ClickFunnels vs Instapage – Which Is Better?

Businesses use landing pages to attract visitors and possibly convert them into customers. Landing pages are like regular web pages except that they contain specific information customers need to learn about and patronize a business, product, or service.

Landing pages usually feature a contact form or other call to action. If a visitor takes action as intended, they become leads and if they end up patronising, it’s a new customer for the business.

As a business, your landing pages have a higher chance of converting regular visitors into leads if you use only the best ones. There are many landing page builders you can use but not all are reliable.

Nevertheless, thousands of businesses who use Instapage and ClickFunnels attest to them being very reliable. If you have to opt for one, this article will help you decide which is better than the other.

So, without delay, let’s get started with the ClickFunnels vs Instapage comparison.

What Is ClickFunnels?

ClickFunnels is a funnel building platform for online businesses. With this platform, it’s easy to create professional funnels that will convert your site visitors into leads and customers in no time.

ClickFunnels records more than 100 thousand users, close to 2 billion contacts, and it’s been used to build over 9.5 million funnels. The platform has features to offer a step-by-step guide to customers, direct them to the important elements, and follow them up when they leave.

Some of the key tools ClickFunnels come with includes a drag and drop web page editor, fast sales funnel builder, smart shipping cart, Facebook and email marketing integrations.

What Is Instapage?

Instapage is a suite of multiple tools businesses can use to increase their conversion rates. The tools available include Landing pages, Experimentation, Personalization, AdMap, Collaboration, and Page Speed.

However, more emphasis is on the Landing page tool when comparing Instapage and ClickFunnels. The Instapage landing page builder is no doubt one of the best page builders around.

It consists of millions of web pages with over 500 customizable layouts. Instapage Personalization and Experimental are useful in increasing user engagement and optimising your landing pages respectively.

How Instapage & ClickFunnels Are Different From Other Tools

A number of general-purpose website building tools are available out there like WordPress and Wix.com. Wix.com helps people create a website for their brand.

Image: ClickFunnels

On the other hand, Instapage and ClickFunnels are created for a specific purpose.

Instapage helps users create better PPC landing pages while ClickFunnels helps them create high-converting, fully functional funnels.

If a user only wants to create a basic online presence – like homepage, services, about us page, — that serve the purpose of educating people about their brand, they might go with something simple like Wix or WordPress.

However, if a person wants to drive traffic to a landing page to encourage online users to perform an action, they should consider using Instapage or ClickFunnels.

Image: Instapage

It is important to realize that if a user wants to build a whole website from scratch that’ll depend on search engine optimization (SEO) for traffic, then Instapage and ClickFunnels wouldn’t be the right pick. For that, WordPress would be best.

If a user is doing SEO, but also needs landing pages and will use paid ads to drive traffic to them, they should consider using ClickFunnels or Instapage with WordPress.

What Purpose Does Instapage & ClickFunnels Serve?

Before we get into the review of the two tools, it is important to point out that both these tools do the same thing.

However, depending on what a user intends to do and the tool they choose, they may have to implement some workarounds and jump through some hoops to get the ClickFunnels or Instapage to work as they want it to.

Therefore, we would recommend people to use the tool that is designed specifically for their use case.

Image: Instapage

For example, Instapage can be used for building a funnel. However, things would be very hectic for the user.

Similarly, single page landers can be built in ClickFunnels, but that isn’t what the software is designed to do.

Their page builder is easy to use and fluid, but it isn’t as advanced as that of Instapage.

In many circumstances, a user would want both. They would want the functionality of PPC landers and also the full-fledged funnels.

In that case, the user must ask – which one do they need more? Or which one provides more value to their business? Which tool can help them do what they are doing right now better to drive more business to them?

Image: ClickFunnels

The two tools target different segments and this can be seen on their website. ClickFunnels positions themselves as a platform for marketing, selling and delivering products and services online.

On the other hand, Instapage positioning is geared towards PPC advertisers who want to create landing pages.

Now let’s move to a more detailed comparison of the two tools.

Dashboard

The first thing to note about the dashboards of the two tools is that the ClickFunnels’ dashboard is very crowded compared to that of Instapage.

This is understandable as ClickFunnels takes an all-in-one approach while Instapage’s approach is more focused.

However, the main problem is that the dashboard of ClickFunnels isn’t crowded with functionality but rather stuffed with ads that take up a lot of the screen space.

Users won’t appreciate seeing ads in a paid product that costs $297/month. ClickFunnels shouldn’t have wasted the valuable screen real estate by displaying ads on it.

It would have been better if the area contained helpful notifications or some kind of stats.

When a user logs in to a tool that they paid for, they expect to see information about how their business is doing.

While that is included in ClickFunnels, it is only taking a small portion on the right side of the screen as compared to ads in the middle that take all the spotlight.

The Instapage dashboard is better and is what a user expects it to be. It is focused and clean and ads don’t take the screen real estate.

Since Instapage is mostly focused on PPC landers, its dashboard displays all the landers of the user giving them an idea about their conversation rates and raw conversion numbers in a glance.

They can also be organized into Groups.

The main navigation can be found on the left side and this provides access to all major features.

In the upper menu, there is a navigation bar providing an option like billing settings, notifications, account settings, and support.

Page Builder

Let’s talk about the page builder of Instapage first. Users can find the “Create New Page” option in the dashboard and when they click it they’ll be presented with three different options – Upload page, AMP page, and Standard page.

With the upload feature, a user can upload a previously exported or downloaded Instapage lander.

AMP is an abbreviation of Accelerated Mobile Pages and it’s a way of creating website pages with very fast loading time.

Image: Instapage

Standard page is a simple Instapage functionality. When a user selects it, they’ll be given the option to either create from scratch using a blank page or use a template.

Different categories of landing page templates are available including lead generation, thank you, webinar, eBook, two-step, app, event, and click-through.

They cover different use cases and provide a starting point to the user. This is especially helpful for users who don’t have an idea of how they want their page to look like.

Once a user chooses a template, the page builder will load another page with options to customize the template.

The user can grab and move elements on the template page in any way they please.

The elements are not trapped inside columns so they can be moved around easily and placed on top of one another.

While this feature should be available in every page builder, ClickFunnels’ page builder and many others don’t have it.

Instablock is the first basic building block a user builds using Instapage. It is just another blank section on the page.

Once the user creates a section, they can add any available elements to the Instablock by clicking on it and dragging it wherever they please.

We like this dragging feature, as it is extremely responsive and fluid.

The elements that a user can insert on their page include buttons, forms, headlines, paragraphs, videos, images, custom HTML, social sharing, and timer. Each of these elements can be customized with a convenient inline editor.

In addition, there are some very useful settings available in the page builder.

A user can connect integrations, change fonts, and add custom HTML and JavaScript. In addition, they can view the editing history of the page and restore older versions.

Image: ClickFunnels

When a user chooses to create a funnel with ClickFunnels, they will be presented with a classic funnel builder.

It will ask them to choose one of the three objectives for their funnel – host webinars, sell products, and collect email addresses.

A user will have to answer a few more questions and then they can start building their funnel.

As we mentioned earlier, ClickFunnels is funnel-focused so every funnel a user builds isn’t a single page but rather a series of pages.

Another way to build funnels using ClickFunnels is with the cookbook.

The cookbook contains funnel recipes which are essentially ‘ready-to-use’ funnels that a user can buy and edit to suit their needs.

Usually, the funnels in the cookbook are built for a specific purpose.

They can be copied to an account with a simple click of a button and they will come with all funnel steps.

The editor of ClickFunnels is nowhere as fluid as that of Instapage.

If a user wants to add content to their page, they must first add a section and follow up by adding rows.

The page’s structure is more rigid than Instapage’s.

A user cannot move elements around freely – elements must be inserted into sections, columns, and rows.

So if a user wants to move any element around, they must modify the building block’s structure first which makes the process cumbersome.

Fluidity is extremely important when building funnels and landers at scale. A user won’t be able to get things done faster if the page builder isn’t fluid.

The Instapage builder is more fluid and more intuitive than ClickFunnels’ and it can get the job done faster.

However, it is important for a user to consider this question – Do they need a higher level of flexibility? Many users don’t require a high level of flexibility as they aren’t building many landers.

If that is the case, then they wouldn’t mind the functionality of ClickFunnels’ page builder.

Other features of the ClickFunnels’ page builder are almost similar to Instapage.

However, ClickFunnels does offer some more elements to insert on the page including FAQ sections, surveys, navigation options, progress bars, shopping cart option and more.

Analytics & Split Testing

ClickFunnels assume that the user will be using different integrations for advanced analytics.

This is perhaps the reason their dashboard only provides limited data. Conversion rates, number of leads, page views, etc. can be viewed.

For many people, this is very simple and not enough. However, some ClickFunnels users – especially those who rely on third-party analytics tools – would find the analytics options sufficient.

As for split testing, using ClickFunnels, a user can split test one variation of each funnel step against a control version.

A total of two variations are allowed for each step. The user can distribute the traffic at the percentage they desire or evenly among the variations.

Image: Instapage

Instapage is more robust than ClickFunnel in both split testing and analytics.

Within the editor, the user can instantly create several variations of their current lander for split testing.

It is possible to create more than two variations in Instapage.

Instapage provides more data on A/B testing than ClickFunnels. In addition to conversion rates and raw numbers, a user can see the percentage improvement over the control variation, cost per lead and cost per visitor.

To see the cost per lead, an advertising platform must be connected with Instapage.

Report Building, Heatmaps, & Graphs

Instapage doesn’t just take the lead over ClickFunnels in A/B testing, but it also provides a better report building feature.

It directly hooks to major advertising platforms like Google Ads.

Then it is able to gather traffic costs from those platforms and display stats like cost per lead, cost per purchase, etc. This functionality isn’t available in ClickFunnels.

In addition, Instapage provides users with cost and performance charts that show plotted data like conversion numbers, cost per conversion and conversion rates.

You can even filter data to show the unique visitors from the total visitor count.

Another impressive feature of the Instapage is heatmaps. This functionality is generally provided by third-party tools like Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg.

However, these tools are expensive, especially for users who get a large amount of traffic.

Therefore, it’s great to have heatmaps functionality available in the Instapage. You can do all the split testing in one place thanks to the impressive functionality of Instapage.

Support

ClickFunnels has a huge Facebook group, it has about 271,000 members right now.

This group is pretty active and the members are helpful. The official support is offered through an email Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM EST.

The Facebook group of Instapage doesn’t have a lot of members, but there is a community forum on their website where you people can ask questions.

The community appears to have people who ask questions publicly and staff members.

As for the official support, Instapage states that their support team is active Monday to Friday. However, their hours have not been specified.

Some Important Considerations

It is important to mention two important modules – Follow-Up Funnels (formerly known as Actionetics) and Backpack – that a user gets in the ClickFunnels’ $297/month plan.

Follow-Up Funnels is an email service provider that can help users avoid paying for third-party email tools like Drip, GetResponse, MailChimp, etc.

Backpack allows users to run their own affiliate program so again it saves them from having to pay fees for using third-party tools.

Follow-Up Funnels and Backpack aren’t just helpful because they save users from paying additional fees for third-party platforms, but because they make the user’s work easier by giving them everything they would need in one place.

Instapage vs ClickFunnels: Pricing

Instapage

Instapage has only two pricing plans. This includes:

Building Plan

• Monthly Payment: $299 per month
• Annual Payment: $199

Converting Plan

• Pricing is customized according to your needs

Note: for the Building Plan, you get 33 percent off if you choose to pay annually.

Some of the features of the Building plan include; Unlimited Domains, Customer Success Manager, Sophisticated A/B Testing, Landing Page Builder, Server-Side A/B Testing, and Real-Time Visual Collaboration, among others.

ClickFunnels

On the other hand, and similarly, ClickFunnels has two main pricing plans. The plans include:

• Click Funnels: $97 per month
• Click Funnels Platinum: $297 per month

The main difference with the Click Funnels and Click Funnels Platinum plan is that you can build unlimited pages, tunnels, and follow-up funnels with Platinum.

Also, Click Funnels Platinum gives you access to priority support, more payment gateways, and domains.

ClickFunnels vs Instapage: Pros And Cons

ClickFunnels Pros

• Ideal for building sales funnels
• Customization and Personalization
• Third-party integrations
• All-in-one platform
• Easy to use
• Customizable templates
• Reliable customer support

ClickFunnels Cons

• Doesn’t support integration with other landing page building apps
• It has a steep learning curve
• Unlike other cheaper ClickFunnels alternatives, it is relatively expensive

Instapage Pros

• Ideal for building landing pages
• Easy to use
• Personalization and customization
• Customizable page templates
• Built-in analytics
• Third-party integrations
• Real-time collaboration

Instapage Cons

• Limited to landing pages
• Support is not very swift

Is Instapage Better Than ClickFunnels?

ClickFunnels and Instapage are both very popular and reliable landing page and sales funnels platforms. Whether Instapage is better than ClickFunnels or not depends on your needs because both have different uses.

Generally, Instapage is more reliable than ClickFunnels. From the above article, you can confirm that Instapage has a lot richer features than ClickFunnels.

For instance, Instapage integrates with more third-party platforms than ClickFunnels. Also, ClickFunnels is limited when it comes to A/B testing, unlike Instapage which has a built-in A/B testing tool.

However, Instapage is inferior to ClickFunnels when it comes to sales funnelling.

The Final Verdict – ClickFunnels vs Instapage

So which one is better? The answer is ClickFunnels.

If a user is creating a sales funnel for a service, product or webinar, etc or if they have a multi-step funnel, then ClickFunnels would be best for them.

Not to mention, ClickFunnels is a better option for users who don’t require a lot of flexibility with the page editor and rely on third-party tools for analytics.

We hope that you will find our comparison of Instapage and ClickFunnels helpful in choosing the tool that is best suited for your needs.