Instapage vs. LeadPages vs. Unbounce [2020 Review] - which is the best for you?

Oliver Bridge

Creating great landing pages is an essential part of any marketing strategy regardless of industry, product, or audience. 

Landing pages limit the number of decisions a visitor can make while on the page, keeping a tight focus on the offer and driving actions like signups or making a purchase. 

In the early days of the Internet, website owners had to work with developers every time they wanted to create a new landing page. Today, users have a whole host of options that make it easy to DIY beautiful custom pages by dragging and dropping the desired elements into place.

It's important to note that these are not the only ways to create a landing page. There are other platforms, such as Elementor, that allows you to create a landing page specifically for WordPress.

However, these are 3 of the top standalone platforms for landing page creation, regardless of CMS.

OK let's dive in...

Leadpages

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Leadpages is best known for helping users design and build landing pages whether they have any web development or design skills or not. Leadpages initially launched as a landing page builder, but now the tool can be used to build entire websites, popups, sticky bars, and more. Just browsing through the site, there’s a lot to take in.

Drag-and-Drop Editor

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We did notice that some users complained about the overall functionality of the tool's drag-and-drop editor. While the editor is relatively easy to use, it lacks the customization options you'll find with the other options on this list. 

For example, you don't have full control over where you can place text boxes, buttons, and media, which some users may find frustrating. Other users reported that the tool sometimes slows down, which certainly puts a damper on the overall user experience.

Templates

Leadpages offers 130+ templates, which can be sorted by type, industry, and more. They also allow you to sort landing pages based on conversion rates. While it seems like a bit of a gimmick, some users may find it helpful to use layouts proven to deliver results. Still, things like copy, images, video, and other factors all come together to drive conversions, so it's hard to know whether these options will work for your specific use case.

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Pop-up Builder

Pop-ups can be published on a website, landing page, or third-party website. Leadpages even offers a WordPress plug-in to really ramp up the convenience factor. Additionally, you can integrate Leadpages with an email service provider like Drip or MailChimp, which allows users to route new subscribers to their preferred email list.

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Instagram & Facebook Advertising

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One of the standout offerings in Leadpages’ extensive lineup is its advertising tools. When you create an ad from Leadpages’ ad builder, the tool automatically sets up Facebook Pixel allowing you to track the results of your ad. 

As is the case with landing pages, websites, and popups, you can easily design and deploy Facebook and Instagram Ads that match your landing pages. Additionally, the platform helps ensure the message matches by pre-populating your ads with content from the associated landing page. From there, you can customize the copy and update the imagery.

Website Builder

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Leadpages goes beyond landing pages and allows you to build a website using the platform’s drag-and-drop editor. The process is similar to setting up a Squarespace site. It’s a relatively simple process, allowing you to choose from a selection of high-converting templates and pre-built pages to build out a decent-looking site fast. Leadpages promises fast load times and offers built-in SEO tools that help you optimize images, meta descriptions, and structured HTML to get more eyeballs on the page.

Price

Leadpages is relatively affordable; the Standard plan is $37 per month, or $25 a month if billed annually. That said, the entry-level plan doesn't come with the full set of tools. You'll get the drag-and-drop editor and templates, but A/B testing is not included, which seems like a pretty big drawback if you're already investing in a tool. 

The Pro plan, $79 per month, or $48 when billed annually does include A/B testing, online sales and payments, email trigger links, and ten opt-in text campaigns. And then there’s the Advanced plan which costs $321 when billed monthly, or $199 billed annually. Here, you’ll get more integrations, 50 additional text campaigns, five sub-accounts, and a personalized onboarding call. 

Unbounce

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Unbounce is a tool that allows users to build and customize landing pages and other lead capture features like popups and sticky bars. While Unbounce doesn't have quite as many features as Leadpages, its tight focus on lead capture allows them to deliver a high-quality editing experience to users. 

While the design experience does come with a slight learning curve, the tool stands to help teams improve conversions, track their efforts, and capture more leads.

Drag-and-Drop Editor

Unbounce's drag-and-drop editor offers a ton of flexibility; you're not limited to the restrictions you'll find in some landing page builders.

Instead, you can place various components on your page as you see fit. Unbounce offers a variety of widgets for CTA buttons, forms, and socials, the ability to embed video into a landing page, and more. You can set conversion goals from inside the builder and indicate which action to track as a conversion for a particular campaign. 

Unbounce's builder also makes it easy to add custom JavaScript or CSS to your pages, customize mobile landing pages and create AMP-friendly designs to ensure fast load times on the site. 

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Popups and Sticky Bars

Users can create popups and sticky bars that prompt visitors to convert using targeted offers, forms, and dynamic text. Unbounce offers a range of targeting options including URL, location, and cookies, and pop-ups can be triggered based on frequency or action such as arriving on a page, scrolling to a certain point, or as they leave. 

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Dynamic Text Replacement

Unbounce offers the ability to add dynamic content to your landing pages, a feature that allows users to personalize their paid marketing efforts by matching the copy on your landing pages to the copy in your PPC ads—done right, this feature could help you deliver more relevant ad content to users and thereby increase your Google Ads quality score. All you need to do to get started is select the landing page text you’d like to make dynamic, set an alternative to replace the highlighted text, and set a default text that will display when the Dynamic Text is inactive. 

Conversion Tracking, Testing & Optimization

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Unbounce integrates with Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager, and more, allowing users to track conversions from just about any external source. You’ll also get unlimited A/B testing and can take advantage of the new Smart Traffic feature, a machine-learning algorithm that sends visitors to the page variant that’s right for them.

Instapage

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Instapage is a landing page builder that specializes in post-click optimization at scale. Unlike Leadpages, Instapage is all about landing pages and offers a range of features that allow users to go deep rather than focus on providing a little bit of everything. 

Drag-and-Drop Editor

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Instapage's drag-and-drop editor is incredibly flexible. You're not confined to specific columns and grids, which is the case with many of these DIY tools; instead, you can move the various on-page elements to any spot you'd like. 

All Instapage templates are mobile-responsive, but you can open the mobile version of a page and customize it so that mobile users see something different than their desk-bound counterparts. Taking mobile functionality a step further, Instapage also allows users to create AMP pages for fast mobile load times. 

In all, the landing page editor allows users to create beautiful landing pages that look professional and can be further enhanced with widgets, CSS, and mobile-friendly features.

 However, the ability to customize pages means that the platform comes with a bit of a learning curve. It's not so much that the platform is hard to use, but you need to have some design savvy and some knowledge of CSS to make the most out of the customization features.

Templates

Users can choose from 200+ templates across multiple categories, including:

  • Lead generation
  • Webinar
  • Event
  • E-Book
  • App
  • Click-through
  • Two-step
  • Thank you

Designs offer plenty of white space and have a modern look in line with what you'd expect from any professional website. Instapage also allows users to save page blocks for reuse, making it easy to stay on-brand across all campaigns. 

Features like multistep forms, countdown timers, multimedia support, and chat plugins bring more functionality to your landing pages. However, you can't use the platform to create different lead gen features like exit-intent popups or sticky bars. 

Personalization

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Instapage’s personalization feature allows users to quickly create unique landing page experiences based on specific UTM parameters.  Like Unbounce’s dynamic text replacement, users can send targeted ad traffic to a personalized landing page that matches the ad's message.

Collaboration Tools

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Instapage offers collaboration features that allow teams to improve their processes for reviewing, approving, and launching campaigns. The idea is, you can keep all landing page activity inside the platform, recording edits and feedback in one place to eliminate all of the back and forth that happens when you have multiple users working on one piece of content.

Additionally, Instapage offers secure sharing, allowing you to share landing pages with clients while preventing unauthorized users from accessing pages. 

Admap

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Instapage's Admap allows you to connect your ad accounts to the platform to see campaign structure and performance metrics alongside corresponding post-click experiences. According to the Instapage site, users can map personalized pages to specific campaigns and track the results. 

Price

Instapage offers a business plan, which starts at $149 per month. Doesn't include all features— AMP pages, editable blocks, 1:1 personalization are not part of this plan. Organizations looking for a full suite of tools will need to contact sales for a custom quote. 

What’s the Verdict? How Do These Tools Compare?

Unbounce and Instapage both offer high-quality design while focusing on tools designed to drive conversions. Both are solid picks, though they offer slightly different features, so which one works best depends on what you want the tool to accomplish. 

Leadpages is the outlier here, offering a whole lot of tools from free domain hosting to SEO recommendations, and a point of sale feature, but the drag-and-drop functionality isn’t quite as sophisticated as the other landing page builders we’ve looked at.

While Leadpages does offer responsive design, you can't manually customize the mobile version of your page like you can with Instapage and Unbounce or move on-page elements around however you please. Still, it is the simplest solution of the three and the most affordable. 

Ultimately, all three solutions are well-regarded, with positive ratings across review sites like Capterra, G2Crowd, and others. All three offer a 14-day free trial, as well as integrations with a wide range of tools, including Bonjoro. 

To learn more about Bonjoro’s integrations, check out our integrations page.

Category
Comparisons
About the author
Oliver Bridge
Growth Grizzly
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