Which Is Best for You in 2023?

If you are a business owner, then you have probably heard of ClickFunnels and Shopify. They are both popular platforms for creating websites and selling products online.

So, which one is better?

With a lot of experience and research on both platforms, we’ve come up with a list of pros and cons that include the best features of each platform.

We will compare ClickFunnels and Shopify to help you decide which platform is right for you.

The main difference between ClickFunnels and Shopify is the type of service they provide. ClickFunnels is excellent for building sales funnels and focuses entirely on bringing you the highest conversions. Shopify is more of an overall solution that you can use to create any kind of online store.

To help you better understand, let’s start with an overview of both platforms.

Overview: ClickFunnels vs. Shopify

Are you looking for a quick answer?

Check out our summary of both platform pros and cons:

ClickFunnels		Shopify
Pros	Cons	Pros	Cons
Comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder	Lacks in customer service when compared to Shopify	Great templates to start with, and an easy customization interface	It is a bit limited in terms of its design options
Highly converting funnel templates to get started with	Highly-priced, lowest plan starting at $147 a month	An extensive app store of over 3,000 different apps that help you get more out of your online store	Reliant on Shopify apps if you want to extend your store’s functionality
Advanced A/B testing tool		Excellent 24/7 customer service, help center, and community forum

To sum up, take a look at the following:

ClickFunnels is an excellent choice if:

• You want to build sales funnels and campaigns that bring maximum conversions.
• You need powerful marketing tools such as A/B testing, email marketing, and analytics.
• You have previous experience selling online successfully.
• You are not limited in terms of budget.

Shopify is an excellent choice if:

• You want an all-in-one solution for creating an online store.
• You want a scalable option that comes with great apps, good payment options, and pricing plans for everyone.
• You don’t have much experience selling online before, but you still want great features.
• You appreciate good customer support, which is something Shopify provides with its 24/7 live chat and email support.

Why you might need ClickFunnels or Shopify for your ecommerce store?

Why exactly do you need ClickFunnels or Shopify?

If you want to create a successful ecommerce store, you need a platform capable of handling the tasks involved.

Tasks involved with creating an ecommerce store:

• Creating an online store to be able to sell products.
• Creating content marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your ecommerce store.
• Managing customer relationships and providing excellent customer service.
• Integrating payment gateways and shipping methods into the store.

And guess what?

Both ClickFunnels and Shopify can help you with all of these tasks!

These two platforms are used for slightly different purposes, but both can help in their own way.

To help you understand better, let’s take a more in-depth look at both platforms next!

What is ClickFunnels?

Let’s start with ClickFunnels!

ClickFunnels is an all-in-one sales funnel builder designed to help entrepreneurs build sales funnels, capture leads, automate emails, and close more sales.

It basically comes with everything you need to create any type of sales funnel, turning it into a powerful sales machine.

While Shopify is a better all-around online store builder, ClickFunnels is best at creating high-converting sales funnels, which is quite effective!

You can do many other things with ClickFunnels as well, including building online courses, membership sites, websites, and ecommerce stores, but it is mostly known for its sales and landing page-building tools.

Pricing

ClickFunnels comes with three plans: Basic, Pro, and Funnel Hacker. These plans range from $147 per month to $297 per month.

If you are unsure if you like ClickFunnels, you can start with their 14-day free plan that is available on all of the plans.

You can find all the ClickFunnels plans here.

The pros of ClickFunnels

To help you better understand ClickFunnels and Shopify, we will also look at the pros and cons of each platform.

We will start with ClickFunnels!

Drag-and-drop website builder

ClickFunnels offers an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder so you can easily create your sales funnels, pages, opt-in forms, and campaigns.

You have complete freedom over how your website will look like. You can add as many pages as you want or keep it a one-page landing page.

That’s one of the reasons why ClickFunnels is so popular; you have complete control.

Also, you don’t need to know any coding to build sites with ClickFunnels!

A/B testing

One of the biggest pros of ClickFunnels is its A/B testing tool.

This means you can test different versions of your sales funnels and see which is more effective.

Whether you want to A/B test your landing page, a single page, or your email campaign, you will be able to do that, and see which version works the best and stick with that!

This is something that Shopify doesn’t offer as effectively. They have third-party apps you can use, but it’s at an additional cost.

Optimized templates and funnels

ClickFunnels comes with a marketplace full of tested and optimized templates and funnels for your specific needs.

Whether you want to create a sales funnel, thank you page, or single-page site, you will find something matching that you can modify and start using immediately.

It’s good to note that some of these templates are paid, but many of them are free to use.

It’s not necessary to use these templates when using ClickFunnels, but they can give you a good starting point, especially if you haven’t built sales funnels before.

The cons of ClickFunnels

Although ClickFunnels is excellent for creating sales funnels, it does come with its drawbacks.

Here are some of them:

Lacking customer service

Compared to Shopify, ClickFunnels support is not as good.

They offer live chat, email, and phone support, but the waiting is longer than Shopify. The live chat is also not available 24/7, so you might not get an answer right away.

If you are a beginner user, this is something you should keep in mind, but this is definitely not a dealbreaker for more advanced users.

Highly-priced

ClickFunnels’s cheapest plan starts at $147 a month, which is much higher than Shopify’s cheapest $29 a month plan.

If you are just starting out and are tight on a budget, ClickFunnels may not be your best option. However, if the price is not a problem for you, then it’s okay.

They also do offer a 14-day trial, which is nice if you want to check out the platform.

What is Shopify?

Next up, we have Shopify.

Shopify is the favorite platform of many ecommerce entrepreneurs, and for a good reason!

It is an all-in-one ecommerce platform that allows you to easily create an online store.

One of the things that make Shopify special is its themes.

You don’t have to start from scratch when creating an online store with Shopify, since it has great themes you can choose from.

There are multiple free themes to choose from and plenty of paid themes that you can customize to better fit your brand.

What makes this all even better?

Shopify also has an extensive app store, allowing you to extend your store with powerful plugins and integrations.

From abandoned cart recovery to product reviews, there are tons of apps to help you get more out of your store.

Pricing

If you want to create an online store with Shopify, you have to pay anywhere between $29 a month to $299 a month, depending on the pricing plan you choose.

In terms of a free trial, Shopify offers a shorter trial than ClickFunnels, being only 3 days. You can use and browse the platform for free during this time, even with no credit card required.

After the free 3-day trial, Shopify currently offers a paid trial deal where your first three months are only $1 per month!

This is a great opportunity to find out if Shopify is the right solution for you.

Tip: Did you create your Shopify account already? If not, sign up by clicking this link here to get a free 3-day trial + pay $1/month for the first 3 months!

The pros of Shopify

What’s precisely good about Shopify?

Here are the main pros of using Shopify for your online store:

Scalable platform

Shopify is an excellent platform for scaling businesses of any size.

Why exactly?

Because of the wide selection of features it offers:

• Great plans for businesses of all sizes, from $5 per month to Enterprise level plans.
• 24/7 customer service, which makes it easy to contact support when any problems arise.
• Ability to sell pretty much anything, from digital products to physical goods.
• You can add unlimited products, variants, images, and descriptions to all of the plans.
• Supports multilingual sites, and multiple currencies.
• Great payment gateway options, covering all of the most popular ones such as Paypal, Stripe, and AmazonPay.
• Easy integrations for advertising with platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook, and Google.

Those are just a few reasons why we think Shopify is great for scaling.

Good templates and easy design

As we talked about before, one of the best parts of Shopify is its templates and design.

At the current moment, Shopify offers 11 free themes and 96 paid themes.

Once signing up, you can select from one of their free or paid templates and customize it to fit your brand and needs.

If you have never used Shopify, that’s completely fine. There are no coding skills needed, as the platform has a straightforward design interface.

You don’t have as much design freedom as what ClickFunnels offer, but in our experience, even the free themes offer enough design options to stand out.

Great customer service

Shopify is known for having one of the best, if not the best, customer service in the ecommerce industry.

You can contact their customer service through 24/7 live chat and email support. On top of this, they have great self-service options, such as their in-depth help center and Shopify community forum.

Extensive app store

One of the best parts of Shopify is the App Store.

It has over 2,000 apps that can help you boost your store’s functionality and give it a competitive edge.

There are some free apps, and many come with free trials, but most of the apps come with a monthly fee.

You can find apps in many niches, including marketing, customization, fulfillment, analytics, dropshipping, and print on demand.

The cons of Shopify

Shopify has some downsides, too.

Let’s go through them.

Reliant on apps

Sure, Shopify plans are not that highly-priced, but the downside is that you have to pay extra for the apps and integrations if you want to extend the functionality of your store.

Are the apps necessary?

No, definitely not.

Without the apps, you have everything you need to build an online store, but they do definitely help.

For example, you need apps if you want to do proper email marketing, or if you want to collect product reviews, or if you want to create urgent sales such as limited-time offers.

The cost of these apps depends a lot on what you select, but with our experience, you can get a pretty good set of apps for under $60 per month.

For example, the all-in-one Shopify app Vitals allows you to get started for only $30 per month and includes all the marketing tools you need to get started.

Limited customization options

Unlike ClickFunnels, Shopify is not a drag-and-drop builder, meaning you have less freedom to customize your store as you wish.

For some entrepreneurs, this could be a limitation since they won’t be able to create a store that looks completely unique.

However, there are plenty of great design options and ready-to-use templates to choose from, so you can still make your store stand out.

If you want a drag-and-drop builder for a Shopify Store, it’s possible to use a Shopify app like PageFly, which is a drag-and-drop custom page builder.

FAQs about ClickFunnels and Shopify

To help you give a better idea of how these two solutions compare, we have included a few frequently asked questions:

Alternatives for ClickFunnels and Shopify

Both ClickFunnels and Shopify are great options with slightly different purposes.

However, they may not be the right fit for everyone. Here are some alternatives that may also be worth considering:

1. WooCommerce (For WordPress)

WooCommerce is a great solution for those who want to use WordPress as their platform, as it directly integrates with it as a plugin.

It is an open-source solution, that comes with a lot of plugins, extensions, and better SEO compared to Shopify and ClickFunnels.

If you want to fully own your online store, since you own the hosting, domain, and security, WooCommerce is a good option.

WooCommerce is also free to use, and you only have to pay for the extensions you use, the estimated price being $39.

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a popular ecommerce platform across scaling teams, thanks to its built-in features, and good functionality.

BigCommerce’s pricing is similar to Shopify, ranging from $29 a month to $299 a month, as well as offering Enterprise plans that are more expensive.

The cheapest plan doesn’t offer as good features as Shopify offers; for example, lacks the abandoned cart saver feature.

3. Leadpages

Last but not least is Leadpages!

Leadpages is a great choice for small businesses and entrepreneurs who want an easy solution for creating landing pages and websites.

The best parts of Leadpages is its drag-and-drop editor, which comes with ready-to-use templates, and great customer service on all plans (email, live chat, and phone support).

The prices range from $49 month to $99 a month, being slightly more expensive than Shopify, but cheaper than ClickFunnels.

They also have a 14-day free trial, that allows you to test all the features before committing to a paid plan.

Taking action

Reading and absorbing information and knowledge is great (definitely if it’s free!), but do you know what’s even better?

Taking action!

So to help you take action with what you have learned in this article, check out these bullet points:

• Decide if you want to use ClickFunnels or Shopify for your store. In short, ClickFunnels is great for building more complex sales funnels, and Shopify is a better overall solution and is more beginner-friendly.
• Sign up for the platform you choose, and get yourself familiar with the features. If you are still not sure, both platforms offer a free trial, so why not check out both platforms and see if they fit your needs?
• Decide what you want to sell. Regardless of what you plan to sell, at this point, you should have an idea of it. If you don’t have products or inventory yourself, the dropshipping business model is something worth looking into.

Conclusion

In conclusion, both ClickFunnels and Shopify are excellent ecommerce platforms that can help you create a successful online store.

If you want to build landing pages and robust marketing tools, then ClickFunnels could be a better option. On the other hand, if you want an all-in-one platform for creating and managing your online store, then Shopify is the right choice.

Depending on your needs and budget constraints, you can make a decision that works best for you.

If you’re still not sure, you can sign up for a free trial for both platforms and see firsthand what both have to offer!

Hopefully, this article has cleared up some of your doubts and helped make the decision easier for you. Good luck!

Want to learn more about ecommerce?

Ready to move your online store to the next level? Check out the articles below: