Kartra and ClickFunnels are the two most widely used all-in-one platforms for online business.

ClickFunnels dominated the market for several years until Kartra entered the scene. Both platforms come with their own advantages and disadvantages.

This detailed, step-by-step comparison will explore the main features of Kartra and ClickFunnels, helping you decide which marketing tool best suits your needs.

Let’s dive in.

Designed by Mike Filsaime, Kartra is an all-in-one digital marketing and sales funnel platform. It handles everything from email campaigns, list management, and website hosting to creating membership sites, landing pages, sales funnels, and more.

It also allows you to build helpdesk systems, lead capture forms, and marketing campaigns. With Kartra, you can automate many aspects of your online business for a streamlined experience.

Main features of Kartra include:

Key features of ClickFunnels include:

This comparison highlights the core functionalities of both platforms, helping entrepreneurs and marketers choose the right tool for building and managing their online sales processes.

ClickFunnels offers a comprehensive suite of marketing tools to help you develop websites and persuasive sales funnels, all without extensive technical skills.

To explore all that ClickFunnels provides, check out my review of ClickFunnels. They also feature an affiliate program that allows you to promote the platform and earn income.

This all-in-one online marketing software, created by Russell Brunson, enables you to market, sell, and deliver products online efficiently. It includes features like email marketing, Facebook automation, sales funnel creation, one-click upsells, drag-and-drop editing, and more.

While Kartra can manage your entire business workflow, Kartra excels in providing an all-in-one platform. On the other hand, ClickFunnels mainly specializes in building sales funnels and training your audience about your business.

Let’s compare Kartra and ClickFunnels step-by-step to help you decide which suits your needs better.

When choosing between these platforms, consider a range of factors carefully. Both platforms bundle numerous features and services, so evaluating their strengths and weaknesses is essential.

**Kartra Pros and Cons**

**Advantages:**

**Disadvantages:**

**ClickFunnels Pros and Cons**

**Advantages:**

**Disadvantages:**

Getting started with Kartra involves choosing a pricing plan and providing basic information like your email, company name, and your own name. You can also opt for a 14-day trial for just $1, which grants full access to all features. Afterward, you’ll need to enter billing details.

Signing up for ClickFunnels is quick and straightforward, taking less than a minute. They also offer a free 14-day trial of their funnel-building platform.

They will prompt you to enter your email address and create a password initially. Next, you’ll need to provide your physical address and credit card information to complete the registration.

**Winner: ClickFunnels.**

Both services make signing up straightforward, but ClickFunnels’ quick, free trial process gives it an edge for ease of access.

A top-notch marketing platform should feature an intuitive dashboard and a wide range of customizable templates to make designing campaigns easier.
Let’s compare how these two popular business tools perform in these areas.

Kartra offers a clear and organized dashboard, starting with an onboarding tour that helps you familiarize yourself with its features. On the left sidebar, you will find all key services, such as calendars, campaign management, page builder, and more.

The platform allows you to create different types of pages; selecting “My Pages” enables you to build landing pages, while “My Products” helps you create full websites or sales funnels. “My Pages” also supports hosting videos and forms.

Main functionalities include:

Most features are accessible with a single click, and the platform offers an initial tour of the builder. You can develop products, pages, and campaigns either from scratch or by choosing from a variety of pre-designed templates.

Numerous templates are available for different page types, such as squeeze pages, sales pages, and product launch pages. These templates are fully customizable — you can modify text, colors, and fonts. However, most predefined elements like logos, images, and timers are fixed in size and cannot be resized freely.

The drag-and-drop builder is user-friendly, flexible, and smooth to operate.

ClickFunnels’ dashboard is also designed to be simple to navigate, featuring a built-in drag-and-drop editor that allows users to craft sales funnels and landing pages with ease.

To begin building your first landing page or sales funnel, click on the “Click Funnels >> Build Funnel” option located in the main navigation bar. You will see a menu with options including Funnels, Contacts, Sales Transactions, Funnel Marketplace, and Build Funnel.

You’ll also find quick links for easy access to common tasks like creating a new funnel, follow-up sequences, or sending broadcasts. These shortcuts help streamline your workflow and save time.

There are numerous ready-made templates available, each designed to boost conversion rates. You can select from various pre-designed funnels and landing pages tailored to specific industries or marketing goals. These templates can be customized with your content, branded elements, and additional sections using a drag-and-drop interface, allowing you to create personalized pages effortlessly.

While you can modify elements like images, videos, buttons, and timers, it’s important to note that you cannot rearrange elements freely on the page. However, you do have the flexibility to embed videos from platforms like YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo, as well as add custom subscription forms and call-to-action buttons.

Winner: It’s a Tie.

Both Kartra and ClickFunnels feature user-friendly dashboards and offer comparable levels of customization in page building, making either platform a solid choice depending on your specific needs.

3. Funnels and Campaigns

Kartra provides “Done-For-You” marketing campaigns and funnels, crafted by renowned internet marketing experts Frank Kern and Andy Jenkins. These pre-built funnels are designed for a variety of marketing objectives and come fully set up with essential components such as opt-in forms, thank-you pages, and sales pages.

For instance, you can check out Kartra’s list builder funnel, which is tailored for growing your email list. This ready-made funnel streamlines the setup process, allowing you to implement effective marketing strategies quickly.

All the necessary components, including tags, marketing automation sequences, and coding, are prepared for you to implement. This setup includes all the lists, labels, and tracking elements needed to monitor your prospects and close sales effectively. Simply insert your product details, branding elements, and images, then launch your campaigns.

Their funnels also incorporate features such as the 4-day Cash Machine—a custom funnel designed to generate income in just four days—quick launch options for your products, ready-to-use campaigns, email sequences, and a List Builder tool that helps grow your email list through giveaway campaigns. The automation includes If-Then logic, which triggers specific actions based on your audience’s behavior, enhancing personalized engagement. The campaigns encompass all essential elements like copy, email content, landing pages, thank you pages, and checkout processes, ready for customization with your product info.

You just need to add your product pricing, branding, and images, then go live. Key tags, automated sequences, and customer lists are all provided to help you follow up and convert leads efficiently.

ClickFunnels offers tailored funnel templates aligning with your business goals. You can choose from options like follow-up funnels to nurture existing or previous customers or lead generation funnels to capture new prospects. There are also funnels designed for selling services, hosting webinars, or marketing authored content. In addition, a quiz helps you identify the most suitable funnel type for your specific objectives.

Their intuitive interface allows you to set up a funnel within minutes by selecting a template, customizing pages—adding or removing content as needed—and using the built-in editor for further personalization. You can add both digital and physical products, run split tests to improve conversion rates, track your performance visually through charts, and even incorporate one-click upsells to boost revenue.

In the end, Kartra scores slightly higher due to its advanced goal-based automation, trigger campaigns, and broader template options. While both tools provide excellent sales funnel solutions, Kartra’s automation capabilities give it an edge for users looking for more comprehensive marketing sequences.

Both platforms also include user-friendly web page builders. They offer essential features like built-in landing page creators, customizable templates, personalization tools, a marketplace for page designs, thank you pages, web form builders, and support for pre-filled forms.

Kartra’s page builder is accessible directly from its dashboard. Simply navigate to “My Pages” and click “New Page” to start. You’ll find a variety of templates designed for different purposes, or you can opt for a blank canvas if you prefer to build from scratch.The website builder allows you to create a variety of page types, such as landing pages, sign-up forms, membership pages, sales pages, upsell and downsell pages, and more.

**Here are some of the available templates you can select from:**

While the process is quite simple, you’ll be guided through each step with a short tutorial.

To get a preview of these templates, you can simply click on the “Preview” option.

You just need to pick a template and then customize it to fit your specific needs.

Once you’ve chosen a page, you’ll find two editing modes – column mode and component mode.
The column mode is flexible and allows you to adjust the layout of sections and columns on your page. The component mode lets you edit individual elements within those columns, like forms, links, videos, and more.

The page builder also includes several useful features, such as:

Another platform, ClickFunnels, offers a page builder known as Etison Editor, designed to help you craft pages tailored to your sales approach and lead collection strategy. You select a template that fits your goals and then customize it by dragging and dropping different elements to build your page effectively.

In addition, everything is organized into four customizable, color-coded blocks to streamline the editing process.

The four main building blocks are:
– Sections (green): These form the foundational structure of your entire webpage.
– Rows and Columns (blue): Located within different sections, they help you design your page layout efficiently.
– Elements (orange): Individual components like videos, buttons, or headings that add specific content or functionality.

This categorization makes it easier to quickly assemble a conversion-optimized website by transforming various sections and elements into a cohesive page.

ClickFunnels provides a variety of elements to enhance your webpage and increase engagement. These include a two-step order form, surveys, pricing tables, bullet lists, videos, video popups, audio players, and more.

Additional customization options include editing CSS styles, adjusting padding, and changing colors. A particularly handy feature is the built-in “Checklist,” which helps you track and complete all necessary steps during the design process.

Adding a shopping cart is straightforward—simply drag and drop your products onto the page, then enter their descriptions and pricing plans. This eliminates the need for separate tools or complicated configurations.

You can also optimize your pages for mobile devices by customizing and previewing text sizes specifically for mobile viewing.

There’s no clear winner in this area because both tools feature user-friendly page builders loaded with multiple elements, templates, and a host of customization options.

Creating subscription-based membership sites is another common feature of both platforms, allowing you to offer exclusive content behind paywalls. Typical features include automated member management, multiple access levels, content dripping, templates, and protected posts.

Let’s compare their unique offerings:

Kartra provides an easy-to-use framework for building membership sites, complete with performance tracking and content management. You can establish multiple membership levels, such as bronze, silver, gold, or diamond. A progress bar shows members how far they’ve advanced through the content, automatically guiding them to higher tiers and triggering automated actions like congratulatory messages upon reaching new levels. This feature helps motivate users and creates a seamless experience as they navigate your membership content.

Furthermore, the platform includes a built-in comments section that encourages member engagement and provides a space for questions. You can moderate comments, manually control access, perform bulk updates, and automatically revoke access when needed.

A notable feature is the Membership Analytics, which allows you to filter data by date, membership type, access level, and more. It provides insights such as subscription and unsubscription rates, active member counts, average retention periods, content progress, time to completion, and other important metrics.

Next, it provides detailed metrics such as how many members subscribe and unsubscribe over time, the number of active users, retention averages, content engagement speed, and overall completion times, giving you valuable insights into your membership performance.

ClickFunnels offers a variety of ready-made templates and tools for setting up membership sites quickly. Simply pick a design, add your content, and your site is ready to go.

This platform supports adding login pages, search functions within members’ areas, and navigation bars for your content. The builder also includes pages for user registration and login processes.

However, a key limitation with ClickFunnels is the absence of integrated video and audio hosting. Instead, you need to embed media from external platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. It also lacks built-in progress tracking, comprehensive analytics, a unified membership portal, or comment moderation tools—requiring third-party tools for these features.

The winner in this comparison is Kartra, because it offers comprehensive progress tracking, analytics, comment moderation, and built-in hosting for audio and video content, making it a more complete all-in-one membership management solution.

Both platforms include email marketing automation tools. They feature a built-in email editor, personalized messaging, automated sequences, templates, tracking, segmentation, follow-up automation, and lead scoring, enabling you to create effective email campaigns.

Kartra Mail provides an intuitive interface that allows you to easily customize your emails with user-specific automation and personalization options. You can access the email campaign builder through the “My Communications” tab on your dashboard.

It also supports behavior-based automation, allowing you to set specific triggers and parameters so your email follow-ups are tailored precisely to your customers’ behaviors and actions.For example, Kartra automatically sends a follow-up message to customers who didn’t open your previous email, increasing engagement. It also keeps track of your email campaigns by recording every click and open. You can perform split tests on your email content and subject lines to see which version converts better, then use the most successful one. The “If and Then automation system” enables your email tool to automatically follow up based on customer actions such as opening emails, subscribing to lists, or making purchases.

Predefined rules guide this automation, allowing you to set criteria like email opens, list subscriptions, or purchases, and the system will act accordingly. Other features include personalizing messages with custom tags, sending SMS sequences, creating multiple trigger rules, cleaning your mailing list, managing subscriptions, and moving leads between lists. Kartra’s sequences run automatically around the clock, providing insights like open rates, click-through rates, revenue generated, unsubscriptions, and spam complaints. Overall, it offers comprehensive automation, analytics, and subscription management, simplifying your email marketing efforts.

ClickFunnels has a similar automation feature called “Actionetics,” which integrates with the Twilio SMS platform. To set up email sequences and follow-ups, you navigate to the “Automation” tab, select a template, and configure details such as sender name, subject line, SMTP settings, and delay times. You can create follow-up funnels tailored to customer behavior, including purchases or source of traffic. Additionally, ClickFunnels offers “Smart Lists,” which analyze your subscriber data to identify segments like customers with many Facebook followers, cart abandoners, free content consumers, or your top buyers. The system then sends automated broadcasts and tracks engagement metrics such as open rates, purchase behavior, and revenue generated per email.

Its other functionalities include integrating with Facebook, Google, and Twitter for richer customer insights, importing existing contact lists, and creating new tags to categorize customers. The platform also ranks clients based on their interactions and potential value, helping you focus your marketing efforts efficiently. Overall, Kartra provides advanced automation and analytics tools that enhance your email marketing capabilities more extensively than ClickFunnels.

Winner: Kartra.

While both platforms are capable, Kartra stands out with its unique features like list cleaning, A/B testing for subject lines, and detailed automation options. Importantly, its email software is included with all plans, making it a versatile choice for marketing automation.

Both platforms assist in building optimized checkout pages and integrating with payment gateways to facilitate sales. Kartra offers fully customizable checkout templates, allowing you to manage sales, carts, coupons, and promotions effectively. It features a cart abandonment tagging system that labels customers who leave their carts, enabling targeted follow-up campaigns. You can create different types of checkout forms, including single-step (vertical) and multi-step (horizontal) options, to suit your needs.

The checkout system also provides tools to manage your existing customer base, adjust pricing structures, issue coupons, reschedule payments, and temporarily pause subscriptions as needed.

The dashboard offers comprehensive insights into your sales performance and revenue metrics, including monitoring sales figures, rebills, refunds, cancellations, active subscriptions, average customer retention, customer lifetime value, and comparisons between long-term and short-term trends. This level of analytics helps you understand your business’s financial health clearly.

Additionally, you can customize the checkout process by adding different product SKUs and custom fields, offering greater flexibility for your offerings.

You also gain capabilities such as setting multiple price points, selling unlimited products, enabling one-click transactions, automatically calculating and adding sales taxes or VAT, incorporating upsells, downsells, and order bumps, tracking customer geolocation, supporting translation into 12 languages and 40 currencies, offering one-time or recurring payments, and providing discounts, trials, and promotional offers.

Regarding security, Kartra adheres to GDPR, SCA, and PCI standards, ensuring all credit card transactions are safeguarded with 256-bit encryption. Still, its payment gateway options are somewhat limited, primarily accepting credit cards and PayPal directly, although integration with third-party gateways like Authorize.net, Braintree, and Stripe is possible.

ClickFunnels offers a variety of customizable checkout page templates that can be tailored to match your brand and seamlessly integrated into your website. Its checkout page builder resembles the main website editor, allowing easy customization. The platform also features tools to recover abandoned carts, manage subscriptions and payment plans, apply coupons, and track sales performance, making it a robust option for online sales funnels.

You can add elements such as Apple/Android Pay options, product variation selectors, order bumps, product summaries, and credit card input fields. Supports multiple third-party payment gateways including Paypal, Stripe, JVZoo, Clickbank, and Easy Pay Direct, providing a broad range of payment options for your customers.

Overall, Kartra stands out for its extensive customization options and detailed analytics, making it the preferred choice for many businesses. However, ClickFunnels edges ahead in third-party payment integration flexibility. If you’re seeking a simpler checkout platform, ThriveCart might be a good alternative; check out my full ThriveCart review to determine if it fits your needs.

Kartra’s calendar feature works smoothly with other tools on the platform and can synchronize with Google Calendar, allowing you to seamlessly manage your appointments and events.

The calendar feature makes it simple to schedule appointments and host live events without hassle. It’s useful for coaches, consultants, or anyone needing to coordinate meetings without constantly checking dates.

The calendar function offers several advantages: it allows for real-time appointment management, automatically adjusts for different time zones, consolidates all scheduling into one interface, updates appointments automatically, and provides access to each client’s complete history—such as previous bookings, purchases, and tags. It also sends out reminders like registration confirmations, event updates, cancellations, or rescheduling notices. Plus, it empowers your clients to book their own appointments independently.

Currently, ClickFunnels does not include an integrated calendar system. To incorporate scheduling, you need to connect a third-party service like Google Calendar into your sales funnels.

Winner: Kartra. Kartra stands out with its built-in calendar system that smoothly works with other platform features, eliminating the need for external tools.

Kartra includes a powerful “Analytics Heatmap” feature that highlights what content or pages are most appealing to your audience. It tracks details such as when visitors land on your site, fill out forms, subscribe to newsletters, or make purchases through Kartra checkout pages. For memberships, the system automatically logs login details.

The platform provides comprehensive tracking throughout your entire sales funnel—from heatmaps and click analysis to video views and file downloads. It consolidates this data into a single, unified report. You can see visitor counts, new leads, and revenue statistics on daily, weekly, and monthly timelines. It also helps identify underperforming forms or videos that aren’t viewed as often as expected.

All analytics are accessible directly within Kartra—there’s no need to employ additional tools. The platform’s marketing analysis tools also communicate effortlessly with each other and other integrated apps.

Overall, Kartra offers a wide range of analytics, including: traffic and conversion reports, subscription stats, product performance, email engagement, calendar and support desk analytics, sales figures, affiliate tracking, and transaction data.

ClickFunnels does not provide in-depth analytics for campaigns or performance metrics on its own. To get detailed insights, you need to connect third-party tools like Google Analytics.

To do this, you go to the Analytics section, access the “Mr.SecretSauce” panel, and in the “Tracking Info” tab, locate the tracking code area. Paste your analytics code into the settings and save. This setup, while straightforward, requires extra steps outside the platform.

Winner: Kartra. With its built-in analytics and reporting features, Kartra eliminates the need for external tools, providing all the insights you need directly within the platform.

Kartra offers native integrations with a variety of third-party applications, such as payment processors, email marketing services, membership platforms, and calendar tools. These built-in integrations make it easier to connect your existing tools and expand your functionality without hassle.

You can develop custom integrations using APIs, Instant Payment Notifications (IPN), or the Custom App system for tailored solutions.

ClickFunnels seamlessly connects with popular autoresponder services like Aweber, MailChimp, Infusionsoft, and ActiveCampaign. This eliminates the need for Zapier, since ClickFunnels offers built-in integrations with many business tools.

Winner: ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels stands out because it integrates directly with autoresponders without requiring third-party automation tools.

Kartra offers a 40% commission to affiliates for each recurring payment made by their referrals, provided those referrals remain members. Affiliate earnings are updated as your referrals change their account plans.
For those managing a network of affiliates, there is also an opportunity to earn a 10% commission from every sale and recurring payment generated by your affiliates.

ClickFunnels’ affiliate program allows promoters to earn commissions not just on top-selling products but also through recurring revenue using “sticky cookies.” These cookies track visitors across devices, so even if a visitor signs up on their phone after browsing at home, you continue earning commissions.
You can start promoting by logging into the affiliate center, grabbing your unique links, and sharing them. The platform offers up to 40% recurring commissions.

Additionally, top affiliates have a chance to win a dream car. Reach 100 users, and you will receive $500 monthly to cover vehicle lease payments. Reaching 200 users boosts this payout to $1,000 monthly.

Winner: ClickFunnels.
Thanks to its robust affiliate system, recurring commissions, and incentive programs, ClickFunnels edges out.

Kartra enables A/B testing via external URLs or its own pages. You can run tests on up to four pages simultaneously and gather detailed visitor data for each.
You can set automatic milestones to declare a winner or choose manually. The platform offers advanced insights into test analytics, providing deeper understanding than some competitors.

ClickFunnels provides two main split testing options: using a template page or duplicating existing pages.
You can modify the proportion of traffic each variation receives and view statistical data, including confidence scores. However, you must manually select the winning page, as the system does not automatically declare a winner.
Note that ClickFunnels’ split testing features are more basic and do not include email or subject line testing.

Winner: Kartra.
Kartra’s comprehensive testing tools and detailed analytics give it an edge over ClickFunnels.

Kartra offers four subscription options:

All plans include features such as checkout pages, sales funnels, video hosting, landing pages, support desk, affiliate management, calendar, and more. A 14-day trial costs only $1, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

ClickFunnels provides three subscription levels:

Their plans cater to different levels of business needs, from startups to advanced marketers.

ClickFunnels provides a 30-day money-back guarantee along with a 14-day free trial to try out the platform.

Winner: Kartra.

The advantage goes to Kartra because its starter plan costs $99 per month and includes email marketing and automation features. In contrast, to access email automation with ClickFunnels, you’ll need to subscribe to their higher-tier $297/month plan.

Customer service and support are crucial aspects when choosing a platform. Kartra offers an extensive free training program for new users to get familiar with the software. Additionally, it provides support via live chat, a ticketing system, and a dedicated Facebook group for customer inquiries. On the other hand, ClickFunnels offers basic support through online tutorials, FAQ pages, and a Facebook community where users can ask questions.

Winning in customer support, Kartra clearly has the edge because of its comprehensive training resources and multiple support channels.

Who’s the Winner? Kartra or ClickFunnels?

This detailed comparison aims to help you decide between ClickFunnels and Kartra based on your needs. Both platforms excel at creating sales funnels, but your choice will depend on your specific business goals.

ClickFunnels is particularly well-suited for e-commerce businesses and online entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, Kartra is a strong option for coaches, consultants, gym owners, marketers, or those selling information products. Both platforms offer user-friendly tools and email marketing capabilities, but with Kartra’s starting plan at just $99/month, you get email marketing automation without extra costs. To access this feature in ClickFunnels, you’ll need to opt for the $297/month plan.

When it comes to payment options, ClickFunnels supports more payment gateways, making it more flexible for sales transactions. Both platforms have affiliate programs, but ClickFunnels also offers the exciting possibility of winning your dream car as part of its affiliate rewards. Their membership site features are comparable, yet ClickFunnels lacks some of Kartra’s advanced functionalities like progress tracking and integrated audio/video hosting.

Kartra’s customer support stands out thanks to its free training, live chat, and robust support system, making it easier for new users to get started and resolve issues. Be sure to review all features carefully to choose the platform that best fits your business’s unique needs.

Further reading on StepThroughThePortal.com: If you’re interested in comparing Kartra with another leading online course platform, check out my review of Kartra versus Kajabi. For a more comprehensive understanding of Kartra itself, visit my full Kartra review.