Comparing Systeme.io vs Clickfunnels: Which One Is Better? (2023)

Navigating the world of online business can be complex.

With an abundance of sales funnel platforms vying for your attention, it can be a daunting task to choose the right one for your needs.

Two giants in this field are Systeme.io vs ClickFunnels – each a robust platform with a suite of features designed to help you run a successful online business.

So, which of these marketing platforms is right for you? In this comprehensive guide, we’ll be comparing Systeme.io vs ClickFunnels, focusing on their core features, pricing, usability, and the key differences that set them apart.

Whether you’re a small business owner looking to create high converting landing pages or an online affiliate marketer wanting to streamline your sales process, this article aims to provide you with a clear understanding of these two platforms to help you make an informed decision.

Let’s dive into the world of sales funnels, email marketing campaigns, and digital marketing tools to find out more.

Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you click a link and make a purchase I may receive compensation at no additional cost to you.

What is Systeme.io?

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing platform designed for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and those seeking to establish a robust and successful online business.

The platform is known for its wide range of features including sales funnels creation, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, and much more.

All of these elements can be handled easily with the platform’s intuitive drag and drop editor.

Beyond its powerful sales funnel builder, the platform also includes online courses and membership sites hosting. The ability to create a blog is also included.

Offering a free plan alongside other competitively priced packages, systeme.io is known for providing comprehensive marketing tools at an affordable price.

Related Article: Comprehensive Systeme.io Review (2023) – Read Before You Buy

What is Clickfunnels?

ClickFunnels is a leading online platform, renowned for its powerful sales funnel builder.

Aimed at entrepreneurs and small business owners, ClickFunnels is designed to simplify the process of creating sales funnels that effectively drive online sales.

The platform’s drag-and-drop editor is user-friendly, making the creation of sales pages and landing pages a breeze.

One of ClickFunnels’ key features is its ability to create and manage a variety of marketing campaigns.

It offers a suite of tools for email marketing, allowing users to design automated sequences that nurture leads and boost conversions.

In addition to sales funnel creation, ClickFunnels also provides functionalities for hosting online courses and membership sites.

Affiliate program management is another area where ClickFunnels excels. Users can create and manage their affiliate dashboards, promotional materials, and track affiliate links with ease.

From its core features to its advanced marketing tools, ClickFunnels is a comprehensive platform that provides everything needed to run a successful online business.

Systeme.io Vs Clickfunnels: Which One Is Best?

Now that you know what these 2 softwares are and have a bit of an overview, let’s compare and contrast some of the specific features of each platform.

Ease of Use

When comparing Systeme.io vs Clickfunnels, one thing that plays a big role is ease of use.

We want these tools to make our online business more efficient and easier to run, not harder.

Both platforms offer a very clear and easy to navigate dashboard. It is easy to locate and distinguish the different features that are included in each platform.

When it comes to funnel building, both platforms use a drag and drop style design feature that makes creating landing pages and sales funnels very simple. However, in this regard Clickfunnels comes out on top.

Clickfunnels has a lot more options for different elements you can include in your sales funnels than systeme.io does. Systeme.io also tends to be a lot more buggy in terms of how well you can interact with objects you are placing into the funnel editor.

Sometimes, when trying to build out a sales funnel in Systeme.io, I have a hard time selecting the element I want to edit or it may drop an element in a completely different place from where I intended.

I can always get it to look the way I want, but it can come at the cost of some additional time spent.

For the ease of use category, Clickfunnels is the clear winner.

Its well designed and easily navigable user interface means you can become very fluent with Clickfunnels a lot faster.

As opposed to Systeme.io where trying to do things too fast will inevitably cause the platform to bug out from time to time.

Third Party Integrations

The ability to connect 3rd party integrations to the softwares that is automating your business is something that is a dealbreaker for me.

Being able to connect to payment processors, email autoresponders, CRM softwares, or automation softwares is a critical feature.

This is where Systeme.io falls short.

Clickfunnels has a very extensive list of softwares and 3rd party capabilities, allowing the freedom to use it for what it does best, funnel building, and then also being able to use other softwares for what they do best.

In the case of Systeme.io, I am limited to the ability to connect 6 payment processors, Paypal, Stripe, Mercado Pago, RazorPay, Flutterwave and Mollie. I can also connect 1 email autoresponder, ActiveCampaign.

This is a very crippling downside for Systeme.io, especially if you are an affiliate marketer and you have no desire to use Systeme.io’s internal autoresponder, which is arguably the weakest component of Systeme.io.

You cannot use ActiveCampaign because they do not allow sending of affiliate links in their emails and you can only connect a high end affiliate marketing friendly autoresponder like Aweber via 3rd party applications like Zapier.

The obvious winner for the 3rd party integration category is Clickfunnels.

Feature Comparison

Let’s do a comparison of the features offered by each of these softwares.

The main difference between Clickfunnels and Systeme.io is that Clickfunnels is a state of the art funnel building software capable of meeting all of your funnel building needs, while Systeme.io is meant to be an all in one software.

Systeme.io being a jack of all trades but master of really nothing, offers:

• Drag and drop funnel building
• Email Autoresponder Ability
• Email Subscriber Storage
• Affiliate Program Creation
• A Course Builder
• A Blog Builder
• A Referral Program
• And Internal Rules and Automations

It does all of these things fairly well, but it doesn’t do any of it so well that I’d write home about it.

If you’re looking for a simple all in one place to do all of these things, then Systeme.io can certainly be a good fit for you. But there is a better option for everything that it offers found in other softwares.

Now as we take a look at Clickfunnels, they offer:

• Superior Funnel Building Ability
• Email Marketing Ability
• 3rd Party Software Connectivity
• Course Creation Ability
• A Referral Program
• Affiliate Program Creation

The Clickfunnels Sales Funnel Builder is what makes Clickfunnels really stand out amongst other funnel builders. The ability to also pair Clickfunnels with any payment, email marketing, or CRM software you would like results in a much more reliable and robust system.

With Systeme.io, you’re fully limited to what you can do in-house. This is great for simplicity, but the downside is that is Systeme is down for maintenance or any other reason, your entire business goes down with it.

As opposed to Clickfunnels where if they go down for maintenance, you can still perform email marketing and manage your CRM for example because they are different softwares, just connected via API.

As for the feature comparison, the winner will be dependent on your personal preferences. If simplicity of having everything in one place is more important, Systeme is the clear winner.

But if you want the freedom to connect your funnel to any external software and no worries about bugs within the software, you’ll want Clickfunnels.

Pricing: Which Is A Better Value?

One of the most appealing features of Systeme.io is their free plan, as opposed to Clickfunnels which only offers a free 14 day trial.

Under the free plan of Systeme.io, you are very limited on what you can do, but it is forever free and includes enough for you to launch your business and get revenue coming in.

Systeme.io Pricing

Under the free plan of Systeme.io, you get access to everything you need to fully explore and try the software.

This includes building up to 3 sales funnels, 1 email campaign, 1 automation workflow, 1 blog, 1 custom domain, and 2,000 email contacts. See all features in the image below:

However, this does quickly become exhausted and you will have to upgrade the software.

The good news about this is that if you are a beginner in online business and looking to start an affiliate marketing business for example, you can assemble everything you need to get your business making enough money to upgrade the software and have it pay for itself.

Then moving up to the Startup tier at $27 per month, you can live here for a very long time before you’ll need more.

You will likely end up upgrading again when you hit 5,000 contacts.

Overall, this software is extremely affordable for anyone looking to get started that isn’t already making money in their business.

Clickfunnels Pricing

Clickfunnels offers a 14 day trial on both packages they offer, Basic and Platinum.

This is more than enough to test out the software and determine if you like it before paying, and they do offer a couple months free when you pay annually.

Under the Basic plan for $97, you will get everything you need to manage most businesses.

It offers up to 20 sales funnels, email automations, 3 custom domains, and all funnel building related features within the software.

Upgrading to their Platinum tier for $297 per month will grant you access to their follow up funnels feature, which is an email autoresponder feature as well as their entire affiliate management system.

It’s safe to say that most businesses will never exhaust the features of the Basic plan if your goal is to create robust landing pages and sales funnels that can connect via API to just about anything.

Considering that Systeme.io offers a forever free plan that contains everything you need to start your online business and even when fully upgraded to their Unlimited tier it is the same cost as the Basic plan of Clickfunnels, Systeme.io is the clear winner.

However, this still boils down to the specific needs and current state of your business.

Which Has The Best Affiliate Program?

Both softwares offer a pretty attractive affiliate program.

They both pay recurring affiliate commissions and they are lifetime tracking, meaning that once a customer makes 1 purchase through your affiliate link, all other purchases within the software will be commissioned to you.

This commission structure makes them both great options for scaling your passive affiliate revenue.

Systeme.io Affiliate Program

The systeme.io affiliate program pays a 60% lifetime recurring commission on all qualified referrals.

Which means that on the free plan, there is no commission earned but when that referral eventually upgrades to the Startup tier for $27 per month, you will earn $16.20 in monthly recurring revenue from that customer.

Systeme.io also has a very user friendly dashboard for all of your sales tracking. Providing information on your leads and customers so you can properly track and project your revenue.

The downside to this affiliate program is that a lot of your referrals will live on the free plan forever. Which means that you will accrue a lot of qualified referrals that never make a purchase.

However, there are a lot of training products in their marketplace that also pay commissions. So even if a software upgrade isn’t necessary, there are still commissions to be earned.

You will immediately become an affiliate for Systeme.io when you create your account and you are still eligible for commissions even when you aren’t paying for a plan yourself.

Clickfunnels Affiliate Program

Just like Systeme.io, you will also be accepted to the Clickfunnels affiliate program immediately upon creating your account.

It is not required you pay for either plan in order to remain an active affiliate and promote all products available.

Clickfunnels offers up to a 40% recurring commission to its affiliates.

This means on a $97 per month referral, you will earn $38.80 in monthly recurring revenue and $89 in monthly recurring revenue for the $297 per month plan.

It does include a dashboard to see and track your earnings, as well as the ability to export all referral information. However, there is no click tracking available right inside the dashboard.

Being that Clickfunnels is headed by marketing mastermind Russell Brunson, there is an abundance of additional products to promote as well and they are all of high quality.

Available products to promote are not limited to just the software.

One MAJOR downside to this affiliate program is that you cannot promote the 14 day trial or software from day 1.

Clickfunnels requires that you earn $1,000 in affiliate commission from promoting their other products before they will unlock your affiliate links for the software.

There is, however, a convenient workaround for this. If you were to become an affiliate for Legendary Marketer, there is a deal worked out between Legendary Marketer and Clickfunnels that all Legendary Marketer affiliates can promote the Clickfunnels trial from day 1 with no earnings yet acquired.

This is done via a form that is available in the Legendary Marketer affiliate dashboard that you can access after becoming approved as an affiliate. It is not required that you actively promote Legendary Marketer to take advantage of this workaround.

The Verdict: Systeme.io vs Clickfunnels

All things considered, it entirely depends on the state of your business currently to determine which platform is better to start with.

As a full time affiliate marketer and Marketing Coach, my choice will always be Clickfunnels because of the reliability, ease of use, and how customizable the platform is.

I could not personally run my business the way that I do without being able to connect my sales funnels to my autoresponder of choice, Aweber, as well as my CRM, my bookkeeping software, my booking calendar software, and my invoicing software.

A luxury that Systeme.io just simply does not offer.

On the other hand, if you are reading this article with no currently active business that is bringing you revenue, but you need a software that can offer the ability to create sales funnels, send email follow up, and store leads then Systeme.io is a perfect fit.

In my business as a Marketing Coach, it is very close to a 50/50 split between clients and which software they prefer.

The clients that use Clickfunnels, love it and don’t desire to ever switch.

My Systeme.io clients originally went to it because of price and oftentimes will switch over to Clickfunnels once revenue begins coming in.

Personally, I’m an advocate for playing the long game when it comes to running an online business.

It is my opinion that all successful businesses will have a need for softwares that cannot be connected to Systeme.io.

Therefore, the clear winner in this case has to be Clickfunnels.