ClickFunnels Review: Is it the Best Sales Funnel Builder? (2024 Update)

ClickFunnels is a popular marketing platform that promises all-in-one sales funnel building. But does it live up to the hype?

I’ve been testing the platform from every aspect and angle to see where it excels and falls short, and here’s my honest take:

• Robust funnel builder: ClickFunnels shines when it comes to building marketing funnels. The easy-to-use builder offers extensive customization for landing pages, potentially replacing specialized tools like Leadpages or Unbounce. It also comes with native A/B testing to help you boost your conversion.
• Solid email marketing: ClickFunnels offers well-defined email marketing tools for lead nurturing and sales. It includes a good template designer, contact management, and a visual workflow automation builder. However, I wasn’t impressed with its automated email sequence builder as it took more unnecessary steps to create one than I expected.
• Limited course builder: While you can upload learning materials and drip course content, ClickFunnels lacks features like student assessments, certifications, native live streaming, and community building — functionalities crucial for dedicated course platforms. 
• It has a steep learning curve: due to its sheer number of features, ClickFunnels can feel overwhelming and confusing for most new users.

Simply put, ClickFunnels excels at its core function— creating sales funnels and marketing automations. Other features like website building, blogging, and online course creation are decent but can’t compete with specialized platforms.

In this ClickFunnels review, we will delve deeper into its functionalities, compare it to alternatives, and explore other aspects like pricing, website building, e-commerce, and integrations to help you make an informed decision.

Let’s get right into it, shall we?

ClickFunnels Review: Funnel and Website Building

The funnel builder is comprehensive with built-in tools like split testing and conditional split path functionality.

ClickFunnels allows you to create multi-step funnels with different page types including 

• Landing pages 
• Sales pages 
• Thank you pages
• Checkout pages

The funnel builder is easy to use and has a clean interface. It uses a drag-and-drop interface to add elements to your funnel. You can quickly start building your funnel by choosing from its wide selection of over 10 prebuilt templates or creating one from scratch.

Inside the funnel builder, you can integrate a workflow that is fired based on the user’s actions and behavior, such as signing up for an email list, making a purchase, or abandoning their cart. 

Additionally, ClickFunnels comes with native split-testing functionality. You can split traffic between two pages in your funnel to see which one converts better. You can also adjust the proportion of the traffic you want to send to its test variation for maximum results.

Moreover, the funnel builder allows you to send your leads to different paths based on your set criteria such as when a customer makes a purchase, enrolled for a course, or is an existing customer among others. This allows you to segment your leads and send targeted messages and offers, guiding them down the conversion path most relevant to their actions and interests.

ClickFunnels can build a full-fledged website but it’s blogging tools could be better. 

Not only can you use ClickFunnels to build sales pages and landing pages but it also allows you to build an entire website. The platform comes with 8 fully customizable website themes. 

Each theme comes with a variety of prebuilt pages including a homepage, blog page, contact page, course page, member login page, and more.

However, when it comes to blogging, ClickFunnels isn’t the most user-friendly platform. It lacks a dedicated blogging tool and relies on its page editor, which is less optimized for blogging. This difference becomes apparent in a few ways.

When you start creating a blog post, ClickFunnels starts by requiring you to enter your post title, featured image, SEO title, meta description, and categories.

However, once done, and instead of directing you to the editor where you can begin adding your content, it’ll redirect you to its blog archive list page. From there you need to click on the edit icon to load the editor—adding an unnecessary step to your workflow.

Building your blog post within ClickFunnels feels more like building a basic webpage than crafting a blog entry. ClickFunnels uses a row-and-column system for structuring your content, which can be cumbersome compared to dedicated blogging platforms like WordPress.

Although ClickFunnels tries to incorporate a block-style editor used by WordPress, it does not support slash “/” commands for quick block insertion or block auto-population. In WordPress, you can easily add primary blocks to a section by just hitting the / key and selecting the relevant block from the list.

Moreover,  you copy a document from my Google Docs with all its rich media content such as images, GIFs, videos, and tables and WordPress will auto-populate the relevant blocks without any issue. 

On the other hand, ClickFunnels requires you to add individual blocks one by one and manually upload images, embed videos, and create tables. This entire process feels cumbersome and unfriendly. Furthermore, the blog editor doesn’t load fully on your tab and instead is displayed as a popup window with no option to maximize it, making it even less user-friendly.

The website editor offers extensive customization options but it struggles with performance issues.

ClickFunnels’ website editor is a double-edged sword. On the bright side, it empowers you with extensive customization options. You have granular control over styling, from setting padding and background colors to adjusting element visibility on different devices.  It’s a WYSIWYG editor, so you can see your design come together in real-time as you make changes.

The editor provides access to 50+ design elements and pre-built section templates to jumpstart your page creation. You can even add advanced effects like animations and shadows for a more dynamic look. 

Moreover, the editor also allows you to add custom code to further style your designs. 

However, ClickFunnels’ editor struggles with performance.  It can be frustratingly slow to load, sometimes taking seconds or even minutes to get started.  

Adding elements or section templates can grind the editor to a halt, leaving you staring at a blank white screen. This kind of unreliability can significantly disrupt your workflow.

ClickFunnels Review: Email Marketing & Workflow Automation

Requires DKIM verification before creating email campaigns.

ClickFunnels prioritizes email deliverability by requiring DKIM verification for your domain email. This verification process helps ensure your emails land in your recipients’ inboxes instead of spam folders.

While ClickFunnels offers a tool to streamline authentication, the process can feel daunting for users unfamiliar with technical aspects. Additionally, if you have a website hosted on your root domain, enabling ClickFunnels’ default DKIM verification might cause unintended redirections—as the option is toggled on by default.

The clickFunnels form builder is highly versatile but has limited display options and trigger rules for popups.

Part of ClickFunnels’ email marketing features is the ability to create forms. Using its drag-and-drop builder you can create and customize an entire form without feeling overwhelmed. You get full creative control of your forms’ appearance and what field types to include.

Essentially, ClickFunnels lets you build any form type your digital business needs, from email opt-in forms and lead capture forms to webinar registration forms, order forms, and surveys.

Additionally, ClickFunnels allows you to create popups for individual pages, and you can customize them based on the content of each specific page.

The popup builder offers settings to trigger popups on exit, based on page load delay, or based on specific elements loaded on your page.

However, it does not currently allow you to display popups on button or link clicks, trigger popups after a period of user inactivity, or control how often popups appear to the same visitor—which can lead to a poor user experience.

Offers a robust workflow automation builder but setting up marketing drip campaigns takes more steps.

ClickFunnels allows you to visualize every step you build in your workflow automations. You can begin by setting what actions trigger your workflow including, when the user opts into a specific funnel, buys a product, or a tag is applied to them among others. 

It gives you more flexibility in setting up your workflows allowing you to decide what steps to include and what not. You also get the ability to A/B test your email campaigns allowing you to test different elements such as email subjectlines, buttons, link text, and different variations of email copy to see which one performs best.

However, building automated email sequences in ClickFunnels can be cumbersome. You have to set up the automation trigger (an event) and add each email in your sequence, along with its time interval, as separate steps in the workflow.

Moreover, ClickFunnels does not automatically populate your chosen email template when you add a new email to your sequence, requiring you to choose a new template every time. This can feel repetitive affecting your email sequence setup process.

ClickFunnels Review: Community and Online Course Creation

The course builder is easy to use but lacks student engagement tools.

ClickFunnels offers a user-friendly course builder, enabling you to create and sell online courses to your customers.  The builder provides all the basic elements you need, including the ability to structure your course with modules and lessons, and even drip the content to prevent student overwhelm.  

You can also incorporate video and audio content directly or embed videos from external platforms like Wistia, Vimeo, and YouTube.

However, ClickFunnels falls short when it comes to student engagement and assessment tools. Features commonly found in well-rounded course builders, such as quizzes, group chats, live events, and certifications, are simply absent. 

Its community-building platform also feels dated, resembling a basic forum from a bygone era.  It’s also less customizable and essential community engagement tools like polls, quizzes, leaderboards, and challenges. 

Your interaction with students is limited to text-based posts with images, where responses are restricted to comments and likes. 

And I thought Facebook Groups were the worst 🙂

ClickFunnels Review: E-commerce Features

ClickFunnels cart builder can replace dedicated checkout software like Samcart.

ClickFunnels has a robust checkout system that eliminates the need for third-party cart builders, such as Samcart.

The checkout is built into its funnel builder, making it easy to add to your funnel and set up workflow automation triggered by customer behavior during checkout. You can also create a popup to boost sales. For example, you can create a discount popup that triggers when a customer tries to leave the page.

What’s even more interesting is that ClickFunnels’ checkout funnel supports sales optimization features such as order bumps and discounts. This allows you to maximize your sales potential by offering relevant incentives at the right moment.

Supports 6 payment gateways

ClickFunnels checkout system supports six payments including:

• Payments AI (their own gateway)
• Stripe,
• PayPal 
• Coinbase 
• Klarna
• NMI

However, it currently does not support Apple Pay and Google Pay. This can be a drawback for customers who prefer the convenience of these mobile wallets.

ClickFunnels Pricing Review: Worth Your Money?

ClickFunnels offers three subscription plans with both monthly and yearly billing options. Yearly plans come at a discounted price, saving you money in the long run. 

The platform’s tiered pricing structure is based on the resources you need.  Higher tiers offer access to more features like additional websites, users, funnels, and contacts.

Here’s a breakdown of the plans and their key features:

• Basic Plan: This entry-level plan starts at $147/month but is discounted to $127/month when billed annually, saving you $240 per year. It allows you to create unlimited courses, workflows, pages, and email sequences but limits you to 1 website, 20 funnels, 3 users, 1 domain, and 10,000 contacts.
• Pro Plan: For $197/month or $157/month billed annually (saving $480/year), the Pro plan offers everything in the Basic plan, plus the ability to create 3 websites, 100 funnels, 5 users, 3 domains, and manage up to 25,000 contacts. It also includes access to API integrations.
• Funnel Hacker Plan: The top-tier plan is priced at $297/month or $208/month billed annually (saving $1068/year). It includes all the features of the Pro plan, but with even higher limits: unlimited websites, unlimited funnels, 15 users, 9 domains, and 200,000 contacts. Additionally, the Funnel Hacker plan grants access to API integrations.

ClickFunnels Pros and Cons

ClickFunnels Review: Final Verdict

In this ClickFunnels review, we used the software to see where it thrives and lacks and few things are apparent.

ClickFunnels strives to be a comprehensive marketing platform, but its core strength lies in crafting high-converting sales funnels. While it offers various marketing tools, they might not be the most efficient choice for every facet of your marketing strategy.

In fact, ClickFunnels works best when used in conjunction with other tools like WordPress for blogging and ConvertKit for email marketing.

Therefore, choose ClickFunnels if: 

• Your business prioritizes high-converting sales funnels
• You’re a creator searching for an all-in-one platform for your digital business that includes a course builder, email marketing tools, and sales funnel builder without the need for third-party integration.
• You want to sell both digital and physical products in one place, such as digital courses and fan merchandise.