ClickFunnels vs Shopify — Which Is Better for Selling Online?

ClickFunnels vs Shopify — which of these two online selling tools is better for your business? Well, in this comparison, I’m going to put the two products head to head, and help you answer that question. I’ll highlight the main reasons to use ClickFunnels over Shopify, and then walk you through the areas where Shopify wins.

OK, let’s start things off with a little bit of background on both products.

Please note: we independently review all products in our comparisons, but when you buy through our links, we may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you). View editorial policy here.

Some background on ClickFunnels and Shopify

ClickFunnels and Shopify are two popular options for selling physical and digital goods.

As its name suggests, ClickFunnels is best known as a solution for creating and optimizing sales funnels. Using ClickFunnels, businesses can create customized sales journeys that automatically guide potential customers through a series of predefined steps, involving landing pages, e-newsletters, and store checkout.

Over the years, ecommerce features have been added to Clickfunnels too, and it’s not just a funnel designing tool any more — you can now sell online in various ways with it, without the need for any additional software.

As for Shopify, it’s one of the web’s best-known ecommerce platforms, offering a comprehensive set of tools for building an online store; dropshipping; and selling via print on demand. It’s also increasingly used for point-of-sale applications, where you use card readers and other hardware to sell in person.

OK, so that’s the background! Now, let’s continue this shootout with a look at five key reasons to use ClickFunnels over Shopify.

Reasons to use ClickFunnels over Shopify

1. It’s a much better solution for creating sales funnels

ClickFunnels was designed specifically as a sales funnel builder. It lets you build bespoke, sophisticated funnels from scratch — but also gives you a wide range of ready-made funnel templates. These include lead funnels, unboxing funnels, presentation funnels and more. All of them can be customized with your brand and product details.

Significantly, you can also accept payment for your goods using Clickfunnels, meaning that everything you need for a funnel-driven approach to selling is bundled with the tool.

Shopify, by contrast, doesn’t include any built-in sales funnel creation tools — to create them, you’ll need to integrate your account with a third-party solution.

2. ClickFunnels is much better for upsells and downsells

Upselling and downselling are two sales strategies aimed at maximizing the value of customer interactions. This is done by either increasing the total sale value (the upsell) or ensuring a sale is made at a lower price point (the downsell).

An upsell encourages customers to purchase a more expensive or premium version of a product, while a downsell offers customers a more affordable alternative when they hesitate or decline to buy a more expensive one.

ClickFunnels is better than Shopify for upsells and downsells because it integrates these selling approaches directly into the sales funnel, allowing for seamless, one-click product additions during the checkout process.

This streamlined approach simplifies upselling and downselling, and increases conversion rates.

By contrast, Shopify requires additional apps or custom coding to provide similar functionality.

3. It’s easier to create split tests in ClickFunnels

A split test, also known as an A/B test, lets you find out which version of a web page generates the most leads or sales. Customers are randomly shown either version A (the control) or version B (the variation), and their interactions on each, like clicking an "Add to Cart" button or completing a form, are tracked.

By analyzing the data generated by A/B tests, online sellers can improve user experience, and ultimately make more sales.

Unlike Shopify, split testing functionality is fully ‘baked in’ to the ClickFunnels platform. But as with other key Clickfunnels features we’ve discussed, split testing in Shopify requires you to invest in other software.

4. ClickFunnels comes with a built-in CRM system

Unlike Shopify, ClickFunnels comes with a built-in CRM tool.

This gives you:

• a ‘ MessageHub’ feature, which centralizes communications through SMS, email, and social media.
• an ‘Appointments’ feature that integrates scheduling and calendar management into sales funnels.
• an ‘Opportunities’ tool that lets you track and manage leads through the sales pipeline efficiently, ensuring targeted communications and maximized conversions.

While Shopify does provide you with some customer relationship management features, including ‘customer profiles’ and various communication tools, the functionality on offer is not remotely as sophisticated as that provided by ClickFunnel.

If you want to get something similar, you’ll have to make use of an integration with a third-party CRM tool like HubSpot, Capsule or Nimble.

5. ClickFunnels provides a community hub tool

The 'Community Spaces' feature in ClickFunnels is a forum builder that lets online sellers develop engaged digital communities for their product offerings.

This feature is particularly useful for ClickFunnels merchants selling online courses and webinars, as it lets them create interactive areas where community members can engage in discussions, share resources, and access embedded media.

Community Space administrators can configure and control groups and topics, manage privacy settings and permissions, and moderate content.

To create a similar community space for a Shopify store will require the installation of a community management app from the Shopify app store, and in most cases, additional fees.

OK, so that’s five key reasons to use ClickFunnels over Shopify.

You can try the platform out for 14 days free here.

But where does Shopify win?

Reasons to use Shopify over ClickFunnels

1. Shopify is much better for building a standalone online store

If you want to sell lots of products on a professional online store, then Shopify is a much more obvious choice than Clickfunnels.

For a start, it gives you over 200 store templates to choose from, compared to a tiny selection of just 8 from ClickFunnels.

You can browse all the Shopify themes here.

Its store builder is considerably more powerful than Clickfunnels too, giving you a sophisticated drag and drop editor and a host of other controls that let you extensively customize the appearance of your store. You also get full access to your store’s code, giving you even more fine-grain control over it.

2. It’s better for international selling

Unlike ClickFunnels, Shopify facilitates multi-currency selling, allowing your store visitors to see product prices in their own currency (and check out in it too). This is something that can lead to significantly more conversions.

And, due to its sophisticated built-in multilingual features, Shopify makes it much easier than ClickFunnels to sell in different languages.

3. It’s better for point of sale

Shopify is a much better solution for point of sale selling (POS), where you use card readers and other hardware to accept payments in physical locations.

While ClickFunnels forces you to work with third-party POS solutions, Shopify gives you access to its own powerful POS system. This is bundled with all Shopify plans, and keeps your inventory levels accurate regardless of whether you make a sale via your online store or in a real-world location.

You can learn more about Shopify POS here.

4. You can start selling much more cheaply with Shopify

Pricing for ClickFunnels starts at a fairly significant $97 per month.

By contrast, Shopify lets you start selling from as little as $5 per month via its ‘Starter’ plan; and its mid-range ‘Basic’ plan is less than half the price of ClickFunnels’ entry-level plan.

5. Shopify integrates with significantly more third-party tools

Thanks to its gigantic app store containing over 13,000 apps, Shopify lets you integrate your online store with a huge range of third-party tools and services.

Significantly, there are several apps in this store that provide dedicated funnel building features (key examples of which being ConvertFlow and PageFly).

By contrast, ClickFunnel’s equivalent app offering is made up of just 20 or so apps.

6. Shopify is much better for dropshipping and print-on-demand

Shopify is much better than ClickFunnels for dropshipping or print-on-demand selling.

This is because Shopify provides direct integrations with hundreds of dropshipping and POD suppliers — and accordingly, makes it a lot easier than ClickFunnels to get going with these business models.

You can learn more about dropshipping with Shopify here.

Although workarounds exist that let you use ClickFunnels for dropshipping and POD too, doing so isn’t always easy, because the platform doesn’t offer any direct integrations with the major fulfillment platforms.

ClickFunnels vs Shopify: the verdict

To sum things up, we’d say that Shopify is the better option for creating an online store, dropshipping, multicurrency applications and selling at point of sale. However, if you want to create really sophisticated user journeys for use in online advertising campaigns, you’ll find this easier to do — out of the box at least — in ClickFunnels.

If you’d like to try ClickFunnels or Shopify, you’ll find links to free trials of both below:

• ClickFunnels trial (14 days)
• Extendable Shopify trial (up to 30 days)

To get all our latest ecommerce advice, make sure you follow our LinkedIn page or sign up to our mailing list.

For a much deeper dive into the differences between the platform, read our full ClickFunnels vs Shopify comparison on the Style Factory website.

Our GetResponse vs ClickFunnels comparison may also be of relevance.

And finally, if you have any questions about ClickFunnels vs Shopify, just leave them in the comments section below. We read them all and will do our best to help.

Written and researched by Matt Walsh with additional contributions from Chris Singleton.