Kartra vs Clickfunnels 2.0: Marketing Agency Comparison (2023)

Today, I’m going to go over Kartra vs ClickFunnels. We’re going to look at a high-level showdown of these two best funnel building and marketing automation software.

This is the most up-to-date comparison where I’ll compare the new ClickFunnels 2.0 version with the recently upgraded Kartra platform.

I’m going to show you where ClickFunnels wins, where Kartra wins. We’re going to look at pricing and look at the value both of them provide.

And then finally I’m going to give you recommendations on which software you should choose based on my experience and other digital marketing experts.

Kartra vs ClickFunnels 2.0 TL;DR

Kartra seems to be a more all-rounded digital marketing platform at first, but ClickFunnels recently launched a new ClickFunnels 2.0 version that was designed to be an all-in-one sales and marketing automation software.

And after the launch of the new ClickFunnels 2.0 version, the differences between ClickFunnels and Kartra are not that remarkable.

Compared to the old version, ClickFunnels 2.0 is now a more comprehensive platform overall and offers many new tools like marketing automation, visual funnel builder, blog builder, team collaboration, CRM, real-time analytics, and most importantly – a newly upgraded email marketing platform.

So if your main goal is to build sales funnels and sell products online, and you are looking for a more intuitive and easier-to-use platform, then ClickFunnels 2.0 is for you. With ClickFunnels, you’ll also get more comprehensive training on not just how to use their platform, but also how to build sales funnel, generate leads, etc.

Although ClickFunnels now offers much more than before, it lacks typical tools for business owners like a booking calendar, helpdesk system, CRM system, and video hosting. And for this reason, Kartra is better suited for business owners and marketing agencies since they also have something called Kartra Agency where you can run and manage client accounts.

Kartra and ClickFunnels provide free trials for our readers, so we highly encourage you to try out both platforms to see which one works best for your business.

 Kartra 30-day extended trial

 ClickFunnels 2.0 30-day trial

If you have used either of the software before, you will know that both of them are super powerful tools.

But is ClickFunnels really the best Kartra alternative to run your online business?

Well, both tools have many things in common but there are some big differences that you should know about before making a decision.

ClickFunnels is more focused on creating sales funnels and optimizing the funnel to get the highest amount of conversion rates.

On the other hand, Kartra is more of an all-in-one digital marketing platform that is broader in terms of features as well as functionality.

By the end of this Kartra vs ClickFunnels in depth comparison, you’ll be able to make a decision about which one is right for you.

What is ClickFunnels?

ClickFunnels is marketing and sales funnel building software. ClickFunnels helps you make marketing funnels that guide your prospects through the buyer’s journey.

This will get them at a prospect level when they’re just a visitor and how do you not only get them to be a buyer but how do you extract the most amount of money out of this person through cross-sells and upsells and all of these great kinds of stuff.

And ClickFunnels builds these funnels for you or guides you through these funnels on how to build these flows.

You’ve undoubtedly in your life been placed into one of these nurturing campaigns, whether it’s through ClickFunnels or some other software, but this is exactly what it does.

What is Kartra?

Kartra is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that has the exact same functionality as ClickFunnels, except it also provides various operational additional features.

It helps you with various marketing campaigns like building marketing funnels, setting up email campaigns, managing clients and it does a lot of other things that ClickFunnels doesn’t do.

And we’re going to get into all of that right now.

>> Unlock Kartra 30 Day Trial

Sales Funnel Builders

The first part of this comparison is the drag-and-drop page builders. A big part of Kartra and ClickFunnels is not having to code anything with any of their page builders. I’m just going to show you how that all works.

Kartra Page Builder

Everything in the Kartra page builder is drag and drop. You just click and you can edit your landing page or choose from dozens of done for you templates.

There’s a lot of great designs and you can just drag them in.

But where Kartra stands out among other sales funnel builders is the Kartra Done For Your Campaigns and we’ll talk more about it later.

Kartra is actually more reliable as well because it won’t actually let you publish the page unless everything has been finished and done.

So in that regards it’s really good.

There are so many times that I’ve heard of people creating campaigns or funnels, putting them out with advertising behind it, and then realizing that they forgot to put in a link here or integration is wrong there so this sort of bypasses that.

When it comes to building your sales funnels Kartra is even comparable with Builderall as I explain in this Builderall vs Kartra comparison.

ClickFunnels Page Builder

So here we are in the ClickFunnels editor. And as you can expect, you can just click on anything and edit it right away.

Everything has drag and drop, super easy to edit. You can configure things, just like many other sales funnel builders you’ve seen.

You can simply drag and add sections things like:

• Columns
• Images
• Videos
• Countdown timers
• Social proof

Now there are pieces and bits that they do better than each other, but for all intents and purposes, though, you’re going to see about 90% of the same so I don’t think it’s worth discussing, which is marginally better than the other.

Personally, I find that Kartra is a little more templates, but again, this is just a wash in terms of which is really better when it comes to page builders.

Website & Sales Funnel Templates

So, the next and probably one of the most important parts of getting software like this is the prebuilt templates.

And I can tell you they’re more or less comparable.

Let’s just take a look at that right now.

Kartra Templates

So we are in Kartra, they offer a breadth of templates.

All kinds for basically any use case including:

• Landing pages
• Squeeze pages
• Thank you pages
• Product launch pages
• Sales pages

And more.

ClickFunnels Templates

Just like that in ClickFunnels, you can see, it’s basically the same thing.

There are ones that are slightly different in each of them, but for the most part, there are the same kinds of funnels.

There are a couple of other funnels with Kartra that ClickFunnels doesn’t have because Kartra has more functionality in it so it just wouldn’t make sense for ClickFunnels to have in there.

But other than that, it’s basically the exact same thing.

And ClickFunnels also has in a sense, two areas for the campaigns, because they actually have the follow-up funnels, which is not included in the basic model. So, you can create a new follow-up funnel.

And one of the things I don’t like though is that it’s not integrated as to when you need to do these follow-up funnels.

So, while in Kartra, because everything is included, it’s actually prebuilt for you from the start so you actually get the emails in that sequence automatically.

Whereas in ClickFunnels, because the emails are optional, they’ve actually separated out the funnel builder into, if you have the email component, and if you don’t.

There is a diagram which kind of tells you what to do. I’ll show you what I mean by the email part being built into the funnels and not.

You can actually download the funnel map, something that is helpful, and then it tells you follow-up funnels.

But that’s it, it just tells you follow-up funnels and you’re supposed to figure out how to build these follow-up funnels or try and, I guess, learn from their resources.

As opposed to Kartra where that it’s actually including the emails in the sequences. All built-in and already tagged for you and the emails already built.

So that’s the one difference there that because Kartra has the emails included in all plans, it’s all part of the funnel importer.

So, I would say that Kartra is slightly better because they do include the emails and all the campaigns and with ClickFunnels, you’re sort of left to figure that part out on your own.

Other than that, they both work the same way. But for the most part, they’re comparable.

Analytics

The next thing where ClickFunnels and Kartra are pretty comparable is basic analytics. Right within each of these funnels, you have analytics. So, for each of the assets, you can see what the analytics are.

Kartra has analytics for every single thing built-in in your sales funnel.

Kartra is a little bit more visual, but from a data perspective, it’s the exact same thing.

In Kartra you can also see which devices your prospects are using and ClickFunnels doesn’t have that feature.

Visually it looks a little nicer on Kartra, but again, completely a wash. I mean, that stuff doesn’t matter what it looks like visually.

Now, let’s compare integrations with third-party software that you would need for your online business.

Integrations

 If we compare the integrations, the integrations are actually a bit different.

ClickFunnels Integration

You can actually integrate ClickFunnels with many other tools like:

• Aweber
• Drip
• GetResponse
• HubSpot
• InfusionSoft
• Market Hero
• OntraPort
• MailChimp

And more.

Kartra Integration

Kartra on the other hand has integration with tools like:

• aMeber
• Authorize.Net
• Kajabi
• Google Calendar
• MailGun
• PayPal
• OptimizePress

And they don’t have integration with other email marketing platforms since Kartra has its own built-in email marketing tool.

This can be a pro as well since you don’t actually need to pay any extra monthly recurring fee for any other autoresponder since it’s included in the Kartra plans.

Where ClickFunnels is Better?

FunnelFlix Academy

So, the first place that ClickFunnels wins is its FunnelFlix academy or learning site.

So here we are in the FunnelFlix portal.

This is just so much content on improving your understanding of funnels and more:

• Personal development
• Funnel building
• Product course
• Copywriting
• Business strategy

And each of these courses that you can just click into and then learn more about.

So, let’s just go into “Funnel hacking Secrets” as an example.

And as you can see, it is some pretty in-depth lessons about this and everything has videos and whatnot so this is a great resource from ClickFunnels to help you understand funnels.

Kartra also has a training program, but it’s nowhere on the level. It’s pretty good in terms of it has videos for everything and let’s say, you want to learn about building simple lists.

It has some stuff here. It has a lot of videos in a lot of different things for all the different campaigns and whatnot, but it’s not quite as in-depth and engaging as the ClickFunnels one.

So, I’d just say that overall, ClickFunnels has Kartra beat there.

ClickFunnels Webinar Funnels

And the other thing that ClickFunnels has that Kartra doesn’t have are the webinar funnels.

So, ClickFunnels has more of an integrated webinar funnel system.

You can do live and prerecorded webinars. The webinar software isn’t included, but it kind of integrates with webinars software and they just have a webinar funnel that you can use.

And Kartra at this time of this writing does not have any sort of webinar funnels.

Now it does integrate with WebinarJam, which is their sister company so you can make webinar funnels, but they’re just not out of the box.

ClickFunnels Community

ClickFunnels is an older and more popular product and it has a bigger community. That’s just a fact.

So, if you’re looking for more resources and information and people making YouTube videos and all that good stuff, you’re going to get more with ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels is Easier To Use

Also, ClickFunnels is marginally easier to use, but that’s only because it does less stuff than Kartra.

So common sense dictates if there’s something that can do three things, and there is something that can do six things, obviously, it’s easier to learn the thing, only the three things, rather than having to learn all six.

So, for the tools that they both share, it’s not any easier, it’s about the same.

I’ll be honest with you, both tools have a decent learning curve.

These are not just simple programs; these are extremely advanced programs.

They guide you through everything with this one-click campaign, but they take a little bit of time.

But all things being equal because ClickFunnels does less than, it’s slightly easier than Kartra. That’s the only reason.

But what about Kartra?

Where does it win?

Well, Kartra has a lot going forward that ClickFunnels doesn’t do. I’m not even just going to sugarcoat it.

Let’s take a look.

Where Kartra is Better Than ClickFunnels?

Kartra Helpdesk

So, firstly, Kartra has a built-in help desk that ClickFunnels doesn’t have.

You can assign tickets, canned responses for everything.

Kartra Calendar

It also has a calendar that is a great Calendy alternative. You can start setting appointments, you can do notifications reminders.

It’s all in one dashboard so when you’re dealing with your clients, this is great.

If you’re doing coaching as well or if you have paid appointments and whatnot, or paid services.

So, right off the bat, those two features, not in ClickFunnels at all.

Kartra Video Hosting

One of my favorite components of Kartra is the video. So Kartra can host video, ClickFunnels can’t.

But it’s not just like a little YouTube video or something like that.

It’s brandable, and most importantly, it has a lead capture mechanism.

So, for example, I’ve added a call to action and you can actually get a link and then you can link out to something, but that’s not all.

You can also add to your video:

• Opt-in form
• Image banner
• Caption
• Caption + button
• Social Unlock 

You can make it so that they have to do a social action before they can access the video.

The video functionality is on par with something like Vistia, which is $100 a month.

And of course, the video integrates with all the other features.

Kartra Heat Map

Another super cool thing is Kartra has heat maps built-in, so you can see where people are engaging with your page, which content, how far they get on the page, all of that.

So, you can see things like time on-page and all of these advanced analytics,

ClickFunnels does not have that. You’d need something like CrazyEgg or HotJar typically to do something like this.

Kartra CRM

The next thing Kartra has is behavioral adaptive marketing personalization and lead scoring.

These are features typically found in enterprise-level marketing automation, software like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot.

So, I’ll show you what that exactly means.

So, as a simple example for you guys, you can see, if you have someone with these dynamic tags, so someone’s purchased a product, they have the gold membership, and they’ve done this other action.

You can start firstly, giving them points for each of these actions.

So, you can do lead scoring, it’s called.

And then if someone triggers a certain lead score, then you can actually start serving them exclusive coupons.

So, personalization on a very high level with the amount of dynamic customization you can do.

And because you have all of this data in one place with Kartra, if someone watches a video, you can give them points.

If they do open an email, you can give them points.

If they click that landing page if they bought a product, the customization level is insane.

And like I said, you’d have to purchase something like HubSpot to get something comparable to this. And HubSpot at the enterprise level is around $30,000 a year. So just keep that in mind.

So, all of these things, ClickFunnels doesn’t have anything close to this.

Kartra Email Automation

Then also vastly superior, email automation.

Looking at the email automation in ClickFunnels, as always, you have to have your triggers.

There’s some stuff here that you can trigger off of. And it’s pretty decent, to be honest, it’s pretty decent.

But looking at the Kartra version, it’s just head and shoulders above.

There’s dynamic tagging, you can have it based on lists, you can have it based on someone who ordered something, visited a page, sequences, and everything that is sort of just drag and drop.

You can just click things and drag, which step happens in the next step.

So, without going into all the intricate details, Kartra is just more advanced.

I mean, I won’t say that the ClickFunnels email automation is bad by any means or anything like that.

It’s just Kartra’s is more advanced because you can do certain things like you can have tags in any of these features.

So, as I said, if you want someone to be served an email because they’ve watched half a video, you can do that because that functionality is all in one place.

ClickFunnels obviously can’t do that because they don’t have videos.

So, the Kartra email automation is superior, and likewise, even the membership sites.

Kartra Membership

Within Kartra the membership portals, you actually get progress tracking, you get badges, and of course, you have videos built-in and ClickFunnels doesn’t so obviously if you’re making an online course these days, you need videos.

If you’re making courses without videos, no one is subscribing to your courses, I can almost promise you that so it’s almost an expectation.

So obviously with Kartra, that’s all built-in, whereas, with ClickFunnels, you’d have to get Vimeo, or maybe you’re like doing unlisted on YouTube or something like that.

Kartra Advanced Analytics

Kartra also has better-advanced analytics and that’s only because there are more features.

When you’re looking at a contact, you can see what videos they’ve watched, you can see how many help-desk tickets they’ve submitted, you’ve seen how many pages they’ve viewed, all of these things.

Everything’s just a little bit more integrated and granular whereas ClickFunnels, that information would be hosted in another tool.

Let’s say you were using like Zendesk or something with ClickFunnels then that would be in Zendesk. It wouldn’t be one place.

And you obviously couldn’t make any automation out of that.

Maybe you can do it with custom API integration, maybe you use Zapier and you pay for that.

But again, it is not as seamless and you’re dealing with technical headaches and you really don’t want that.

Kartra Blog Feature

Kartra technically has blogging and ClickFunnels doesn’t. But I wouldn’t let Kartra brag about it too much because Kartra blogging feature is not great.

And so technically they have a blog post feature and you can do all the same stuff like the page builder, you do all of this great stuff, except the content is not dynamic.

It’s not really a content management system so we can’t dynamically update this content like if you actually had a content management system.

It doesn’t know what your most recent posts are, you’re manually entering this.

So yes, Kartra does have blogs and I guess that’s additional value that you could use if you wanted to.

It does all kinds of blog templates, but I can’t say that it’s particularly good. It’s even comparable even to some cheap sales funnels builders like GrooveFunnels as I explain in this Kartra vs GrooveFunnels review.

If you’re serious about blogging, get something like WordPress and that’s probably the only other CMS system you need to compliment Kartra.

Kartra vs ClickFunnels: Pricing

Now let’s talk about pricing.

So, I’ll look at both plans, here’s what the truth is.

Kartra Pricing

Kartra offers a 30 day $1 trial and after the trial, the pricing plans go as follow:

• Starter Plan – $119/month
• Silver Plan – $229/month
• Platinum Plan – $549/month

So, Kartra is way better for entry-level pricing and functionality and it has annual discount plans. Let me show you what I mean.

With Kartra, all of the features are included in every single plan, including the $119plan.

The only feature that’s excluded is the agency functionality, which starts at a $229/month plan.

And all that means is that if you want to create Kartra accounts for people you manage. Let’s say you’re running an agency and you want Kartra accounts for your customers, then that’s $229.

And I assume there’s a percentage of people who do that.

But for most people who are just running their own business, that functionality has no bearing on their decision.

So with Kartra for $119/month, you get all of the features, including email automation.

On top of that, Kartra also provides a 25% discount if you do an annual plan. ClickFunnels does not include that, and there are no annual discounts.

>> Unlock Kartra 30 Day Trial

ClickFunnels Pricing

ClickFunnels provides 3 pricing plans:

• Basic – $147/month
• Pro – $197/month
• Funnel Hacker – $297/month

Now where ClickFunnels shines a little bit is that with Kartra, once we get to the same price as ClickFunnels, you only have up to 25,000 leads whereas ClickFunnels has unlimited leads.

So, that means if your business has more than 25,000 contacts, then ClickFunnels could be cheaper for you in that sense, only if you don’t need any of the other functionality.

And now that there are other little things like the number of users. Kartra gives you unlimited users but ClickFunnels is limited.

But the main item here is the number of contacts or leads and ClickFunnels gives you an unlimited amount.

Because obviously this plan is for someone who’s used ClickFunnels for a long time and built their entire business in ClickFunnels.

Kartra vs ClickFunnels 2.0: What Software Is Better?

So, who is the overall winner in this Kartra vs ClickFunnels comparison?

To be honest, it’s hard for me to recommend ClickFunnels over Kartra. Kartra wins hands down in practically most situations.

Kartra is a much better platform overall but ClickFunnels also has some advantages.

Choose ClickFunnels If

I’d only possibly recommend ClickFunnels over Kartra if you have more than 25,000 leads and really don’t care about any of the additional functionality that Kartra offers.

So if you have 20,000 or 30,000 it won’t make sense, but maybe if you have like 400,000 contacts, then maybe ClickFunnels is better.

But at that point, you could contact Kartra for an enterprise plan and who knows how much that would be.

Also, choose ClickFunnels if you’re willing to pay for the additional services for whatever reason like email marketing platform or video hosting.

I would also recommend ClickFunnels only if you really want funnel education. And another part of that is ClickFunnels also has a pretty cool community you can be a part of.

And so, for people who find that interesting and who want to take part in that educational experience, that is something cool you do get with ClickFunnels that you don’t necessarily get as much with Kartra.

Other than those two exceptions, what I would consider somewhat exceptional cases that not everyone would fall into, there really is no reason to get ClickFunnels over Kartra.

Especially if you’re starting out and you don’t need unlimited contacts at that point, there is absolutely no reason to pay 3x as much to get less functionality.

Choose Kartra If

Kartra is a more advanced marketing platform where you put all of your digital marketing campaigns together so everything is always going to be inside Kartra. It has everything in one place to put together a complete marketing campaign.

In addition, it will cost you less compared to ClickFunnels simply because with Kartra you don’t need to integrate any other third-party tool.

So that’s my recommendation. Kartra is the better solution for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, digital marketers, and business owners.

Before You Make a Decision…

But what I would recommend before you make a decision is to really do the trial for both platforms.

When it comes to Kartra is $99 a month but if you click my affiliate link, I can actually give you a 30-day trial for $1.

When you click the link you’ll be taken to the same Kartra pricing page except now you’ll see that you have a trial, you have a 14-day trial for $1, and you can extend that to your Kartra trial to 30 days.

This is extremely beneficial when you’re trying a product like Kartra that does have a lot of stuff in it to test out.

ClickFunnels vs Kartra: Wrapping Up

So that’s it my Kartra vs ClickFunnels review. Hopefully, I’ve helped you make a decision on which marketing automation or funnel-building software is right for you.

In short, ClickFunnels and Kartra comparably do more or less the same thing.

Now I’m not splitting hairs. There are little pieces that each of them do better, but for all intents and purposes, these are the areas where it’s basically a toss.

There may be specific situations to you where one is slightly better than the other but for the most part, they’re almost dead even.

After testing both of these platforms, I choose Kartra since it offers many more marketing automation features that ClickFunnels doesn’t have.

In addition, with Kartra I can save more money on other tools since everything is included in the platform.

So, I’d love to hear your comments on whether you’ve tried one and you switched to another and whatnot. And so, I’d love to hear that sound off in the comments.