The average conversion rate of a landing page is 9.7%.
This metric is approximately 2-4 times higher than the average B2B website conversion rate, ranging from 2.23% to 4.31%.
That said, you can generate a lot more leads and customers with landing pages than with other marketing strategies.
Fortunately, you don’t have to hire a costly developer to build landing pages. All you need is a landing page builder like Instapage or Clickfunnels.
Both Instapage and Clickfunnels provide comprehensive functionalities and come with lots of benefits. However, they are entirely different tools.
So, if you want to know whether Instapage or Clickfunnels is the better solution for your business, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’re going to compare both tools in terms of…
- Landing pages
- Templates
- Forms
- Split tests
- Sales funnels
- Analytics
- Custom domain
- Integrations
- Pricing
…and in the end, you’ll know whether Instapage or Clickfunnels is the right solution for your business.
Let’s start.
Instapage vs. Clickfunnels: The Main Difference
Before we dive into the comparison between Instapage and Clickfunnels, it’s uber important to understand both tools’ main differences.
Instapage is mainly a tool to build landing pages. With Clickfunnels, you can build entire marketing funnels.
But what is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel describes the whole customer journey. It begins when your customers learn about your business and ends with the purchase.
Here is a chart illustrating a marketing funnel:
In terms of Clickfunnels, think of a marketing funnel as a series of pages. This series of pages should guide visitors towards a conversion goal, whether it’s an email opt-in or a sale.
You can also build marketing funnels with Instapage. The thing is that Instapage doesn’t provide the functionality to map landing pages visually to a funnel, measure funnel stats, or provide funnel templates. But technically, it’s possible. You can build different landing pages, link them, and track metrics with Google Analytics.
But what we can claim upfront – If you want to build marketing funnels, go with Clickfunnels. If you want to create landing pages, Instapage is the better solution in most cases.
Instapage vs. Clickfunnels: All the Pros and Cons
Instapage Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Extremely user friendly
- Lots of design options
- Quick publishing process
- Beautiful templates
- A/B testing
- Heatmaps
- Great mobile editor
- Lots of integrations
- Fast page-load speed
- Opt-in forms
- Collaboration features
- 1:1 ad-to-page personalization
- Ad Map
Cons:
- High pricing
- Not designed to add custom code
Clickfunnels Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Quickly launch funnels
- Lots of training and resources
- You don’t need to code
- Lots of integrations
- Simple drag-and-drop builder
- Templates for landing pages and marketing funnels
- Cookbook with pre-built funnels
- An inbuilt email marketing tool
- Responsive
- A/B testing
- Email Opt-ins
- Pop-ups
Cons:
- User experience
- User navigation
- Bad UX with the membership platform
- Expensive
- Poor reporting
- Slow page-load speed
- Low support
- The landing page builder isn’t powerful
- Templates look outdated
Instapage vs. Clickfunnels: In-Depth Comparison
Landing Page Builder
You don’t need to hire a developer if you want to build high-converting landing pages. Tools like Instapage or Clickfunnels make it extremely easy to create them. Here are the pros and cons of each drag-and-drop editor:
Instapage
Most landing page builders work section-based. You can only position and resize elements within a defined section.
With Instapage, you can drag and drop elements without any restrictions. It’s a real drag-and-drop builder. Here are all the pros and cons:
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Easily create page variants for A/B testing
- 500+ templates available
- Add custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Save landing page sections as custom blocks
- Collaboration features
Cons:
- Not designed for custom code
Clickfunnels
Clickfunnels also provides an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder. While it’s a little bit complicated to find your way around, you can set up landing pages in minutes once you’re used to it.
Also, the Clickfunnels drag-and-drop editor isn’t as flexible as Instapage’s. The design capabilities are restricted, which can limit your creativity. Here are all the pros and cons of the Clickfunnels editor:
Pros:
- Easy to use
- It works as it should
- You can easily create page variants for A/B testing
- 100+ templates available
- Add custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Save sections and rows for other landing pages
Cons:
- Limited design capabilities
- Bad user interface
- Designs look old
All in all
Both Instapage and Clickfunnels offer great drag-and-drop editors. They are both easy to use, work smoothly, and provide lots of templates.
However, Instapage’s drag-and-drop editor is much more powerful. You can create fully personalized landing pages while Clickfunnels restricts customization capabilities.
Also, Instapage offers a better user interface. Clickfunnels user interface is very old-fashioned. It’s hard to say, but you’d think you were going back ten years in time with Clickfunnels.
Templates
You don’t need to build landing pages from scratch. Instapage and Clickfunnels both offer pre-designed templates.
While Clickfunnels’ templates look a bit outdated, Instapage provides more than 500 templates optimized for conversions. Instapage’s templates look super modern and come sorted by industry.
On the other hand, Clickfunnels also provides templates for sales funnels. Clickfunnel’s cookbook offers hundreds of pre-built marketing funnels, also optimized for maximum conversions.
Long story short, Instapage provides more and better-looking templates for landing pages. Clickfunnels offers pre-built marketing funnels.
That said, both tools offer awesome templates for their initial uses. There’s no winner and no loser.
Form Builder
You need to collect email addresses. 90%-95% of visitors leave your site and never come back. If you can gather your visitors’ email addresses, you can send them email campaigns and promote your offers for years to come.
On average, $1 spent on email marketing leads to a return of investment of $42.
That said, you need a form builder within your landing page tool.
With Instapage, you can create forms with an easy-to-use form builder. What’s great is that you can create multistep forms. Here’s how the Instapage form builder looks like:
However, you can’t create pop-ups or sticky bars with Instapage.
With Clickfunnels, you can create forms and pop-ups. The downside is that Clickfunnels customization capabilities are also quite limited when it comes to forms.
If you care about a professional look of your forms, go with Instapage. However, remember that you can create pop-ups with Clickfunnels.
Optimization
Optimization is essential if you want to grow your business.
Split testing is a core part of optimization. Changing an element on your landing page can lead to a massive increase (…or decrease) in your conversion rates.
What’s excellent about Clickfunnels is that you test different versions of buttons, headlines, and images without creating a new page variant.
With Instapage, you need to create a new page variant and test different variants against each other.
So, when it comes to split testing, both tools are pretty similar.
But Instapage provides another feature that’s super useful for optimizing your landing pages.
Instapage provides heatmaps. A heatmap is a graphical representation of data depicted by color. It shows you with which page sections visitors interact and with which one not.
Heatmaps are super helpful to optimize your landing pages for maximum conversions.
That said, Instapage offers better optimization features.
Marketing Funnels
In terms of Clickfunnels, think of a marketing funnel as a series of pages. This series of pages should guide visitors towards a conversion goal, wheter it’s an email opt-in or a sale.
While you can also create marketing funnels with Instapage, Clickfunnels is the better solution here. You can set up lead funnels, event funnels, or create a custom funnel.
What’s also great about Clickfunnels is that you can utilize the cookbook for pre-built funnels.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution for marketing funnels, go with Clickfunnels.
Analytics
With Instapage, you can see basic metrics like visitors, bounce rate, conversions, and conversion rate. You can filter analytics by period and traffic source (paid/organic).
What’s great is that you can also connect your ad network and get valuable insights such as cost per visitor or cost per lead. However, you can only use this feature with the Enterprise Plan.
Here’s how the Instapage analytics dashboard looks like:
With Clickfunnels, you can check funnel stats and see page views, opt-ins, sales, and earnings/pageview.
With both tools, you can set up Google Analytics to get more insights.
All in all, Instapage provides a bit more analytics features than Clickfunnels. What’s especially useful is the cost per visitor/cos per lead metric.
That said, Instapage provides better analytics features than Clickfunnels.
Integrations
Integrations are essential for online marketing tools, and they are especially critical for landing page software like Instapage or Clickfunnels. Fortunately, Instapage and Clickfunnels both offer a variety of integrations.
There are four different types of integrations:
- Direct integrations
- Zapier integrations
- Code injection
- Webhooks
Direct integrations connect one service to another directly. Zapier is a platform that links different web services. If you don’t know Zapier, you should check it out here. Code Injection Integrations work via JavaScript. Webhooks are automated messages exchanged via Apps. If you want to learn more about Webhooks, I highly recommend reading this article.
Here’s a rough overview of how much integrations both tools offer:
Clickfunnels:
- 27 Direct Integrations
- 41 Zapier Integrations
Instapage:
- Total 120 Integrations
I highly recommend checking out all Instapage integrations here and all Clickfunnels integrations here.
Finally, you need to know which integrations you need and which not. No matter which tool you choose, make sure you can integrate it with your existing marketing tools.
Custom Domain
It’s best to use a custom domain. Using a generic domain harms Google Indexing and Google Ads compatibility. But that’s not the worst problem. Generic domains hurt user experience and, therefore, your brand.
Just imagine – what do you think about a company that hosts its landing pages on a generic domain like clickfunnels.pages.com/page1/? This domain might seem weird to you, and you won’t be willing to buy something from this company.
Fortunately, you can connect your custom domain with both, Instapage and Clickfunnels. However, Clickfunnels goes one step further here. You can directly purchase a custom domain from Clickfunnels. With Instapage, you need to buy your domain from another provider and then connect it to Instapage.
Pricing
Instapage only offers two different plans [monthly billing (annual billing)]:
- Optimizing – $199 ($149) per month
- Converting – Custom pricing
Clickfunnels, on the other hand, offers three different plans:
- Clickfunnels – $97 per month
- Clickfunnels Platinum – $297 per month
- Two Comma Club X – $2497 per month
With the cheapest Clickfunnels plan, you can only create 20 funnels and 100 landing pages.
I think Instapage and Clickfunnels are both a little bit too expensive when you consider that you can “only” build landing pages with them. Accordingly, I believe there isn’t a clear winner for this category since both tools could be more affordable.
Customer Reviews
I searched all the reviews on G2 and picked out the most important ones, helping you understand the pros and cons of Instapage and Clickfunnels.
Let’s start with Instapage.
Most customers don’t like the pricing structure…
However, most people found the drag-and-drop builder user-friendly…
What about Clickfunnels?
Some people neglect that it’s hard to build a fully personalized page with Clickfunnels…
…and they also don’t like the pricing structure…
However, what most people found good is that the drag-and-drop editor is easy to use…
…and that Clickfunnels provides excellent training material…
Conclusion
Both Instapage and Clickfunnels are great solutions for landing pages and marketing funnels. It depends on your specific business requirements which tool you should use.
You should use Instapage if you…
- …don’t need to create marketing funnels.
- …want modern landing pages.
- …care about professional-looking forms.
- …page-speed is critical to you.
- …want to make use of heatmaps.
You should use Clickfunnels if you…
- …need to create marketing funnels.
- …want to utilize an in-built email marketing tool.
- …like to access highly professional training material.
Finally, if you want to create landing pages, use Instapage; if you need to build marketing funnels, use Clickfunnels.
However, if you would force me to go for one tool, I would go for Instapage simply because ease of use and landing pages’ design is critical to me.