In the past, only web designers with coding backgrounds were able to build a website from scratch. For marketers, this meant an additional expense to outsource an important task that would jump-start their lead generation and conversion of online visitors into customers, subscribers, and loyal fans.
This all changed in 2011 when Unbounce launched as a landing page software. This meant marketers would be able to build landing pages, lead capture forms, and other front-end website components in a drag-and-drop fashion and WITHOUT programming knowledge.
In the same year, InstaPage, Leadpages, and ClickFunnels launched. At the time, all 3 software companies were based on the Unbounce platform with improvements and features added here and there.
So if Unbounce came first and ClickFunnels was inspired from Unbounce, does that mean Unbounce is better? Well, not necessarily.
Both ClickFunnels and Unbounce have their strengths and weaknesses. If you’re looking for a tool to create landing pages, read on to help you decide between these two highly popular marketing tools.
Main Differences of ClickFunnels vs Unbounce
Let’s first get the main differences of these two powerful software companies out of the way before we dig deep into the features, pricing, and pros/cons of each one. It is only fair to understand what exactly each software was designed to offer.
Unbounce is a landing page tool that helps users build single sales pages.
Unbounce makes it extremely easy for anyone without design or coding skills to drag-and-drop elements and publish a page quickly. The purpose of Unbounce is to convert page visitors into leads or leads into customers.
Features that Unbounce has (and ClickFunnels don’t):
- Real-time analytics
- Advanced Agency tools
- Custom coding and custom form builder
ClickFunnels is a sales funnel software focused on automation and high-converting sales funnels.
Technically speaking, every funnel begins with a landing page, which is then connected to additional pages (and extremely well-planned steps) in the hopes of pulling leads in, turning them into fans, and eventually paying customers.
Features that ClickFunnels has (and Unbounce don’t):
- email autoresponder
- Sales funnels collaboration
- Website hosting included in the plan
Unbounce vs ClickFunnels Feature Comparison
Here are some of the common features ClickFunnels and Unbounce share and which one delivers better features:
1. Landing Page Builders
Unbounce Landing Page software
Unbounce has an impressive drag-and-drop builder, which lets users build both single landing pages and multi-page landing pages similar to what Clickfunnels offer.
What’s special with Unbounce’s page builder is that you can customize all big or small details, then add your self-made pop-ups and sticky bars into the pages, which is a must-have if your goal is more conversions from that particular page.
ClickFunnels Landing Page Builder
The ClickFunnels’ drag and drop editor is a bit more advanced, and once you’ve moved past the learning curve, you can easily move, switch and remove the 4 building blocks available (sections, rows, columns, elements) to create a fully customized landing page.
ClickFunnels’ landing page builder can be intimidating, but some guides pop up if you’re feeling a bit lost in the process.
What’s cool about ClickFunnels is you can purchase a domain and host it with the company as well. This feature isn’t common with other landing page builders.
2. Ready-made Templates
Unbounce Landing Page Templates
Unbounce has hundreds of ready-made landing page templates that you can use if you prefer not to use the drag and drop editor. These high-quality templates are fully customizable, which is perfect for business owners who still want to include their branding into the sales pages.
ClickFunnels Templates
If you don’t want to create landing pages from scratch, ClickFunnels has over 100 templates readily available. However, note that the number of templates available would depend on your plan (the cheapest plan has 20 funnels).
Designed by in-house and third-party designers, the ClickFunnels templates are divided into several categories (lead generation, sales page funnels, event funnels, product launch funnels, marketing funnels).
3. Analytics & Data Reporting
Unbounce Live Reporting
The real-time data reporting Unbounce offers on the user dashboard is VERY useful. If you don’t know by now, measuring conversions is important in understanding what kind of landing pages or sales funnels work or not. But by seeing how many website visitors are currently on your landing page, what they are doing, and which offers they’re eyeing, you can twist the narrative and create custom triggers to pull the visitors in.
You can also integrate Unbounce Google Analytics, which is always a good idea especially if you’re an entrepreneur planning to sell the landing page in the future.
ClickFunnels Funnel Stats
ClickFunnels doesn’t report live, but it allows you to see the performance of every funnel you’ve created, including sales funnel pages, call-to-action elements, and even all stages of your email marketing.
Also, you can integrate ClickFunnels with Google Analytics, Segmetrics, and other similar tools.
4. Integrations with Other Services
Unbounce Integrations
Unbounceworks with any email marketing tool you’re using. It has a pretty comprehensive list of available integrations, and if you can’t find anything, there’s always Zapier to bridge the gap for Unbounce and your preferred third-party product or service.
One big thing I love about Unbounce is its compatibility with WordPress, which means it allows you to add Javascript into the landing page and incorporate API, full-screen backgrounds, widgets, parallax scrolling, URL redirects, and many other WordPress features.
With Unbounce, payment processing tools are integrated via Zapier. There’s Stripe, PayPal, and other popular alternatives.
ClickFunnels Integrations
ClickFunnels supports direct integration with multiple apps and also uses APIs to connect to other third-party apps and payment gateways.
5. A/B Split Testing
Unbounce A/B Testing
Unbounce provides A/B testing just like its competitors, but what makes Unbounce better in this regard is that you don’t need to pay extra for this service. Others offer A/B testing only to higher-priced plans. Unbounce, meanwhile, offers this for free to all its plans (except for the cheapest plan). You can test unlimited pages, including the performance of your sticky bars and pop-ups.
ClickFunnels A/B Testing
ClickFunnels allows users to split-test almost all of the funnels. This is pretty useful, especially for monitoring lead capture funnels. However, you will be charged an extra fee a month to access advanced split testing.
6. Automation
Unbounce Automation
The focus of Unbounce has always been to provide business owners an easy-to-use, high-converting landing page builder. However, the company also knows that to be competitive in this day and age, you’d have to offer almost all features possible. As such, even if Unbounce didn’t focus much on automation before, you can now build pages with call-to-action triggers and maximize the potential of these sales pages by integrating with ActiveCampaign.
ClickFunnels Automation
This is where ClickFunnels shines. Its marketing automation features are incorporated into the drag and drop editor. From here you can begin your marketing sequence, so your business would be able to send a visitor an email depending on this visitor’s action. For example, you can set a trigger to send an email to leads checking out the products or services page for a minute, or clicking a banner from
ClickFunnels also has an advanced email autoresponder and texting ability, so you could go beyond the email list and send SMS to would-be customers.
7. Customization
Unbounce Customization Tools:
Unbounce has a ton of services that encourages you to customize your sales pages. You’re able to add high-quality SVG graphics without slowing down your pages.
You can add lightboxes and embed videos into any section of your pages, create impressive depth illusion with parallax scrolling, adding your choice of Google Font, importing free images from Unsplash, auto-optimizing images for faster page-loading, and making a pixel-perfect adjustment to your pages so leads and customers have the best experience visiting your business pages.
ClickFunnels Customization Tools:
Because ClickFunnels is a full-blown sales funnels builder, you’ll find plenty of customization options from the landing pages to the membership sites, to your e-commerce shopping cart, and everything you need to automate gathering leads into an email list or converting leads into customers.
8. Special Features
Unbounce Special Features
- Popups and sticky bars: Unbounce’s pop-ups and sticky bars are call-to-action elements, which you can fully customize to improve your conversions. It encourages visitors to continue with an action, such as scrolling through the end of the page or subscribing to the newsletter.
- Security: Unbounce provides your sales pages with automatic SSL encryption (without extra cost). The company also now offers audit logs, two-factor authentication, Single Sign-On (SSO), and I.P filters.
- Agency-ready: The target market of Unbounce are marketing agencies that plan to offer other businesses a made-for-you, high-converting landing pages. Unbounce even lets agencies organize separate business clients with their respective Unbounce landing page builders. Agencies can even group certain sales funnels together or separate, set up permissions for every campaign, and even be on top of the leads for your client’s products or services. And if the agency’s customers decide they want out, Unbounce has an option to transfer assets (landing pages, popups and sticky bars, etc.) as hassle-free as possible.
- Dynamic text replacement: Dynamic text replacement is a very impressive feature wherein you’re able to customize the text on your landing page so it would match the keyword parameters used by the visiting customers. With dynamic text replacement, you can add or change metadata, keywords, SEO, and even headers of your landing pages to offer the visitor a more “personalized” experience.
ClickFunnels Special Features
- Upsell and Downsell Feature: ClickFunnels is so comprehensive that I’m sure you’d still be discovering cool features even after you’ve made several landing pages. One example of a cool feature you must check out is the upsell and downsell feature, a sales technique that encourages users to offer additional products/services after customers have bought something. You can set these all up in just a few clicks.
- ClickFunnels Marketing Tools: Aside from the high-converting sales funnels you can build with the comprehensive ClickFunnels Editor, the company continuously integrates and make in-house marketing tools (like email automation or search ads) available to users.
- Membership sites: ClickFunnels lets users create a membership site accessibly only by members that subscribe to your businesses. This membership site can help grow the number of customers of your business.
- Built-in shopping cart: If you’re running an e-commerce business, you no longer have to find third-party integrations since the cart is already built into the ClickFunnels landing pages builder.
- Affiliate program: There is an affiliate program built into the ClickFunnels platform where every affiliate receives a commission for encouraging other businesses or individuals to purchase ClickFunnels subscriptions.
9. Customer Support
How quickly can the company help you if you need someone to guide you with your campaign? A few hours? A day or two? A week?
Unbounce Customer Support
You can reach the Unbounce support team via email, live chat, or phone. You can start a support ticket by emailing [email protected]
Unbounce has a toll-free line as well:
- Worldwide: +1 604 484 1354
- North America (toll-free): +1 888 515 9161
Note that customer support (via phone, email, and live chat) is only available from 1:00 AM – 9:00 PM PST on weekdays. Meanwhile, email support is the only communication you can get during weekends from 9:00 AM – 9:00 PM PST.
Clients with higher-priced plans have their dedicated customer support agent assigned to them.
ClickFunnels Customer Support
ClickFunnels provides 24/7 customer service through multiple channels. You can reach their customer support via live chat, Facebook Community, or its well-documented educational center with tutorials, podcasts, and even one-on-one coaching from ClickFunnels experts.
Unbounce vs ClickFunnels Price Comparison
Pricing for Unbounce and ClickFunnels may vary depending on how you choose to pay, but for this comparison, I’ll just list down the monthly plans for both.
Check out which service between ClickFunnels vs Unbounce offers more value for your money.
Unbounce Pricing and Plans
Unbounce used to have only 3 plans all of which included unlimited landing pages, unlimited pop-ups, and unlimited sticky bars. Now, the company added a 4th (the cheapest plan) that removed some of the freebies that other business owners may not need for their landing pages.
Here are the 4 Unbounce plans (as of March 2021):
- Launch ($80 per month) – This lets you connect only 1 domain, but accommodates up to 20,000 visitors and up to 500 conversions. No dynamic text replacement or A/B testing is included in this plan.
- Optimize ($120 per month) – This plan includes everything except for Advanced Targeting and Scheduling, as well as Accelerated Mobile Pages. There are A/B testing and conversion tools like Smart Traffic included, but only for 3 domains with up to 30,000 visitors and up to 1,000 conversions.
- Accelerate ($200 per month) – Includes 7 domains with up to 40,000 unique visitors and up to 2,000 conversions.
- Scale ($300 per month) – Comes with 15domains with up to 50,000 unique visitors and up to 3,000 conversions.
Unbounce offers a 14-day trial if you’re interested in any of its plans.
ClickFunnels Pricing and Plans
ClickFunnels has two pricing plans:
- ClickFunnels ($97 per month) – The cheapest plan gets you 20 sales funnels, 100 beautifully-designed landing pages, 3 payment gateways, chat support, and access to the Funnel Flix (education portal) and Funnel Hacker Forum (community). This plan gives 1 user access to all the features and lets you connect up to 3 domains.
- ClickFunnels Platinum ($297 per month) – This higher-priced plan comes with 3 users, 9 payment gateways, and unlimited landing pages and sales funnels. But the best part of this plan is the weekly peer review hackathons, wherein you could get coached by ClickFunnels’ in-house guides to help you craft high-converting pages from start to finish. Another feature included in the Platinum that isn’t part of the basic plan is the “follow-up funnels.” On this plan, you are allowed to connect and reconnect with your audience as many times as you want.
If you wish to try any of these two plans, ClickFunnels is offering a 14-day trial totally FREE.
There’s also the TwoCommaClub, which costs a whopping $2,497/month and is mostly aimed at big agencies with multiple clients under their belts.
Unbounce vs ClickFunnels: Weighing the Pros and Cons
The easiest way to pick between Unbounce and ClickFunnels is to weigh their pros and cons, then decide based on these details how your business could grow using your chosen landing page tool.
Pros and Cons of Unbounce
You have to understand that Unbounce isn’t trying to be the all-around marketing tool. It has been laser-focus in providing users a way of churning out professional-looking landing pages quickly, effortlessly, and with a high rate of conversion.
PROS
- Affordable pricing
- Custom-coded landing pages with advanced optimization features
- Ability to create sticky bars and pop-ups that match your branding
- Easy to use drag-and-drop landing pages builder
- Good mix of templates regardless of the plan
- Live analytics (real-time reporting)
- Can integrate with almost any third-party tools via Zapier
- Secured landing pages thanks to automatic SSL certificate
- Cool dynamic text replacement feature for lead generation
- Ability to A/B split test for mid-tier and high-tier plans
CONS
- No automation or sales funnels creation built-in
- Customer support not available 24/7
Who is Unbounce For?
Unbounce is perfect for individuals and small companies getting started with landing pages. Because Unbounce lets anyone create mobile-friendly landing pages with just several clicks, even without programming or design knowledge.
Choose Unbounce if you:
- Only need to create landing pages (and not complete sales funnels)
- Need to import or export landing pages (and give third-party people access to the landing pages
- Want to do A/B split testing and advanced customization via dynamic text replacement
Pros and Cons of ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels, on the other hand, has been working very hard at being the go-to of comprehensive sales funnels building. This reason is why ClickFunnels has been preferred by businesses involved in e-commerce (selling products or services), and big agencies that handle marketing efforts of other businesses.
PROS
- Ability to create sales funnels
- Built-in affiliate management (so you can create your own affiliate program for your products)
- Built-in membership site
- Advanced lead generation settings
- Ability to create upsells and downsells
- Exceptional customer support with extensive tutorials
- Plenty of third-party integration options
CONS
- Pricing plans can be expensive
- Steep learning curve due to extensive options and features
- Cheapest plan has limited templates
Who is ClickFunnels For?
ClickFunnels is a complete digital marketing platform that allows you to create single landing pages, or full-blown sales funnels with numerous pages, triggers, elements, and so on. It is a massive program, which is why it requires time and effort to maximize its potential.
Choose ClickFunnels if you:
- Require email automation (such as auto-responder feature)
- Have the time or employees to build an entire sales system from scratch (triggers, follow-up funnels, texting features included)
- Plan to offer your marketing services to other businesses
- Require an affiliate marketing program for your products
- Need to create membership sites for your own community (or other business’ community)
ClickFunnels vs Unbounce Verdict: Which one wins?
Unbounce is a better fit for a business owner or agency that is just starting. It is user-friendly and is a true drag-and-drop platform. If you need to showcase your products or services online, attract more leads and jump-start a non-existent web presence, Unbounce has all the things you need at a cheaper price. Plus, you can scale up as your business grows.
ClickFunnels is more appropriate for marketing agencies with a big budget or a team of marketers who could spend months fine-tuning a sales funnel to perfection. The potential for high-converting landing pages from ClickFunnels is there – you just need to build a well-crafted campaign to maximize its potential.
Both Unbounce and ClickFunnels are leaders in the landing page building industry. You really can’t go wrong using any of them. However, since most businesses only need just one tool, your choice would most likely come down to your business needs, business industry, the amount of time you’ve been in business, and budget.