Instapage vs Clickfunnels: I Tried Both And Found A Winner

The way people build websites has rapidly evolved over the years. And it's not just the "how" that has evolved, but the "what" as well. Static websites, dynamic websites, and subcategories of both came to life, like websites built entirely based on "funnels". Tools dedicated to building specific types of websites emerged, and in this blog post, we'll compare two of the most popular landing page builder options: Instapage vs Clickfunnels.

Instapage vs Clickfunnels: What's The Value?

This doesn't just apply to ClickFunnels and Instapage, but most visual page builder software out there. Back in the old days, you needed a web developer/designer to create a simple website, then tools that made life a little bit easier, such as Microsoft's Frontpage were born. These tools still required a bit of technical knowledge as well as the skills to organize and upload the pages created to a web host, and manage things from there.

When page builders emerged, they massively reduced the barrier to entry. Most offer cloud hosting accounts that support your own domain name, which means building a website is practically as easy as signing up for a Facebook account and customizing your profile.

Try out Instapage Right Here (Free Trial) or Try Clickfunnels Right Here (Free Trial)

Instapage vs Clickfunnels: General Purpose

There are many "general purpose" website builders out there, such as wix.com. Wix helps you create an online presence for your brand. ClickFunnels and Instapage, however, were created to fulfill a specific purpose: create better PPC landers (Instapage), and creating a fully functional, high-converting funnel from A-Z, including checkout (ClickFunnels).

If you just want basic online presence for your brand, meaning: a homepage, about page, team page...etc just to serve the purpose of "existing" online or educating the public about your brand without selling digital or physical products, then you might want to go with something like Wix.com or WordPress (more advanced, if you need more control).

If you're just looking to drive traffic to landing pages to encourage visitors to perform specific actions, then you should consider landing page builder software such as ClickFunnels and Instapage. It's also worth noting that if you're thinking of building a whole website that is mainly dependent on SEO for traffic, Click Funnels and IP may not be your best bet. For that, I'd recommend a WordPress website.

If you're doing that but also need the power of simple landing pages and will drive paid traffic to them, then you should consider combining WordPress with IP or CF, or a WordPress plugin such as Thrive Architect.

At the end of this blog post, I'll provide specific tool recommendations based on your needs and specific usage scenarios. For now, let's start comparing Instapage vs Clickfunnels marketing tools head to head.

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Main Use Case

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of this section, there's one thing to get out of the way first. Theoretically, you can get both tools to do the exact same thing. However, depending on your use case and the tool of choice, you might have to "glue" a lot of things together, jump through a few hoops and implement a few workarounds to get the tool to work as you want it to.

These "hacks" can cause instability, and despite all the effort you invested in them, they make things more likely to break. It's, therefore, a better approach, in my opinion, to choose the tool that "has you" and your specific use case in mind.

For instance, you can build a funnel in Instapage, but things would be more hectic than in ClickFunnels. You also can build single page landers in ClickFunnels, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the software; plus, their page builder, although very fluid and easy to use for page creation, is not as advanced as Instapage's.

It's okay, though. I understand that, in many circumstances, you'd want both. You want the PPC landers functionality as well as the full-fledged funnels. If that's your situation, then it's really a matter of asking yourself which one do you need more? If that's a hard question to answer, then ask yourself: which one brings more value to your business? Which of these two marketing tools would help you do what you do right now better and drive you more business?

As mentioned earlier, these tools target fundamentally different segments of the market, and you can see this very clearly on their website. Instapage basically positions themselves as a landing page tool for PPC advertisers, while ClickFunnels' positioning is more geared towards people looking for an all-in-one platform to "market, sell and deliver your products and services online".

Product Tour

To shed more light on the focus areas for each sales funnel tool and help you make a more informed decision, let's dive into a little product tour to compare them. This won't be a tutorial on how to use both because you can easily find support on their respective websites. Instead, this will focus more on the differences between the two.

Dashboard

So the first impression, the dashboards. I'll add both right after each other for easy comparison. Here's what I see once I log in to ClickFunnels:

And this is the Instapage dashboard:

The first thing you notice is probably the first thing I noticed as well. The ClickFunnels dashboard is pretty crowded compared to Instapage's. Now to be fair, ClickFunnels' "all-in-one" approach versus Instapage's focused approach would naturally mean that the ClickFunnels interface has to do a lot more.

The problem is, however, as you can see, the ClickFunnels dashboard isn't really crowded because it's "stuffed" with functionality but rather because "ads" are taking up most of the screen real estate. The red arrows show two "ads," and then you can see helpful notifications in between.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't really appreciate cramming a paid product with Google ads/upsells, especially one that costs $297/month. Instead, either give the whole screen real estate to stats or have this area contain only helpful notifications, like the "Let's create your first funnel" one.

This has always been Russell Brunson's approach. I really love his stuff, he's one hell of a marketer and salesperson, but his "pushy", overly pushy sales process is not always my cup of tea. When I log in to a paid landing page builder tool that helps me with my business, I want to see information about how my business is doing, front and center. While that, in a way, is still included, it's taking "minimal" screen real estate on the right-hand side as compared to the "upsells" taking all the spotlight in the middle.

On the other hand, the Instapage dashboard is what you expect it to be. It's very clean and focused. Since Instapage focuses on PPC landing pages, the dashboard displays a list of all your landers, which gives you an idea about their raw conversion numbers as well as conversion rates with a quick glance. You can also organize your beautiful landing pages into "Groups", a functionality similar to folders.

On the left-hand side, you have the main navigation providing quick access to all the major product features. The navigation bar in the upper menu has options like account settings, billing settings, help and support, and notifications.

Instapage vs Clickfunnels: Page Builder

So first, the Instapage builder. From the dashboard, when you click "Create New Page", you're presented with three options: Standard page, AMP page, and Upload page. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is a Google-friendly way of creating beautiful landing pages that load very fast. It's only available on their enterprise plans, though. The "Upload" feature allows you to upload a previously downloaded/exported Instapage lander.

Finally, the standard page is the typical Instapage functionality without any bells and whistles. Once I selected "standard", I was then asked to choose a page template or start from scratch (blank page). Landing page template categories included: Lead Generation, Two Step, Click-Through, Thank You, Webinar, eBook, Event, and App. They cover a wide range of different use cases and give you a good starting point to get your creative juices flowing. This is helpful if you don't have a solid idea of how you want your page to look yet. Once you choose a template, the page builder now loads:

One thing I noticed right away was that I was completely free to grab and move any elements on the page any way I pleased. The elements aren't "trapped" inside columns. I can freely move them around or even place them on top of each other during landing page creation. While this may seem like an obvious feature every page builder should have, a lot of builders lack it, including ClickFunnels'.

The first building block in Instapages landing page builder is called the "Instablock". The instablock is basically just a new blank section on your landing page. Once you create a section, you can then add any of the available elements to it with a click of a button and drag that element around wherever you please. The "dragging around" process is extremely fluid and responsive.

Available elements to insert when you create beautiful landing pages include: headline, paragraph, image, video, button, forms, shapes, social, timer, and custom HTML. Each of the elements is fully customizable using a very convenient inline editor.

The landing page tool also has a group of very useful settings. The "cookie bar" setting helps you easily adhere to the GDPR. You can also change fonts, connect integrations, add custom javascript and html (tracking scripts...etc) as well as view the page's editing history and restore older versions of your landing page (in case you made a fatal mistake) with a click.

Now it's time for the ClickFunnels landing page builder.

When you choose to create a new funnel with CF, you'll be presented with the above. The "Classic Funnel Builder", is just as described, their basic builder. It asks you to choose one of three objectives for your funnel: Collect Emails, Sell Product, and Host Webinar. It then asks you a few questions, and off you go to building your landing pages for your funnel.

As mentioned earlier, CF is "funnel-focused" landing page software which means every "funnel" you build is usually a series of custom landing pages, not just a single landing page as is the case with Instapage. The second, and particularly interesting way of building funnels, is using the "Cookbook".

The cookbook contains a variety of "funnel recipes," which are basically a "done-for-you" entire sales funnel that you buy (or get for free) and just edit to suit your needs. These funnels are usually built for a specific purpose and are available to "copy" to your account with a click of a button, including all the features and "steps" necessary for building the perfect sales funnel (landing page templates and pages).

To test their builder, I chose the cookbook route along with the "Lead Magnet" funnel. The "recipe" was then copied to my account and, as you can see below, included two steps: the lead capture page containing the opt-in forms as well as the "thank you" page. 

Once you're in the drag-and-drop editor, you can tell straight away that it isn't as fluid as Instapage's. To add content to your landing pages, you need to add a "section" and then add "rows". The structure of the page is generally pretty rigid compared to Instapage.

You can't freely move elements around when you optimize landing pages; elements need to be inserted and locked into sections, rows, and columns as you create landing page designs. To move any element around, you'd need to modify the structure of these "building blocks" which isn't as smooth as Instapage's. "Fluidity" may seem like a luxurious term, but when you're building landing pages and funnels at scale, speed is a really important factor, and "fluidity" helps you get things done a lot faster. The InstaPage landing page builder just feels a lot more intuitive.

That being said, there's an important question to ask here: Do you NEED this level of flexibility when you customize landing pages? In many, many cases, I think your answer will be no. If you don't need this level of flexibility and don't need to build hundreds or thousands of landing pages, then CF would serve you well.

The rest of the features are almost on par, but I noticed CF offers quite a bit more elements to insert on your landing page, including shopping cart options (which makes sense since they're an "all-in-one" solution), FAQ sections, progress bars, navigation options, surveys and more.

Split Testing and Analytics

Clickfunnels allows you to split test 1 variation of each step against a control version, for a total of two variations for each step. You can choose to distribute the traffic among the variations evenly or at any percentage you desire.

As for stats and analytics, CF assumes you'll be using their various integrations (like Google Analytics) for advanced analytics, so their dashboard provides limited (but helpful) data. Page views, number of leads/sales...etc, and conversion rates. Many people would find this way too simple, but it's actually sufficient for a lot of CF users, especially if they depend on third-party analytics software.

Instapage, on the other hand, is a lot more robust when it comes to analytics and split testing. Within the editor, I was able to instantly create 8 variants of my current landing page for split testing. I created those 8 and didn't hit any limits, so it appears you can create more.

I don't know if they have a hard limit on the number of A/B testing variations. I tried to search for that in their help center but came up with nothing. In any case, most people will only be running 2-3 variations of their landing pages at a time, so I think it's safe to say that 8 concurrent variations are more than enough for the majority of users.

As you can see above, IP also provides more data on A/B tests than the simplistic approach taken by CF. In addition to raw numbers and conversion rates for your landing pages, you also get to see the % improvement over the control variation as well as the cost per visitor and the cost per lead/sale (you need to connect to an advertising platform for that).

One minor issue that isn't really problematic but I found pretty annoying was the ability to determine the traffic share for each variation is available inside the analytics reports. This made no sense to me at all as I feel it would be much better to allow me to do this inside the editor itself.

The analytics section, in my opinion, should be exclusively reserved for viewing data and interacting/filtering different reports on your landing pages, but not adjusting important settings like this. In any case, I could've easily omitted this part, but I found the placement of the feature very weird, so I just had to comment on it.

Graphs, Reports, and Heatmaps

IP doesn't only beat CF in A/B testing capabilities, but it also offers much more comprehensive built-in reporting. IP hooks directly to major advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads. It's then able to pull traffic costs directly from the platforms and display stats such as the cost per lead/per purchase; this could be invaluable and is non-existent in ClickFunnels.

You also get performance and cost charts that plot data like raw traffic and conversion numbers, conversion rates, and cost per conversion (if the traffic source is linked). You can also see a visual comparison of this data plotted on a separate chart for your different split test variations. You can also filter data to show unique visitors only or all visitors.

A very neat feature IP also provides is heatmaps to analyze landing pages. Many third-party analytics tools provide that functionality, such as Crazy Egg, Hotjar and Lucky Orange. These analytics tools can be rather expensive, especially if you're getting a lot of traffic to your sales pages. Having the functionality built-in IP is a treat, especially because heatmaps can be a great inspiration for split-testing ideas. With Instapage, you can do it all in one place.

IP supports Click, scroll, and mouse movement heatmaps. The image below shows what heatmaps in IP look like; credits for the image go to this help center article of theirs.

Integration

Instapage integrates with a large suite of tools and services including advertising and Google analytics, email marketing automation, webinar hosting, live chat support, CRM and others. As for ClickFunnels, the only public page I found listing its integrations was this, but it's dated December 2016, so a lot may have changed since then.

It would appear Instapage natively supports more integrations, though. But both platforms support Zapier which lets you connect to over 1000 different apps, tools, and services.

Support

ClickFunnels has a massive Facebook group; it's almost 200,000 members at the time of writing this post and growing rapidly. I'm honestly not a member of the group, so I can't attest to the quality of the posts and how helpful members are with each other, but it's safe to say it's a pretty active group.

As for the official support, they seem to offer email support Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM EST.

Instapage doesn't have a massive group on Facebook, but they do have a "community" forum on their website at which you can ask questions. The "community" does appear, however, seem to only include their staff members and people asking publicly. So it's more of a "public support ticket system" rather than an actual community. If you'd rather contact them privately, you can always open a private support ticket as well.

They also say they offer Live Chat support, but I could not see a button or link to reach it (even though it's not the weekend, so maybe they stopped offering it). IP also states their support team is available Monday through Friday, but they do not specify hours or time zones.

Pricing

Instapage has two plans. The core plan costs $99/month if paid annually and $129/month if paid monthly. It includes the most common features. The Enterprise plan seems to be quoted on a case-by-case basis and includes "Global Blocks," "AMP Pages," and "Real-time collaboration," among a few other things, such as a dedicated account manager.

I don't see any "killer" features in the enterprise plan that I wouldn't be able to live without, so I think the $99/month plan would suit most people. There's a "fine print" that wasn't very easy to spot, though, which is that the $99 plan is capped at 30,000 unique monthly visitors, 30 published pages, 5 subaccounts, and 5 team members. So even if you don't need the extra features, if you hit any of those limits, you'll likely be forced to upgrade.

ClickFunnels, however, has two plans and do not advertise any "custom" plans. The plans cost $99 and $297 per month respectively, and they don't appear to advertise discounts for annual subscriptions. The $99 ClickFunnels plan is capped at 20,000 monthly visitors and 20 funnels, but do take note that the 20 funnel limit will probably end up being a lot more than IG's 30-page limit because a single marketing funnel can contain many steps/page.

So, for instance, say you want to create a landing page that leads to another and then another, then finally to a "thank you" page. That's 4 pages in Instapage. In CF, however, that's just 1 funnel. In CF, you can create 20 of those, so that's 20x4 = 80 pages. To create 80 pages in IG, you'd need the enterprise plan.

The $300 plan offers two additional major "modules." The "Actionetics" module and the "Backpack" module. Actionetics is basically a built-in e-mail service provider that aims to help you avoid paying for additional third-party tools such as ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, GetResponse….etc. Backpack allows you to run your own affiliate program, again saving you from having to pay additional fees to use tools such as iDevAffiliate or others.

In any case, both platforms offer a free trial. IG's free trial can easily be activated with no credit card required, while CF's requires a credit card to be entered.

Other Considerations

I feel this review so far may have been a little biased against ClickFunnels because Instapage clearly excelled at most points of comparison of the two landing page builders. The "Backpack" and "Actionetics" modules in the CF higher-tier plan are really helpful, though, not just because they save you from paying for third-party tools but because they help keep everything in one place—no messy integrations.

The drawback here, obviously, is that you don't get every expected feature under the sun from each of the modules. The only way you could get that is if you opt for a dedicated solution for each feature you require. The additional "gluing and stitching" involved with getting funnels to work properly with Instapage is a big turn-off for me as well if I was to use the platform primarily for funnels.

Instapage vs Clickfunnels: The Verdict

You might've heard people mention that CF and IP are apples and oranges. I agree to an extent, and after reading this, you probably understand why. At the core, both online marketing tools allow you to build landing pages using a visual drag-and-drop editor, but they're much more than that.

Ultimately, what you choose will depend on your needs. I know many people find this sentence annoying because it doesn't give enough pointers, so I'll go ahead and give you a few. Read the two groups of bullet points below, see which group better represents your landing page needs (The group containing the most bullet points you agree with, that's my recommendation for you!), then decide.

Use ClickFunnels landing page software if:

• You're creating a full-fledged sales funnel for a product, service, or webinar.
• You have a multi-step sales funnel with upsells, downsells...etc.
• You depend on third-party tools for analytics or aren't much of a data nerd.
• You need a good drag-and-drop editor that gets the job done but doesn't require the most flexibility.
• "Selling" is a big factor here. If you're not selling something, the advantages of all the features CF landing page software has to offer are lost (upsells/downsells, payments, backpack...etc).

Use Instapage landing page software if:

• You need highly flexible landing pages for lead generation, but most of your pages consist of just a squeeze page and a thank you page or a buy page and thank you page (you don't need funnels).
• Being able to move page elements anywhere you please when creating landing pages rather than be restricted by global blocks is an important feature.
• You need to split-test more than 2 variations of a landing page at the same time.
• You want to connect your traffic platforms and see traffic cost combined with landing page stats in one place for your PPC campaigns.
• You see big value in better analytics and landing page heatmaps consolidated into one platform.

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Well, that's about it! Hopefully, this puts you on the right path to choosing which suits your needs from these two best landing page builders. 

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