Your Best Free Clickfunnels Alternative

There’s no doubt Clickfunnels is as expensive as it is powerful. But is there a free Clickfunnels alternative that can challenge the incumbent sales funnel builder? Of course there is!

Clickfunnels is an advertising giant – and we don’t just mean for their customers. Clickfunnels is one of the most aggressive advertising campaigns going in the online business space – with challenges, ebooks, a generous affiliate program and a “made with Clickfunnels” badge on customer pages that can be difficult to remove.

None of this is without cause. It is a great product and a perfect plug and play out of the box solution for anyone who wants to start selling fast.

But that time saving comes at a big financial cost and if you haven’t even tested your product yet to might be reluctant to commit to an expensive Clickfunnels plan, despite the fact hoardes of affliates are hungry for their 40% commission and are urging you to go for it.

One option is to go with their direct and slightly cheaper competitor, Leadpages, or another one of the best funnel builders on the market.

Or you could really cut costs and go for GetResponse which includes pre-built funnels and integrates with popular shopping cart solutions.

But with a little work you can graft your own free Clickfunnels alternative without spending anything.

While Clickfunnels is fast, popular and easy to use, its core features can be broken down quite simply and then recreated with free Clickfunnels alternatives.

What You Need In A Clickfunnels Alternative

  • Landing page builder
  • Autoresponder
  • Shopping cart
  • Upsells

Method 1: Groovefunnels

When the market places a sales funnels tool like Clickfunnels top despite its high price, there’s always room for competition.

One of those new competitors and best Clickfunnels alternatives is Groovefunnels. It’s pretty much a direct competitor offering a huge package of landing pages, email marketing platform, drag and drop website tools and more.

GrooveFunnels claims to be the world’s first absolutely free funnel builder, so let’s check if this is true.

At the very top of their website, they say that the features GroovePages and GrooveSell are currently free, adding that this is a limited time offer. Surprisingly, there isn’t a clearly defined pricing section on their website.

However, the visitor is encouraged to “Get Started Right Now” or “Get Free Access” not less than six times via huge, pink, call-to-action buttons. If you look around online, you can eventually find some info about their pricing policy.

How much does GrooveFunnels really cost?

Only the Basic Plan of GrooveFunnels is free for life.

It includes GrooveSell, GrooveAffiliate, and GroovePages Lite. The first tool is basically a shopping cart, the second manages your affiliates, and the third allows you to build sales funnels and landing pages. The Basic plan includes three landing pages and three sales funnels, but it does not offer any custom domains.

To get access to their premium plans, you’ve got to first activate GroovePages Pro. You have the following options:

  • One-time payment of $1,397
  • Use Lite for 14 days and then pay $497 for 3 months or a total of 1,491
  • If you pay $288 for 6 months or $1,728 you get a Lifetime Platinum Account plus 40% Affiliate Commission
  • Finally, you can pay $188 for 12 months or a total of $2,256. That’s the most expensive option, but you again get a Lifetime Platinum Account plus 40% Affiliate Commission.

GroovePro allows you to build an unlimited number of sales funnels, landing pages, and sites. It also gives you unlimited access to their rich template library. You’ll also have the ability to create as many custom domains as you need, and avail of the platform’s free hosting.

The Groove Silver Plan costs $99 per month. in addition to the above three features, it also offers GroovePages Pro, GrooveMail, GrooveMember, GrooveVideo, and an Affiliate Program

The Groove Gold Plan costs $199 per month and includes everything in the Silver Plan, plus GrooveBlog, GrooveDesk, GrooveCalendar, GrooveSurvey, and GrooveQuizz.

Finally, there’s the Groove Platinum Plan that costs $299/mo. It includes everything in the Gold Plan, plus live webinars via GrooveWebinar, a suite of marketing automations, and an e-commerce suite.

So, the myth that GrooveFunnels is absolutely free for life has just been debunked.

GrooveFunnels Features

We were unpleasantly surprised to find out that if one klick on some of the features listed on the platform’s official website, the link takes them nowhere. Anyway, the following features have been listed in small print at the very bottom of the page:

  • Sales and Affiliate Platform
  • High Converting Funnel Software
  • Powerful Email Automations
  • Membership Site Platform
  • Powerful Video Platform
  • Complete affiliate system
  • Product and Affiliate Marketplace
  • Content Delivery Made Easy
  • Analytics and Data

The thing is, some of the features above, as well as some of the core features like GroovePages, are still in their sandbox versions. One of GrooveFunnels’ main advantages is that their GrooveSell feature (the shopping cart) works really well. And you get it for free with your free account.

Method 2: Landing Pages And Autoresponder

What attracts people to Clickfunnels is the ability to build an attractive but simple web presence like a landing page with some sort of offer.

The vast majority of your future customers will not be ready to buy from you at the first touch. They aren’t going to buy from your first Facebook ad.

A traditional sales funnel works by offering a low-value “tripwire” incentive at the first instance – a free ebook, webinar or just an insighful newsletter.

All this depends on what you will ultimately be selling as an entrepreneur as a physical product will be different to coaching and courses. However, the basic sales funnel principles are the same.

Once that landing page is built with an incentive to sign up, you then want an autoresponder to nurture those leads so they grow more familiar with and trust you.

The good news is some free autoresponders also include a landing page builder.

Aweber

Aweber is a good option and is free up to 500 contacts. Aweber is one of the oldest email marketing services in the book providing a simple and reliable tool which now includes a landing page builder.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is free up to 1000 contacts, although the emails have to be manual broadcasts rather than automations unless you upgrade, which is still cheaper than Clickfunnels.

GetResponse

GetResponse also features a great landing page builder complete with access to thousands of Shutterstock images.

GetResponse is paid but actually offers great value for what you get. It even as inbuilt sales funnel templates you can use and integrates with a wide array of Ecommerce gateways.

Plus you can try the 30 day free trial before you commit. See how they compete with Clickfunnels here.

Thinkific

If you are selling online courses – a very popular use for Clickfunnels, then a great free Clickfunnels alternative is Thinkific’s trial that lets you create three courses complete with shopping cart.

This combination of landing page builder, autoresponder and Thinkific free trial are all you need to create a powerful free Clickfunnels alternative to test out your online course.

Once you have proven market fit – i.e. you’ve outgrown your free plans, then you can be confident you can upgrade to a paid plan without losing out.

If you plan on selling live webinars or coaching, then you should definitely look into GetResponse’s webinar features.

Method 2: Free Clickfunnels Alternative With WordPress

I am a WordPress evangelist. I feel hurt when I see people signing up for closed systems for a subscription fee when the open source WordPress framework means you can truly own your website. Once you have your domain and some cheap, reliable hosting, you have full control.

WordPress is host to a universe of plugins built to seamlessly integrate with your website. Once you’re up and running you can bolt on these plugins for speed, memberships, ecommerce and more. If there’s something you don’t like, you can change it.

With WordPress you can build your own Clickfunnels alternative by designing your pages with Elementor – a free and powerful visual page builder that will rival sexy alternatives like Squarespace and Shopify.

Elementor comes complete with drag and drop forms which you can then connect to your chosen autoresponder, again using Aweber’s free plan.

Look at any classic sales funnel template and you’ll see there realy isn’t much to it – an appealing headline, big call to action, social proof and testimonials, product features, another big f*cking button. All that can be created in the free version of Elementor in minutes.

You can then use the Woocommerce plugin as a payment gateway, which itself has extensions for online courses, paid downloads and members’ only areas. If you’re looking for the best Clickfunnels alternative then I would recommend the One Click Upsell plugin for Woocommerce. Plus there are a range of Woocommerce extensions to clean up the checkout process – you can pretty much replicate the smooth widgets of Shopify without paying a subscription.

What’s more is a website that you own can be grown into a much bigger asset. For instance, with a bit of SEO knowledge you can generate huge volumes of free traffic by targeting low-competition search terms (which you can find with SEMRush) and then crafting content that ranks high on Google. I achieve this with Surfer which analyses the top results in Google to give you a cheat guide recipe based on hundreds of ranking factors.

Clickfunnels might promise to convert your visitors, but getting free traffic is a gamechanger.

My WordPress Clickfunnels Alternative recipe:

  • WPX hosting
  • Elementor page builder (free trial)
  • Nitropack page speed booster (free trial)
  • Aweber autoresponder (free trial)
  • Woocommerce (free)
  • Woocommerce extensions depending on your product

This takes a lot of tinkering and you will have to learn, but its really not difficult.

You don’t need to know code – which I repeatedly see as one of the biggest myths in 2020s in the online business world used to sell easy software like Clickfunnels when there are free and cheap alternatives.

However, if you still feel that hacking together all these plugins on WordPress (which can go wrong when plugins refuse to play nicely together) is too much for you, then read on. Plenty of aspiring entrepreneurs want to focus on their product rather than building a website, hence the appeal of Clickfunnels, but there is a WordPress Clickfunnels alternative which brings you the benefits of WordPress with the power and simplicity of Clickfunnels.

CartFlows – A WordPress Alternative to Clickfunnels

CartFlows is a direct Clickfunnels alternative built specifically for WordPress. That means your own website and your own hosting, but all the simplicity and pre-built templates you would expect with a sales funnel builder like Clickfunnels, Leadpages or GetResponse.

What’s more is a basic version of Cartflows is actually free. Like most WordPress plugins, Cartflows is freemium with a generous free version and a paid version for full functionality.

It integrates beautifully – and indeed requires – popular page builders like Elementor, Divi and Beaver Builder along with the ecommerce functionality of Woocommerce.

You may recognise the sound of a lot of these features from Clickfunnels:

  • Build Unlimited Funnels
  • Premium Templates
  • Conversion Optimized Checkout
  • Checkout Fields Editor
  • Checkout Offers
  • One Click Order Bump
  • One Click Upsell & Downsell
  • Cart Abandonment
  • Top Notch Support
  • Amazing User Community
  • Great Documentation & Video Tutorials

All this is just $349 per year – equal to about three months of the cheapest Clickfunnels plan.

Cartflows comes complete with prebuilt sales funnel templates for all sorts of products – ebooks, supplements, beauty products, music and more.

Leadpages – The Cheaper Clickfunnels Alternative

If you’re still not convinced by the prospect of replicating Clickfunnels with WordPress, or creating an Aweber landing page complete with autoresponder funnel, or going for the GetResponse funnel builder, Leadpages is basically a direct competitor to Clickfunnels with a much lower price.

At just $25 a month it is a great opportunity to test out your idea and see if sales funnels are right for you. Plus, just like Clickfunnels, you can try it with a 14-day free trial.

Not convinced? Have a look at our Leadpages alternatives or see how it compares with GetResponse.

Leadpages promises to get your webpage up and running in a matter of minutes thanks to their rich template library. You can customize each template according to your business vision using the integrated drag-and-drop page builder. All template designs have been developed to facilitate and speed up lead conversion.

With the help of the analytics dashboard, a/b tests, and real-time conversion hints provided by Leadpages, you’ll be able to effortlessly optimize your email marketing campaigns. Unlike other sales funnel builders, Leadpages doesn’t charge more for the number of leads you collect or sales funnels you build.

This sales funnel software offers free hosting and premium security features so you needn’t worry about data loss. However, we could not see any sales funnel templates in their library. Perhaps you’d be able to design and launch your sales funnel from the “Design from a blank page” section of their landing page builder.

Leadpages provides a wide variety of features in the following categories:

  • Website and landing page builder
  • Design and Template Library
  • Conversion Tools
  • Email Marketing & Publishing
  • 3rd-Party Integrations
  • Customer Support

In the library, there are two separate sections – one for landing page templates and the other – for websites. In the Conversion Tools section, you can access 10 Opt-in text campaigns with SMS messaging, campaign ROI, A/B tests, email trigger links, as well as tools for real-time analytics.

How much does Leadpages cost?

You can get started with the Basic Plan of Leadpages. It costs $25 per month and offers one website, unlimited landing pages, pop-ups, alert bars, traffic, and leads. You’ll also get a free custom domain for the first year and free hosting. The technical support comes via email only. The plan also includes mobile-responsive templates, lead notifications, and over forty standard integrations.

The Pro Plan costs $48 per month and includes all features in the Basic Plan, plus:

  • Online Sales & Payments
  • Unlimited A/B Testing
  • Email Trigger Links
  • 10 Opt-in Text Campaigns
  • 50 Extra Opt-In Text Campaigns
  • Advanced Integrations
  • 5 Pro Sub Accounts
  • 1-on-1 Quick Start Call

The Advanced Plan comes at $199/mo and includes everything in the Pro Plan, plus the following premium features:

  • Advanced Integrations
  • 5 Pro Sub Accounts
  • 50 Opt-In Text Campaigns
  • 1-on-1 Quick Start Call

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