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Samcart vs ClickFunnels: Which is Better? (2023 Comparison)
Looking for a Samcart vs ClickFunnels comparison that will help you find the right tool for your online business?
SamCart and ClickFunnels are two ecommerce tools that are quite similar in some respects, but quite different when it comes down to supporting the overarching goals of your online business.
While SamCart is a shopping cart and ClickFunnels a funnel builder they both support the functions of the other. This makes SamCart not just a checkout pages tool, but a sales and marketing tool capable of growing and scaling your online business. Similarly, ClickFunnels doesn’t just generate leads, but it takes them all the way to conversion and beyond so it’s a little more than just a Samcart alternative.
But are both suited for your business? Probably not. And this is what I want to help you decide in this article. Here’s what I’ll cover: what they do, their features, user-friendliness, integrations, customer support, pricing, among others.
Samcart and Clickfunnels both offer a 2-week free trial period.
For a short period ending soon, we have secured a special offer to extend Samcart’s free trial from 14 days to 30 days for our readers with some additional free bonuses. If you are interested in this special offer, click here for registration details.
Table of Contents
What Is Samcart?
SamCart is a checkout tool and page builder designed to minimize cart abandonment through the use of clear, well-built, and focused one-page product pages and sales funnels.
This means that instead of bombarding customers with multiple sales pages or multiple product offers, SamCart lets you capture your potential customers’ attention by showcasing one product at a time on one checkout page.
SamCart has comprehensive features, it is user friendly, it offers fast and reliable customer support, it integrates with a large number of email marketing software and most of all, it is reasonably priced and therefore beginner friendly.
What Is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is also a tool that supports customer checkout, but it is first and foremost a website and sale funnel builder. ClickFunnels is designed to solve one problem that online entrepreneurs face the most: that of high drop off rates early on in the sales funnel.
ClickFunnels does this by helping you to increase engagement early on in the customer journey so that more and more of your customers make it to your conversion optimized checkout pages.
See our ClickFunnels review for more info.
Go For Samcart If:
- You are working with a limited budget
- You are already well established in your selling process
- Your main goal is to create optimized shopping cart pages
Go For ClickFunnels If:
- You want a full-fledged marketing and funnel building tool to help you attract visitors, turn them into prospects, then leads and finally customers
- You want to optimize an entire sales funnel including the checkout stage
- Budget is not an issue
Samcart works wells for those customers who are close to conversion. Even where this isn’t the case, SamCart’s templates allow you to add product information on each page So your customers can still go through all the stages of buying right on that one page.
ClickFunnels is an overall lead generation and eCommerce platform. It is most suited for eCommerce sellers who still need to do some groundwork to build a brand name and generate leads.
Feature Comparison Between SamCart And ClickFunnels
Here’s how SamCart and ClickFunnels compare along some key features:
Shopping Cart Feature
Since SamCart’s primary function is as a checkout tool, its shopping cart feature is more advanced and powerful than that on ClickFunnels.
In other words, with SamCart, you can build very clean checkout pages that incorporate sales boosting elements such as one-click upsells and order bumps.
ClickFunnels does offer a shopping cart, although it’s quite basic as it’s only supposed to aid checkout.
Winner: SamCart
SamCart’s shopping cart is quite advanced as it incorporates funnel elements that may be all you need to grow and scale your business. Our full Samcart review has more details.
Email Marketing Automation
ClickFunnels is way more advanced at email marketing than SamCart. This is because unlike SamCart, ClickFunnels has Actionetics, which is a tool for building follow up funnels. It’s sort of like a cart recovery and email auto responder in one that helps improve your overall sales process.
So basically what you do with Actionetics is that it allows you to create and send emails and text messages to anyone on your smart lists (a mail list created based on predefined rules and criteria). In addition, Actionetics tracks statistics for each email sent to see which of these emails convert, giving you greater insight into the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
While SamCart doesn’t have inbuilt marketing campaign tools, it can integrate with third party email marketing tools to give you email marketing campaign functionality. The downside is that you will have to pay for those separate email marketing software tools.
Winner: ClickFunnels
Actionetics puts ClickFunnels way ahead of the email marketing game because of its ability to structure email follow ups in a funnel format to optimize your sales process. This keeps the engagement going with any clients who might otherwise have completely lost interest in your brand.
Sales Conversion Features
Sales conversion features positively impact your bottom line by encouraging customers to purchase more.
SamCart has fewer conversion boosters than ClickFunnels, namely, upsells, cart abandonment and bump offers. ClickFunnels is a little more jam-packed with conversion boosters than SamCart as not only does it give you upsells and bump offers, but you also get Actionetics, click popups and click optins.
But what SamCart lacks in variety, it makes up for in design; SamCart’s upsell page designs are better rounded, they are fantastic looking, and they allow your customers to claim their upsells with one click.
ClickFunnels also has upsells but unlike SamCart, they don’t have a pop up exit intent. Cart abandonment is also visibly lacking on ClickFunnels. However, even if these important features are lacking in ClickFunnels, it’s hard to ignore the power behind all the other conversion boosters that come with ClickFunnels.
The Clickpop feature for instance, is a pop up building and display tool. Popups are especially useful when you want to draw a potential customer’s attention to a free gift or a product or service you are selling.
The thing about Click Optins, and this is part of what makes it really special, is that it allows opt in straight from the email as opposed to directing people to an opt in page. This makes the process a lot easier for users and therefore more likely for them to reach conversion.
I mention Actionetics here again because it allows you to build follow up funnels. The aim of these funnels is to convert more people even after they have finished transacting with you.
Winner: ClickFunnels
SamCart’s conversion boosters work, but you can do way more with ClickFunnels when it comes to increasing conversions for a more efficient sales process.
Setting Up And Listing Digital And Physical Products
Although listing a product on ClickFunnels is part of a whole multi-step funnel building process, the product listing itself takes place on the order form.
In this step, you can:
- Add a payment integration. Stripe and PayPal are the main modes of payment, although you can integrate with multiple other payment methods.
- Decide how you want to charge for your product: subscription, one-time payment or a payment plan
- Add product details and variations. You can add as many products as you like.
- Decide to offer the product as a bump or as the main product
- Define fulfilment and shipping details
- Trigger follow up actions. This is where you use your email integrations to engage more with your buyers.
Once you finish creating your product on ClickFunnels, it is automatically added as a step in the funnel with a checkout page for your customers to complete their order.
The product listing process is different on Samcart as instead of listing products in a store front format like in Shopify, or a funnel format like in ClickFunnels, Samcart lets you display and sell your product in a one-page checkout format.
As a result, the set up process is quite easy and straight forward as compared to ClickFunnels.
Both SamCart and ClickFunnels support selling of physical and digital products, although when it comes to listing physical products, how well you do this with each of these tools will depend on the amount of inventory you have.
Winner: Both
SamCart has a bit of an upper edge when it comes to ease of listing products, but that’s not what we are talking about here. Both products can list digital and physical products and that’s a score on both sides.
Affiliate Management
Affiliates are people who sign up to sell your products to other people in exchange for a cut of your profits or a commission of the sale value. You can generate affiliates, onboard them and run your own affiliate program on both ClickFunnels and SamCart.
The presence of this feature on both of these ecommerce tools is of huge value because you don’t need to go outside of your website to find people to support you in marketing and selling your products. Instead, you build a marketing network straight inside your own website.
That said, affiliate management is more intuitive and straight forward on SamCart. It’s a lot easier to set up and if you want to track earnings, there is a chart feature readily available to guide you through that. So I find it quite effortless to run as compared to ClickFunnels.
The affiliate feature on ClickFunnels (officially known as “backpack”), is, like everything else in ClickFunnels, robust and feature packed. While this is a good thing, it unfortunately means that you’ll take a lot of steps, and therefore a lot more time and effort to set up and run.
But, the affiliate set up process on ClickFunnels can run automatically, so you don’t have to set up each individual account manually. This is great as it can free up your time after your initial set up.
ClickFunnels’ basic plan doesn’t come with Backpack while on SamCart, you can only access the affiliate center on the scale plan.
Winner: SamCart
In as much as backpack is more complicated to set up while SamCart’s affiliate program is more straightforward and it also automates some areas like auto sign up and auto approval.
Page and Sales Funnel Templates and Builder
Most businesses lose customers on their checkout pages. This is because while most checkout pages are built for functionality, more often than not, they aren’t optimized for conversions.
SamCart strives to solve this problem by giving you a checkout page builder that allows you to build pages that pay attention to function, design and conversion.
SamCart’s one-page checkout templates support designs that range from single-column vertical layouts, to multi-column layouts. These different designs address different concerns such as responsiveness and screen space. All of SamCart’s templates are fully customizable, support image and videos, and, are also mobile responsive.
You can add any of SamCart’s numerous trust seals anywhere on your checkout page to further build customer trust and deal with last-minute purchase jitters.
SamCart supports addition of pop up pages to its checkout, a feature that can increase engagement and reduce cart abandonment levels. More so, if you want your checkout window to pop up, you can do that as well with SamCart.
SamCart’s checkout templates are as such better built for reducing cart abandonment.
Things are radically different on the ClickFunnels side where instead of working with one main template, all templates are categorized by goal and funnel step. You have a squeeze page, sales page, order page, order confirmation page, and thankyou page.
Checkout pages on ClickFunnels are called order pages. ClickFunnels offers a wider selection of order templates than SamCart. Some are ready made while others are blank pages that you can customize to your liking.
Winner: Both
The overall ease of building a checkout page and the fact that the checkout is a one-page format is a big win for SamCart. However, ClickFunnels still delivers in terms of what a Checkout page should do and therefore both win here.
How Easy Are They to Use?
I’m going to be a bit controversial here and say that contrary to what most reviews say out there, ClickFunnels is not easy to use. You cannot set up your funnels in 10 minutes like I have seen people claim. Not even in 30 minutes. You might even need some help with it at first.
Why do I say this?
When you first log into ClickFunnels, you see a simplified interface. But that’s where it ends. Once you get to actually building a funnel, you will spend a lot of time on the funnel building page, which has quite a number of menu options that you need to learn and understand.
You might actually find this a bit overwhelming at first.
But just so you know, the top row menu (the blue one) affects the entire funnel. So if you change anything here, it will affect each of the funnel steps you have on the left. The grey menu below that (let’s call that a sub menu) only works at step level.
One thing about the sub menu is that whenever you are editing a funnel step, you have to select the right funnel template in the sub menu. This is what I mean:
Say you select “order form” as a funnel step. First, you have to remember your goal (goals can either be optin, sales or webinar). So if your goal is sales, head over to the sales tab on the sub menu and select order form. If you don’t do this, you will end up building the wrong funnel.
These are all important distinctions that took me time to make out but hey, you are lucky to be learning all these cool things in this one review.
You may also experience some beginner overwhelm when you go to the page editor as it has a lot of options. In addition, the terminology on the ClickFunnels set up pages can be a bit confusing, which is not a great thing for a beginner.
If you are not familiar with terms like Favicon, head tag, body tag, group tag, then you might find yourself doing quite a bit of reading before you can feel confident enough to create your first funnel.
What I recommend is you first take time to test and play around with all these areas before you launch full force into any kind of building.
So all that being said, I still like some things about ClickFunnels set up:
- It is goal oriented, and you see that when you first start building your funnel. ClickFunnels lets you specify whether you want to collect emails, sell a product or host a webinar. ClickFunnels then guides you through building a funnel best suited for your goal.
- You get a bunch of prebuilt funnel templates for practically any selling goal you can think of. This is a time saver. However, if your design tools are sharp, you can always click on “create a custom funnel” to build your own designs from scratch.
- You can move around any of the funnel building steps on the left of your funnel builder and even delete them by clicking on the big scary X that appear when you hover over each step.
Moving on to SamCart…
Samcart, I have to say, is truly one of the simplest tools I have ever used. Everything is where you need it, making setting up a product or funnel super simple. See what I mean?
SamCart guides you from one step to the next so fluidly and eliminates confusion and guesswork. So getting up and running takes a comparatively shorter time.
As long as you know your way around a computer and the web, getting started with SamCart is a breeze.
So what’s the bottom line here?
Winner: SamCart
ClickFunnels is a bit more complicated than SamCart. You need to learn ClickFunnels first before you start using it. If you don’t, you will most likely mess up. SamCart takes a shorter time to set up and unlike ClickFunnels, it (SamCart), also has a shorter learning curve.
Reporting And Analytics Feature
The importance of Reporting and analytics cannot be understated in the ecommerce world. Fortunately, SamCart and ClickFunnels both place a lot of emphasis on reporting.
For SamCart though, you can only access basic reporting on its lowest plan. This means that while you can track sales performance, you cannot analyze it or use it to optimize performance. On the higher tiers however, you can see conversion reports by product and date. You can also view traffic reports, subscription performance and upsell funnels.
If you want to do some further analysis with your raw data, you can quickly and easily export the data to a CSV file. You don’t need to go that far though as SamCart’s advanced reports offer very detailed analytics:
- If you want to know how your subscriptions are performing, look at the subscription report. This report also contains details on free trials and payment plans.
- The charges report tracks your charges and their origin and any upcoming charges and their due dates.
- When you want to deep dive into your traffic sources, look at the traffic report. It will tell you traffic performance by channel, and if you have enabled UTM tracking, you will get a utm table and a referrer’s table for referred traffic.
So, how does ClickFunnels measure up?
ClickFunnels has tools with which you can track and monitor performance of each funnel from the moment you launch. You can for instance track conversion rate for your pages, email optins, etcetera.
And just in case you have been A/B testing your pages, you can see performance reports for the different versions of the pages and use those results to fine tune for better performance.
Overall, SamCart’s dashboard has a simpler format and the reports are easier to understand. ClickFunnels on the other hand may be a bit complicated for beginners. However, once you get past the learning curve, you will start to enjoy its advanced analytics features a lot more.
Winner: Both
Just like SamCart, ClickFunnels has detailed reports that track a variety of sales funnel metrics such as orders, conversion rates and traffic.
Integrations
If you have use a bunch of tools to run your business, you need a way to keep all those tools connected and all the data they collect flowing to one place. Fortunately, SamCart and ClickFunnels afford you this kind of connection, either natively or through Zapier – Zapier is a tool that allows different tools to connect and communicate.
You can integrate SamCart and ClickFunnels with payment providers, email marketing tools, fulfilment services, webinar tools, and membership platforms.
A key differentiator in SamCart is that it supports integration in Sandbox mode, where you get a chance to test each integration before you take it live. In addition, you can run test payments in Stripe, SamCart’s main mode of payment. This feature is not available in ClickFunnels, although in all honesty, you could probably test with your own account.
Winner: Both
Both tools can integrate with a lot of software.
Customer Support And Community
ClickFunnels offers a lot of great support, but to have to pay to access a lot of that training, and you see this right from when you start off with your free trial account.
Besides the numerous videos, books and hackathons, ClickFunnels also offers chat support which is always great in case you are stuck when building your funnels.
However, if you are using chat support, don’t expect to chat to a human. The chat bot will suggest a few resources to help you out. In case you need more support, a real human will respond by email. That said, support gets more dedicated once you pay for the higher plans.
SamCart does not offer chat support. They do however have a free training that anyone can sign up for. In addition,
- You get email support on every SamCart plan. Priority level support is only available for the Scale plan while the grow and launch plans have a 1 day and 2-day lead time respectively.
- Samcart has a knowledge base, which is a help page equipped with content on every SamCart area
Winner: Both
SamCart may not have chat support but their knowledge base is so equipped with content that you might never need to chat anyone.
Key Difference Between SamCart And ClickFunnels
As you have seen, there is a lot of overlap between SamCart and ClickFunnels. But, there are some slight differences too:
Samcart:
- The checkout system is a lot cleaner, intuitive and navigable
- Its lowest plan is less expensive than ClickFunnels
- Its checkout pages templates are more robust and powerful
- It has inbuilt order bumps and one click upsells
- SamCart has an inbuilt cart abandonment system
ClickFunnels:
- ClickFunnels lets you build detailed funnels
- ClickFunnels has Actionetics, which is a built-in auto response system that you can use to generate leads and increase conversions
- You can split test on all of ClickFunnels plans but SamCart only offers A/B testing on its highest tier
What Tools Are Available On Samcart And Not On ClickFunnels
- Abandoned cart saver
- Order bumps
- One-click upsells
- One-page templates checkout templates
- Dunning
- Tax management
- Refund management
What Tools Are Available On Samcart And Not On ClickFunnels
- Customer database management
- Promotions management
- Customer segmentation
- SEO
- Conversion rate optimization
- Follow up funnels
Samcart Vs ClickFunnels Pricing And Transaction Fees
On the cost front, SamCart pricing is the cheaper option. SamCart’s least priced tier is $49, and although you can build unlimited pages and list unlimited products on this tier, you cannot use most of SamCart’s famed sales boosters such as one-click upsells, order bumps, multiple payment options or cart abandonment.
You begin to get real value with SamCart’s second tier which goes for $99 per month but even then, you still won’t be able to A/B test or to recover your carts. For that, you need SamCart’s most expensive tier. That will set you back $199, but in exchange, you get a performance horse that you can do more with: CRM integrations, custom integrations, customer self-cancellations, customer onboarding, A/B testing, affiliate center, subscription saver, all sales boosters, and all the other features available in the lower plans.
That brings us to ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels’ lowest priced tier will set you back $97 and for that, you can only build 100 pages, 20 product funnels, and no follow-up funnels.
ClickFunnels has two more plans: Platinum @ $297 per month and Two comma club @$2,497. Here’s the interesting thing about these two plans. You get unlimited pages, funnels and follow up funnels on both. The main difference is that the pricier plan supports more domains, more sub users and more payment gateways. See our ClickFunnels pricing guide for more info.
Winner: SamCart
It’s the cheaper option. Even its priciest plan is way cheaper than ClickFunnels’ mid-tier plan.
Conclusion
That is definitely a lot of information to take in, so I’ll summarize for you below:
SamCart is a checkout tool that is best suited for anyone who probably has an established customer base, a large and reliable social media following, referrers, or a marketing and lead nurturing system. It is by and large, the best way to start accepting payments for what you offer.
If you don’t have any of the things mentioned above (customer base, a large and reliable social media following, referrers, or a marketing and lead nurturing system), then ClickFunnels should be your ecommerce tool of choice.