GrooveFunnels vs Kartra Comparison: Which One Is Best?

Last Updated on 23rd February 2024

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GrooveFunnels vs Kartra is a hot discussion in the funnel-building community because of the similarities between both platforms.

They both aim to be the all-in-one solution that lets their customers build their entire business. In this article, we are going to compare them to see which one is best for you.

Something that also caught my eye about GrooveFunnels, is that it offers a free plan. That’s something that isn’t too common for software of this kind.

But, we’ll talk more about that later on.

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GrooveFunnels vs Kartra: Overview

	GrooveFunnels	Kartra
Website	groovefunnels.com	kartra.com
Founded In	2018	2013
Pricing	Starting at free	Starting at $99 per month
Trial?	Freemium	Yes, 14 & 30 days
Money-back Guarantee	30 days	30 days
Overall Rating	9.3/10	9.5/10

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What Is GrooveFunnels?

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GrooveFunnels is a piece of software that lets its customers build sales funnels, send emails, and do various other tasks.

GrooveDigital, the company behind GrooveFunnels, was not founded until 2018.

The product GrooveFunnels has also only just officially launched on October 6th, 2020, meaning it’s still in the early stages.

Because of this, some of the features are not fully developed yet, but the most important ones are. We’ll talk more about this later on, but GrooveFunnels does offer a big selection which is what makes it special.

The founding members of GrooveFunnels are:

• Mike Filsaime
• John Cornetta
• Matt Serralta
• Matt Naus

Interestingly, Mike Filsaime was also actually the founder of Kartra. He decided to take a buyout and leave the Kartra project due to creative differences with his business partner.

As a result of this move, he started GrooveFunnels with the other founding members mentioned above.

Something to note though is that when someone like Mike Filsaime leaves a company, there are also often entire teams (for example, developers) that will leave with him as well.

For this reason, there are probably some additional similarities between Kartra and GrooveFunnels.

During the launch of GrooveFunnels, Mike has stated that getting a second run at creating an all-in-one business tool of this nature means that he can build it bigger and better than Kartra, with more modern technology.

That’s a big claim considering that Kartra is such a successful business SaaS solution.

However, these words are also coming from a guy with a tremendous amount of experience and respect in both the software and the online marketing industry.

In this article, I aim to find out which platform is best, Kartra or GrooveFunnels, and share all the details with you.

This platform comes with a ton of useful tools you can use to grow your business. If you want to find out exactly what GrooveFunnels has to offer with nothing left out, then you can see all the GrooveFunnels features here.

GrooveFunnels Pros & Cons

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What Is Kartra?

Kartra is also an all-in-one business software solution that also helps you build and scale your online business.

The company behind Kartra is Genesis digital which was founded in 2013.

Genesis Digital was also behind many other successful SaaS tools for online businesses including EverWebinar and WebinarJam.

Mike Filsaime, who we spoke about earlier on, was also involved in both of these projects.

Kartra is Genesis Digital’s most recent project which didn’t launch until 2018, so it’s not too old either. However, unlike GrooveFunnels, all of the features are fully developed.

The current head team members of Genesis Digital include:

• Andy Jenkins (Co-founder)
• Hector Yague (Hector Yague)
• A.J. Robers (Chief Revenue Officer)

You can also read our detailed review of Kartra here.

Kartra Pros & Cons

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What Are The Similarities?

Other than Mike Filsaime being involved heavily in both of these projects, there are also several other similarities between Kartra vs GrooveFunnels.

In fact, GrooveFunnels has or will have every Kartra feature, and is also promising to add more software tools that Kartra does not have.

Will Kartra respond and then begin to add more apps to their platform also?

Time will tell.

However, GrooveDigital has an edge here as they have intimate insider knowledge of the blueprint behind Kartra. Because of this, they know exactly how to replicate it with modification and additional features.

In this section, I’m going to run you through the parts of these platforms that are similar, so that you know exactly what to expect if you decide to purchase either of them.

Page Builder

Both of these platforms have a brilliant page builder that lets you create several different types of websites, landing pages, and sales funnels.

With both Kartra and GrooveFunnels, you can build squeeze pages, landing pages, sales funnels, full-navigation websites, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Both platforms use intuitive drag and drop editors, which is nice to work with.

The main difference between the page editors is that GrooveFunnels uses more up-to-date software, which also helps the pages load faster.

Groove’s landing page builder app is called GroovePages, and you can get access to it completely free here.

Having said that, it’s not to bash Kartra in any way. Kartra’s page editing software is outstanding too, and probably uses software that beats a lot of other products on the market.

Plus, GrooveFunnels will also naturally have a few more bugs than Kartra, at least in the early stages, as it’s only just launched and will naturally have a few wrinkles to iron out. But, the GrooveDigital team is working on them continuously, and they are becoming less common.

In short, they both have great drag and drop editors, but GrooveFunnels might just have the edge here over Kartra due to the superior load speed. This is important because it will help any landing pages built by GroovePages to rank better in the search results.

Large Selection of Templates

Both Kartra and GrooveFunnels have a large selection of templates.

The templates aren’t just for one type of landing page or funnel, they have something for pretty much anything you can think of.

I haven’t counted all of them, but it looks as if Kartra currently has a few more. Although, this is to be expected, as the software has been around longer.

GrooveFunnels, on the other hand, have said that they will continuously add more templates to their GroovePages library every Friday on an ongoing basis.

Regardless, both platforms have nice templates that are easy to work within the drag and drop editors.

Email Marketing

Kartra has KartraMail, while GrooveFunnels has GrooveMail.

The email marketing feature inside of GrooveFunnels is one that is still actively getting a lot of development put into it, as it’s not quite as advanced as Kartra yet.

You can send broadcasts, and also build basic automation sequences, but that’s about it as of right now.

The GrooveFunnels team is putting a lot of resources into developing GrooveMail as they want it to be, in time, one of the most advanced email marketing solutions with powerful automation capabilities, like ActiveCampaign.

Kartra Mail, on the other hand, is fully developed and is supposed to be already quite similar to ActiveCampaign, which is pretty sweet.

Kartra Mail has a huge number of automation triggers including popular ones like:

• “If customer has been refunded”
• “If recipient is an active affiliate”
• “If recipient has visited X page”

GrooveMail will eventually also have these automation triggers, but as of right now they are only available in Kartra.

Membership Site

The next similarity between Kartra vs GrooveFunnels is the membership site feature.

Both platforms have online course platform apps that allow you to build and manage your membership sites.

They both platforms have all the usual features that you would expect such as:

• Drip-feed content
• Multiple Access Levels
• Progress Tracking
• Advanced Analytics
• Ont-time or subscription payment options
• Member access via password

As Kartra and GrooveFunnels have these features, you won’t need any type of external membership software like Thinkific or Kajabi.

Checkout & Sales

Kartra and GrooveFunnels also have great checkout and sales features.

The checkouts are fully customizable on both platforms, meaning you aren’t locked into one style.

They also both have great up-sell features including:

• One-click Order bumps
• One-click Upsells
• One-click Downsells

Powerful features like these can help you to increase your revenue considerably, so it’s great to see that both platforms have them.

Share Funnels

Another similarity between the two platforms is the ability to create share funnels and campaigns.

With both Kartra and GroovePages, you can share your sales funnels and entire campaigns with other people who are using the same platform. This can also include your email sequences.

This can be especially useful if you are operating an affiliate marketing model and you want to offer a done-for-you landing page, funnel and email sequence as a bonus, or even as a paid product upsell of your own.

Network marketers would also find this element very useful as they can give ready-made sales funnels to members of their downline to help them build their business.

When it comes to the share funnel feature, I believe ClickFunnels started it. However, with Kartra and GrooveFunnels, it has now been taken a step further as you can share other assets, such as email autoresponder sequences, not just the sales funnels.

I haven’t tested it out yet, but I recently heard that helpdesks are also shareable on both these platforms.

Video Hosting

When Kartra first came out, one of the main features that really caught my eye was that it also comes with video hosting.

Now to see the newcomer, GrooveFunnels also providing this feature is really exciting!

In my opinion, the lack of video hosting in ClickFunnels is one of its biggest letdowns. It’s a great platform, but without this feature, you’re soon gonna run up extra costs on other 3rd party services.

Video hosting will be really useful for those of you with membership sites, landing pages that use a video sales letter (VSL), or any other place where you would need to host your own videos.

Having the video app built-in will save you at least $50 per month as you won’t need to go for a platform like Vimeo or Wistia.

This hosting feature inside of GrooveFunnels and Kartra is also extremely advanced. For example, you can tag a lead based on how much of your video they watched, and then send them emails based on the point where they switched off. That’s pretty powerful!

Now, some people might think, “I don’t need this feature, I can just host them on YouTube privately and then embed them into my landing pages and members areas.”

Well, yes, you can do that. However, there are two problems with this.

Firstly, if you are hosting your VSL on YouTube with the intention to use it to sell a product and then the viewer clicks on your video, they’ll be taken away from your landing page and straight to YouTube.

Secondly, if you’re hosting your videos on YouTube and then embedding them into a paid members area, you’ll have to set them to the public in order for them to be viewable in your member’s area. But that then means that everyone else on YouTube will also be able to see your videos.

So, basically, you’d need to host them privately.

And why not take advantage of free video hosting inside GrooveFunnels or Kartra?

Helpdesk

Both platforms also have a help desk tool that you can connect to your websites, landing pages, or membership sites.

They allow your customers to easily contact you, meaning you will be able to provide better customer service.

Again, it’s nice to see that both platforms have this tool, as it saves you from having to get an external tool for this.

Calendar

Another tool that both Kartra and GrooveFunnels have is the calendar feature.

This tool allows you to book appointments with your clients and manage your time better.

It’s a rather small feature compared to some of the other ones, but it could prove to be useful if you own a service-based business, especially for something like consulting.

Affiliate Management and Tracking Suite

If you want to recruit affiliates to promote your own products and services then both GrooveFunnels and Kartra offer this feature.

Recruiting affiliates to promote for you is an extremely effective way to grow your business quickly.

Both of these all-in-one business solutions offer an easy-to-use affiliate management tool with powerful tracking and reporting capabilities.

Using either Kartra’s affiliate management suite or Groove’s solutions known as GrooveAffiliate, you can do the following:

• Offer flexible commissions
• Review affiliate applications
• Approve affiliates
• Create custom landing pages for affiliates
• Offer payouts via PayPal
• Set payment milestones
• Tag your affiliates
• Offer layered commission tiers
• Set up your program as either transaction or subscription-based
• Provide your affiliates with promo tools

Affiliate Program

The next similarity between GrooveFunnels and Kartra is that they both have a pretty good affiliate program.

Kartra pays out 40% recurring commissions to all its affiliates, while GrooveFunnels pays 20% to free members and 40% to paid members.

The GrooveFunnels affiliate program has also gone one step further than Kartra by offering a tier-2 level commission on top of the 20 or 40% commission, depending on your membership level.

So, if you’re on the 20% commission rate for direct sign-ups, you will then also get an additional 5% commission on anyone who signs up through someone who you have signed up with.

And if you’re on the 40% commission structure, then your tier-2 commission increases from 5% to 10%.

Both affiliate programs have a ton of material for affiliates to use, including:

• Banners
• Email swipes
• Ad Swipes
• etc.

If you’re an affiliate with a funnel-building audience, promoting either GrooveFunnels or Kartra could be pretty lucrative for you. Plus, you would be promoting two of the best pieces of software on the market, so you can feel good about it too.

Both of these programs are good for beginner affiliate marketers and experienced veterans alike.

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What Are The Differences?

As you have seen above, there are quite a lot of similarities between Kartra and GrooveFunnels.

Below, we’ll be taking a look at the key differences between both of these platforms.

What GrooveFunnels Has That Kartra Doesn’t Have

Here are the main tools only available in GrooveFunnels.

Once it’s fully developed, there may also be some parts of the individual features that are only available in GrooveFunnels. But, we’ll have to wait and see for that.

Webinar Hosting

The first app that is available in GrooveFunnels but not Kartra is the webinar hosting feature.

GrooveFunnels lets you host both pre-recorded (evergreen) webinars and live webinars.

This is not available inside of Kartra, so if you’re using that platform then you’ll need to integrate with something like EverWebinar and WebinarJam.

This means, if you are looking to use webinars, it would make sense to go for GrooveFunnels and save money by using their webinar hosting service.

GrooveKart

GrooveKart is the eCommerce platform by GrooveDigital. If you sign up for GrooveFunnels premium or get the lifetime deal (check here if it’s still available), you will get access to it.

It’s similar to Shopify in the sense of what it does, but the cool thing about it is that all the apps are built-in for free. With Shopify, you gotta pay extra for them.

GrooveKart also has some great educational material on things like traffic and copyrighting to help you grow your business.

Faster Page Loading Times & Better Page Builder

Mike Filsaime left the Kartra project to start GrooveFunnels with his partners. 

GrooveFunnels uses more up-to-date software for its page editor. For this reason, it’s easier and more intuitive to edit your landing pages in the GroovePages app.

All the landing pages and sales funnels built with Groove are done so by using HTML.

This means that your landing pages and websites will load much faster for your visitors, and so there’s less chance of your visitors getting frustrated waiting for your page to load and leaving. Unfortunately, this often happens with slower page builders.

If your landing pages are loading quickly then you’ll also get an additional SEO benefit. This is because Google now awards higher rankings to pages that load faster, especially for mobile.

If you’re looking to use SEO to generate organic traffic, this (and the next feature) would be a big reason for you to pick GrooveFunnels over Kartra.

GrooveBlog

GrooveBlog is a blogging platform that will be quite similar to WordPress. It will also have an open-source plugin store, meaning 3rd party developers can upload their own plugins. 

The blog pages will be easy to edit and also be SEO-friendly. To have something like this inside of your funnel-builder is awesome. 

• GrooveQuiz and GrooveSurvey

Kartra also doesn’t have any features for Quizzes and Surveys.

You can build basic ones by connecting the buttons, but it’s nothing like the features designed for these purposes inside of GrooveFunnels. 

What Kartra Has That GrooveFunnels Doesn’t Have

Let’s now look at the tools that Kartra has but GrooveFunnels does not.

Although, I could also imagine that later on GrooveFunnels will eventually add all of these features, as they’re clearly looking to do one better than Kartra.

• Kartra a finished Product

This first point isn’t a feature, but it’s the fact that Kartra is a finished product.

With GrooveFunnels, you’ll still be waiting on certain apps. Every single tool inside of Kartra is available and fully developed. 

If you want all the features right now for whatever reason, going for Kartra may be the right option. However, you could also look for software that integrates with GrooveFunnels, if you don’t want to miss out on the future of Groove. 

• Kartra Uses BAM – Behavioral-Adaptive-Marketing

BAM or Behavioral-Adaptive-Marketing is a feature that lets you match what your visitors and leads see, based on their behavior.

With this feature, the landing pages, emails, copy, and offers that you create will adapt to the behavior of your visitors and leads.

This is a killer tool that can help lift your conversions, and as of right now, it’s only available in Kartra. GrooveFunnels may add this later on, but they have not mentioned anything about it yet.

• Kartra Agency

This feature is only available in Kartra.

As the name suggests, this is extremely useful for agencies. It allows you to sell Kartra accounts and manage them as well. You get them for a 40% discount but can sell them for any price you wish.

For example, you can build an entire funnel for a client with emails, helpdesks, etc., and charge $2,000 for the setup, plus a $500 per month retainer for managing it.

Your monthly cost would only be 40% less than what a Kartra account usually costs, and if the client stops paying you, you can revoke access.

• Better Automation sequences (As of right now) 

As of right now Kartra also has better automation sequences.

GrooveFunnels will eventually catch up with Kartra, but right now it only has the basics. That being said, you can easily integrate GrooveFunnels with an autoresponder of your choice, if you do need advanced automation sequences.

Kartra Drawbacks

Compared to GrooveFunnels, Kartra has a few drawbacks. In this section, we are going to take a look and see what these limitations are.

No Free Plan

Firstly, Kartra does not have a free plan.

The starting price for Kartra is $99 per month, while GrooveFunnels has a completely free plan.

Slower Pages

The pages inside of Kartra are not the fastest, as it uses older technology if you are comparing it to GrooveFunnels.

From my experience, Kartra pages can take anywhere from 3 to 7 seconds to load, depending on the size.

This could cost you conversions in some cases, and is also a problem if you’re looking to use SEO to generate organic traffic.

Fewer Features

As you may have noticed throughout this article, GrooveFunnels has more features than Kartra.

While at first glance these features may not seem like that big of an impact, they are.

For all of those features, you would need entirely separate pieces of software that could easily cost you a couple of hundred bucks per month combined.

For example, GrooveKart would be comparable to Shopify. But, with all the paid apps you would need for Shopify, that would cost you at least $70-$90 per month. 

Smaller Community

Despite Kartra being older, it has a smaller community.

This isn’t anything to be ashamed of, as GrooveFunnels has seen some exponential growth this year. However, fewer people using the platform also means you’ll find it a little harder to network or get “community help”.

That being said, you may be someone who prefers a smaller community.

Kartra’s Facebook group has 21,000 members compared to GrooveFunnels’ 100,000.

21,000 for an online business group is still quite big in all fairness to Kartra.

GrooveFunnels Drawbacks

GrooveFunnels doesn’t have as many drawbacks as Kartra, but the main one of course is that it’s still in its early stages. Other than that, there isn’t much at all that you could complain about.

Still In Early Stages

GrooveFunnels is still in the very early stages.

This is the biggest drawback with the software, as it means:

• Some features are not available at all
• Some features are still being developed & improved
• There are a few bugs (although they are becoming less frequent)

Because of the list of features that this platform has, it still is a great offer, even if it would stay the way it is.

Still, this is a drawback and it’s the biggest one with this platform. Other than that, there are only minor limitations.

Features On Lower Plans

With Kartra, even on the lowest plans, you get access to all features, apart from the Kartra agency.

This isn’t the case with GrooveFunnels, as you need to have the premium plan to get access to all features.

Of course, the other plans still have great value, but this could be seen as a drawback if you were looking at one of the lower plans.

In the lifetime deal, you also get access to all features, so it’s an incredible deal, but we’ll talk more about that later on.

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The Pricing

Now that we have taken a look at what features both platforms have to offer, let’s see at what cost they both come.

Kartra Cost

Starter Plan: $119/mo – or $99/mo with annual billing (saving you $240 per year)

• Contacts: Up to 2,500
• Emails per month: unlimited
• Custom Domains: 1
• Team members: 5
• Websites: unlimited
• Pages: unlimited
• Videos: unlimited
• Prodeucts: unlimited
• Memberships and courses
• Funnel mapping
• Forms
• Funnels and campaigns
• Checklouts
• Lead capture
• Lead management
• Sales management
• Calendars
• Advanced analytics
• Automated sequences

Get 30% off this plan here

Growth Plan: $229/mo – or $189/mo with annual billing (saving you $480 per year)

• Contacts: Up to 12,500
• Emails per month: unlimited
• Custom Domains: 3
• Team members: 10

You also get all features included on the Starter plan, plus:

• Surveys and quizes
• Webinars – 1 presenter, 300 attendees
• Funnel simulation
• Affiliate management
• Helpdesk support

Get 30% off this plan here

Professional Plan – $549/mo – or $429/mo with annual billing (saving you $1440 per year)

• Contacts: Up to 25,000
• Emails per month: unlimited
• Custom Domains: 5
• Team members: 20

You also get all features included on the Growth plan, plus:

• Webinars – 6 presenters, 1000 attendees
• Real-time funnel analytics
• Helpdesk live chat

Get 40% off this plan after a 30 day free trial here

Overall, I would say the Kartra pricing plans are fair, especially when you consider what you get for your money. If you were to buy all the features separately, they would cost you a lot more as well. 

GrooveFunnels: Cost

As mentioned a couple of times throughout this review, there may still be a lifetime deal available. Before we jump into that though, let’s take a look at GrooveFunnels pricing.

In the image below, you can see the features and costs of each plan. Of course, there is a completely free plan which lets you build pages, sell your products, and also gives you access to the GrooveAffiliate platform.

If you were to add up the costs of all the tools you would need to get the features available in any of the plans below, you’ll realize what an incredible deal GrooveFunnels is offering.

GrooveFunnels Lifetime Deal

GrooveFunnels used to have a lifetime deal offered during the beta phase of their launch, but this deal is no longer available.

The original lifetime deal gave you access to everything inside of GrooveFunnels for a one-time payment of $997. This was then increased to $1397 for about a year. Then, in the final few months of beat, GrooveFunnels upped the price to $1997.

At this time there is also no lifetime deal for Kartra.

Since GrooveFunnels has a lot of tech issues and doesn’t function as it should, I personally would choose Kartra.

Final Thoughts: Which Is Best?

Throughout my GrooveFunnels and Kartra comparison, we’ve seen a close battle.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that there’s a winner, as they both have tremendous value for marketers and business owners.

Kartra could work exceptionally well if you work with clients, thanks to the agency feature. Or, it could also be the right choice for you, if you’re an experienced marketer looking to utilize the BAM feature, as well as the advanced automation sequences.

GrooveFunnels on the other hand could work incredibly well for you if you are willing to wait for all the features. Once, the software is fully developed, it will have everything you need to build a business, and you probably will rarely ever need another SaaS tool again.

GrooveFunnels could also be a good option if you are starting and want to use the free plan.

Either way, both of these platforms have some powerful features for a great price. You can use the links below to check them out for yourself.

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Want More GrooveFunnels Comparison Articles?

Did this comparison between GrooveFunnels and Kartra help you out? If so, let me know in the comments below.

If you’re still not sure which business software suite is for you between Kartra vs GrooveFunnels, and you want to see more comparisons, then I recommend you read one of my other popular articles below:

• GrooveFunnels vs. ClickFunnels
• Kartra vs. ClickFunnels

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