnels.
You’re also free to reach out to me via my Youtube Channel Seth Jared by clicking here if you have any questions.
Whatever you decide to do, I hope this article has given you a little bit more clarity. When researching the best all in one platform for your business, your business and customers come first. Pay attention to the specific features and values the platform will provide, and what will be best for you.
Whatever one of these marketing tools you end up using, I wish you the best with your online business!