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There are dozens of tools for creating, maintaining, and updating landing pages for sales web platforms. With all these options, it can be difficult to parse through which platforms provide the features and the value that you need. We’re going to take a look at two of the most popular landing page development tools, Leadpages and ClickFunnels to find out which comes out on top.
Is Leadpages or ClickFunnels the best landing page tool? Because Leadpages is focused on landing page creation, it is the superior landing page tool. It has more features and a more powerful interface for landing page creation. ClickFunnels, on the other hand, is easy to use and includes a whole suite of tools for every point in the sales funnel process.
Leadpages is a dedicated landing page tool, while ClickFunnels is an all-in-one sales funnel platform. This is the general distinction between the two, but what about the details? What does each one have that the other doesn’t, and where do they overlap? Let’s talk about landing page tools and then move on to important additional features.
Landing Page Tools
First impressions matter. For many of your customers, the first interaction they have with your company will not be with you, your product, or your employees—it will be your landing page. Making a landing page that is beautiful, clean, professional, and easily navigable is crucial to showing your leads from the first moment they meet you that you are someone that they want to do business with.
If you aren’t a talented developer and don’t want to pay to hire one or keep one on staff, a landing page tool is going to be your best bet at creating a landing page that’s dressed to impress. Both Leadpages and ClickFunnels have powerful tools that make it amazingly easy to design, edit, and launch a landing page that looks great with no training and no background in web development.
These tools are going to allow you to spend less time and less money monkeying around with your website every time you want to make an adjustment. This will allow you to spend more time doing what you really enjoy, running, and growing your business.
When it comes to landing page creation, these tools have a lot of overlap in features and functionality. Each software also has advantages that are uniquely it’s own. Let’s breakdown the best features of each platform.
Leadpages
Leadpages is widely considered to be the best landing page tool on the market. Leadpages allows for customized landing pages and opt-in forms. Once you become familiar with landing pages, you’ll start seeing it all over the web. Its popularity is immediately apparent.
Templates
What immediately sets Leadpages ahead of the competition, including ClickFunnels are its templates. Leadpages has hundreds of professionally designed templates. There is a wide variety of styles and formats to choose from. All these styles are not only gorgeous but tested and proven to drive traffic and produce results.
If the ideas of sorting through dozens of templates to find what you’re looking for seems intimidating, don’t worry. Leadpages provides filtering tools so that you can sort down to just a handful of templates that are closest to what you’re looking for.
A platform like ClickFunnels cannot compare with the sheer volume of templates available through Leadpages. No matter what product you’re pushing, what aesthetic you’re going for, or what industry you’re involved in—Leadpages has a template for you.
Drag and Drop
Once you’ve selected a template, Leadpages allows you to make the page your own with their drag and drop editor. The editor allows snap to place text boxes, opt-in pages, countdown timers, and other elements. You’ll be able to work your page however you need to and can edit the site quickly and easily at any time.
The drag and drop editor makes creating your webpage a snap and doesn’t require you to be a designer, a programmer, or a developer to make the page your own.
Customization
If you do have a little more web coding know-how, Leadpages allows you to view, edit, and export the HTML script for each page you create. The customization options in the drag and drop editor are certainly impressive, but sometimes you need to add that extra special something or to make that slight adjustment to make things perfect.
If you’ve got an understanding of HTML, a program like ClickFunnels that doesn’t allow for customization of the code directly can be frustrating, especially when you know that something isn’t quite right, and you know exactly how to make it perfect.
A/B Testing
Split testing is a powerful tool that allows you to make two separate lead pages and see which drives traffic, opt-ins, and conversions more than the other. Sometimes selling online is more art than science, and other times you need a little science. Split testing can help you find and define that secret sauce that allows you to generate leads, generate sales, and generate profit.
A/B Testing with Leadpages is simple and provides a suite of analytic tools, including conversion tracking and optimization, ROI analytics, real-time analytics, and a host of reporting tools on a variety of metrics. Knowledge is power, and the more you understand about how your landing page is connecting with potential customers, the more you gain the opportunity to understand them and sell to them.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a remarkably simple platform to use. Build your sales funnel from the ground up and run it at every stage through ClickFunnels. The major advantages around ClickFunnels as a landing page builder are all going to center around its ease of use, which is highly respected in the field of sales.
Drag and Drop
Similar to Leadpages, ClickFunnels uses a drag and drop system to edit premade templates. While there isn’t the same wide selection of templates as with Leadpages, ClickFunnels is widely praised for its simple and intuitive customization tools. So, whatever template you start with, you can quickly make it your own.
Use the drag and drop tools to create something that presents your brand and sells your product. You can easily make changes as you feel they’re necessary and publish the changes immediately.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is another point of parity between the two platforms but an important one. If you aren’t constantly improving your business, then you’re falling behind. You need to be testing what works and what doesn’t, and you need to do it regularly. Split testing isn’t just a handy feature; its permission to play for a landing page tool today.
A/B testing for ClickFunnels is built right into the dashboard for the page. It’s easy to use, and the results are easy to interpret.
Ease of Use
While both platforms are drastically easier than designing, coding, and testing a landing page yourself—ClickFunnels edges out Leadpages in this regard. With ClickFunnels, you can put together a website that will immediately begin generating business for you in just minutes.
Once you see how easy it is to get started with ClickFunnels, you’ll be eager to start your next funnel, your next project, your next business. You’ll never get slowed down by web-development and execution again.
Website Hosting
ClickFunnels further cuts costs and justifies its higher price point by providing web hosting services. (Leadpages does this as well, but only on its premium service platform.) When you’re working through ClickFunnels, you’ll never have to worry about finding and paying a web host. It’s all handled in-house as part of your monthly subscription fee.
Other Features
Creating a great landing page is an important step in creating your online business. However, there’s a lot more that goes into running an online sales funnel than just having a gorgeous landing page. You’ll want to:
- keep in touch with your email list
- market to your leads
- take payment from customers ready to purchase your products/services
- stay in contact with visitors through multiple channels
Frankly, this is still only scratching the surface of what goes into running this type of business. While Leadpages is almost indisputably the top dog of landing page creation, the accessory features are where the all-in-one system of ClickFunnels really shines.
Leadpages is designed to integrate into additional programs and services like an autoresponder, CRM tool, marketing automation, and digital advertising. However, you’ll need to pay for each of these additional services. Then you will need to figure out how to integrate these services into Leadpages (which may cost even more money).
With ClickFunnels, you can use third-party integrated software if you prefer, but these services all come built-in ready to go. Control your entire funnel from one dashboard without a lot of fussing around with different platforms. ClickFunnels may be a jack of all trades, master of none—but there is an added simplicity with paying and learning to use a single service.
Lead Pages
While most of Leadpages useful features are directly tied to its landing page creation tools, there are a few other features that make it more useful and give it a distinct advantage over ClickFunnels.
Analytics
Leadpages has a full suite of analytics tools so that you can measure, track, and improve the performance of your landing page. You can use Leadpages analytics to measure the following metrics
- views
- unique views
- conversions
- conversion rate
- earnings
The analytics tools in Leadpages allow you to view these metrics for each page as a table or as a graph over time. Being able to track trends over time can really help you visualize how your reach, influence, and brand are growing. Analytical tools allow you to celebrate successes and milestones while also pinpointing possible improvements.
For even more powerful analytical tools, many people connect a third-party analytics tool. Google Analytics is extremely popular and provides powerful tools for marketers who need that extra bit of insight.
Sub Accounts
One awesome feature of Leadpages is the ability to create sub-accounts. Sub-accounts allow you to create a separate account, with a unique login and dashboard, connected to your main Leadpages account.
Sub Accounts can be useful in a number of ways. For agencies or developers, subaccounts allow you to give your clients access to just their landing page without providing access to your entire account. Sub-accounts can also be useful for larger businesses with multiple locations. Allow each of your locations to adjust their page to their own market while still being supervised from the headquarters account.
You can use up to five subaccounts on Leadpages’ advanced account and an unlimited number on their premium package. But, if this feature is going to be useful to you, it’s well worth the price tag, and it’s a feature that you’re unlikely to find somewhere else.
ClickFunnels
Where ClickFunnels really shines is the strength and robustness of its all-in-one platform. ClickFunnels allows its users to interact with customers at every level of the marketing process with no third-party software whatsoever.
While Leadpages users have access to many of these features, they will need to get them from another platform and spend time setting up integrations. Let’s go over some of the amazing additional features of ClickFunnels and the alternative programs that allow Leadpages users to get the same functionality.
Autoresponder
Many people use a landing page not for selling a product directly (or not just for selling a product directly), but to capture lead information for further contact and follow-up. Having an email list is a great way to get into contact with people who have interacted with your landing page, but an email list alone is almost useless without an autoresponder.
An autoresponder allows you to contact different types of leads with different tailored messages based on a set of preset parameters. For example, if a lead visits my page, supplies their email address for a magnet offer on my landing page and then doesn’t convert on my upsell, I can have my autoresponder automatically send them an email offering them a discounted price or asking again for the sale.
And this is just one condition that an autoresponder can react to. You set the parameters and use your landing page to generate the maximum amount of growth for your business.
There are a great number of autoresponder services out there. Aweber and MailChimp are among the most popular. Both of these services offer some sort of free trial and cost as little as $20/month after that. But with ClickFunnels your autoresponder is built into your landing page and is easy to manage from the same dashboard.
Sales Flow
Perhaps the most brilliant feature of ClickFunnels is the ability to intelligently move your visitors through a different sales flow based on their interactions at each stage. You can lead page visitors through upsell pages, Downsale pages, cross-sell pages, and more. ClickFunnels is designed to convert rather than simply inform or act as a web presence. A ClickFunnels page is laser-focused on making money.
For example, you might attract visitors to your page with a magnet offer, this can be anything free or heavily discounted that your target customer is interested in. Perhaps a free guide or a sample product. Once you’ve captured customer information on the magnet offer, hit them with an upsell—tickets to a webinar or a large order of product. If they don’t bite on the upsell, bring them to a Downsale page before taking them to the thank you page.
The sales flow process built into ClickFunnels works, and it will give your visitors a dynamic, guided tour through your brand and offerings. The sales process doesn’t even end at the thank you screen. With autoresponder services and multi-channel marketing options, you can follow up and keep contact with leads in more ways than you thought possible.
Multi-channel CRM
Email is the classic form of direct online marketing, and it has a lot of strengths. Emails allow for detailed, carefully crafted messages to be sent to your target audience. However, people don’t use email the same way they did 10 years ago. In fact, if your customers are using certain email providers, your messages may get sent directly to a promotions tab or spam folder.
If you want to reach your customers where they live, you need to contact them in the way that they are most likely to see and respond to your message. This means a multi-channel approach. The premium version of ClickFunnels allows you to reach out to your mailing list via text, social media direct messaging, targeted ads on major online platforms, as well as by email.
You can include these additional channels of communication in the smart autoresponder flow you set up through your funnel.
Say you send an email promoting a big upcoming event. You’re investing a lot in this event, and you want to maximize your turnout. If your customer doesn’t open that email with a certain amount of time, say two hours, they’ll get a social media message inviting them to the event. If they don’t respond to that, they’ll get a bombardment of targeted ads making sure they know the deal.
A multi-channel CRM is the only way to reliably connect with people in the current marketing climate. There are some great CRM tools out there, including Infusionsoft and Salesforce. If you’re more comfortable or more familiar with these platforms, they can be easily connected to both Leadpages and ClickFunnels.
Checkout
To go along with its smart sales flow, ClickFunnels has an equally advanced checkout process. While Leadpages has a built-in checkout tool that works great, it’s only going to allow you to take payment for a single transaction at a certain price at one time.
ClickFunnels allows you to capture payment information only once and use it throughout the upsell, Downsale process. Say you’ve got that really enticing magnet offer. Your customers come to your site to get a really discounted price on your most basic offer, and then you hit them with an upsell. They can now purchase that upsell with a single click because you’ve already captured their information.
It’s not like entering payment information is difficult, but you’ll be amazed by how much more you convert when you make the sales process as easy as possible for the customer. This isn’t simply a convenience factor, this could be the difference between a customer hitting “buy now” and deciding to wait for another time.
ClickFunnels’ advanced checkout process can help you make more money buy making it easier for your customer to spend it. That’s a huge win over Leadpages.
Pricing
Both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. Generally speaking, Leadpages is the better landing page tool, but ClickFunnels is much more powerful overall. But the big question remains, which is a better value at its price.
Both platforms have multiple subscription levels. Let’s get into what’s included at each of these levels and why you might (or might not) want to pay for them.
Leadpages Pricing
Leadpages is by far the cheaper of the two platforms, and this shouldn’t come as any surprise, it does a lot less overall. However, if all you really need is a landing page tool, or if you’re really attracted to some of the unique features of Leadpages then it’s a really affordable option that will help you create stylish landing pages.
Start
Price: $19/month or $180/year
Start is essentially the bare bones, trimmed down version of Leadpages. It doesn’t include many of the features we’ve lauded as being the best aspects of Leadpages. Perhaps most devastatingly, you don’t get access to Leadpages’ massive library of templates.
Features included are:
- 1 website
- 1 custom domain (included if on annual pricing)
- Unlimited traffic and leads
- Lead notifications
- Drag and drop editor
Standard
Price: $37/month or $300/year
Standard is the base software for Leadpages. It includes most of the features we’ve raved about. Standard will get you the best landing page creation tool in the business and not a lot else. If a landing page tool is all you need, the price is right, and the service is excellent.
These features include:
- 1 website
- 1 custom domain (included if on annual pricing)
- Unlimited traffic and leads
- Lead notifications
- Drag and drop editor
- Unlimited landing pages, pop-ups, and alert bars
- 200+ landing page templates
- HTML and custom code editing
- Digital file hosting and delivery
Pro
Price: $79/month or $576/year
Pro gets you the best service lead pages has to offer. Perhaps most importantly, pro allows you to build three websites off a single subscription instead of just one. If you’ve got multiple projects or businesses, this is an incredible value. Pro will also give you access to Leadpages’ split testing system and checkout tools as well as some limited CRM functionality.
Features include:
- 3 websites
- 1 custom domain (included if on annual pricing)
- Unlimited traffic and leads
- Lead notifications
- Drag and drop editor
- Unlimited landing pages, pop-ups, and alert bars
- 200+ landing page templates
- HTML and custom code editing
- Digital file hosting and delivery
- Online payments and checkout system
- Unlimited A/B testing
- Email trigger links
- 10 opt-in text campaigns
ClickFunnels Pricing
ClickFunnels is easily the more expensive of the two platforms. It’s two or three times more expensive. While the actual landing page builder is slightly more basic than with Leadpages, you’ll see when we get to the bullets here that the number of features included is staggering. ClickFunnels is a one-stop-shop that provides all the tools you need to run your digital business under one roof.
ClickFunnels
Price: $97/month
The base version of ClickFunnels isn’t slouching on features. This is going to get your page up and running and allow you to start making money on the site immediately. Some of ClickFunnels’ coolest features are sealed away in the Etison suite, but the base version is more than adequate to let you hit the ground running.
Features include:
- 20 websites
- 3 custom domains
- 100 pages
- 20,000 visitors
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited A/B split testing
- Email Integration
- Opt-in forms and pop-ups
- Checkout forms
- Full library of landing page templates
- Unlimited members
- Upsell, downsale, and cross-sell pages
- Share funnels
Etison Suite
Price: $297/month
The base version is perfect for getting your landing page up on the web, but the full power of ClickFunnels is unlocked with the Etison Suite. We’ve already given detailed descriptions of some of our favorite features of the Etison Suite, but the full list is quite impressive. Suffice to say that while the price for the Etison Suite looks high, you won’t be paying out to any third parties for additional services.
Some of these services include:
- 20 websites
- 3 custom domains
- 100 pages
- 20,000 visitors
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited A/B split testing
- Full library of landing page templates
- Unlimited members
- Upsell, downsale, and cross-sell pages
- Actionetics analytics tools
- Send broadcast emails
- Track email opens and clicks
- Send emails based on location
- Send emails based on social media
- Unlimited affiliates
- Unlimited commission plans
- Subscription plans
