Every marketer spending money on online ads knows that, apart from the ad itself, another crucial element of a marketing campaign is where the visitor ends up when clicking on the ad – the landing page. Landing pages serve as the final steps in the funnel, converting the users obtained by the ad clicks into customers by motivating them to take specific actions. Those could be anything from signing up for a newsletter or a free trial, to leaving their contact information or even purchasing a product. While it’s definitely necessary to maximize your ad click-through and efficiency, landing pages are where all the magic happens – their importance in driving your website’s growth and profitability is difficult to overestimate.
Since landing pages are essential to any website looking to grow, powerful specialized toolkits exist nowadays to create, optimize and analyze them professionally. Two stand out: Leadpages and Instapage, being close competitors and market leaders. In order to make a choice in one’s favour, let’s look at the features and costs as our primary decision factors.
Feature Comparison
Being close competitors, Instapage and Leadpages share a large proportion of features which can be considered close substitutes, such as drag-and-drop landing page builders, analytics, and dozens of third-party service integrations, thus we will only mention those which stand out for one or the other.
The essential element of each platform is a drag-and-drop landing page constructor, and both Instapage and Leadpages offer flexible and powerful solutions. There are template libraries available with hundreds of pre-optimized blueprints which can be edited to fit your specific needs, the only significant difference is in the fact that Instapage allows creating a new landing page template from a blank canvas, whereas Leadpages only allows taking an existing library template as the starting point. For those with a clear own design idea in mind a blank starting page might be an easier option than editing a predefined template. Moreover, Instapage allows editing the underlying code of the landing page in addition to the visual interface, which is a nifty feature for the users who are familiar with coding and want to tinker with the fine details of their landing pages.
A feature worth mentioning separately is A/B split testing, which is the process of creating two or more versions of the same landing page and displaying them randomly to your incoming traffic in order to find out which of the versions is more effective at driving conversions. Split testing for landing pages is available on both platforms, yet only starting from the second pricing plan on each (Leadpages Pro and Instapage Professional). Without split testing, the entire concept of landing pages kind of loses half of its value, since the primary idea is to maximize conversions. This is something to consider when choosing between the pricing plans (more on that – in the next section).
Another important distinguishing factor is the ease of collaboration: whether you’re a freelance professional or an agency working with clients – or conducting marketing activities for your in-house needs – it’s rare to work in complete isolation. Each marketing project has various team members and stakeholders, and they should be able to participate in each step of the process seamlessly. In this respect Instapage clearly takes the gold, offering a one of a kind collaboration system with instant feedback and real-time from any member, as well as secure sharing with anyone, from your fellow team members to your client’s legal/compliance depts. This set of features allows successfully eliminating many bottlenecks faced by marketing teams and make the process of landing page roll-out much more efficient. While also focussing on real-time editing, Leadpages doesn’t quite match the power of Instapage’s collaboration interface at the moment.
Price Comparison
Each of the platforms offers three pricing plans, the simplest targeted to individuals and freelancers, the medium being the most value-for-money option for most teams since it includes A/B testing, and the advanced plan focussed on bringing maximum features for large enterprises and agencies.
The starter plans are priced very similarly, with Leadpages Standard at $25 and Instapage Basic at $29 with annual billing. The mid-range solutions with A/B testing included cost $48 per month for Leadpages Pro and $55 for Instapage Professional. Since Leadpages offers significant discounts from its monthly-based billing levels, in case of both packages they have a slight upper hand when it comes to pricing. The most powerful kits pack even more extra features and will set you back $127 per month for Instapage Premium and a hefty $199 for Leadpages Advanced, giving the former a clear lead in this segment.
It is worth noting that Instapage offers a 2-week trial period with full functionality, without having to input your credit card details, while Leadpages does not let you try out the product without making a purchase. You can give Leadpages a test drive by buying one month of Standard subscription for $37 (note the difference vs the annual billing cycle mentioned above) and cancelling any time during that period: the company offers a 30-day money back guarantee.
Conclusion: Which One is Better?
Choosing between Instapage and Leadpages is not an easy task: both offer highly capable and closely similar platforms for building and managing landing pages. After a more detailed consideration, one can see that Instapage is slightly ahead in terms of features, especially collaboration possibilities, while Leadpages is priced slightly lower for both the basic and mid-range plan. Adding the fact that you need to pay up-front to even test Leadpages, though, our preferences go to Instapage in this comparison.
Have questions about Instapage vs Leadpages? Using one or the other (or both) and would like to add your opinion? We’ll be glad to hear it out in the comments section below, let’s discuss!