ClickFunnels vs. Instapage vs. WordPress

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Wordpress is a great solution for a website of nearly any type. It may not be as suitable if a fully custom solution or app is needed, and it does have some limitations when it comes to connecting it to external products (especially if the product doesn't have any support from a native system), and it does require a lot of testing. Multiple plugins in one install are common but also increase the risk of conflicts, and when those do occur, it can be exceptionally time-consuming and tedious to identify what is causing the issue. As third parties create many plugins, you're also at risk with each potential security breach, which needs to be kept in mind. I would be cautious to use WordPress to store any sort of sensitive PPI. That said, it's a wonderful, easily customizable solution for many, many different types of websites and can allow even inexperienced client users with low-tech knowledge to update basics.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The complications we have and the lack of support. Every plugin has a differente team of support in charge and make one plugin work with the other one always affects the website performance. It's a thousand times better to have only one provider with all functionalities included unless you are an expert web developer or have a team dedicated to it

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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!

Extremely easy to use and train users. It took very little time to get everyone trained and onboarded to start using WordPress. Anytime we had any issues, we were able to find an article or video to help out or we were able to contact support. The menu options are well laid out so it is easy to find what you are looking for.

Incentivized

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

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.

Incentivized

Again, support is just awesome. I've never had any issues go over 24 hours and the people are friendly and speak English really well.

I give this rating, which I believe to be a great rating for a community based support system that's surrounding it. Most platforms and products have their own, and as WordPress does have their own team that help here and there, a lot of it's handled by community involvement with dedicated users who are experts with the system who love to help people.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

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.

Incentivized

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

WordPress isn't as pretty or easy to use as certain competitors like Jimdo, Squarespace or HubSpot, but it makes up for it with its affordability, familiarity and the ability to find quality outside help easily. The same can't be said for certain competitors, as you might need to find an expert and it could get costly.

Incentivized

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• 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)

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

Incentivized