Stuck choosing between Leadpages and ClickFunnels? It’s a tough decision to make.
But hopefully, after reading through our comparison of the two, you’ll walk away with a better idea of which path to take.
In this in-depth guide, we’re taking a look at both of these popular online marketing programs to help you make the right choice. Because these kinds of marketing tools can be a little confusing to newcomers, we want to clear the air about what each choice offers and put them to the test in a head-to-head comparison.
Armed with a clear understanding of how they function and the features each offers, you should be able to make a confident decision between the two.
However, before we dive deep into the specifics, let’s ensure we cover the basics.
First, let’s get up to speed on what landing pages and sales funnels are so everything makes sense.
Landing Page: What Is It?
A landing page, essentially, is any page on your website that is the first stop for a new visitor – they ‘land’ there from their search results.
This means a blog page, a home page, a sales page, or an opt-in page could all qualify as landing pages. As long as traffic is being driven directly to that page, it’s a landing page.
As a marketing professional, your goal should be creating landing pages that are optimized to welcome new visitors and inform them about your company and product or service.
Even if you don’t make the sale on the first go around, you can still work towards that goal by converting them into email subscribers with tools like a tripwire or lead magnet. Once you’ve earned your way into their precious inbox, you’ll have the space and opportunity to nurture these leads until they finally give in and become a loyal customer.
To get this kind of conversion, however, you’ve got to have a landing page focused on the conversion. And here is where landing pages and funnels start to tie in: your landing page can function as the first step of your sales funnel.
Sales Funnels: What Are They?
A sales funnel is a series of web pages that work to lead your visitors to reach your end goal – usually placing a sale.
This goal will vary depending on the purpose of the funnel and the company, but any of the following would be a good end goal to have:
- Purchasing a product
- Subscribing to your email list
- Signing up for a free trial
- Nurture leads
- Convert leads to customers
- Upsell customers
- Convert customers into affiliates
One great thing about funnels is they will never tie you down. You can create as many different ones as you’d like and continue to optimize and change them as you go.
A typical funnel (which, by definition, is just a series of optimized pages centered around a single conversion) might have this structure:
- First step: a content page that educates the visitor on who you are and introduces what you sell
- Second step: a landing page that asks for email addresses, known as an opt-in page or squeeze page
- Third step: A sales page for your product
- Fourth step: A checkout page where the customer has the opportunity to finish the transaction
- Final steps: These will be customized to your liking, but may include upsells or additional offers the visitor can add on to their purchase
ClickFunnels: Overview and Features
Now that we’re up to speed on what exactly landing pages and sales funnels are, we’re going to dissect ClickFunnels from the inside out.
Let’s begin with an understanding of how exactly the tool works.
ClickFunnels works by allowing you to create BOTH: landing pages and funnels. In addition to these, users can also create email campaigns, marketing services, affiliate programs, and membership sites.
What’s even better is that you’ll find it’s easy to create all of the things mentioned above without needing high-level web design or marketing knowledge. Thanks to its user-friendly interface, you can create professional-looking web pages easily using ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels has a lot to offer, that’s for sure. To keep it simple, we’re highlighting our favorite features they offer. These are what makes ClickFunnels such a good choice:
ClickFunnels Best Features
Making Sales Funnels
Of course, making sales funnels is one of the application’s top features.
Here’s how:
- First, sign up for a ClickFunnels account.
- Then, select a funnel from a library of pre-built options. Or, you can make your own.
- Next, design each page of your funnel. You can use templated pages to make it easy or get creative customizing everything. Choose from free and paid template options.
Making Landing Pages
Next up, you can use their page editor to create landing pages. You can even use this function to create a fully working website.
That’s right – you get up to 100 web pages with the standard plan, which you can use to create a digital presence.
What’s even better is that you won’t need a separate web host for these pages: ClickFunnels has that covered for you.
Digital Marketing
Actionetics is ClickFunnels’ very own communication system that many members use to stay in touch with their leads.
Using behavior-based data, ClickFunnels makes it easy to set up responses triggered by certain actions.
As an example, if you want to nurture a lead that signed up for a webinar you’re offering, you can set up a series of emails or texts about your next upcoming webinars.
Hosting
As we mentioned above, you won’t need a separate hosting service for your ClickFunnels pages. The cost is included in your subscription to the service.
Domain
Most of the time, when you create a website there are multiple steps just to set it up. One of those steps is usually buying your custom domain. With ClickFunnels, you won’t have to go elsewhere to set this up. You can choose to register a new, custom domain or use one you already own.
Compatibility
If you’re used to using WordPress, you’ll love the fact that ClickFunnels has a plugin that will allow you to include your funnel pages into your WordPress blog – without any coding knowledge.
Sharing
If you teach others in using funnels, work with a team, or want to send a funnel to friends so they can convert leads, the sharing function will come in handy.
Lead Nurturing
Once you capture leads, it’s crucial to continuously nurture them. With a set of automatic email responders, you can welcome them and guide them down your sales funnel without manually doing anything yourself.
Email Segmentation
Any experienced marketer knows how important email segmentation is. This lets you tailor your message to your audience based on things like behaviors, position in the sales funnel, or customer demographics. ClickFunnels has email segmentation enabled as a part of its platform.
Split Tests
Trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work on your audience? A/B Testing is the way to go.
By sending out two different versions of your emails, you can test out things like buttons, design, content, headlines, and more to see what’s most effective in securing leads.
KPI Identification
Tracking and understanding your marketing data is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. With ClickFunnels, you’ll be able to identify your key performance indicators (KPIs) and track important data.
Information regarding conversions, top-performing affiliates, and email campaign health will all be at your fingertips.
Affiliates
A great way for small businesses to grow their marketing reach is through affiliate programs.
Backpack is ClickFunnels’ very own affiliate program. This allows others to share your products or funnels and make a portion of any commission they earn you.
Built-in Email
Considering paying for an email marketing service like Hubspot? Think again.
With a ClickFunnels Etison Elite membership, you won’t need to buy a separate service. Their Actionetics tool will make communicating with leads and customers via email seamless.
Lead Magnet Automation
Lead magnets are small, value-packed offers that can attract a lead. These include things like a worksheet, e-book, or compilation of helpful resources.
ClickFunnels allows its members to build out their email list with such magnets automatically.
User Interface
One of the very best aspects of this platform is the easy user interface. Creating funnels is as easy as dragging and dropping elements.
Without too much trouble, you’ll be able to optimize and edit your funnels as you go to maximize performance.
Marketplace
If design is not your forte, fear not. The ClickFunnels marketplace is chock full of professional templates you can buy and implement into your landing pages.
Membership
If you have amazing content to offer, you should consider putting a gate in front of it and charging for entrance.
In a membership model, only paying subscribers would get access to your site. This is available to both of ClickFunnels’ membership tiers.
ClickFunnels: The Cost
There are two membership options when joining ClickFunnels. The basic plan begins at $97 each month and the elite plan, which includes Backpack and Actionetics, is $297 per month.
No, ClickFunnels is not cheap. But that’s because it works.
Now for the good news: you have the opportunity to try out everything ClickFunnels has to offer during a FREE 14-day trial. Once your trial runs out, you’ll have thirty days to decide whether or not you like the product. If you change your mind about it on the 29th day, you’ll still be able to cancel, no questions asked.
Another great aspect of the ClickFunnels payment model is that there are no hard contracts to get locked into. You’ll love the freedom of the month-to-month subscription, meaning you can cancel at any moment. If you need to pause the service and then pick back up where you left off, that’s okay too.
Looking to cut down on this cost? You have the opportunity to pay for a year of ClickFunnels in advance, saving you 2 months’ worth of fees.
If you’ve already done some research on ClickFunnels and LeadPages, you probably already know there’s a big price difference. LeadPages costs considerably less per month than ClickFunnels does. If cost is truly the only thing that matters to you, LeadPages would be a better option. That being said, we don’t think cost should be the only thing considered in this decision.
What matters most is which tool is the best choice for the job. ClickFunnels is more expensive, yes. But it also offers more customization, membership options, A/B testing, and so much more. While ClickFunnels’ primary use is to build powerful sales funnels, it can act as an all-in-one digital marketing system for your business.
LeadPages: The Overview and Features
LeadPages, on the other hand, is a building tool for landing pages. Marketers can use this application to build strong sales pages for information collection and contact management. It’s got more to offer than just landing pages, however.
LeadBoxes, a tool within LeadPages, allows marketers to create pop-up forms where visitors can opt-in from any page of your website. LeadLinks enables email communication with leads after their information is captured. Finally, its LeadDigits tool makes text marketing easy.
As you can see, it has a lot going on. Let’s take a step back to understand how LeadPages works its magic.
Similar to ClickFunnels, LeadPages doesn’t require any high level of coding or design knowledge to create strong landing pages. You’ll also find a drag and drop editor here, but what steals the show is its built-in templates to choose from. After that, all you’ll need to do is adjust the text and images. This is by far the easiest way to create professional-looking pages, as their drag and drop editor is nowhere near as user-friendly as ClickFunnels is.
If you’re a beginner who is just getting your feet wet in the realm of landing pages and digital sales, LeadPages is a good place to start. It’s also friendly on the budget. What’s great about LeadPages for newbies is that even without any experience, you’ll find confidence in your first finished product with LeadPages.
It doesn’t take much to make it happen. Once you begin creating a new page, you’ll be able to choose from professionally designed templates that are pre-made or create one yourself.
Keep in mind that choosing the pre-made templates leaves little room for customization. You’ll be able to hide certain page elements, but you won’t be able to add any or rearrange things to your liking. Creating a drag-and-drop template on your own, however, allows for a lot more creativity. You can edit most things, but you won’t be able to utilize A/B testing.
Some users will find it a bit difficult to work with the drag and drop editor. If you’re particularly new to design, there might be extra frustration here.
With one landing page built, you can continue building out new ones in a chain to create a sales funnel. From there, you can utilize lead magnet offers like a free template or e-book in exchange for signing up. All of this will happen automatically thanks to LeadPages hands-off delivery approach.
Once you’re ready to publish your pages, there are a few options to choose from. Whatever aligns best with your goals is the path to take. For example, you can choose to host the page on LeadPages, publish it to WordPress, add to a Facebook business page, publish on your server, or share the template with others.
LeadPages Best Features
If you choose LeadPages and sign up, here are the top features that you’ll fall in love with:
Drag and Drop Customization
As with ClickFunnels, LeadPages will allow you to create your lead pages with a drag and drop editor.
LeadPages quite literally followed ClickFunnels’ lead on this, and unfortunately, their editor doesn’t keep up with all ClickFunnels’ has to offer.
That being said, the drag and drop editor is a feature of LeadPages but shouldn’t be the main feature that leads you to choose them.
Pre-Built Templates
While their custom page builder lags behind in some aspects, their pre-built templates are extremely strong. By using them, you can simply swap out text and images to create an already-optimized page.
What’s great about these templates is they have already been proven to convert. There’s no extensive customization needed to make a good one.
In that sense, if you’re looking for a quick and easy landing page builder, LeadPages makes it super easy.
Pop-Ups
Using opt-in pop-ups is one of the best ways to capture leads online.
Using the LeadBoxes feature, you can create a ton of different opt-ins to get the attention and information of the leads you want. A cool feature even allows you to embed these pop-ups in WordPress blog posts.
Split Testing
When you choose to use the pre-built templates you’ll also be able to use A/B testing. As covered before, this means swapping out headlines, images, or design to learn what works best.
Notifications
Stay on top of the leads you’re getting with live data coming through your inbox as you collect them. Even without an email marketing service, you’ll still be able to capture the leads so that you can one day start communicating with them.
SMS
If you haven’t had a ton of luck getting folks to opt-in to your email subscribers list, SMS sign-ups might be a tactic you’ll want to try. This makes it easier than ever to capture their information. In this method, a text to their phone asks for their email address. Once they reply with the information, they’re signed up. Easy.
Pro Tip: Does your business participate in speaking engagements or host a podcast? This is a great way to capture information from these verticals. Simply tell them to text a certain number and you’ll get them on your list.
Lead Magnet Delivery
A lead magnet is a marketing specialist’s best friend. If you want to woo your visitors, offer them a valuable free gift. Trust us.
Setting up your digital asset delivery that completes your lead magnet process is so simple with LeadPages.
Here are the steps:
- Find Lead Magnet Delivery from the menu
- Upload the file you want to use
- Name the file
- Choose the name and email of the sender
- Craft a message that will be sent along with the file
- Connect it to a form where they opt-in for the asset
- Let LeadPages do the rest!
LeadPages: The Cost
As we briefly mentioned before, LeadPages costs significantly less than ClickFunnels does. It comes in three tiers. Choose from Advanced, Pro, or Standard membership plans. If you choose to pay for a year in advance, you’ll save some money. If you want to commit and pay for two years in advance, you’re saving almost half of what you would pay in monthly billing.
The Standard plan comes in at $17/month when purchased for two years and paid for up-front. If you only want to pay for a year in advance, it comes out to $25 a month. And finally, paying month to month will cost you $37 each time.
The Pro plan is $42/month in the 2-year plan, $48/month in the annual plan, and $79/month paying each month.
If you’re going all-in with the Advanced Plan, you’ll notice there is no month-to-month offer. You’ll pay $199/month in an annual bill or pay $159/month when paying for two years in advance.
Final Verdict: ClickFunnels or LeadPages?
To keep it simple, we’re telling you the best choice that fits a number of specific circumstances.
Without further ado…
- If you want to create a series of funnel pages without coding knowledge, choose ClickFunnels.
- If you want to create beautiful sales pages on a marketing budget, choose LeadPages.
- If you want to use a tool as an all-in-one marketing system, choose ClickFunnels.
- If you are only needing one landing page, choose LeadPages.
- If you want to create flexible, professional funnels, choose ClickFunnels.
