Ontraport holds itself out as a “business automation software for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and small businesses” that incorporates tools like CRM, marketing automation, ECommerce and reporting”.
ClickFunnels bills itself as a “website and sales funnel builder for entrepreneurs”.
Having said that and having previously used both platforms for extended periods of time, let’s just cut to the chase right here. In our opinion, neither of these tools is a one-size-fits-all solution. Both of them cater to different businesses with different needs.
ClickFunnels Benefits
If you already have your marketing stack and all you need is a landing page creator and funnel builder, you might consider the ClickFunnels platform. ClickFunnels is solely focused on doing one job: helping you sell your products and services to your customers.
Ontraport Benefits
On the other hand, if you want a complete e-commerce suite for online sales, marketing and sales pipeline management along with a payment management system equipped with a visual campaign builder automating every step of your customer journey, consider the alternative. Ontraport is a full suite of marketing platform that includes, sales, marketing campaigns, customer loyalty and more, plus the ability to manage your payments through the full e-commerce suite. And with Ontraport’s new Setup Wizards it is even easier to get up and running.
Ontraport’s New Systems And Setup Wizards
Ontraport’s goal with their systems and setup wizard is to provide an automated wizard for almost every system you can think of. In just their first release, they’ve focused on systems that their customers told them they wanted:
- Email Newsletter Opt-in and Delivery: Collect new subscribers, confirm their subscription, and automatically schedule and send your newsletters.
- Free Download Lead Magnet Funnel: Get opt-ins for your free resource, deliver it via email, and follow up to keep your new leads engaged.
- Mini-course Lead Magnet Funnel: Show your expertise to your leads and pitch your product with an educational video email series.
- Webinar Promotion Funnel: Gather sign-ups for your webinar and automatically send reminder emails to increase attendance at your webinars.
- Thank You Page Conversion Booster: After you capture new leads, use your thank you page to learn more about them so you can follow up with relevant messaging.
- Stay-in-touch Drip Email Campaign: Nurture your leads with an ongoing series of emails that share your expertise and advice.
- Persuasive Sales Funnel: Sell your product or service with a long-form sales page and order page, built to convince buyers that you’re the right choice.
- Abandoned Cart Recapture: Give a nudge to almost-buyers who came to your order page but didn’t complete their purchase.
- Smiley Survey and Testimonial Generator: Gauge the sentiment around your product and gather testimonials from your happiest customers automatically.
- Membership Starter Kit: Create an Ontraport Membership Site, complete with automated login functionality, reminder emails and more.
- Subscription Management on Autopilot: Manage subscription payments and give your subscribers a Customer Center for self-service.
ClickFunnels Has Templates
ClickFunnels also has a library of free and premium landing page templates for you to select from. These are landing pages that are fully optimized and created to convert, ensuring they engage with your users and help you achieve your goals.
One thing to note, if you want to send email from your ClickFunnels account you MUST be on the $297 per month platinum account.
When you upgrade to ClickFunnels Platinum, you can also connect or reconnect with your audience anytime, anywhere using multi-dimensional marketing. You can send highly-targeted messages to your customers through email, social, text, and desktop notifications.
Ontraport Is All About Business Automation
As a small business owner, you’re probably already using automation tools in your business. If you use applications such as GSuite, PlusThis, Zapier, IFTTT, Hootsuite, Zendesk, or similar to save time and get more done – you’re already tapping into the power of automation.
Automation strategies allow you to systematically apply the right tools to optimize the benefits of these technologies and boost your bottom line. Incorporating automation into your business can:
- help save precious time
- increase agility
- lower costs
- improve productivity
- reduce delays
- minimize errors
- and improve customer satisfaction
First hand experience reveals most business owners want to keep records of their contacts. Ontraport provides the ability to create individual records for every conceivable customer type, from customer names and addresses to email addresses and phone numbers (aka custom objects). To our knowledge, Ontraport is the only marketing platform for small businesses that offers the ability to create completely individual data set types, establish relationships between them and fully automate the system. Ontraport was deliberately designed to integrate all the functions a company needs to manage its entire customer life cycle from awareness to engagement and subscription to conversion and ultimately ascension and promotion.
Customer Service Comparison
As business owners ourselves, we understand the often under highlighted value of customer service and the fact that not all customer service is equal.
We value good (minimum) customer service and place a high emphasis on it. We consider good customer service just as important as the product or service we are purchasing. We believe good customer service should provide accessibility to an internal specialist or expert. This is sooooooo important (lol) when you are building and creating landing pages, email sequences and other techie stuff.
Our customer service experience with ClickFunnels at both the standard and platinum level memberships was somewhat subpar. At the time, we could only communicate via email which meant a few hours (at best) for a response. In our opinion the customer service did not meet our needs.
In contrast, and one reason why we selected Ontraport, is because Ontraport customer service is stellar and provides value. Their support team is incredibly professional and responsive. When we have issues that need to be escalated, the response is prompt and resolutions are fast.
Ontraport also offers screenshare sessions with their customer support folks at a time that’s convenient for you to walk through the issues in a side-by-side arrangement.
Ontraport provides support Monday through Thursday from 6am to 12am, Friday from 6am to 9pm and Saturday and Sunday from 9am to 9pm.
Ontraport Vs ClickFunnels Pricing Comparison
ClickFunnels currently has three account levels:
- ClickFunnels “Standard” $97 per month
- ClickFunnels “Platinum” $297 per month
- ClickFunnels “Two Comma Club X” $2,497 per month
Click here to go straight to the ClickFunnels pricing page.
Ontraport currently has four account levels:
- Ontraport “Basic” $79 per month
- Ontraport “Plus” $147 per month
- Ontraport “Pro” $297 per month
- Ontraport “Enterprise” $297 per month
Click here to go straight to the Ontraport pricing page.
Ontraport Vs ClickFunnels Ease Of Use
We know and realize ease of use is an individual experience. What comes easy to you may not come easy to us. Ease of use is subjective.
It was our experience that building landing pages in ClickFunnels was easy and click simple but we had issues implementing “Follow-Up Funnels” (previously called Actionetics) and turned to ActiveCampaign (another 3rd party platform) for our email messaging.
Again, ease of use is subjective but our experience with Ontraport was a night and day comparison, their platform is super intuitive and all the pieces are integrated in the platform.
Ontraport Vs ClickFunnels Conclusion
It is our opinion, both Ontraport and ClickFunnels are solid platforms based on our years of first-hand user experience with each.
If you’ve already invested in a collection of marketing tools and are comfortable making the integrations (duct taping) work and simply want a landing page creator and funnel builder, ClickFunnels may be enough.
If on the other hand, you’d like to have an “all-in-one” business automation software platform with all your marketing tools, and all your data in one software then Ontraport is worth a look.
For more details on Ontraport vs ClickFunnels click here.
If you have questions about Ontraport or ClickFunnels click here to schedule a 15-minute discovery session.
