Here’s how Systeme and ClickFunnels stuck up based on my years’ of using both (including for online courses, marketing automation, and site design).

As I’ve grown my online portfolio, I’ve learned not to use too many tools to offer my courses and digital products. It gets increasingly complex, difficult to manage, and expensive over time. You’ve probably experienced this, too.

So I began searching for the best all-in-one business platform for online business owners, like you and me.

This continuous improvement journey has included using platforms such as Kajabi, Teachable, Kartra, and, most relevant for this comparison, Clickfunnels and Systeme.io.

Here’s my take on using both platforms based on experience, so you’ll know which one to choose with confidence.

Systeme vs ClickFunnels: Overview

You don’t have all day, so I’ll share with you the key differences between ClickFunnels and Systeme.io that really matter. Then you decide which platform is best for your particular requirements.

What Does Systeme.io Do?

Systeme provides an all-in-one platform for starting, running, and scaling an online business without investing hundreds of dollars monthly.

With Systeme.io, you can create and sell unlimited courses online, build your website or blog, set up multi-step sales funnels, automate your marketing, promote your products and services with an affiliate program, and more.

Systeme is often compared to Kajabi.

What Does ClickFunnels Do?

ClickFunnels markets itself as a comprehensive platform for online business platforms, like Systeme or Kajabi.

The platform recently expanded its capabilities to include courses, membership sites, and more with ClickFunnels 2.0. You can see a quick comparison of ClickFunnels 1.0 and 2.0 here.

Of course, we’ll compare the latest version of ClickFunnels with Systeme’s.

Quick decision

What are some similarities between ClickFunnels and Systeme?

Consider the following:

• All-in-one platforms: Both can help you build and run your online business with minimal integrations or separate tools (I’m in!). Expect capabilities such as funnels, custom website building, email marketing, affiliates management, and conversion optimization tools.
• Course creation: Create, manage, and scale online courses and content creator businesses.
• Sell everything: Both allow you to sell digital and physical products, although fulfillment is handled by third parties.
• Unlimited offers: There is no limit to how many courses, products, workflows, pages, and emails you can create, manage, and sell ( based on your subscription, anyways).
• Kajabi alternatives: ClickFunnels and Systeme are both solid, less expensive alternatives to Kajabi.

Yet, they differ in ways that’ll make one more suitable for you than the other. Here’s how.

What I like about Systeme vs. ClickFunnels

• Great value for free: Systeme has a free plan (ClickFunnels has none), which includes a solid affiliate program, accepts unlimited students/content/emails/etc, enables up to 3 sales funnels (each is up to 15 steps), custom website, and more.
• User-friendly platform: Systeme is more intuitive and has a less steep learning curve than ClickFunnels.
• Quick-to-build automations: You can build funnel steps quickly with the platform’s simple and intuitive workflows.
• Build email list for free: Send unlimited emails for free and manage up to 2,000 contacts to build an audience before paying a monthly subscription. Handy!
• Superior teacher-student engagement tools: Unlike ClickFunnels, comments, discussions, and community spaces are included here. You and your learners can interact, encouraging brainstorming and accountability.
• Host private and public communities: Share tips and tricks through emails, blogs, and direct messages to memberships, communities, and focus groups.
• Affordable pricing: Systeme’s unlimited plan costs $97 a month, for example. Compare that with $208/month (ClickFunnels) and $400/month (Kajabi). And I like that Systeme’s plans are designed to grow with you, offering more flexibility (4 plans) than many competitors.

What I like about ClickFunnels vs. Systeme

• Customization options: Systeme allows you to build custom websites for free, but ClickFunnels offers more customization options.
• Advanced funnel building: Includes multiple funnel templates tailored to different customer segments.
• In-depth sales funnel stats: Discover what’s going on in your business (includes live stats) so you know what to do next.
• Richer landing page builder: More templates, elements, and Elementor-like page building experience.
• Robust split and A/B tests: ClickFunnels supports split testing for funnel steps, workflows, and pages, such as checkout pages. It also features A/B tests for email elements, including the subject line and opt-ins.
• Solid Follow Up emails: Create appealing promotional, invitation, newsletter, and order confirmation emails. Boost engagement and sales with automated, targeted follow ups.
• Central Customer Center: Track visitors, interest signals, and save them to your CRM automatically. Then follow up to turn website visitors to customers.
• Streamlined Ecommerce store: Organize all your courses, products, and services in one place, so customers can access them easily.
• More integrations than Systeme: Pair many of the tools you need or already use to run and thrive your online business.

Upfront bottom line: Like Kajabi, ClickFunnels‘ capabilities target the more advanced online business owner, including advanced funnels, marketing automation, and landing page builder. Systeme aims to be the more user-friendly platform, with many of the capabilities of a more expensive platform but at a fraction of the cost.

Systeme vs. ClickFunnels: The key differences

Here’s a more in-depth comparison of ClickFunnels vs Systeme to help you make the best purchase decision.

Key difference #1: Systeme has more powerful student engagement tools for courses

With System and ClickFunnels, you can structure your courses into modules, lessons, and lectures (including video lessons).

It’s also nice that Systeme provides quick access to everything you need:

Moreover, rather than overloading students with information, Systeme lets you drip-feed the course content to them over time. It’s up to you what interval you’d like.

However, neither Systeme nor ClickFunnels offer assessments, course completion certificates, or quizzes (although you can create a simple quiz using Systeme’s survey block).

Even so, ClickFunnels has more templates and design elements to customize the look and feel of your course.

However, Systeme features comment areas within course modules. Students can use this component to discuss a topic, request clarifications, or just to interact.

Key difference #2: ClickFunnels helps you build more sophisticated funnels than Systeme

Systeme.io enables you to create sales funnels based on four goals;

• Build an audience (email list)
• Sell a product or service
• Build a Custom funnel from scratch, or
• Run a webinar funnel.

You can also run a funnel based on a limited-time offer (Deadline funnel). And you can split test your steps to figure out which strategies are most effective.

Ultimately, you can seamlessly connect your Systeme email marketing to your sales funnels. You can then use Systeme’s rules and workflows to trigger specific automations within email sequences:

Despite this, ClickFunnels excels at funnels.

In addition to the level of customizability (including 22+ specialized templates), ClickFunnels also includes superior tagging, automation, segmentation, email marketing (broadcast and Follow Up emails) and funnel automation tools.

Plus, ClickFunnels organizes all these aspects in a single place for easier management and follow-through; The FunnelHub.

You can also set up rules and triggers across multiple funnels and they’ll run seamlessly without much manual effort in the future.

On that note, you can combine Funnels and Workflows to support advanced capabilities. This can include adding conditional split paths (split testing funnel steps) and Follow Up funnels (campaigns).

ClickFunnels is like the OG of funnel building and with their latest ClickFunnels 2.0, they took it to a whole new level.

Key difference #3: Systeme supports both communities and memberships

The community feature fosters a sense of belonging among learners or customers. In addition to keeping in touch, it also helps rally members towards a shared goal.

For course platforms, where interactions can encourage discussions and accountability partnerships, it’s a must-have feature, in my experience teaching online.

On that note, Systeme does support communities (both public and private).

Besides assigning roles (like moderators) in your Systeme community, you can also block some members, establish community rules, and enforce them.

Otherwise, all members can add posts or leave comments, and notifications inform you when someone comments on your public community posts.

In addition, you can create public or private memberships (paid for recurring income or free to share exclusive content, offers, services, etc with specific people). You can grant this access to particular members either by adding their email to the private membership site or by inviting them to join.

ClickFunnels supports memberships, too (called Membership funnels):

You just create the membership site using the Memberships Funnel, like this:

Once you are done building one, this is what your subscribers will see on their ClickFunnels accounts (Customer Center):

Unlike Systeme, ClickFunnels does not include any community features where your students can interact.

If you need a solid community platform, then you may need to go with dedicated community platforms like Circle.so or Mighty Networks, which I have also reviewed.

Key difference #4: ClickFunnels has a richer page builder for emails, landing pages, and sites

Systeme’s simplicity extends to its page builder (designing emails, funnels steps, websites, blog posts, checkout pages, etc). Designing is quick and easy, and you can use a variety of page elements and templates.

Here are more elements to design your Systeme checkout pages:

However, if you want to customize your sites, emails, and pages to look and feel consistent with your brand assets elsewhere, Systeme’s customization options are rather limited.

Compare that to ClickFunnels’ broader options, which include the ability to use custom code and select from a variety of trendy templates.

Likewise, I like how well-organized the ClickFunnels checkout page feels (they call it the Ecommerce Store with good reason).

However, the checkout page isn’t as conversion-oriented as those offered by ThriveCart or Kajabi (both offer advanced tools for minimizing cart abandonment, supporting downsells, and letting you configure “pay what you want” offers).

Also, it may not be as feature-rich as dedicated e-commerce platforms like Shopify, but it can help you sell your brand merchandise.

Key difference #5: ClickFunnels offers more robust Analytics

Both Systeme and ClickFunnels provide plenty of analytics to help track performance across your online business, from conversion rate per product to course completion progress.

However, I like that ClickFunnels delivers more granular reporting, including live stats for events and funnels. Picture this:

Look at that. I really like how it displays the key performance indicators at the top with a graph that helps you correlate the metrics.

Key difference #6: Pricing between Systeme vs ClickFunnels

Consider Systeme’s pricing and plans:

Now, let’s compare ClickFunnels pricing and plans:

Here are a few pricing differences between Systeme and ClickFunnels to note:

• Systeme offers a free forever plan (and a robust one, I should add) while ClickFunnels provides a 14-day trial (plus, a 30-day moneyback guarantee, if that counts)
• Systeme’s free plan includes a rather powerful affiliate program (requires the $197/month plan on ClickFunnels), sites (custom website, blog, community, membership sites), and 24/7 email support.
• ClickFunnels offers a an unlimited subscription for $208/month (usually $297/month) compared to Systeme.io’s $97/month unlimited plan. This includes a 1 hour technical assistance phone call. Additional phone support costs $57 for a two-hour “technical” session with Systeme’s reps.

And yes, both platforms do offer some of the most responsive customer support I know. Yet, unlike Systeme, ClickFunnels offers live chat 24/7.

Both do resolve issues fairly quickly (ClickFunnels resolves in as little as 30 minutes, while Systeme often solves issues in an hour or two).

Aaand there you have it.

Systeme vs ClickFunnels: Verdict

Here’s the deal.

Choose ClickFunnels if you need to build more sophisticated funnels, complete with split testing, rich customization, and advanced CRM functionality than Systeme.io.

Select Systeme if you are looking for an easy-to-use, affordable, yet comprehensive platform for small or medium-sized businesses (without needing to learn complicated technical concepts).

I hope my experiences with ClickFunnels vs Systeme will help you make an informed decision you’ll be happy with in the long run. Have you used Systeme or ClickFunnels before? I invite you to freely share your experience with us in the comments section below.