ClickFunnels vs Shopify: which platform is better in 2021

Today, I am going to dive deeper into two eCommerce instruments allowing selling any kind of products or services on the Internet.

They are Shopify and ClickFunnels.

First of all, I want to give a brief definition of these services and their target audience.

What is Shopify?

It’s a web-based multichannel commerce service that is primarily targeted at creating and customizing online stores for selling large volumes of products.

What is ClickFunnels?

It’s an online marketing platform enabling funnel creation and customization that is designed for selling expensive and complex products. 

To figure out which service can be the best fit for your business, I paid attention to their sales functionality: email marketing, shipping, delivery options, etc. Also, I analyzed their user-friendliness & the variety of pricing plans. The last step was testing the quality of customer support to figure out how fast they can solve your issues.

Keep reading! 

In-depth comparison

User Experience

Before you can use both services, you’ll have to pass a standard registration process, add payment details and your industry.

After that, you’ll be transferred to the main working area to feel the first difference between the services.

Difference 1. Buttons and short links

Shopify’s working area includes a menu with the following buttons:

Button	What you can do
Orders	receive orders and payments; view abandoned checkouts;work with order drafts.
Customers	manage the list of your customers;work with clients’ information;manage purchase history.
Products	add or import items;choose the price.
Marketing	design marketing campaigns and automate them;check info about items, rejected or confirmed orders, etc.
Analytics	explore data about average order value, total sales, sales by traffic, top products, etc.
Application	add applications for popping up your products, collecting customers, etc.
Discounts	generate discount codes and inbuild them into checkouts;create automatic discounts to add to customers’ carts.
Sales channels	select among available sales channels (Handshake, Google, Messenger, etc.).
Online store	work with web store themes;create blog posts;build pages;edit domains, etc.

ClickFunnels users may get confused since their working area looks overwhelmed with buttons. But don’t worry — the service offers detailed guidelines and tutorials on sales funnel creation.

For your convenience, I’ve made the list of buttons you’ll be working with:

Profile	change profile and account settings;check affiliates;
Help	receive help from ClickFunnels experts.
Backpack	work with an integrated affiliate management system.
ClickFunnels	build sales funnels;check contact list;get access to the ClickFunnels marketplace.
Follow-up funnels	manage email lists;edit broadcasts;design email campaigns, etc.
FunnelFix training	get access to training programs
Stats	see the data about sales activity, affiliate earnings, statistics about follow-up emails, etc.

Sales functionality

As I’ve mentioned above, both platforms are oriented at increasing sales by providing a bunch of features for up-to-date online shops, including detailed visitors’ behavioral analytics. However, their purposes aren’t the same, so feel invited to check the difference between the platforms below. 

Difference 1: sales funnels creator

ClickFunnels provides you with an embedded sales funnels constructor that supports a drag-and-drop option (you don’t need to know how to code).

The layouts offered for designing sales funnels can be divided into the following groups:

• layouts for whole funnels;
• layouts for single pages.

Besides, it’s possible to navigate across the templates using tags (sales, opt-in, real estate, etc.) or categories (squeeze page, book, VSL layouts, etc.).

Along with this, users are free to build action funnels and custom audiences with the help of Actionetics. This automation service allows you to customize the email newsletter each audience (group) gets to send only relevant and interesting data to your clients.

For example, users may choose the “Social” group and set a rule of sending emails only to Facebook users with more than 1000 followers. 

Or you may choose the “Product” group and send the newsletter to the people who bought the specific product.

A list of custom groups available:

• Social;
• Product;
• Contact;
• Funnel;
• Broadcast;
• Email step;
• Lists.

When it comes to its competitor, Shopify doesn’t have an embedded sales funnel builder. However, it’s possible to try external marketing platforms like Klaviyo, GemPages, Zipify, etc. to design and integrate sales funnels.

Besides, it’s possible to use Google Analytics to create a basic sales funnel and add it to the webstore. For example, you can track order page visits or clicks on the newsletter subscription form.

In this case, a funnel can be considered as a chain of several URLs, which your visitors pass through.

Difference 2: webstore builder

Both services give you a set of tools, helping you sell any kind of product. Shopify is a multichannel webstore constructor itself. In turn, its competitor offers you functionality for selling products through building funnel steps.

Let’s start with Shopify. This service provides you with paid templates, which you can find in the store. So having a budget of $140-180, you may select among a bunch of nice layouts. 

Also, you can try free ones, but their number is significantly fewer: it’s possible to choose among 10.

Another way to get templates is by visiting a platform called Themeforest. There, you may find templates with an average price of $50 per item.

If you’re not interested in stock layouts, you can contact Shopify’s experts and order a personalized template.

An open-source template language called Liquid helps users design a webstore. This language uses a combination of:

• filters to edit the output of variables or objects;
• tags, which are the key components of a programming logic;
• objects, which are responsible for dynamic content.

The second supported type of template file is called JSON. Using JSON layouts, it’s possible to change, rearrange, or delete the content from the sections.

Also, the platform offers a powerful IMS (inventory management system). Using it, you can view shipping history, change the number of available products, etc. In case you’re a Shopify POS user and sell on many addresses, you may add different locations and individually manage fees, orders, and track items.

If you work with small volumes of products or have several locations, it’s better to manage them with help of the Inventory page.

A bulk editor or a CSV file will be handy if you have to handle large volumes of products and a bunch of locations.

If we speak about ClickFunnels, users need to find the “Steps” button, select the “Sales” page, and click on an “Order Form” button. Then, they may select among the offered layouts.

When you finish the product page customization, you may add billing integrations and items, edit their names, amount, price, etc.

Difference 3: email marketing

Both platforms offer email marketing to build relationships with customers. Shopify gives you access to a service called “Shopify Email”. As for its competitor, it provides users with the “Actionetics” service.

These services have a lot in common: they both assist users in building and scheduling email campaigns, edit email lists, import/export contacts by means of CSV files, etc.

The main peculiarity of Actionetics is that it helps convert the web page visitors into customers by gathering the data about your website visitors and making groups to optimize message targeting

This feature also includes an inbuilt autoresponder that can send emails to potential clients as a response to their actions on the web page. Besides, it supports tags, which you may embed with any funnel step.

Difference 4: shipping and delivery

Users of both platforms are provided with the expanded options for shipping and delivery.

At the same time, you’d have to try an external service to manage the ClickFunnels delivery system. The platforms support a lot of third-party integrations, for example, Shipstations, PackageBee, and so on.

The situation with Shopify is different: you’re offered an inbuilt option for building and implementing the delivery strategies and managing shipping rates. To start using it, you’ll have to choose a carrier and a shipping service according to the region (FedEx, UPS, Sendle, etc.). You can search for the whole list of the available services on the shipping carriers page in the Help Center.

Users may either pass shipping costs onto customers or provide free delivery.

With an increase in sales volumes, it becomes reasonable to try a Shopify Fulfillment Network to manage the business data, track items, gather customers’ info, check inventory levels, etc.

Difference 5: statistics and analytics

ClickFunnels and Shopify give you comprehensive data about the behavior of your visitors and their activity: the most frequently viewed pages; orders, profit, and transactions statistics; volumes of sales during a certain period of time, etc.

Except for the above-mentioned statistics, ClickFunnels also provides users with comprehensive data about sales funnels. This data can be divided into 2 groups: opt-in funnels and sales funnels.

Opt-in funnels:

• the number of all and unique page views;
• opt-in rates;
• all opt-ins received from the page.

Sales funnels:

• profit per click;
• total sales;
• ACV (average cart value);
• sales rates and value;
• recurring count.

As for Shopify, it’s aimed at showing the webstore efficiency data:

• products performance for the last 90 days;
• sessions (by location, over time, etc.) and visitors;
• orders;
• marketing strategy performance;
• profit reports, etc.

Also, you’d keep in mind that the depth of the analytics directly depends on the type of subscription you chose.

Pricing plans

Both platforms offer 3 pricing plans and a 14-days trial. During the trial period, customers feel free to try full-fledged functionality disregarding the pricing plan they select.

Difference 1: money-back guarantee

In case you’re a ClickFunnels user, you may take money back during 30 days, while its competitor doesn’t provide such an option.

Difference 2: cost of subscriptions

From the tables below, you may see that ClickFunnels is pricier than its competitor.

ClickFunnels

Feature	ClickFunnels($97 monthly)	ClickFunnels Platinum ($297 monthly)	TwoCommaClubX ($2,497 monthly)
Ability to share funnels	+	+	+
Available funnels	20	without limits	without limits
Available pages	100	without limits	without limits
Available payment gateways	3	9	27
Number of domains you may connect	3	9	27
Ability to try follow-up emails	–	+	+
Live chat support	+	Priority Support	Priority plus VIP Support
FunnelFlix	+	+	+

Shopify

	Basic Shopify	Shopify	Advanced Shopify
Cost	$29	$79	$299
Number of products	no limits	no limits	no limits
Number of members with access to the Shopify POS and admin	2	5	15
Discounts and gift cards	+	+	+
SSL certificate	+	+	+
Ability to recover abandoned cart	+	+	+
Support of sales channels	+	+	+
Discounts on shipping	up to 77%	up to 88%	up to 88%
Shipping labels	no limits	+	+
Transaction fee	2%	1%	0,5%
Shopify POS Lite	+	+	+
International domains	–	+	+
International pricing	–	+	+
Ability to set individual prices for products	–	+	+

Customer support

Both commerce platforms give users access to a bunch of information articles they may find in Help Centers, API documentation sections, official blog pages. Also, you may follow platforms on different social media networks (YouTube channels, Facebook groups, Twitter, etc.).

Besides, it’s possible to contact the platforms’ team experts by email, phone, or using a live chat.

Difference 1: hiring experts

Shopify offers an option to hire their expert: the average price of this service is about $500. Also, users may read reviews about experts before making a choice.

Pros and Cons

	Shopify	ClickFunnels
Pros	completely web-based;newbies-friendly;a vast theme library;multi-channel retailing.	drag-and-drop editor;ability to share funnels;A/B testing.
Cons	no free plan;additional fees for using external payment gateways.	expensive pricing plans.

FAQ

Summing Up

Even though Shopify and ClickFunnels both are eCommerce platforms, they’re used for different business purposes.

Shopify is a choice when creating and managing a webstore is required. The platform offers advanced delivery features and a powerful inventory management system. At the same time, you’ll need to use third-party integrations to expand your business opportunities: landing pages creator, application for launching email campaigns, business automation service, etc. 

In turn, ClickFunnels can assist you in building highly customizable sales funnels and landing pages. Its users get access to an advanced customer relationships system; they may build and customize email lists, group customers, manage email campaigns, and many more.

But if you want to take advantage of both services, you can create a webstore on Shopify and integrate it with ClickFunnels to get a higher conversion rate and boost sales.