Unbounce vs Instapage (2023): The Complete Guide

Landing page builders like Unbounce and Instapage ensure you can have the best chance at connecting with and converting your target audience. With these tools, it’s quick and easy to showcase the biggest benefits of your products or service, in a way that captivates, inspires, and eventually converts too.

Unbounce and Instapage will both help you to create amazing landing pages – the question is, which one is the better tool?

There’s a significant amount of overlap between Instapage and Unbounce because both tools are intended for the same purpose – to increase conversions.

What is Unbounce?

Unbounce was launched in 2011 as a leading landing page builder. Before this service, creating landing pages was a far more complex and involved process. The simplicity of Unbounce and it’s subsequent success encouraged the design of multiple competing companies, including Instapage.

Today, Unbounce is a state-of-the-art intelligent landing page tool, packed full of AI innovations. With Unbounce, you get everything from intelligent page creation to convenient insights into your customer’s behaviors and sentiment.

What is Instapage?

Instapage is a tool designed to simplify the creation and analysis of landing pages. You create highly relevant on-brand landing pages, and personalize them to suit your customer’s needs, then experiment with A/B testing. There’s even a comprehensive ad-mapping service, so you can track the customer journey all in one place.

Unbounce vs Instapage: Unique Features

Both Instapage and Unbounce are designed for landing page conversions and optimization. As such, you can see a lot of the same features between both of them, including A/B testing and personalization options to make your pages stand out.

However, there are a lot of differences between these services too. Unbounce offers a lot more customization and flexibility options, where Instapage works more smoothly out of the box, with pre-defined landing pages. Unbounce is also much cheaper, starting at $90 per month, while Instapage starts at closer to $149 per month.

In terms of insights and analytics, Instapage can offer heat maps, while Unbounce delivers AI-enhanced services. Unbounce also offers more advanced custom popup functions. Some of the unique features of Unbounce include:

• Intelligent customizable landing page creation with AI suggestions
• Copy insights to help you convert more customers
• Builder grid guidance with your drag-and-drop builder
• Google fonts and SVG images
• Direct domain publishing for easy growth
• Multi-device page preview

Instapage has a host of convenient tools to offer too, particularly now the company has evolved with acquisition from Postclick. The all-in-one service includes hundreds of features built to improve conversion rates. Some of the unique features include:

• Admap for visualizing your ad campaigns and conversion options
• Collaboration tools to keep your teams connected
• Page speed insights for loading enhancements
• Heat maps to track customers movements
• Postclick proprietary scoring
• Instablocks for reusable content

Unbounce vs Instapage: Landing Page Builder

Let’s dive a little deeper into the main focus of both Unbounce and Instapage: the landing page builder. The first thing you should know about both of these tools is they’re extremely intuitive and easy to use. Both allow you to choose from a range of pre-existing designs to get started, and give you extra tools for customization.

However, there are some major differences in the building experience. With Unbounce, you’re going to get an AI-enhanced building opportunity, with drag-and-drop functionality included. Unbounce’s approach to landing pages has evolved drastically over the years, today featuring a number of valuable innovations in artificial intelligence.

The Unbounce “smart builder”, features:

• Optimized page sections with pre-built modular templates you can mix and match to suit your landing page requirements.
• Style guides, so you can ensure you’re providing your entire team with a selection of colors, typography, and approved images to use.
• Design assistant with AI support to help you build landing pages more effectively with data-backed recommendations specific to your audience, goals, and industry.
• Copy insights powered by smart copy to get recommendations for high-converting copy based on your tone and audience.
• Builder grid guidance to help you snap sections into place and reduce the risk of anything looking out of place on your website.
• Mobile-responsive design as standard with multi-device page preview, so you can see exactly what your customers are going to see
• Built-in Google fonts to ensure all of your page copy looks perfect on any device, and SVG images are available too to avoid slowing down your site.

Instapage, of course, also has its own selection of special features to make building your landing pages easier. The Instapage ecosystem features something called “blocks”, or “Instablocks” which you can use to create a consistent style and branding across multiple landing pages or points in a website. This is fantastic if you want to use a range of different pages, while maintaining a consistent color theme and messaging in all environments.

From a landing-page building and ease-of-use perspective, Instapage also offers:

• More than 500 customizable layouts sorted by industry and use case, to help you achieve the best conversions for your business.
• AMP and Thor render engine technology to give you the fastest page loading times on the market. The built-in AMP support offers fantastic mobile experiences.
• Collaboration tools built into the drag-and-drop builder so you can easily interact with your entire team when designing landing pages.
• Replica table blocks and global blocks you can easily access at the click of a button to create consistency on any page.
• Precision editing tools with pixel distance information to ensure you can create the best possible alignment between your elements.
• Parallax scrolling and other unique page experience options to help engage your target audience and improve conversions.
• Publishing tool options, including the choice to publish Instapage landing pages on an existing WordPress or Drupal blog or website.

Unbounce: AI and Popups

While both Unbounce and Instapage have a lot to offer modern business owners and enterprise leaders, they take different approaches with their tools. Unbounce is currently working on creating the ultimate AI-enhanced ecommerce tool.

The conversion intelligence platform from Unbounce provides access to a range of different AI solutions, including a design assistance with advice on how to improve your conversions. You can integrate your CRM and email marketing tools and create clever end-to-end segmented campaigns for your audience. There’s even access to the “Smart Copy” generation, to help you create the best messaging.

Speaking of messaging, Unbounce can allow you to replace the text on your pages dynamically. Dynamic text replacement in the landing page software automatically adjusts your landing page templates to suit the expectations of your target audience. This feature also works with Unbounce’s extensive range of sticky bars, pop-ups, and other tools for grabbing user attention.

On top of all this, Unbounce can also keep you aware of exactly what’s happening with your campaigns, by sending you notifications when a user converts.

Instapage: Collaboration Functionality

One of the crucial features setting Instapage apart, aside from its convenient “blocks” for replicating content throughout your landing page templates, is the collaboration ecosystem. With the web-based collaboration tool from Instapage, you can bring your entire team together on your digital marketing efforts. There’s even live-chat functionality.

If you’re trying to work on a comprehensive set of campaigns with your team, or you’re an agency developing landing pages for your customers, Instapage is a great choice. You can even use live annotation and feedback to make valuable changes on the go.

Ideal for small businesses offering building services, Instapage also displays client histories, so you can find out what specific customers were struggling with. There’s even automatic routing included within Instapage, so you can route your customers to the right departments.

Another bonus feature for agencies is the ability to publish completed pages on a “demo” page, so you can see how well they perform before launching.

Unbounce vs Instapage: Testing and Analytics

For both small businesses and larger enterprise entrepreneurs, analytics and testing are important parts of choosing the right landing page platform. Unbounce and Instapage both offer a range of tools for examining the functionality of your lead capture efforts.

Unbounce comes with A/B testing for your landing pages, so you can test how every change makes a difference to your marketing campaigns. You can also access various smart features within the page editor which improve the quality of your page designs as you work, such as visitor attributes to help you understand your audience, and conversion mapping tools.

Unbounce also offers smart traffic insights and smart traffic reports, with real-time notifications and advice delivered straight to your page editor.

Instapage ensures you can enhance your sales funnel with it’s own A/B testing functionality. However, it also offers a feature you can’t get with Unbounce – heat mapping. The heat mapping solution means you can track exactly which parts of your marketing campaigns are grabbing the most attention. Heat Mapping combines with real-time analytics to ensure you make better decisions about how to build your pages.

Both tools also integrate with a wider range of tools to help you boost your sales funnel performance, like Mailchimp for email automation, CRM tools such as Salesforce and HubSpot CRM, and of course, Google Analytics. You can also use Zapier to tie in other widgets and tools.

Pricing

Pricing for both Unbounce and Instapage falls into a number of different categories. This ensures companies can more easily choose the package best-suited to their specific feature requirements and budgets. Notably, both tools also offer discounts if you’re willing to sign up with the service for more than a month at a time. Annual packages are offered at a reduced rate.

Unbounce Pricing

Let’s start by looking at Unbounce pricing.

There’s a 14-day free trial for users who want to test the functionality of Unbounce before committing to a paid plan. After that, there are a total of four packages available for Unbounce’s smart builder system. These include:

• Launch: $90 per month: This package allows you to create unlimited landing pages, pop-ups, and sticky bars. You can manage up to 500 conversions, 20,000 visitors, and a single domain. There’s also full access to all of the top smart builder features, such as the Design Assistant, multi-device templates, and the “speed boost” function for improving your site’s performance. You also get an automatic image optimizer.
• Optimize: $135 per month: This includes all the features of Launch, but it’s suitable for up to 30,000 visitors, 1,000 conversions, and 5 domains. You’ll also gain access to Smart traffic management, visitor attributes, time-to-learn functionality, and conversion mapping. The Optimize package includes smart traffic reports, advanced targeting and scheduling, A/B testing, and dynamic text replacement. Plus, you get unlimited user sub-accounts.
• Accelerate: $180 per month: At this point in the Unbounce pricing packages, you’ll have access to all of the features available from the smart builder, with more scale. You can support up to 2,500 conversions, 50,000 visitors, and 10 domains. All of the other features are the same as you’d get with Optimize.
• Concierge: Custom pricing: Concierge is the enterprise-level pricing package offered by Unbounce for people who need to manage more than 2,500 conversions, more than 50,000 visitors, and multiple domains (over 10). This package starts at $575 per month, but you’ll be given a custom quote when you contact the sales team. You’ll also get access to a dedicated “success team” to help you make the most out of the service.

The Smart Copy functionality is free for up to 5 generations per day. However, there’s also a premium solution with Unbounce pricing which offers unlimited generations for $49 per day.

Instapage Pricing

Switching over to Instapage pricing, you’ll notice you have fewer options, however there’s still a great deal of flexibility on offer. Instapage does offer a 14-day free trial like Unbounce. After that, the paid packages are a lot more expensive. Your options include:

• Building: $299 paid monthly, or $199 paid annually: This package comes with everything you need to start building post-click landing pages. There are no conversion limits, unlimited domain access, server-side A/B testing, and real-time visual collaboration tools included. You also get Instablocks, AMP pages and experiences, the Thor render engine, a post-click score, and ad map. Plus, there’s also access to conversion analytics, dynamic text replacement, SSO, GDPR compliance, SSL encryption and integrations with HubSpot and Zapier.
• Converting: Custom pricing: This is the specially customized pricing package from Unbounce which includes all the features you might need for your unique sales requirements. You get all of the features of “Building”, plus some extras. For instance, you can integrate with Salesforce and Marketo, access global editable blocks, and get ad-page personalization elements. There are multi-step forms, heatmaps, custom fonts, direct lead-bypass, audit logs, bulk lead downloads, and an uptime SLA. Plus, Unbounce also offers a dedicated launch specialist, page migration service, custom feature integrations, design services, a success manager, and conversion consulting.

While Unbounce has more options than Instapage for pricing, you do have the benefit of being able to access a lot more advanced features during the initial packages offered by Unbounce. There’s also an excellent discount on the annual package, reducing your cost by around $100 per month if you’re willing to sign-up for longer.

Instapage vs Unbounce: Conclusion

Both Instapage and Unbounce have a lot of overlap when it comes to choosing the best landing page builder. You can use each of these tools to send traffic to your website or webinar, and access split testing functionality to improve conversions.

There are plugins and extra tools to make your custom landing pages more effective, custom domain access, and an easy drag-and-drop editor for both tools. However, Unbounce is intended more for the business in search of an intelligent way to build conversion opportunities for SEO, PPC, and other marketing purposes. Unbounce is quite a bit more affordable for beginners than Instapage, which only has an enterprise plan or an expensive package to choose from.

Instapage is more likely to appeal to companies who want to build state-of-the-art landing page funnels for clients. Marketing agencies will definitely benefit from the strong collaboration and sharing tools. Of course, as always, the best landing page builder for you will be the one capable of addressing your specific needs. Don’t forget to check out all of your options, including extra alternatives like Leadpages and clickfunnels, before making your choice.

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