SamCart vs. ClickFunnels Comparison - Which Is Better?

A SamCart vs. ClickFunnels comparison is a very interesting one. On the one hand, these two platforms do have fairly different features; on the other, they are competitors in the same domain. How are these two business software solutions in such a unique position?

While both SamCart and ClickFunnels provide means for businesses to promote and sell their services and products (physical as well as digital) in the most effective way possible, they do so differently. 

Both platforms give you access to tools that enable you to set a basic offer, attract leads, inform them about your business and products/services, and provide social proof. You’ll also be able to maximize your earning opportunity through upsells, downsells, and order bumps.

However, ClickFunnels is a dedicated funnel builder that allows you to promote and sell your goods through diligently crafted elaborate funnels. SamCart, on the other hand, is a specialized shopping cart builder that allows you to create the smoothest possible shopping, checkout, and – generally speaking – user experience. 

Since each emphasizes different aspects of the process, it’s clear the results won’t be the same when using either SamCart or ClickFunnels to power your business.

If you’re in a quandary about which platform would best fit the bill in your particular business situation, this article may be of help. In our SamCart vs. ClickFunnels guide, we’ll go over some of the important differences between the two platforms, talk about their pricing systems, and take a look at what they offer in terms of integration options. 

Pricing

Right from the start, we can definitely say that SamCart is more affordable than ClickFunnels. However, the trade-off is that it comes with fewer features and fewer integration possibilities (as you’ll see in the next section). You may also find you have a somewhat narrower scope of application with SamCart. 

Nevertheless, let’s take a closer look at the most important aspects of the two platforms’ pricing systems.

SamCart Pricing

The SamCart pricing system includes four pricing plans and a 14-day free trial. The four pricing plans are the following:

Launch Plan:

• Monthly billing: $59/month
• Annual billing: $39/month (paid for an entire year in advance)
• Features:
  • Unlimited products and pages
  • Courses (also unlimited)
  • “Pay What You Want” pricing option for your customers
  • Smart pixel tracking
  • Email and chat support

Grow Plan:

• Monthly billing: $119/month
• Annual billing: $79/month (paid in advance for the full year)
• Features:
  • Multiple payment options
  • Order bump collections
  • Post-order upsells
  • Subscription charge reminders
  • Priority email support and one-on-one launch support call (the latter available with the annual subscription)

Scale Plan:

• Monthly billing: $299/month
• Annual billing: $159/month (paid in advance for the year)
• Features:
  • Subscription saver
  • Abandoned cart recovery
  • Your own affiliate center
  • Split testing
  • Dedicated SamCart support expert (with the annual subscription) 

Enterprise:

• Pricing: custom
• Features:
  • Sub-accounts (multiple)
  • Custom reporting
  • Dedicated account manager
  • Technical setup support
  • Product roadmap prioritization

ClickFunnels Pricing

The ClickFunnels pricing system consists of three pricing plans and a 14-day free trial. The ClickFunnels pricing plans and essential elements of what they offer are:

Basic Plan:

• Monthly billing: $147/month
• Yearly billing: $127/month ($1,524/year paid in advance)
• Features:
  • One website
  • 20 funnels
  • One admin user
  • Three courses
  • 1,000 students
  • 10,000 contacts
  • Basic analytics

Pro Plan:

• Monthly billing: $197/month
• Yearly billing: $157/month ($1,884/year paid in advance)
• Features:
  • One website
  • 100 funnels
  • Five admin users
  • 15 courses
  • 10,000 students
  • 25,000 contacts
  • Basic analytics
  • Affiliate program
  • API access

Funnel Hacker Plan:

• Monthly billing: $297/month 
• Yearly billing: $208/month ($2,496/year paid in advance)
• Features include:
  • Three websites
  • Unlimited funnels
  • 15 admin users
  • 200 courses
  • 20,000 students
  • 200,000 contacts
  • Advanced analytics
  • Affiliate program
  • API access

Features

Common Features

As we said earlier, SamCart and ClickFunnels aren’t exactly the same, but since they both operate in e-commerce and business-related niches, an overlap in features is expected. Some of the features they have in common are the following:

• Split testing
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Upsells, downsells, and order bumps
• Sales pages and checkouts
• Page templates
• Drag-and-drop editor

When comparing any two business management platforms, including SamCart and ClickFunnels, there will be some variations even in the common features. For example, while they may offer the same features, they may not be distributed across their pricing plans in the same way. 

Let’s look at the split testing feature. SamCart and ClickFunnels both offer split testing. However, ClickFunnels allows access to this feature for all of its pricing plans, while SamCart reserves the feature only for its higher-tier plans. This is just one example, but the chances are that the same will hold for most of the common features, so it’s just something you need to be aware of.

Now, let’s look at some key differences between the two platforms that will help us understand their nature and purpose more clearly.

SamCart’s Advantages

Awesome Shopping Carts and Checkout Pages

The biggest advantage of SamCart over ClickFunnels is the ability to create unparalleled shopping carts, sales pages, and checkouts that make for a superb buying experience.

The uniqueness of SamCart’s approach is reflected in the platform allowing you to unify all three aspects – a shopping cart, sales page, and checkout – in a single page. This means you won’t lose any of the page’s intuitiveness, simplicity, or elegance. 

You’ll also reduce the likelihood of abandoned shopping carts as a result of this smooth checkout experience. In comparison, ClickFunnels currently doesn’t have a native shopping cart. Until they make one, you’ll have to add it through either a custom code or an integration.

When it comes to the shopping experience, SamCart has made everything as smooth, quick, and convenient as possible. With that in mind, over the years, it has introduced the following features:

• Pre-populated checkout forms

Whether you use ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, or Mailchimp, you’ll be able to extract the needed information like name, phone number, and email. You can then display checkouts with pre-filled information to speed up the checkout process and prevent users from abandoning their shopping cart.

• Live checkout split testing 

This feature allows you to create one or more checkout page variants that switch around automatically. You can test how each version of the page performs in real time and see which one has the greatest success in terms of conversions.

• Easily embeddable checkouts 

SamCarts checkouts are easily embeddable, which means that you can add them to your website or blog.

• Add a range of special e-commerce elements

With the ability to add a host of different elements to your checkout, you can improve your customers’ sales and checkout experience. The elements include things like:

• Multiple payment options
• Social proof
• Countdown widgets
• Guarantee widgets
• Terms and conditions
• Billing information
• Signature blocks
• Custom fields
• Upsells
• Order bumps
• Email confirmation fields, etc.

Courses

Another of SamCart’s best assets and a big advantage over ClickFunnels is the ability to create and host courses on the platform.

SamCart refers to itself as “a digital product e-commerce platform” with emphasis on “digital.” Despite the fact that it allows you to sell physical goods as well, the platform primarily caters to businesses that promote and sell digital products. 

The Courses App takes things even further in the realm of digital products. With this, the platform doesn’t just revolve around selling digital products but also attending to other needs, such as product creation, hosting, and management. Clearly, this makes SamCart even more appealing to digital product-based businesses. 

SamCart customers who decide to build their courses on the platform have access to a ton of benefits that the Courses App brings to the table, such as:

• Pre-built responsive and customizable sales pages/checkouts designed and optimized specifically for selling courses.
• The ability to use any type of file as course material – video, audio, or text.
• Creating drip content.
• The possibility to allow your students to download course files.
• Including quizzes in your courses.
• Analytics tools and reports that show important metrics related not just to sales but to your students’ progress on quizzes and assessments.

Auto-Enroll

Another interesting native feature of SamCart that sets this e-commerce platform apart from ClickFunnels is its Auto-Enroll technology. This is a feature closely related to the previous topic of courses.

What exactly is AutoEnroll? Simply put, it’s a tool that dramatically simplifies your customer’s enrollment process. In slightly more detail, this technology uses the information added by first-time students in the checkout to pre-fill the create-account form. This makes it easy for you to retain customers and turn what may have been a one-time student into a repeat student.

This dramatically cuts the time needed to set up a new student’s account. Your customers can enroll in a course without doing anything other than entering a unique password to keep their newly created account safe – no confirmation emails, no protracted procedures. 

The following image shows how the “Create Your Account” form looks with Auto-Enroll in action:

When a returning customer buys a new course, they’re automatically directed to their library of purchased courses and can access the new content without doing anything else apart from just clicking the “Start Course” button. 

Subscription Saver

The Subscription Saver is another native SamCart feature that gives this platform the upper hand in a SamCart vs. ClickFunnels comparison. It’s applicable to recurring payments that might fail to complete due to an expired or canceled card, for instance. How exactly does the tool work, though?

When you need to receive a payment but it’s declined, the Subscription Saver automatically activates and sends an email to the customer whose payment you could not process. 

If your customer does nothing about it after the first reminder, the tool sends three more emails within a period of 10 days. If the customer fails to update their credit card information by the end of this period, the Subscription Saver will automatically cancel their subscription. 

This way, you avoid the risk of allowing access to your valuable content to customers who do not make the due payments. The amount of money this tool can save you is staggering. According to SamCart’s estimations, the Subscription Saver has managed to save more than $400 million over a period of five years. 

Pay What You Want

The “Pay What You Want” feature is exactly what it sounds like: the freedom for customers to choose exactly how much they want to pay for a product or even not to pay at all. 

This might sound risky, but SamCart allows you to customize this feature and configure different options. For example, you can:

• Set a minimum suggested contribution.
• Allow users to get your product free of charge.
• Use “Pay What You Want” as a recurring contribution option.

The “Pay What You Want” option can also come in very handy for any non-profit organization that collects donations online. If you choose not to ask for a specific amount of money and allow your benefactors to donate as much as they deem appropriate, you give them absolute freedom and create an atmosphere of trust right from the get-go. In the long run, this can benefit you more than asking for a specific amount.

ClickFunnels’ Advantages

Sophisticated Funnels

Clearly, the most fundamental aspect in which ClickFunnels differs from SamCart is funnel creation. In fact, ClickFunnels’ entire culture is based on everything to do with funnels, which is much more than just the ability to build them.

ClickFunnels makes it possible to create any type of funnel. You name it – the platform can do it. ClickFunnels gives you the possibility to build a funnel, regardless of whether it’s: 

• A new product that you want to promote. 
• A webinar that you need to register users for. 
• An e-book or a paper that you want to sell online. 
• An offer for others to get your expert help and work with you, or anything else.

What’s more, unlike SamCart, where creating a membership area is possible only through the integration of third-party membership software, ClickFunnels includes the ability to create a membership area without resorting to third-party software; although, a membership area in ClickFunnels is essentially a funnel – but a membership funnel.

The platform also offers conversion-optimized templates for different use cases to make funnel building as convenient as possible. Moreover, in the ClickFunnels Marketplace, you’ll find a whole bunch of free full-funnel templates in addition to the paid ones that you can customize and give a personal touch to in line with your brand.

However, you shouldn’t overlook that SamCart has the capacity to build funnels as well. While it’s not a classic funnel builder, you can build sales funnels on it. SamCart calls them upsell funnels because they revolve around the idea of offering multiple upsells in a sequence on top of the main product/service you sell. Of course, as you might guess, in SamCart you won’t have all the options available in a specialized funnel builder like ClickFunnels.

A Wealth of Choices

Since ClickFunnels is bigger than SamCart both in terms of revenue as well as number of employees, it provides a far greater range of choices in various areas. 

As an illustration, there are literally tons of educational materials and training resources available to ClickFunnels customers, and the video training platform FunnelFlix is just one part of it. 

Another example is the ClickFunnels Marketplace. It’s a place where you can find a myriad of pre-built full funnel and page templates, many of them free of charge. On top of this, the ClickFunnels Marketplace allows you to connect with and hire a professional who can create a custom design tailored just for you. 

As a seller, you’d be able to offer your original products, such as templates or services that help other ClickFunnels-based businesses.

Some of the additional features and benefits offered by ClickFunnels include built-in email marketing as well.

Email Marketing and Follow-up Funnels

ClickFunnels strives to provide a lot to its customers. Email marketing is a very valuable tool that many platforms don’t include, but ClickFunnels does. ClickFunnels includes a built-in autoresponder and a host of other built-in tools that cover the email marketing side of your business. 

Unfortunately, these tools are not available with the Basic plan, but if you’re on the Pro plan or above, you can reap the benefits of the following email marketing-related features:

• Visual email builder
• Email broadcast
• Lead scoring
• Flexible and advanced list segmentation
• Ability to send emails based on location

This is in no way an exhaustive list, but it shows pretty clearly what ClickFunnels can do in the email marketing automation realm. You can see the entire list of features only from within your admin dashboard after you create a ClickFunnels account.

Probably one of the most important features in the aforementioned realm is the possibility to use the ClickFunnels follow-up funnels. Essentially, these allow you to have another shot at missed conversion opportunities. 

The follow-up funnels enable you to send email sequences that re-target prospective leads who didn’t complete a purchase the first time around. These funnels can also come in extremely handy in the context of re-targeting existing customers with attractive upsell offers.

Custom Domains

Both platforms allow you to use custom domains, but in ClickFunnels, you can get one directly from your admin dashboard, which is super convenient. 

The ClickFunnels “Account Settings” is where you’ll find the “Domains” option that allows you to purchase and register a custom domain. By clicking the “Choose a domain” option, you’ll be able to select from a ton of available domains. It goes without saying that each domain comes secured with SSL encryption, and prices start at around $20/year. 

Buying custom domains from your admin dashboard may not sound like a big deal, but today, virtually everything is about convenience.

Differences in the Affiliate Programs

When it comes to affiliate programs, it’s a similar situation to the one with the custom domains. Both companies have affiliate programs, but ClickFunnels makes things easier and more convenient for its customers. In fact, the ClickFunnels affiliate program is one of the platform’s best selling points. 

For starters, ClickFunnels automatically provides an affiliate account for every member, which implies that you don’t have to apply for affiliate status. In comparison, in SamCart, you need to apply first, get approved, and only then begin your journey as a SamCart official affiliate.

In addition, ClickFunnels is much more straightforward and transparent when it comes to affiliate commissions. It states in a very unambiguous way: 

• How much you can earn 
• The factors your commission depends on 
• Up to what percentage your earnings as an affiliate can grow over time 
• What conditions you need to meet to “get a raise” 

For more details, check out this ClickFunnels page. 

In contrast, the only piece of information on affiliate commissions we managed to find on the SamCart official website is the vague statement that you can receive “up to $995 upfront for each new SamCart user you sign up.” 

Maybe we missed something, but even the SamCart Affiliate Terms & Conditions are not very specific about how much you earn on a regular basis and whether there are any variables that can lead to a higher commission over time.

Integrations

The SamCart Integrations

The SamCart Partners & Integrations page features five partners and just over 25 official integrations.

The group of partners includes web platforms like: 

• Fiverr: an online work marketplace
• Gravy: a failed payments recovery tool
• Name.com: a domain name registrar

On the list of integrations, among others, you’ll find the following widely known apps:

• ConstantContact: an email marketing tool
• ActiveCampaign: an automation platform
• Kajabi: a membership site builder
• Zapier: an integration and automation platform
• WordPress: a site/page builder and blogging platform
• Stripe: a payment gateway

Samcart has left room for more third-party apps, so if what you want isn’t in the list of official integrations, there is still hope. It is possible to add custom HTML blocks to your pages, so you can embed code. This embed code method of integration will allow you to dramatically extend the number of a platform’s integrations.

A perfect example is DropInBlog. DropInBlog is a cutting-edge blogging app with much more modern design than WordPress, and you can add it to SamCart using the embed code method. The team has even created a brief integration guide that shows you how to add DropInBlog to SamCart and explains the relatively simple integration process.

The ClickFunnels Integrations

Even though ClickFunnels does not offer the gazillions of integrations that platforms like Shopify offer, it fares pretty well in this area. The number of available integrations is bigger than with SamCart, which doesn’t come as a surprise. 

As we already mentioned, ClickFunnels is a bigger platform than SamCart, and it strives to do more things and provide more features.

ClickFunnels has a slightly different integration page from SamCart:

As this image shows, in ClickFunnels, the integration page is a part of the Help Center. Essentially, it details the apps that you can and cannot integrate with ClickFunnels. Everything is sorted into several categories according to the apps’ use and purpose, such as payment gateways, SMS tools, webinar integrations, and autoresponders.

Some of the most prominent apps found among the ClickFunnels integrations are the following:

• Drip: an autoresponder
• EasyPayDirect: a payment gateway
• EverWebinar: a webinar platform
• ZenDirect: an actions and messaging app
• Twilio: an SMS and communication platform
• Shopify: a delivery app
• Avalara Sales Tax: a sales tax tool
• Mailgun: an SMTP service

Interestingly enough, ClickFunnels also allows integration with third-party software through the embed code method as well. As this platform completely lacks a native or third-party content marketing solution, you can learn how to take advantage of the embed code method and add a blog to ClickFunnels in this integration article.

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