ClickFunnels offers a web page designer oriented around setting up a sales funnel easily, for those with no coding and design experience.
$97
per month
Instapage
Score 7.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Instapage, from AirSlate since the October 2023 acquisition, offers post-click automation to help digital advertisers create more relevant and impactful advertising, unifying the post-click stage of the advertising funnel. Instapage helps marketers to maximize conversions by creating, personalizing, and optimizing post-click landing pages at scale, and automatically connecting ads with relevant post-click pages.
They've done a great job of centralizing tools such as checkout order forms, form submissions, easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, and email automation all in one tool. ClickFunnels is an overall hefty funnel software and was our game-changer when we first launched it.
ClickFunnels for more complex funnels and sales pages, Insatpage for simple opt ins, and I use dont use Leadpages at all in anymore. It just didn't have the quality and I customization I was looking for.
Great for an all-in-one marketing package. From the web page to lead and email capture. Running ads to a sales funnel page to capture leads to a sale on a shopping cart page and the ability to up-sell and down-sell products with ease. Whether your business is face-to-face or online ClickFunnels has everything and more that you require to run marketing.
Well-suited for simple landing pages which don't have any complex functionality. Great for creating landing pages for lead generation campaigns - as it comes with tons of excellent templates and a variety of forms. Not great for pages that contain a lot of information and can potentially be very long. We found that Instapage is not a great fit for building pages that need to be updated frequently, like a blog page.
The ease of building landing pages is incredible. It's just drag and drop, and still very customizable. It's simple enough that anyone can build a page, not just a designer. They have simple templates to start from and you can make a great branded page easily from there.
It's great at generating leads. You can embed simple opt-in forms in webpages at the top of your landing page and integrate with your CRM and it also stores your leads in the system as well. Opting in can trigger a number of different actions, including a thank you page, a second offer, or trigger an automated email.
ClickFunnels's biggest strength is sales funnels. Easily create a continuous set of pages that get someone from a visitor to a subscriber, and to a paid customer. You don't have to "glue" a bunch of different systems together like a page builder, shopping cart, eCommerce tool, email marketing tool, or CRM. It's all interconnected so you can churn out sales quickly, all automated.
Instapage makes it easy to frame out a landing page really quickly. They provide template blocks for various components of a landing page (header, features, testimonials, etc.) that you can easily modify for your own needs. Other tools provide whole-page templates, but I much prefer the section-level templating. It's more convenient to assemble a page this way and add the details on top of that versus taking a finished template and peeling away design and functional elements to get what I want.
Instapage's mobile auto-resizer works better than other platforms I've used. I found that I had many fewer adjustments on their auto-resizing of the full page than I've experienced with other tools. I still had to work with text size a bit, but they generally did a better job of ordering elements for mobile the way I would want and maintain proportionality of page elements better.
Instapage has a lot of integrations that marketers will love. I don't know if they particularly stand out in this respect, but this is a particularly important aspect of their tool that most marketers will care about.
End USER EXPERIENCE - OH. MY. GOODNESS. This software needs help in the design department. I don't like critiquing people or products, but in this case, you need to get someone to help you with design to really make your landing page look professional (this is attached to your brand image). A lot of direct response marketers use this platform for younger brands, so typically the designed landing pages on this software don't look great.
User navigation - It's not necessarily user intuitive.
The software has interior platforms for membership courses - But this is not a great user experience for your course. A micro-course, 7-day trial, or mini-course as an opt-in offer might work here, but COACHES, do not use this as the delivery system of your membership course. Go elsewhere for that, like Teachable, MyKajabi, or Thinkific.
They need to make more room for templates. The basic plan of $99 only allows you to have 20 landing pages. According to industry leaders, you should have 40 per offer.
There are only a couple of minor issues that I dislike. One is offering a Drupal community-approved update to their module. We are using a slightly older version of Drupal and it appears they don't have plans to offer a Drupal-approved update to their module for that version.
There are also random bugs when trying to format text. For example, sometimes a sans serif font appears as a serif and doesn't seem to want to change.
If you work with a template and some code, it can be challenging to edit the default coding.
The built-in forms can be a bit limiting.
The program will try to automatically reformat for mobile, but it may not always be exactly the way you want it to look, so there is a bit of redesigning required when going to mobile.
I use the funnel on a daily basis and spent a significant sum to hire someone to set this up and design the funnel, there's no way I won't renew the funnel. It is easy to maintain, very cost-effective, and doesn't require a lot of my time to manage properly.
Very easy to use and manage. There have been a few times I have needed to make some edits or change the flow of the funnel, and even though I didn't do the initial setup, I have no problems figuring out how to make the changes on my own without their help.
I've tried all of the other landing page services on the market, and this is literally the easiest to use. I am not a designer or software developer, just a simple guy and if I can learn how to use it, anyone can. That's what won me over. Their support and pre-made templates are awesome, but the usability is what I love!
I don't think you should have to wait for more than an hour or two to get in touch with someone when you need support. Because they primarily have overseas help, it's typically at least until the next business day until you get help. Then there is the language barrier to deal with. It's not ideal. I have contacted support a few times and have gotten answers. However, I consider myself much savvier than most in terms of understanding all the behind the scenes issues that go on with building a website and online marketing funnels. So if I were a beginner or not as familiar with how to code and create websites, I would think the support is terrible.
Yes, I highly recommend you hire an expert for this. While CF claims that anyone can set up a funnel, there's a difference between having a funnel and having a funnel that works. Between the design and the copy you use, unless you have a marketing background, hire an expert.
I went with ClickFunnels due to recommendation by a digital marketing mentor. WordPress to me had too much maintenance in the background and it was more time consuming to build pages at the time. Mailchimp is an email marketing software with a website builder and landing page builder but the payment integrations where limited. Kajabi was simply out of my budget at the time and it had more features than i needed
HubSpot was terrible because it required a lot of coding experience if you wanted to work outside the given 4-5 templates. If you wanted a new template built, or to rebrand existing templates, they charged you. Very inflexible program and was very challenged by it. Our main website was built using WordPress, which is great for building webpages, but more difficult to build a landing page without the distraction of the top navigation menu. Instapage literally answered all the problems we were seeking to address: simplicity, customization, ease of use.
My clients make more money with it than without it
Other builders aren't necessarily better...we've tried and keep coming back to CF
If CF 2.0 (which launches around March I'm told) is anywhere near as impressive as Russell Brunson makes it sound, it will be a TOTAL game changer when compared to the current version...(which will still be available as well)
We've not had much of a conversion rate on some of our landing pages -- but this could be because we are relatively green with the marketing side of things and forget to send people to it. It's not easy for people to find on their own -- so I highly recommend you use some of the "hidden" SEO tools to increase the ROI. Without it, you're not going to be happy with your investment.
