Instapage
vs.
When it comes to landing page and website builders, you have a lot of options. And to make matters more confusing, it’s rarely a matter of which is best—it’s about which is best for you and your business. Because when you stack them up against each other, different tools do different things well.
Our company’s mission is to help you and your small business succeed, even if it means Leadpages isn’t the right tool for you.
So—Leadpages vs. Instapage. What’s the difference?
We’ll break it down for you using a few different categories that include ease of use, functionality/features, look and feel, conversion tools, publishing options, and of course, value.
Ultimately, both tools are designed to help you build, publish, and optimize landing pages. However, the biggest difference right off the bat is that Leadpages is designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs, while Instapage caters to medium and enterprise-sized businesses.
But it’s not as simple as that. Let’s dive a little deeper and see what these tools have to offer.
Note: comparisons in this article were last updated in January 2022.
1 - Ease of Use:
The building experience
Leadpages:
Leadpages is one of the simplest tools to use on the market, with no coding or web design experience necessary. Once you log in, simply choose one of the professionally-designed templates, edit the text and images, move a few things around (if you want), and you’re ready to go live.
The number one thing that makes Leadpages such a user-friendly platform is the Drag & Drop Builder. It lets you click, drag, and drop page elements where you want them, so it’s easy to get things looking exactly how you want them to. Leadpages’ grid system of sections, rows, and columns mean that page elements snap into place right where they should be—perfect for non-designers.
The platform gives you a shortcut to expanding the existing templates with section templates. Organized into categories like Hero, FAQ, and About, they make it easy to bring more customization to any page.
Want to use your own fonts when publishing your page? You can upload up to 10 custom font families to Leadpages. This expands on the existing library of 40+ fonts.
Furthermore, the built-in Leadmeter tool gives you real-time recommendations on how to improve your conversion rate. It’s based on data gleaned from over a million pages created by customers, so you can drastically improve your chances of creating a high-converting landing page, even if you’ve never built one before.
In addition to offering landing pages, Leadpages includes a full website builder as well. The same ease and flexibility of the landing page builder is extended to a mobile-responsive site builder.
Instapage:
Instapage offers an intuitive grid-free, drag-and-drop interface that provides you with a lot of flexibility. Most noticeably, you’ll have more ways to build, edit, and design your page.
Instapage also includes Instablocks and Global blocks. The former allows you to save your own section templates. The latter gives you the ability to update all instances of a published global block from one place. However, this feature is only available on higher-priced custom plans.
Like with Leadpages, you can add custom fonts to Instapage, but not on their first-tier level.
For those with experience using website and landing page builders—or those with significant design knowledge—these additional options may be useful. However, if you’ve never built landing pages before you might find the platform a little overwhelming at first.
Instapage currently doesn’t offer a website builder.
Verdict:
We’re going to call this one a tie.
Leadpages makes it easy to drag and drop elements into a smart grid layout, which is ideal for those with less web design knowledge. Additionally, the Leadmeter provides valuable insights that help you create high-converting pages right out of the box.
Instapage’s grid-free drag-and-drop builder may be more appealing to experienced web designers who are familiar with advanced design software and need more flexibility in the way they build pages. Instablocks and global blocks are also quite useful for those with design experience.
2 - Functionality: features, widgets & integrations
Leadpages:
Leadpages integrates natively with 90 online marketing tools (and counting)—including all major email service providers (ESPs), customer relationship management tools (CRMs), webinar platforms, and social networks. That’s in addition to the 2,000+ integrations available through Zapier.
Leadpages also offers 18 widgets that allow you to add features like progress bars, countdown timers, social like buttons, icons, and more to your page. Perhaps most importantly, Leadpages has integrated checkout pages and payment via Stripe, so you can easily sell your services online.
As an added bonus, Leadpages stores data from your integrations and resends it if the app is down. This helps ensure you stay up and running, even if one of your tools is having technical issues.
Instapage:
Instapage also has a strong integration library, with more than 100 tools on the roster that can be connected to your page. This includes integrations for marketing automation, ESPs, CRMs, ecommerce, analytics, advertising, call tracking, pop-ups, and live chat.
Some integrations are native, while others are made possible through third-party platforms. Instapage also works with Zapier, which greatly expands the number of integrations available to you.
One cool feature is their unique dynamic text replacement, which allows you to use real-time editing to tailor an ad to a landing page—ideal for those who do a lot of PPC advertising.
Instapage offers 13 widgets within their builder with many of the same functions as Leadpages. But they do lack certain key widgets including progress bars, Calendly, OpenTable, and Checkouts (although you can add these features through third-party integrations).
Verdict:
Again, this depends on your needs.
Both platforms offer a wide range of useful (and similar) integrations—with Instapage beating out Leadpages in terms of the number of integrations. Although the fact that both platforms work with Zapier means virtually any app or tool can be connected to both.
Leadpages does offer a few more widgets, which allow you to add features like Calendly booking and payments through Stripe without having to go through the integration process.
3 - Look & feel: templates & customizability
Leadpages:
Leadpages has over 220 landing page templates to choose from. Not only that, but they offer landing pages designed for specific industries and applications. Are you an author looking to promote your new book? There are landing pages for that. Need a landing page for your next event? There are landing pages for that too.
Not only can you filter templates by industry, page type, color, and style, but you can also sort them by conversion rate. This means you can find a template that both fits your business and helps you generate leads and sales.
All of Leadpages’ landing page and website templates are mobile responsive and fully customizable. Change colors, add and remove sections, and more to create your ideal landing page.
Instapage:
Instapage has a similarly impressive library, with over 200 templates. You also have the ability to purchase premium themes through Envato. Templates are sorted into a number of different categories, including app download, demo request, event registration, product sales, thank you, and more. This makes it easy to quickly identify the templates that fit your needs.
That being said, the designs don’t offer much variety. Many templates look very similar, with sections simply rearranged or adjusted. This could lead to your page looking like a lot of other Instapage landing pages. So, when using Instapage templates you might want to add a little more customization to set yourself apart.
Verdict:
This one is close, but Leadpages has the edge here. With more unique templates, and the ability to sort by conversion rate, it’s a lot easier to find a unique high-converting theme with Leadpages.
4 - Conversion tools
Leadpages:
As the name implies, Leadpages’ goal is to help you find leads and customers for your business. In fact, the whole platform was developed with conversions in mind. All Leadpages plans include a wide range of tools that simplify the lead generation process.
These features include:
- Leadmeter, which provides real-time conversion tips as you build your page.
- Alert bars that are publishable on any website or landing page—perfect for events, downloads, lead magnets, or anything else you want to promote.
- Pop-ups, that prompt signups and turn traffic into leads—even as visitors leave.
- Checkouts, that allow you to sell your services online and accept recurring payments.
In addition to these tools, Leadpages offers unlimited A/B testing on the Pro plan, so you can test different variations of your page to find out which version converts best. And once you capture leads they’re conveniently stored in the Leads Library for you to review.
Plus, any customer of Leadpages can use the lead magnet delivery feature to send an initial welcome email with a lead magnet to new leads and customers.
Instapage:
Instapage offers solid analytics and A/B testing. To create pop-ups or alert bars, you would need to embed code from third-party tools like OptinMonster or OptiMonk, as they’re not part of Instapage natively. It also has an option to integrate landing pages directly with Google Ads—which is great if you want to leverage PPC advertising.
If you opt for one of their advanced plans you’ll have access to the heat map tool, which allows you to see where visitors are spending their time on your page, and the ability to download your leads.
Instapage allows you to upload lead magnet files and link to them from your thank you pages or in a third-party email. However, Instapage is not able to send out a lead magnet delivery email like Leadpages.
Verdict:
Leadpages takes this category, especially if you’re a small business without a lot of lead generation experience.
While some of the same features exist in each platform, Leadpages offers more native conversion tools, downloadable CSV files of leads at all plan levels, and lead magnet delivery. The Leadmeter guides you through the process of creating a high-converting landing page, and the Leads Library stores all your leads in one place.
For enterprise-level marketers, the tighter integration with Google Ads and heat mapping is definitely a plus.
5 - Publishing options
Leadpages:
Leadpages gives you lots of different ways to publish your pages. If you don’t already have your own domain you can publish on a free Leadpages subdomain (https://your-domain.lpages.co). Or if you have a domain, Leadpages lets you connect it to your account and will host your page. Both of these options are free.
If you don’t own your own custom domain you can get a free domain (powered by Hover) when you sign up for an annual Leadpages subscription.
Want to publish your page to WordPress? Use the Leadpages plugin to publish your landing pages, pop-ups, and alert bars on your WordPress site in less than four clicks. You can even publish them as a dynamic HTML page on non-WordPress websites. This option automatically updates when you make changes in the Leadpages builder.
Finally, Leadpages makes it easy to share a landing page or website template with your team or clients who use Leadpages at no additional cost.
Instapage:
Like Leadpages, Instapage lets you publish your landing page to your own custom domain or WordPress. It also gives you the ability to publish your page to a Drupal site.
If you wish to test your landing page before it goes live, you can do so through their page demo feature. This lets you publish it to an Instapage subdomain. However, keep in mind that these pages have a limit of 30 requests per minute per IP and they’ll be unpublished after 72 hours during the free trial stage of your subscription.
If you want to share your page as you’re working on it you can set multi-user permissions of the viewer, editor, and manager to make collaboration easier.
Verdict:
We’ll call this a tie. Both services can host your landing page for you, and offer an option to publish via a WordPress plugin, or connect to a third-party site in a very similar process. They both have multi-device preview and domain mapping. However, Instapage includes multi-user permissions for collaborating with large teams or agencies.
6 - Traffic & advertising
Leadpages:
There’s more to building a landing page than just hitting publish and sending it into the wild. You need to track and optimize your efforts to ensure what you’re doing is actually working.
Luckily, Leadpages offers a streamlined analytics dashboard and real-time data, so you always know exactly how your pages are performing.
A big part of SEO is page load speed, and this is one area where Leadpages really excels. The platform has lightning-fast page load speeds of 2.4 seconds faster than average, so you’ll never lose leads while they wait for your page to load.
Leadpages also offers search engine optimization tools. Use the SEO settings and previews to set the meta title, keywords, and description of any page to increase the likelihood of prospects finding you through search.
Instapage:
Instapage offers an analytics dashboard that displays visitors, conversions, and conversion rates. Plus, their heat map feature provides some valuable insights that help you further optimize your page. Instapage also integrates with Google Ads and AMP, which is great for media buyers.
In an effort to increase their page load speed, Instapage has developed their proprietary Thor Render Engine. This back-end technology ensures your landing pages will always load as quickly as possible.
Just like Leadpages, you can easily edit your metadata to optimize it for search engines.
Verdict:
This is another category that’s too close to call. Both tools offer a real-time analytics dashboard (displaying traffic and conversion rates) and integration with Google Analytics or other third-party services.
But there are features that outweigh one another, depending on your goals. For instance, Leadpages’ best-in-class page load speeds are a huge draw, while Instapage offers native integrations with Google Ads and AMP templates that may be more important to your business goals.
7 - Value
Leadpages:
Leadpages’ Standard plan starts at $37/month (paid annually), while the Pro plan is $74/month (paid annually). Every plan includes unlimited traffic, leads, and landing page publishing. Customer support is available through email, chat, and priority phone, based on plan level. Weekly marketing and conversion coaching is available for all.
It’s also worth noting that Leadpages features a website builder in addition to the landing page builder, meaning you only need one subscription for both your website and your landing pages.
Instapage:
Instapage’s Building Plan is $299/month (with an annual discount available). This plan is capped at 30 published landing pages and 30,000 visitors. They also offer custom packages that include additional features and team members at higher metered rates.
Verdict:
Leadpages is more affordable for most small businesses, but agencies and larger teams will appreciate the multi-user collaboration features (even at a much higher cost) with Instapage.
Instapage offers a few extra features, namely their integration with Google Ads and AMP. However, you pay a premium for this.
If you’re looking for a cost-effective solution that includes everything you need to run your business (unlimited leads and traffic, website builder, conversion tools, etc.) then Leadpages is probably the right choice for you.
So who wins—Leadpages or Instapage?
There are a lot of similarities between the two platforms. Ultimately, they’re both a great choice for creating high-converting landing pages. That being said, there are differences in the features that might make one better suited for your business than the other.
Here’s a quick recap to help you decide which platform is right for you.
Thinking about giving Leadpages a try? Sign up for a 14-day free trial to see if Leadpages is the right fit for your business.
