Are you thinking of using Kartra to sell your products, services, and membership sites? Do you want to know if Kartra suits your business or not?
Today, I am going to review Kartra in-depth, explaining to you all the features Kartra comes with and helping you decide whether it is worth your money or not.
Let’s get started with the review!
| Type | All-in-one checkout platform |
| Best for | Selling products, services, and membership sites |
| Starting price | $99/month |
| Can I create sales funnels? | Yes |
| Does it come with in-built email marketing? | Yes |
| Competitors | ClickFunnels and Kajabi |
Quick decision
What do I like about Kartra? 👍
- Built-in funnels, calendar booking, email marketing, and sequence builder.
- A/B split testing for email content and subject lines.
- It includes behavioral adaptive marketing, which dynamically changes landing page content based on user behaviors
- Help desks feature for customer support.
- Agency tool for managing multiple client accounts.
What I don’t like about Kartra? 👎
- UI/UX feels very cluttered and outdated (development has almost stalled)
- App is quite slow compared to say ClickFunnels
- Kartra has a limited number of integrations.
- Kartra costs more starting at $99/mo.
Verdict
Kartra is a really good all-in-one platform that comes with all the features you ever need, tightly integrated with each other.
But unlike other platforms, there is a lack of depth to its features. For example, when it comes to membership sites, there’s a need for more specialized course creation features.
Additionally, their email builder and website builder are quite clunky, so you often feel like you’re missing out on a lot of specialized shiny apps when using Kartra. But all in all, it works and doesn’t hold you back from focusing on the most important aspects of your business.
Interface (UX and UX)
When it comes to UI and UX, there is a lot to be desired. All the options available are cluttered in the left sidebar without any consideration of intuitiveness.
It’s no wonder that many beginners have a hard time getting their heads around the platform and find it very unintuitive to use.
In my experience, to even access basic features, it needs three to four clicks. It needs a major organizational revamp.
Additionally, page loads of the app are very slow.
I strongly suspect that it is due to their poor code base. This is also reflected in their poor website page loads, with a lot of “unwanted” code leading to slow load times, making it a big no-no for SEO.
Courses and membership
Kartra has a membership feature wherein you can restrict content to people based on their membership levels.
First, you need to upload the membership content.
And then when creating memberships, under “Content”, you need to load the “Builder”
This will load a builder where you can create your membership content using various building blocks.
In their membership page builder, you need to add various categories and subcategories.
And inside each of the categories, you need to create a post and then create membership content.
In here, selecting the Kartra video, in the drop-down, you need to select the membership videos that you uploaded in the previous step.
If it were videos, you need to upload all your videos in the separate video section.
You can assign membership access levels, and whenever a membership post is unlocked, you can automatically send an email to subscribers.
Apart from this, there is a lack of specialist LMS or course creation features. For example, there is no straightforward way for you to create various modules, lessons, and upload the videos right there. Also, you can’t create quizzes, assessments, and enable lesson comments.
For a more streamlined course experience,, you may need to go with platforms like Thinkific or Kajabi, which is an still all-in-one platform.
Now, how the site looks at the frontend?
When you create a membership site in Kartra, you have various modules that you can drag and drop to the front end.
Although it’s not a comprehensive set of modules, they have enough modules that are marketing-centric.
Funnel building
Kartra calls funnels as “campaigns”.
To create a new campaign, you need to head over to “My campaigns” and click on a new campaign.
You can either build them from scratch or make use of “done for you” campaigns by just importing them.
These “done for you” campaigns are plug-and-play campaigns created by top industry experts that are proven to work and will generate you huge revenue.
When you create a campaign, you can select all the assets that need to be part of the campaign. For example, if you’re launching a campaign in which videos can be included, you can add them.
And also Kartra allows you to market and sell the done for your campaigns by deploying them as per your requirements and make money out of it.
If you have creative ideas that will help others, implement and share them in the Kartra marketplace either for free or at a price.
Page building
Kartra comes with a powerful page builder to create beautiful pages, opt-in forms, and checkout pages.
Kartra also provides various templates for:
- Landing pop-ups
- Exit pop-ups
- Lead capture pop-ups
- Checkout pop-ups
- Video pop-ups
- Info pop-ups
You can optimize the pages for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
To speed up the design process, Kartra provides various quick features like show columns, and also modes like columns and component mode.
But still, you may find some features lacking, like global styles and copying styles, which may take you more time to create the pixel-perfect designs you want compared to other dedicated page builders like Elementor.
All the features of Kartra are really rolled out keeping marketing use cases in mind. I especially like the ability for you to include call-to-actions in the middle of the videos.
If you have a main video on your landing page, you can include an opt-in or a call-to-action button to appear at a specific point in the video.
For example, if it is a webinar registration video, you can make a webinar sign-up opt-in appear at, say, the two-minute mark so that the webinar conversion rate will be high.
Apart from this, my favorite options when it comes to their page builder are:
- A/B testing versions of the pages
- Responsive pages
- It allows showing or hiding specific page sections based on a visitor’s tags and past interactions (called Behavioural Adaptive Marketing) – more on this later.
👉 If you are coming from WordPress, you obviously feel there is a lack of design customization options. In those cases, you can continue hosting your funnel inside WordPress using CartFlows, Funnelkit or even OptimizePress.
You can host the Kartra pages either on your own domain or host them on Kartra.
If you don’t have a domain, Kartra hosts your pages under its subdomain like https://YourUsername.Kartra.com/page_name.
👎 Overall, although Kartra’s page builder is quite comprehensive, there are some minor bugs here and there, the page speed can be improved a lot, and also there’s a lack of auto-save feature considering it’s 2024.
Marketing features
In Kartra you can boost conversions through its behavioral adaptive marketing feature, allowing you to tailor your marketing based on customer behavior and interests.
For example, if a user buys your fitness eBook, you can promote fitness-related products to them on their next visit, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
This is excellent of eCommerce!
Kartra supports upsells, downsells, bump offers, and 1-click transactions for smooth conversions.
👉 Additionally, the dynamic OTOs feature allows you to offer tailored upsells and downsells based on user behavior, such as providing different offers to full-price buyers compared to those who purchased at a discount.
Additionally, Kartra’s cart abandonment feature helps recover incomplete transactions by scheduling email campaigns through its autoresponder.
Email marketing
With Kartra’s built-in email marketing feature you can send either broadcast messages or the follow-up sequence emails through their powerful automation features.
It also supports A/B testing of email subject lines and even email content, which is quite unique!
Automation builder
When it comes to sequences, you can use its drag and drop visual sequence builder to create highly engaging funnels that run on autopilot.
Kartra allows you to create behavior-based automation that sends emails based on the recipient’s behavior.
In the above image you can see whenever a lead fills any opt-in form or added a tag or even purchase any product, we can trigger them a welcome email.
Like this, you can create complex sequences. You can use various building blocks like sending an email, SMS, and what not.
And also, Kartra has cleverly added something as called as sub-sequences to help you effectively organize larger sequences.
Suppose when you’re sending out a 30-day email sequence, rather than having all the 30 emails in one-giant sequence, you can create a sub-sequence and direct people to the sub-sequence using the “Goto” block.
I’ve included a video here from the Kartra official channel, for you to watch to get more idea regarding this.
Lead/Customer profiles
Each lead entered into the system will have a profile displaying tags based on their campaign behavior.
You can view their email interactions, visited pages, sequences, memberships, webinars, surveys, calendar events, orders, and help desk chat logs.
👍 The best part is Kartra has on-page site tracking, so you can also see all the pages that are specifically visited in real-time when in your funnel. But it’s cookie-based, which is disabled in most browsers nowadays!
This can effectively replace any of the CRMs that you may be using because it offers a more integrated approach.
And also it has some features like a specific notes area where you can jot down notes regarding a specific lead.
Calendar booking
To ease the booking process of your clients, Kartra comes with the calendar feature.
Kartra even integrates with Google Calendar and blocks out all the dates that are already reserved in Google Calendar thus avoiding the conflicts.
Agency
If you have an agency, Kartra is the best platform you can use to manage all of your client’s websites from a single dashboard.
If the clients want to access their accounts, you can provide them the login credentials with custom permissions.
Kartra allows you to white label and customize the client reports, manage the billing of all the clients under 1 account, import the existing client accounts to your portfolio, and much more.
To manage client accounts, you can choose either the owner or contractor model.
If your client lacks a Kartra account and doesn’t want to handle technical details, you can create and manage their account using the agency model. This allows you to set your own monthly charges and earn recurring income.
For clients who already have a Kartra account, you can link your account to theirs and manage it as a contractor until the project’s end. Note that the agency feature is available only in the higher plans of Kartra.
Integrations
Kartra integrates well with popular payment gateways, email gateways, SMS gateways, membership platforms, and calendar apps.
However, its number of integrations is limited.
You can use Zapier to connect with third-party tools and services. For custom integrations, Kartra offers API, IPN, and custom apps features.
Helpdesk
Kartra includes a robust ticketing system that filters tickets by category, ensuring the right support member handles each issue.
The multi-agent collaboration allows for seamless transfer of tickets, chats, and messages between departments.
You can create live chat helpdesks, use canned responses for frequently asked questions, and redirect customers to alternative helpdesks when no agents are available. This eliminates the need for external platforms like ZenDesk or Intercom.
You can host these helpdesks on your own domain or Kartra’s subdomain.
Pricing and support
Kartra’s Starter plan costs you $119 per month. It comes with unlimited everything except it has a limitation of hosting only up to 2,500 contacts.
However, if you exceed 2,500 contacts in the Starter plan, you’ll need to upgrade to the $229/month plan, which is still less expensive than other platforms like Kajabi and ClickFunnels.
And support!
When it comes to support, although I have not reached out to their support during my time on Kartra, but as per web research, their support is quite bad.
You will not be available to easily talk with them and your emails may not receive timely replies.
But things may have changed. I suggest you shoot them an email and see for yourself.
Verdict
Overall, Kartra is a really good all-in-one platform with the ability to build landing pages, e-emails, automation sequences, funnels, calendar, surveys, and more that are tightly integrated with each other.
However, when it comes to UI/UX., it deserves a lot of improvement. It feels a bit clunky and also they can improve the load speed of their app.
At times it feels like it’s a jack of all but master of none. You feel you’d be better off using specialist apps. But the all-in-one experience is unbeatable.
👉 If you feel adventurous, you may be better off using separate specialist apps, like OptimizePress for Funnels, Cal.com for calendar booking, a separate email marketing app, and glue them all together.
