Unbounce vs. Instapage: Which Tool Should You Choose?

Companies that increase their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads.

55% – That’s a lot.

That said, you need to use landing pages within your marketing.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to build them. All you need is a landing page builder like Unbounce or Instapage.

Unbounce and Instapage are the most popular solutions for landing pages. But although they are very similar, they differ in some functionalities.

If you want to know whether Unbounce or Instapage 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:

• Editor
• Templates
• Forms
• Optimization
• Analytics
• Custom domain
• Integrations
• Collaboration
• Pricing

…and in the end, you’ll know whether Unbounce or Instapage is the right solution for your business.

Let’s dive right in.

Unbounce vs. Instapage: All the Pros and Cons

Unbounce Pros and Cons

Pros:

• WYSIWYG editor
• Easy to use
• Great templates
• Smart Traffic
• Dynamic Text Replacement
• A/B testing
• No need to code
• Lots of integrations
• Fast page-load speed
• Email opt-ins
• Pop-ups
• Sticky bars
• Collaboration features

Cons:

• Improvable mobile editor
• Poor analytics

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

Unbounce vs. Instapage: In-Depth Comparison

Landing Page Builder

You don’t need to code to build landing pages. Tools like Unbounce or Instapage offer drag-and-drop editors to create them with ease. But which solution offers the better editor, Unbounce or Instapage?

Unbounce

Unbounce provides an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.

The publishing process is quick and straightforward. Unlike other builders with snap-together grids and blocks, Unbounce doesn’t set boundaries. You can personalize your pages without any restrictions.

You can also add custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and integrate a tracking pixel. Unbounce offers access to Unsplash, an online image gallery with free stock photography.

Here are the main pros and cons of Unbounce’s editor:

Pros:

• Quickly build and publish landing pages
• It works smoothly (…and doesn’t lag)
• Easily create page variants for A/B testing
• Create fully personalized landing pages
• Make use of beautiful templates
• Add HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Integrate a tracking pixel
• Use a responsive mobile editor

Cons:

• Mobile versions could be looking more similar to desktop versions
• The number of elements within the drag-and-drop builder may disturb you

Instapage

Instapage’s editor works similarly to Unbounce’s. It doesn’t limit your creativity when creating landing pages. You can drag and drop elements without any restrictions.

Apart from that, the Instapage editor might have a slight competitive edge when it comes to ease of use.

Here are all the pros and cons:

Pros:

• The editor is straightforward
• Easily create page variants for A/B testing
• Quickly publish landing pages
• Utilize 500+ templates
• Add custom HTML, CSS or JavaScript
• Integrate a tracking pixel
• Save landing page sections as custom blocks
• Use a responsive mobile editor

Cons:

• Not designed to add custom code

Which one is better?

Unbounce and Instapage both offer great drag-and-drop editors. They are both easy to use, work smoothly, and provide comprehensive functionalities.

While the Instapage editor is a bit easier to use, the Unbounce editor offers more functionalities.

That said, if time is more important than features, Instapage is the better solution. If not, I recommend Unbounce.

Templates

You don’t need to build landing pages from scratch. Unbounce and Instapage both offer pre-design templates optimized for conversions.

While Instapage offers 500+ templates, Unbounce “only” provides 100+ templates.

From my personal view, their templates don’t differentiate in design quality.

While I don’t think that you need 500 templates (100 is more than enough), Instapage is the better solution if templates are super necessary.

Form Builder

Most visitors leave your site and never come back. If you can get your visitors’ email addresses, you can send them campaigns and bring them back to your product offers.

On average, email marketing has a return on investment of 4.200%.

It’s always better to sell products to warm leads instead of pitching offers to cold ones. Opt-ins are always the first stage of your marketing funnel.

With Unbounce, you can build opt-in forms, plus you can set up sticky bars and pop-ups.

With Instapage, you can also build forms. What’s great is that you can create multistep forms.

However, if you want to use pop-ups or sticky bars, you need to use third-party tools.

That said, Unbounce is the better solution to capture your visitors’ email addresses.

Optimization

Optimizing your landing pages is essential. One single change can lead to a massive increase or decrease in conversion rates.

Both Unbounce and Instapage provide A/B testing features. In my opinion, the two A/B testing features don’t differ. You can create different versions of landing pages and run split tests to find the winning one.

But Unbounce and Instapage offer additional features for optimization.

Unbounce’s Smart Traffic helps you to improve conversion rates with artificial intelligence.

Just imagine – visitors use different devices, came from other locations, have different ages, and work in various jobs. Smart Traffic learns from past conversion data and sends segmented visitors to the landing page version with the highest conversion-potential.

You only need to create different landing page variants and turn on Smart Traffic.

Compared to a typical A/B test, Smart Traffic works much more efficiently. It starts optimizing your traffic distribution with data of only 50 visitors. A/B testing requires periods of random testing before you can confidently apply each learning.

Instapage provides heatmaps to optimize your landing pages. A heatmap is a graphical representation of data where values are depicted by color. Long story short, a heatmap shows you how your visitors interact with your landing page.

Heatmaps are super helpful to optimize single elements of your landing pages and get more conversions.

Both Unbounce and Instapage offer great features for optimization. Smart Traffic is a unique split testing feature, and heatmaps are also super helpful. There isn’t a winner or a loser.

Analytics

Unbounce shows you basic metrics like:

• Pageviews
• Opt-ins
• Conversions

You can access reporting data in the Unbounce dashboard. If you want more insights, you need to integrate Google Analytics. Here’s a guide on how to do that.

Setting up Google Analytics enables you to precisely track user actions, like button clicks or other conversions. There’s a wide array of conversion events you can set up with Google Analytics.

With Instapage, you can also check basic metrics:

• Visitors
• Bounce rate
• Conversions
• Conversion rate

What’s great is that you can filter metrics by period and traffic source (paid/organic). You can also connect your ad network and get valuable insights such as cost per visitor or cost per lead.

If you want more insights, you also need to set up Google Analytics.

That said, Instapage provides much more analytics features. Plus, a heatmap to analyze and optimize your landing pages.

Integrations

Integrations are essential for landing page builders like Unbounce or Instapage. Fortunately, both tools offer enough of them.

There are four different types of integrations:

• Direct integrations
• Zapier integrations
• Code injection
• Webhooks

Direct integrations connect two services directly. Zapier is a platform that links various software tools. If you don’t know Zapier, you should check it out here. Integrations via Code Injection work with 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 Unbounce and Instapage Integrations:

Unbounce:

• 21 In-App Integrations
• 42 Zapier Integrations
• 48 Integrations that work via Code Injection

Instapage:

• All in all, 120 Integrations

…as you can see, both tools nearly offer the same number of integrations.

In the end, you need to know which integrations are essential to your business. No matter which tool you choose, make sure you can integrate it with your existing marketing tools.

Therefore, I highly recommend checking out all Unbounce integrations and all Instapage integrations by yourself.

Custom Domain

You need to use a custom domain. A generic domain like unbouncepages.com harms Google Indexing and Google Ads compatibility. Also, generic domains hurt user experience and, therefore, your brand.

Just imagine – what do you think about a company that uses a generic domain like unbouncepages.com/landingpage_1/?

I guess this will seem weird to you, and you won’t be willing to buy something from such a company.

Fortunately, you can connect your custom domain with both, Unbounce and Instapage. There is no difference between both tools.

Pricing

Unbounce pricing is based on monthly visitors and the number of conversions.

Here are all their plans [monthly billing (annual billing)]:

• Launch – $80 ($72) per month – up to 500 conversions and 20.000 visitors – 1 connected domain
• Optimize – $120 ($108) per month – up to 1000 conversions and 30.000 visitors – 3 connected domains
• Accelerate – $200 ($180) per month – up to 2000 conversions and 40.000 visitors – 7 connected domains
• Scale – $300 ($270) per month – up to 3000 conversions and 50.000 visitors – 15 connected domains

Instapage offers two different plans [monthly billing (annual billing)]:

• Optimizing – $199 ($149) per month
• Converting – Custom pricing

Instapage is the most expensive solution for landing pages. That’s also a big reason why I recommend most businesses going with Unbounce. The Launch Plan is for 20.000 visitors and 500 conversions and costs only $72 per month billed annually

Collaboration

Both Unbounce and Instapage provide collaboration tools.

Since Instapage is a landing page builder for enterprises and agencies, you will likely work together with a team using it. In this case, you can make use of Instapage’s visual collaboration tool.

You can leave comments on specific elements. For example, you can leave a comment on a headline you want to change. Another team member can answer your comment or make changes to the element, while Instapage tracks all changes.

With Unbounce, you can also track a whole team’s interactions within the landing page builder. You can also export reports for easy review. What’s great is that you can give as many team members access to Unbounce as you want.

However, we would say that Instapage provides a bit better features for collaboration.

Customer Reviews

I examined all the reviews on G2 and picked out the most important ones to help you understand the pros and cons of Unbounce and Instapage.

Let’s start with Unbounce.

As already mentioned, it’s sometimes hard for people to make the mobile version look good…

However, most people feel that the drag-and-drop builder is easy to use and not limited like with other tools…

…and most people also like their templates…

What about Instapage?

Most customers don’t like the pricing structure…

However, most people found the drag-and-drop builder extremely useful…

Conclusion

Finally, which tool should you choose?

Both Unbounce and Instapage are great solutions for landing pages. It depends on your specific situation which tool is better for your business.

If you work for an agency or need to create hundreds of landing pages, Instapage might be better for you.

Apart from that, I would go for Unbounce simply because it offers more bang for your buck.