When it comes to building sales funnels for businesses, Clickfunnels has been an undisputed king for long since it was released in 2014.
There have been few competing software releases since then but nothing was close to being as good as Clickfunnels.
Until April 2018. When Kartra released, it was immediately evident to me that this is unlike any of the previous attempts. This is going to be it.
Kartra has lived up to the task. In fact, I would say it has surpassed the expectations and now it’s the best funnel building tool in the market as it offers a lot more than just building sales funnels.
Reasons why Kartra is best Clickfunnels alternative
- More features for less money
Quite simply, Kartra offers more for less money than Clickfunnels. The Etison suite in Clickfunnels that costs $297 a month offers unlimited funnels, emails, and affiliates, whereas the silver plan of Kartra costs $199 a month and offers way more features.
Below is the comparison of Etison suite plan in Clickfunnels and Silver plan in Kartra,
Remember Actionetics is just a tool to get detailed analytics of your emails and you need to connect an SMTP to send out emails to your subscribers.
For example, If you connect Sendgrid as an SMTP service, 125,000 emails will cost around 50 to 70 dollars a month. Therefore, the overall cost of the Etison suite comes to around $350 a month.
The silver plan of Kartra costs around half of that at $199 a month and offers video hosting and helpdesk portal as additional features as well.
If you use Wistia and Zendesk for advanced video hosting and help desk support along with Clickfunnels, that could easily end up costing more than $500 a month.
That's serious value for money provided by Kartra for just $199 a month.
There is also an option to pay annually and it brings down the silver plan's cost to just $139 a month.
The starter plan costs $99 a month when paid monthly and $69 a month when paid annually for up to 2500 email subscribers and 15,000 emails per month.
It is a good plan to start and test the system. However, the silver plan offers the best value for your money.
Check my detailed review of Kartra
- Complete website builder
Unlike ClickFunnels which is an exclusive funnel builder, it is possible to build complete full-blown websites in Kartra.
This is really a huge advantage if you want to have both your website and funnels within the same platform and thereby offering an integrated and seamless experience.
Also, it's possible to optimize the website for SEO with parameters like title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, etc.
- Responsive pages
ClickFunnels was released in 2014 and Kartra in 2018. Mobile traffic has increased exponentially in this time period and consists of almost 55% of overall traffic (expected to grow up to 70% in 2020).
Therefore it is imperative to have the web pages to be as responsive as possible to fit in smaller mobile screens.
Although ClickFunnels claims to be a responsive builder, the pages created often need editing separately in mobile and desktop mode.
This consumes a lot of time if you are building a lot of funnels.
Kartra's page builder is super responsive instantly and also offers a powerful hiding feature where you can hide or show specific elements on the page in either desktop or mobile mode.
- Modern looking templates
Clickfunnels has been in the market for more than 4 years, but the templates haven't become any modern looking.
It's so monotonous and widely spread, so much so that it easy to spot a page built with Clickfunnels if you haven't done some serious editing.
Kartra’s templates are really a breath of fresh air that looks clean, modern and appealing.
A lot of new templates were released in April 2019 that really look stunning.
- Better integration with WordPress
Kartra team has made it clear that they complement WordPress rather than competing.
It is possible to easily export the pages made in Kartra to a WordPress website, which simply cannot be done in Clickfunnels.
It is also possible to connect your WordPress pages to the Kartra's email platform and automation sequences.
It is as simple as making a product link in Kartra of your WordPress pages and set up tags for all the visitors to that page and the sequences will work the same as any other Kartra page.
Such level of integration is very difficult to achieve with ClickFunnels.
- Automations are much more powerful than actionetics
As good as email marketing is in Clickfunnels, automation and tagging are much more powerful and efficient in Kartra.
The behavioral adaptive marketing in Kartra offers more in-depth triggers and flows. Sequences can be built based on a specific action or even set to be sent on a specific date & time. Very useful for product launches.
- Membership sites are way better
Membership sites are clearly an afterthought addition in Clickfunnels. It’s so bare-bones in its feature set.
Kartra’s membership sites have a lot more functionality and design capabilities.
The content layout is extremely basic and the navigation is really not very intuitive compared to Kartra's membership sites.
The level of customization and flexibility is head and shoulders above that of ClickFunnels.
For example, it is possible in Kartra to update the pricing of your memberships midway through the subscription. So handy to offer special discounts to existing members and even reward them for good performances.
There are some well-documented issues from some known marketers on how they lost thousands of dollars in revenue when their users were able to access the membership content even after they have canceled or stopped paying their membership fee.
These bugs might have been resolved now, but they shouldn't have existed in the first place if there has been some good beta testing of the tools.
- Done for you campaigns
One of the high points of Kartra is its built-in campaigns.
Yes, Clickfunnels also has funnel templates, but Kartra offers whole campaigns with built-in automation, email sequence, etc.
An effective e-mail marketing strategy is vital to a successful funnel. Having a tried and tested email sequence saves a ton of time and effort when you are building your first funnel.
- Campaign sharing
While ClickFunnels offers a way to share the funnels built, in Kartra you can share an entire campaign along with all the pages built, automation and email sequence set up.
- Integrated calendar and scheduling
Kartra has an integrated calendar and appointment tool which syncs with all the automation built-in. An additional tool like Calendly will be needed with ClickFunnels to get the same level of functionality.
As the calendar functionality is built in, it blends perfectly with your emails and helps a lot in the branding of your business.
- Frequent feature updates
Kartra as a platform is evolving at a very fast pace with the frequent release of new features and updates.
It gives a lot of assurance and confidence to the customers that there are developers actively involved in listening to queries and implementing changes to improve the overall experience of using the software.
The community is very much involved in the requests for feature updates. There is even a public Trello board where any user can request for a new feature or vote for an existing request.
It also gives an overview of the features that are in the development and planning stage.
There are also plans for an agency plan where an agency can multiple clients under a single account.
- Way of promotion
ClickFunnels is no longer just a software product. It is promoted as more of a networking platform.
The company hosts events like "Funnel Hacking Live" with outrageous prices where so much hype is generated around the software.
Of course, there will be a huge number of successful marketers making a million with ClickFunnels and an equal number who has made nothing as with any other software tool.
The point is, a successful online business is based on the quality of your product or service and the tools can only assist its promotion and success.
A software tool cannot be the only reason for a great business story. Unfortunately, that's the way ClickFunnels is promoted most of the time.
It is extremely clear by this time that the events like Funnel Hacking Live and awards like 2 Comma Club are just ways to upsell to ludicrously expensive 2 Comma Club Coaching program from ClickFunnels.
Also, this way of promotion dilutes the concentration in software maintenance. Even after 4 years of release, ClickFunnels remains a bug-filled platform.
- Better support
ClickFunnels has grown to over 70,000 users and their support has not been really top-notch for a long time. The response time can be very long for some technical issues.
Kartra's support team has really been impressive until now and the Facebook group offers a lot of helpful suggestions.
There was a short server downtime in March 2019 and it was handled in the most professional manner. All users were informed immediately, reasons & corrective measures were conveyed and everything was up and running within a few hours.
As long they maintain this as they grow larger, their support is significantly better than that of ClickFunnels.