Kartra Review: Pros and Cons, Apps, Features and More

Last Updated on 15th September 2024

If you have been looking for a complete Kartra review that breaks down everything you need to know about the software, you’ve come to the right place.

I’m going to give you a look inside at what this software offers to help you choose whether it’s right for your business.

Let’s get started!

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What Is Kartra?

If you’re new to the online marketing world then you may be wondering, what is Kartra?

Kartra is an all-in-one suite of marketing tools complete with a landing page, sales funnel, and membership site builder, plus a ton more apps.

Kartra launched in 2018 and is owned and operated by Genesis Digital.

Genesis Digital was actually founded in 2013. They’ve created several other successful software products for online businesses, including WebinarJam and EverWebinar.

Interestingly, Mike Filsaime, the CEO of GrooveFunnels, was also one of the founding members of Kartra.

Mike left the Genesis Digital team in 2020 due to ‘creative differences’ with co-founder, Andy Jenkins. As a result, he broke off and founded GrooveFunnels instead. which is Kartra’s closest rival.

During the launch of Kartra, the software platform was mentioned on internet marketing guru Billy Gene’s podcast saying that Kartra aimed to be an “InfusionSoft killer”. Basically, Kartra aims to do everything that Infusionsoft can do, and more.

He went on to explain that they wanted to do this by offering a product that is more powerful and easier to use than Infusionsoft.

However, Kartra is also often compared to other funnel builders like ClickFunnels, Groove Funnels, etc. as its features and audience are similar.

If you want an exact comparison of Kartra stacked up against the most similar alternative, then check out my detailed article comparing Kartra and GrooveFunnels here.

Since Kartra was launched in 2018, it has become extremely popular in the internet marketing community, with a Facebook group of over 22,000 members.

One of the reasons many users like it is the powerful automation features that are all hosted in one, convenient place. However, I’ll go into more detail on this soon.

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Alternatively, get an extended 30 day free trial of Kartra here.

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Who Is Kartra For?

Kartra is best for:

• Marketers and businesses selling digital or physical products/services looking for an all-in-one solution (that doesn’t need a blogging feature)
• Agencies that build websites and marketing campaigns for clients
• Affiliates that want to build funnels to promote Kartra, or other products to earn commissions

Kartra can also be used for eCommerce businesses that sell physical products. However, from what I have seen, it can be quite hard to find good order fulfillment solutions if you were, for example, wanting to fulfill via dropshipping. However, if you get one sorted out, then there is no reason why you can’t use Kartra.

From what I have seen in the Facebook group, and the Kartra community in general, most users fall into one of the three categories above.

However, Kartra is not suited for anyone who wants to grow a blog. Although they have blogging templates, the pages don’t load fast enough, and you have limited SEO options.

If you are looking for an all-in-one funnel builder that has a better blogging feature, I suggest going for one of the following alternatives:

• GrooveFunnels (Blogging feature coming soon)
• DropFunnels (Is powered by WordPress)
• WordPress with Cartflows or ThriveThemes

Recently, we explained all of these options in our best funnel builder article. If you are looking to find the right option for your business, make sure to check that article out.

That being said, Kartra also gives you the code to embed entire pages. So you can use WordPress and embed your Kartra pages.

This might be useful for squeeze pages, but I have not yet, tested how well this works for SEO.

Things To Think About Before Purchasing Kartra

I also wanted to give you a few things to think about before purchasing Kartra:

• Will my business need an SEO/blogging feature?
• What features do I need to grow my business, and does Kartra have them?
• How many resources will my business need, and which Kartra plan is best suited?
• Will my current provider let me migrate my business to Kartra, and if yes, how?

Kartra Review: The Features and Benefits

As we already mentioned at the beginning of the article, Kartra aims to be an all-in-one software. This means it does have a nice number of features, which I have all broken down below.

Drag & Drop Page Builder & Templates

Similar to most of Kartra’s competitors, it also comes with a drag and drop page builder.

You select a template (or start from scratch), load up the page builder, and then edit the pages.

Compared to a lot of other page builders, Kartra’s is pretty decent. It does have the occasional lag/freeze, but it’s very rare. Apart from that, it’s solid, as you have a good selection of elements and can build almost any website type.

The templates also look nice and modern. I was especially impressed by the full-navigation websites, as many funnel builders don’t put a lot of effort into these.

Plus, Kartra also has templates for every step of your funnel, whether that’s your squeeze page, landing page registration, or course sign-up page.

It even has some templates for your blog pages. Although, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, I wouldn’t recommend Kartra if you are looking to grow a blog. This is due to the pages not being the fastest and not having the full SEO flexibility.

Still, overall I think Kartra’s page builder is pretty solid. It’s easy to use and lets you build pretty much any type of page that you can imagine. Plus, you can also embed your Kartra pages anywhere you’d like using the code they provide you with.

Behavior-Adaptive-Marketing Technology

Another cool thing about Kartra is that it has a behavior-adaptive-marketing technology built in. This means you can adapt your pages to the behavior of your visitors.

Using this feature, you can send a more targeted message to your visitors and increase your conversions.

Kartra Checkouts

The next feature inside of Kartra is its checkouts.

Kartra allows you to build checkouts or use one of their templates. Once you’ve created the checkout, you can then embed it into one of your Kartra pages.

The checkout feature is pretty advanced, as it has order bumps, one-click upsells and down sells. This is great, as you won’t need to use an external checkout tool like SamCart, and you’ll have what you need to make the most out of every sale.

I also like the style of checkout templates that they have, as they should suit most businesses.

Video Hosting

One complaint that you hear with many membership sites and funnel builders is that they don’t have video hosting. That means that on those other platforms you then need to pay for external video hosting with a company like Vimeo or Wistia, which can get expensive.

Kartra comes with built-in video hosting with a lot of memory to use on most plans.

This feature is also pretty decent, as it allows you to add CTAs and headlines to your videos to help you convert viewers.

You can add your videos to any page within Kartra, and that also includes your membership sites, which is awesome. So, you won’t have to spend any additional money on getting a video hosting software like Wistia or Vimeo.

Email Marketing

Kartra’s email marketing tool, Kartra mail, was something that I was very impressed by.

You can send out newsletters or build automation sequences.

Inside of the automation sequences, you can choose from many triggers, which allows you to send more targeted emails.

It’s also pretty nice that everything is built into the Kartra system, meaning the email marketing feature can easily access and use data from your sales funnels, membership sites, helpdesks, or even videos.

For example, if a lead watches the entire sales video but doesn’t buy, you can tag them and start an automation campaign based on that to follow up with them. You can also do the same if they have a support ticket open, are an active affiliate, have been refunded, and various other triggers.

That’s pretty cool, as it allows you to send more targeted emails, which will ultimately increase your conversions.

The templates inside of Kartra Mail are also gorgeous. You just need to insert them, and then they can easily be edited. Or, you can use plain text emails, if you prefer as well.

Something that I really like about Kartra is the pre-built emails, which are part of the campaigns and sales funnels, but I’ll get into those next.

Sales Funnels and Campaigns

From all of the features mentioned in this Kartra review, this is probably my favorite one. You’ll see why in just a moment.

Kartra’s sales funnel approach helps you build out the entire customer journey, from the moment they first come across your website to the point where they’re a customer. This also includes your emails, membership sites, etc., instead of just your pages.

You can save all of the assets you create in Kartra under a campaign to help you keep an overview of all your assets. However, that isn’t yet what makes it unique, but these two points below are.

1. Share Entire Campaigns, Not Just Pages

You’ve probably heard of or even used ClickFunnels’ share funnel feature. Kartra takes this one step further and lets you share entire campaigns with not only your pages but also your emails, membership sites, helpdesks, videos … You get the point, everything.

This means if you’re creating a campaign for a client who has Kartra, you can share your campaigns with a click of a button. And, if you are skilled in building campaigns, this makes selling them a lot easier.

You can also create mini-campaigns, use them as a lead magnet, or sell them to your audience.

There’s an unbelievable number of opportunities, thanks to this feature. And that’s not even the best part of Kartra’s funnels and campaigns.

You can read more about Kartra compared to ClickFunnels here.

2. Done-For-You Campaigns From Frank Kern and Many Others

Creating your entire campaign requires an enormous amount of effort. There are the pages, the copy, the automation sequences, the membership sites, and a whole load of other assets that you’ll have to create from scratch.

Well, with Karta, you don’t have to create them from scratch.

In fact, you get access to campaigns built by industry-leading experts like Frank Kern.

All you need to do is go into your Kartra account and head over to campaigns, and you’ll find endless campaigns for all types of businesses ranging from info-product vendors to consultants.

For example, many of these templates, such as the book funnel and the famous 4-day cash machine, are built by Frank Kern. Not only are these the sales funnel steps, but they also have pre-written sales copy that you just need to edit to tailor towards your business.

For example, it will say “(Insert Benefit 1),” and you just need to make those little changes while also leveraging copy that has been proven to work.

I don’t know about you but I think that’s pretty awesome!

There are also endless additional campaigns for you to use created by Genesis Digital and some other internet marketing experts.

Additionally, there is also a marketplace where you can purchase more from other Kartra users or sell your own.

Why This Is Great

This set of features helps all users, no matter what their experience level is. Beginners can get started with done-for-you campaigns, while advanced users can sell their own.

There are templates for consultants, course creators, agencies, and various other businesses. Plus, if you have any type of marketing-related business like an agency, or that’s what your audience is interested in, this opens up many opportunities.

You can also use the Facebook group to discuss your ideas, find partners, etc. which makes this even better.

Leads System/CRM

Kartra has a leads system that helps you segment your customers automatically to target your marketing messages much better.

This is comparable to a CRM, as Kartra’s leads system automatically scores and tracks your customers to help you make better marketing choices.

This, combined with the advanced analytics (which we’ll get into later on), makes it a lot easier to figure out what’s working and what your next steps are.

I’m a big fan of this because, if we’re honest, we’ve all had some marketing campaigns where we didn’t really have an overview of what’s happening. And, because this lead system is in the same place as your pages, email automation, membership sites, etc., it can give you a true picture of what’s happening.

Also, if you have high-ticket clients or are looking to in the future, this will be of huge benefit to you. Just by clicking on a lead’s name, you’ll be able to see their value to your business, their tags, and various other information.

Take a look at what I mean below. You can also click on the bar’s features at the top to get all the needed information from that particular feature.

Affiliate Marketing/Management and Marketplace

Kartra also comes with a powerful affiliate management tool that lets you recruit affiliates for your products.

The affiliate reporting inside of Kartra is super comprehensive for both the vendor and the affiliate.

Plus, the amount of options you have when creating your affiliate offer is almost insane.

Here are some of the things I’m talking about:

• Multiple Commission tiers (i.e., create tier 2 affiliate programs/pay affiliates for finding affiliates)
• Open and closed affiliate programs (Control who can become an affiliate)
• Pay affiliates instantly with PayPal
• Joint venture brokers
• Create CPA affiliate programs (for example, upon lead registration)
• Recurring & Standard affiliate programs
• Set payment milestone (i.e., affiliate has to earn at least X to get paid)
• Fixed commission rate or % of the sale

This is also something that gives you many opportunities to grow your business, as you can create almost any type of affiliate program you want.

Affiliate Marketplace

Kartra also comes with an affiliate product marketplace that you can compare to ClickBank.  This is where vendors can upload their products with the affiliate program, and affiliates can find them.

Meaning, if you have a product, you can upload it, and if the affiliate offer is good, you’re likely going to get affiliates applying to promote it.

Or, if you are looking to become an affiliate yourself, you’ll have access to a huge library of different types of affiliate offers that you can promote.

This is another feature that I think will be very helpful to many users.

Membership Sites

Throughout this article, I’ve already mentioned a couple of times that Kartra has membership sites. However, I still want to break down what exactly Kartra’s membership site builder has to offer.

Kartra’s membership site builder comes with all the features you would expect from a normal membership site builder, such as:

• Drip Feed Content (with scheduling)
• Multi-site portals
• Advanced Member management
• Comments
• Details analytics (Average retention, average progression, subscription rates & more)
• Multiple membership tiers

Kartra’s membership sites are also straightforward to build, as all you need to do is select a template, then use the drag & drop builder to create it. The only complaint I would have with this feature is that the templates look a little boring.

Yes, you can completely remove the Kartra branding and add your own, but they are very basic. However, there’s nothing wrong with simplicity, but that’s just the way I personally feel about the templates.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t build a high-quality membership site with Kartra. And, it still has more than enough features to give your students an amazing learning experience.

Helpdesk Portal

Kartra has a built-in helpdesk tool that will allow you to connect a helpdesk to all of your pages, membership sites, etc.

This will allow you to provide ticketing support and email support to your customers. Again, the cool thing about this is that you don’t have to switch between two or three software pieces to access the data you need to provide support.

Since your sales platform and CRM are also inside Kartra, you can instantly access any information you need.

Analytics

Kartra also has detailed analytics for every feature. That includes your emails, pages, membership sites, affiliates, and everything else inside Kartra.

I also like how visual the analytics are, making it really easy for you to keep an overview. However, what I was very impressed by, were the metrics that Kartra provides you with.

Some of these include:

• ROI of Campaign
• Average Lead Value
• Retention (For membership sites)

And many more, these metrics are beneficial in deciding what’s right for your business.

For example, once you know your average lead value, you can, of course, focus on scaling your campaigns.

If you know your lead value is $7, you can recruit affiliates and pay them $1-3 per email sign-up. Plus, you can also run paid ads and control the cost, so you don’t spend more than $1-3 per lead.

Overall, I think that Kartra’s analytics are one of its strong points.

Kartra Agency

Kartra Agency is a feature available on all plans but Kartra starter, but we’ll talk more on pricing later on.

This feature, as the name suggests, is made specifically for agencies.

It allows you to manage separate Kartra accounts using your master login, and it also has some unique features:

• See all your client’s data from your account
• Generate personalized reports for your metrics
• Get discounted Kartra accounts and sell them

If you want to set up clients with separate Kartra accounts, you can also get those for a discount and sell them for the standard price, plus your service fees.

Integrations and APIs

Kartra also has a list of native integrations. However, you get access to both the inbound and outbound API keys, so you should be able to integrate with all of the tools you need.

If you do want to take a look at the native integrations, here’s a list of those:

Payment processors:

• Braintree
• Stripe
• PayPal
• Authorize.Net

Email integrations:

• Mailgun
• Sendgrid
• Elastic Email
• Postmark

Membership site integrations:

• Digital Access Pass
• OptimizePress
• aMember
• s2 Member
• Wishlist
• Kajabi

Other:

• Twilio
• Nexmo
• Plivo
• Google Calendar
• Zapier

Kartra Pros and Cons

Okay, that was quite a hefty number of features. I did say this was going to be a detailed Kartra review, so I had to explain them all.

 But to help you get a clearer overview of whether this platform is right for you, I’ve listed the Kartra pros and cons below:

Kartra Pricing:

Now that we have seen what Kartra has to offer in terms of features and benefits, let’s look at the cost of this software tool.

There is currently no lifetime deal on Kartra, so you will need to opt for one of the four price plans.

Below, I’ve explained all of these plans in detail. I like Kartra’s pricing because all features (apart from Kartra Agency) are available on every plan.

This is great, as I think it can be annoying when platforms advertise all their features, and then you have to be on the highest plans to get them all.

So, you’re only limited in terms of the resources you use.

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

Best Kartra Alternatives

If you’re not quite feeling Kartra, then don’t worry! There are several great alternatives on the market that offer similar features.

Here are our top picks for alternatives to the Kartra platform:

SamCart

If you’re a digital product creator or a seller of physical goods online, then of the best alternatives for you to consider is SamCart.

This robust yet elegant platform has one of the best optimized checkout experiences out there. Not only does it provide a great experience for your customers, it can also increase your sales by a whopping 30%!

SamCart’s comprehensive checkout platform specializes in maximizing sales of both digital and physical products. If you want to get the most out of selling your own products online, then you can’t go far wrong by leveraging SamCart’s highly optimized checkout process and conversion-focused tools.

SamCart boasts a good range features, many of which are comparable with Kartra. Although Kartra does offer more features overall, the features that SamCart does offer certainly pack a punch, especially when it comes to the checkout and online selling process.

The SamCart features include a landing page and funnel builder, an online course app, an affiliate program manager feature, and conversion features like order bumps, one-click upsells, and beat cross-selling feature.

SamCart also provides decent analytics. This is great because the platform enables you to hone in on exactly what’s working in your business so you can scale.

SamCart also integrates with many popular tools out there including all the popular email marketing platforms. You also have a variety of options for payment gateways when using SamCart including PayPal, Stripe and ApplePay, ensuring a seamless and secure checkout experience for your customers.

ClickFunnels

Another popular alternative is ClickFunnels. It’s powerful a sales funnel builder that allows you to create high-converting landing pages, sales funnels, and membership sites.

ClickFunnels offers a drag-and-drop interface, making it easy for beginners to create professional-looking pages without any coding knowledge.

Being another all-in-one platform (but with less features), ClickFunnels also comes with a built in course feature, a webinar feature, and it’s own email autoresponder. ClickFunnels 2.0 also allows you to build full blown ecommerce sites if that’s what you’re looking to do.

With ClickFunnels you also get varying degrees of access to their extensive library of training, known as FunnelFlix, depending on which ClickFunnels pricing plan you choose. This is great because it means you can increase your marketing knowledge while you build your business.

Similar to SamCart, ClickFunnels also integrates with a wide variety of third-party tools, allowing you to connect your sales funnels with your favorite marketing and automation platforms.

Builderall

If you’re looking for a more complete all-in-one platform, then Builderall is also worth a look.

Builderall is by far the most complete marketing platform out there. It can do everything Kartra can do, plus it has a ton more tools. That said, it’s likely that you won’t need all those tools.

From testing out the platform myself, I’d say that their landing page and funnel builder, the website builder, the webinar feature, and the chatbots are their strongest feature. Personally, I did also like their heatmap feature since I could integrate it with my WordPress website, which is pretty neat. That said, it did freeze on my a couple of times, but to be fair to Buildrall, that could have been due to my internet connection.

Another stand out feature of Builderall is that you can also use it to build and host fully functional WordPress websites. Since more than 35% of websites are built on WordPress this is a big deal. All of Builderall’s other features also integrate with WordPress too.

So, if you currently have a business that revolves around a WordPress website, then choosing Builderall might be the best bet for you.

Similar to ClickFunnels 2.0, you can also use the Builderall platform to build full blown ecommerce sites if that’s your bag. And, of course, you also get all the other features like the funnel builder, online courses, a built-in email marketing platform, and free video hosting.

For such a large range of features, Builderall is also priced very reasonably too.

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Review of Kartra: My Final Thoughts

That’s it! I hope you have enjoyed my Kartra review. If you are looking for an all-in-one platform with a powerful lead management system and strong sales tools, I recommend giving Kartra a try.

Kartra has a 13-day trial for $1, which you can access through the button below to see if it’s right for you.

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