Thanks to the power of the Internet, society is connected as ever. This connectivity leaves a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs and businesses to attract new leads and customers online. One of the easiest ways to do this is to drive traffic to a landing page. These landing pages are designed to sell a prospective customer on products or services or capture a lead for a future sale.
In the following comparison guide, we will cover two of the most popular landing page platforms on the market: ClickFunnels vs Leadpages. Our team will compare these two services head-to-head across an assortment of criteria to ultimately determine which landing page/sales funnel service is the best value overall.
TL;DR – Quick Comparison
ClickFunnels
The Leader In Landing Pages & Sales Funnels
Founded by the marketing master, Russell Brunson, ClickFunnels has become a leader in the software, training, and community behind modern digital sales funnels and landing pages. The software is easy to learn with a drag-n-drop user interface while harnessing many third-party integrations.
Sign Up For A Free 14-Day Trial
Leadpages
An Affordable & Easy Website/Lead Builder
Leadpages is a more affordable software solution that originally was specifically designed for use with capturing leads, but has since grown to allow for in-depth sales funnels and even building traditional websites. The service is priced affordably with generous account restrictions.
Sign Up For A Free 14-Day Trial
Similarities Between The ClickFunnels vs Leadpages
- Both offer a free 14-day trial period
- Both require no knowledge of existing code
- Both offer a drag-n-drop interface
- Both are capable of A/B testing on some plans
- Both require no long term commitments
- Both offer pre-made, ready-to-use templates
- Both offer large libraries of pre-made templates
- Both offer the ability create sales pages with payments
- Both have excellent guided tutorials & user support
- Both offer Facebook groups full of active members of each platform
- Both offer support for Google Analytics & Facebook Pixel
Differences Between The ClickFunnels vs Leadpages
- ClickFunnels is more popular (84K vs 21K active sites)
- ClickFunnels has a larger official FB group (217K vs 17K)
- ClickFunnels allows you to accept your own affiliates
- ClickFunnels has more payment gateways (12 vs 1)
- ClickFunnels offers more email integrations
- ClickFunnels includes A/B testing in their base plan
- Leadpages offers more plan options (4 vs 2)
- Leadpages base plan is much cheaper ($19/month vs $97/month)
- Leadpages has less traffic restrictions on base plans (unlimited vs 20K)
Comparison Guide Shortcuts (Jump To A Section)
Company History & Popularity
Community & Events
Pricing & Affordability
Site & Traffic Limitations
Ease Of Use
Tutorials & Guides
Template Library
Email Integrations
Payment Gateways & Affiliate Support
Page Analytics
A/B Testing
Final Verdict
Company History & Popularity
ClickFunnels
Founded by Russell Brunson and a few co-founders back in 2014 when the group found the frustration to build a successful digital funnel to be too frustrating to create. The company was bootstrapped from the beginning and has taken no outside venture capital to grow into the behemoth of a software company that they become in 2019.
ClickFunnels is based in Boise, Idaho where the company was founded, but also has a location in Atlanta, GA. The company has grown significantly over the past few years with revenue surpassing $63.9M in 2017 (updated sales have not been made public) with a 4,321% growth since 2014. Inc. rated them in the #76 in their top 5000 for 2018.
ClickFunnels is widely regarded as one of the best software for creating landing pages and funnels on the market. Current ClickFunnels customers include Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, Lewis Howes, Dan Henry, Dean Graziosi, Garret J. White, and more.
Leadpages
Founded in 2012, Leadpages was co-founded Clay Collins who stepped down as CEO in 2017 but remains the board chairman. The company is currently headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and currently staffs over 50 employees (they have had as many as 164 employees, but experienced layoffs in 2016/2017).
Leadpages acquired Drip, an email marketing company on July 6th, 2016. The company received $43M in funding to date with a $5M initial financing back in 2013, an $11M Series A in 2014 and a $27M Series B in 2015.
From a popularity standpoint, Leadpages is also used by some big names in the industry including Pat Flynn, Ezra Firestone, Brian Dean,
Winner: ClickFunnels
Leadpages has been around longer, but ClickFunnels takes the cake being associated with master marketer Russell Brunson, experiencing tremendous growth despite no venture capital investments and being used by some of the well-known business personalities and marketers in the present day. ClickFunnels's growth is exponential whereas LeadPages is struggling to maintain market share.
Made Your Decision?
Community & Events
ClickFunnels
Now that we have established the massive user base of ClickFunnels, we can dive into one of the greatest strengths to the platform, and that is the ClickFunnels community. Some people are using the platform to compete against each other in the same industries. Yet what impresses me most about ClickFunnels is how many users are willing to collaborate and help one another by critiquing or suggesting successful strategies for their funnels.
Most of this collaboration happens through the official ClickFunnels facebook group, which currently has a whopping 217,766 members. The group is entirely free to join, and the amount of daily value that you can gain from being apart of this vibrant community of marketers and entrepreneurs is pretty astonishing.
Once a year (usually in February), ClickFunnels runs their very own conference called Funnel Hacking Live. This event showcases the newest trends in the landing page and sales funnel industry. FHL is not a free event and tickets aren't cheap, but it is one of the most rewarding events to attend as a marketer.
Last year, ClickFunnels had over 4,500 attendees listen to 19 speakers over 3.5 days. FHL offers a great networking opportunity for those who are looking to expand their reach and learn new strategies of how to use ClickFunnels to grow their business in the next 12 months.
Leadpages
Since Leadpages has a significantly smaller userbase, it makes sense that their official Facebook group is appropriately smaller. However, 17.6K users is still a substantial number and more than enough to get appropriate conversation and discussion that could be helpful to your success using the platform.
Unfortunately, Leadpages does not hold any live events surrounding its product or its community. Back in 2016 and 2017, they held a conference called Converted. This event focused on sharing strategies for landing pages and lead generation using Leadpages over two days. However, the Converted website still references 2017 as the last year the event ran. We assume this has been not profitable enough for them to keep hosting in recent years or the future.
Winner: ClickFunnels
The benefit of a massive community of ClickFunnels users is the high engagement among members within the Facebook group as well as the ability to attend a live conference to educate yourself on landing pages and sales funnel strategies as well as networking opportunities.
Made Your Decision?
Pricing & Affordability
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels offers a 14-day free trial period for anyone looking to sign-up and test the service before committing any monetary investment. Once that trial period is over, there are two plan options.
The base ClickFunnels plan is $97/month and includes all the core features like funnel building, custom domains, email integration, A/B testing, funnel templates, order/up-sell pages, etc. However, you are limited in total to just 20 funnels, 100 pages, 20,000 monthly visitors, and three custom domains.
Jumping up to their Etison Suite, the cost is $297/month. With this plan, you gain access to the same core features without any limitations when it comes to the number of funnels, pages, visitors, or custom domains. Additionally, you gain access to advanced features such as Actionetics (their e-mail list/autoresponder software), Backpack (their affiliate management software) and more sales options, billing integrations, and customization potential.
ClickFunnels does offer discounted annual plans that vary in price compared to the monthly rates. These are presented to you upon actually signing up for the service as an up-sell. By choosing a monthly plan, you are not locked into long-term any contract. You are free to end your subscription any time that you do feel the value of the service is no longer warranted.
Leadpages
For many years initially after its launch, Leadpages did NOT offer a free trial although they changed their tune. They now offer a 14-day free trial period that matches that of ClickFunnels. Once this trial period has ended, there are four plan options. To see a more detailed breakdown of the plans and their capabilities, visit this link. All annual plans within Leadpages include a free domain name registration of your choice.
The ‘Start' plan is priced at $19/month ($15/month when billed annually) and includes support for one website. Within this plan, you get unlimited traffic/leads, although you lose access to a lot of the basic features. These include limited HTML/code editing, limited landing pages, can't access pre-made template library, no A/B testing or digital file hosting/delivery.
Moving up to the ‘Standard' plan, it is priced at $37/month ($25/month when billed annually) and includes support for one website. This plan consists of the same unlimited usage for visitors and leads generated as well as advanced features like pop-ups, alert bars, template library (200+ pre-made landing pages), 40+ integrations (ESP, CRM, Webinar, etc.), digital file hosting & delivery and custom HTML/code editing.
A step up from this is their ‘Pro' plan, which is priced at $79/month ($45/month annually) and includes support for three websites. This offers all the same features as the Standard plan with the addition of online sales & payments, unlimited A/B split testing, email trigger links, and ten opt-in text campaigns.
Lastly, you have the ‘Advanced' plan from Leadpages, which sells for $321/month ($199 when billed annually) and includes support for up to fifty websites. This Advanced plan offers all the same features as the Pro plan while expanding to advanced integrations, 5 Pro sub-accounts, an additional 50 extra opt-in text campaigns, a 1-on-1 quick start call with a representative and access to LeadPages Virtual Workshops.
Winner: Leadpages
While both of the services offer a 14-day free trial period, LeadPages offers more plans options as well as cheaper pricing especially when you take into consideration the savings when paid annually. At the top tier, ClickFunnels gives you fewer limitations and more features for a cheaper monthly price, but LeadPages still comes out the winner in annual pricing.
Made Your Decision?
Site & Traffic Limitations
ClickFunnels
At the base plan, ClickFunnels offers the following limitations:
- 3 custom domains
- 20 funnels
- 100 pages
- 20,000 monthly visitors
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited members
At the higher-tier plan, ClickFunnels offers significantly less limitations:
- Unlimited custom domains
- Unlimited funnels
- Unlimited pages
- Unlimited visitors
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited members
Leadpages
On the other hand, Leadpages subscriptions offer
- Support for 1-50 websites (Start through Advanced plans)
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited traffic
- Unlimited leads
- Unlimited pop-ups
- Unlimited alert bars
Winner: Leadpages
While ClickFunnels higher tier plan is uncapped in terms of custom domains (aka websites), the fact that LeadPages doesn't limit you on the number of landing pages or traffic numbers across all four of their plans makes it the clear winner in terms of account restrictions.
Made Your Decision?
Ease Of Use
ClickFunnels
Designed to make landing pages and sales funnels without the time and experience needed to custom code, ClickFunnels is incredibly easy to use from a user standpoint. The organization of the user interface mixed with the drag and drop functionality is simple to learn and doesn't take years to master. There is support for advanced lead capture techniques like popups and one-click opt-ins.
For those that do want to further customize their pages with custom CSS or adjustments to aspects like padding or color, the platform does support this using their new Etison Editor. Since ClickFunnels offers many third-party integrations, you can set up complex funnels that deliver everything from email list building, payment processing, membership backends, and affiliate management without needing to leave the ClickFunnels interface.
Leadpages
Similar to CF, Leadpages offers a drag-n-drop interface for building and customizing websites on their platform. Beyond building landing pages, Leadpages can help you create an attractive opt-in popup or alert bar to display at the top or bottom of your website to help attract new leads.
Winner: Tie
Both platforms offer a drag-n-drop interface that is easy to use and does not require any prior knowledge of coding.
Made Your Decision?
Tutorials & Guides
ClickFunnels
There are a ton of valuable guides and tutorials on how to create a proper landing or sales page using ClickFunnels. For those looking to stick strictly to in-house ClickFunnels training, there is a lot of useful case studies and guides within the blog section of their website.
What I like most about the ClickFunnels help content is that it isn't merely telling you to press this button or edit that title. Instead, they help you to identify the essential aspects that make up a sales funnel or landing page. This allows you to get into the right way of thinking to apply these marketing concepts to your funnels or pages.
If you don't mind spending some money on proper training to learn landing pages or sales funnels, ClickFunnels sells a few premium training programs including:
- Dotcom Secrets (free book by Russell Brunson)
- Expert Secrets (free book by Russell Brunson)
- 30 Day Summit – Affiliate Bootcamp 2019
- One Funnel Away Challenge
- Funnel Scripts
There are plenty of successful users such as Dan Henry tho sell dedicated courses to build a marketing agency using ClickFunnels. There are also many courses to help you to create a successful online course. Doing so allows you to learn to sell to others using a sales page made with the software.
Leadpages
There isn't as extensive of a help section within Leadpages, but there still are some great resources. They do have a landing page guide which is free and pretty in-depth. This guide teaches basics of a useful landing page and how to apply these practices to your own created in Leadpages.
All of the four paid plans do offer access to “Weekly Group Coaches” as one of the features. We couldn't find a lot of details at to what this exactly entails. All things seem to point to something like a weekly webinar that goes over the basics of the service and how to get some success creating your landing pages.
Some of you may want dedicated 1-on-1 support from a Leadpages representative to get started or participate in Leadpages Virtual Workshops. To be eligible for this, then you'll need to dish out for the most premium ‘Advanced' plan which includes access to both of these benefits.
Winner: ClickFunnels
While Leadpages offers “weekly group coaches” on all of their plans, this benefit is very vague and likely more marketing hype than beneficial. ClickFunnels on the other hand offers a ton of case studies, how-to guides and several free and paid premium training books or courses via their service to help both beginner and the most advanced users perfect their funnel or landing page.
Made Your Decision?
Template Library
ClickFunnels
The beauty of using a landing page or sales funnel service like ClickFunnels is the vast assortment of pre-made templates available for you to use. There are many “free” templates available as a paid subscriber, or you can purchase premium add-on funnel templates sold in their marketplace.
While ClickFunnels doesn't list the exact number of variations available in their template library, there are hundreds. What we like best about them is the wide variety of purposes with two types: whole funnels vs single page templates. Think of these templates as an easy starting point allow you to customize and personalize the content to your liking or client before going publishing it. This saves you time when compared to starting from scratch.
If you end up signing up with ClickFunnels and get good at building your funnels or landing pages, you can become a template seller yourself. Doing so would allow you to list your templates in the CF marketplace and earn a 70% fee if someone purchases it.
Leadpages
Similar to CF, Leadpages has a template library offering over 200+ templates in total. These Leadpages templates are split between single landing pages and website theme templates so you can't necessarily make a “funnel” as easily.
Like anything else, the template can be used as a starting point to get the design or feel of the landing page down before customizing the inner content with your desired personalization.
It is worth noting that the cheapest ‘Start' plan with Leadpages does have “limited” support for HTML and custom code editing. The remainder of the plans has full access to this type of advanced customization.
Winner: ClickFunnels
While both offer large template libraries to choose from, ClickFunnels marketplace allows for other sellers to upload and sell successful landing pages or full funnels adding more variety/styles to the library as well as allowing skilled users a new revenue opportunity.
Made Your Decision?
Email Integrations
ClickFunnels
With any ClickFunnels account you can natively integrate within the following autoresponder services:
- Active Campaign
- AWeber
- Constant Contact
- ConvertKit
- Drip
- GetResponse
- Hubspot
- Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)
- Mad-mimi
- Market Hero
- Ontraport
- Salesforce
- Sendlane
Leadpages
With any Leadpages plan, you have compatibility with the following email marketing services:
Native Integrations
- ActiveCampaign
- AWeber
- Constant Contact
- ConvertKit
- Drip
- Emma
- GetResponse
- iContact
- MailChimp
Integrations via Zapier
- BombBomb
- Campaign Monitor
- Gmail
- Klaviyo
- Mad-mimi
- MailerLite
- SendInBlue
Winner: ClickFunnels
Both of them offer a variety of supported integrations with email autoresponder services, but ClickFunnels offers more native support and with some bigger players compared to Leadpages such as Hubspot, Keap/Infusionsoft and Salesforce.
Made Your Decision?
Payment Gateways & Affiliate Support
ClickFunnels
From the start, ClickFunnels was designed to be a service to create not just landing pages for capturing leads, but sales pages and full-fledged funnels. Due to this, there are many advanced features for actually making money and carrying out financial transactions through the platform.
As of the time this article was written, ClickFunnels accepts the following payment API gateways:
Native API Integrations
- Apple & Android Pay
- Authorize.net
- Bluesnap
- Keap
- NMI (Gateway Funnel Pros)
- OntraPort
- Recurly
- Stripe
Integrations via Third Party Access
- ClickBank
- JV Zoo
- Paypal
- Warrior Plus
Once you are set up with the appropriate payment processor linked to your sales page or funnel, those with the higher-tier ClickFunnels plan can utilize their Backpack feature to set up a native affiliate program. This feature allows you to be able to recruit others to sell your product or service while giving them a commission which is chosen by you during setup.
While it is an entirely optional step, the affiliate features within Backpack are stellar with excellent tracking, the ability to create multiple types or tiers of affiliates and even add an affiliate login to your funnel for easy access.
Leadpages
On the other hand, Leadpages was designed to be a simple lead capture style landing page in the original business model. While this approached worked well for them, they saw the high demand for creating a sales page like ClickFunnels can accomplish.
Due to the desire for this feature, Leadpages added a “checkout” feature with anyone on their Pro or Advanced plans back in August of 2017. Unfortunately, this feature while present is rather limited.
For example, Stripe is the one payment processor currently available. There is not an easy way to create a multi-page sales funnel with Leadpages like you can with CF nor can you allow any affiliates to help your product.
Winner: ClickFunnels
Having been designed specifically with sales in mind, ClickFunnels blows Leadpages out of the water when it comes to supported payment gateways and affiliate support. Leadpages has made strides to improve their sales page potential, but wasn't designed for this initially.
Made Your Decision?
Page Analytics & Tracking
ClickFunnels
You can see basic analytics information on your pages and funnels within the ClickFunnels dashboard. Many of you who are serious about making money with this platform will want a more robust tracking solution.
ClickFunnels allows you to insert a Google Analytics tracking code. Google Analytics will let you see more detailed metrics on your visitors, demographics, and actions. Having this data provides more insight on how to tweak your campaigns to be more successful.
Google Analytics is free to sign-up, and the most widely used analytics service for websites in existence. There is a lot of great tutorials out there on how to use it and interpret the data that it provides.
If you are looking to set up a Facebook Pixel within your sales pages or funnels, ClickFunnels allows this.
Leadpages
Similarly, Leadpages offers basic analytics for pages created on the platform. These include metrics like views, unique views, conversions (opt-ins), conversion rate (percentage), and earnings (if using checkouts).
Leadpages also allows you to incorporate Google Analytics tracking within their platform as well as Facebook's Pixel. There are step-by-step guides on how to set up both of these services on Leadpages via their website.
Winner: Tie
Both services offer basic analytics within their respective dashboards, but those wanting to dive deeper into their users' data and actions will need to install a third-party tracking source such as Google Analytics or a Facebook Pixel which are both supported on each platform.
Made Your Decision?
A/B Testing
ClickFunnels
An essential practice in digital marketing and sales is to A/B test (aka split-test) your designs or landing/sales pages to identify how different layouts, colors or wording affects conversions or user behavior.
ClickFunnels offers the ability to carry out A/B testing on both of their plans. They recommend running the split test for at least 30 days so you can get a large enough sample size to determine which variant is the most successful.
Something we like about ClickFunnels is that they give you a “confidence score” using the acquired data. This score can help you determine whether or not the platform thinks the A version will outperform the B version and vice versa.
Leadpages
Within the Leadpages platform, you have access to the ability to A/B test your pages on their higher tier “Pro” or “Advanced” plans as of 2017. At this time, there was no way to split test lead boxes or landing pages created within their drag and drop editor.
According to their documentation, they planned to introduce more versatility and feature within their split-testing functionality, but the comments section on the help article seems to feature a lot of unsatisfied users who claim these features were never carried out.
Winner: ClickFunnels
While both services do offer some form of A/B testing within their plans, ClickFunnels offers it on all of their plans whereas Leadpages only offers it on their top two plans. Additionally, Leadpages hasn't yet expanded the split testing functionality to all of their creative assets.
Made Your Decision?
Final Verdict
At this point, we have broken down the pros and cons of the ClickFunnels vs Leadpages debate. Here's a brief summary of the results of our findings to help you visualize the bigger picture:
ClickFunnels
- Company History & Popularity
- Community & Events
- Tutorials & Guides
- Template Library
- Email Integrations
- Payment Gateways & Affiliate Support
- A/B Testing
Leadpages
- Pricing & Affordability
- Site & Traffic Limitations
Tied
- Ease Of Use
- Page Analytics & Tracking
Overall Winner: ClickFunnels
While more expensive than Leadpages, ClickFunnels offers more features, greater versatility, a larger community and sales-driven focus over Leadpages so we can officially declare it as the winner for most prospective users. However, Leadpages still offers value and maybe a better choice for some especially if you are on a tight budget or simply want to create landing pages for capturing leads versus selling online.
