What Is Kartra?
Katra is a platform owned by Genesis Digital. It is a group of people passionate about developing eCommerce tools that are constantly evolving.
The platform provides complete solutions and straightforward tools for entrepreneurs and digital business owners to automate their online course businesses effortlessly from one dashboard.
Using Kartra digital business owners can build sales funnels, conduct email campaigns, build landing pages (for mobile and desktop) and run affiliate programs, among other advantages.
When using the software, you will also be able to integrate SMS/texting software, checkout software, and bot software, to name only a few features.
What Is Shopify?
Shopify is an e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The platform allows marketers to create ecommerce stores without coding skills or experience. Shopify is a favorite of entrepreneurs who look forward to managing their online stores quickly and efficiently.
The platform is a leader in the market, with a market cap of $45.73 billion (January 2023) and 700 million buyers for this year. A popular feature among business owners is the variety of themes in their store, with over 100 free and premium themes to choose from. Exploring the free Shopify themes can help new store owners launch with minimal upfront investment while maintaining a professional aesthetic.
Who Is Kartra For
Kartra is an all-in-one platform for course creators to host, market, and sell digital goods. The platform has respectable popularity among solopreneurs, course creators, and other digital product developers because it allows them to count on a single platform for their operations.
Who Is Shopify For
Shopify is designed especially for entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, drop shippers, and digital business owners in general.
Shopify helps marketers to design and customize their online stores with paid and free themes. The multiple themes allow each marketer to build an attractive yet unique site that resonates with their branding and identity.
You can use the software to collect payments with ease and security using a third-party payment gateway. These are features you can not miss.
Kartra Vs Shopify Comparison criteria
The best way to break down this Kartra Vs Shopify battle is by making a comparison feature by feature. I will evaluate the main criteria to consider when looking for the best platforms and tools to set your digital business to success.
Pricing
Pricing should not be the main reason to select one platform over the other. But we know that money is a factor to consider, especially in the early stages of your digital business.
Kartra Cost
They offer four different levels to suit your needs. You can decide to pay monthly or yearly. If you pay yearly, you can save 25%.
- Starter Plan: For $99 monthly, you access a custom domain, up to 2,500 leads, and up to 15,000 emails.
- Silver Plan: For $199 monthly, grants you up to 3 custom domains and unlimited emails.
- Gold Plan: For $299 per month you get 25,000 leads and 5 custom domains.
- Platinum Plan: The price is $499 per month and gives you 50,000 leads, 10 custom domains, and unlimited everything else.
Kartra includes the following features for all its plans:
- Kartra Checkouts: sell online your products or services using safe checkout forms.
- Kartra Pages: intuitive drag-and-drop page builder and hundreds of professional-looking templates.
- Kartra Leads: to build your leads, prospects, and customers database.
- Kartra Funnels and Campaigns: to engineer multi-page funnel flows to convert visitors into leads, customers, and loyal clients.
- Kartra email: for live or automated email/SMS marketing campaigns.
- Kartra Memberships: deliver your content, course, or training material with a drag-and-drop editor to build your membership portal.
- Kartra Marketplace: market your services and resources, or discover resources created by other users.
- Kartra Affiliate Management: to help you recruit, manage and track an army of affiliates to promote your products.
- Kartra Surveys and Quizzes: to help find valuable information about your audience and fine-tune your strategies.
- Kartra Videos: Add pop offers mid-way through your video, inject lead capture forms, multi-video playlists, etc.
- Kartra Calendars: Organize everything from your dashboard.
- Kartra Helpdesks: with ticketing and live chat that integrates with checkout.
When you buy the annual subscription, you save 25%.
Shopify Pricing
Shopify has four pricing options, a free 14-day trial, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The Basic Shopify Plan entitles you to sell unlimited products with a 2% transaction fee charge of $26 per month.
With the Shopify Plan, you can have all the basic plan features plus new features like customized gift cards, abandoned cart recovery, and only a 1% transaction fee of $71 per month.
Advanced Shopify Plan: the cost ranges from $266 to $2,000 monthly, depending on customizing. The transaction fee for these plans is 0.5% transaction.
You can take advantage of the annual discount because annual plans get a 10% discount, biennial plans get a 20% discount, and Shopify light it’s only $9 per month.
Results
My vote goes to Shopify pricing, in general, because it offers more options, and if you are ready for a longtime commitment it saves you a respectable amount of money with the annual plan or biannual plan.
Integration With Third-Party Tools and Platforms
It is fundamental to consider integration when you are looking for the best tools to build, grow, and scale your online business.
Third-party integrations enable communication between applications and are fundamental for cost savings and efficiency. And for that reason, it is our next feature in the kartra Vs Shopify showdown.
Kartra
Kartra was built as a complete marketing platform. So what some people consider a lack of features is the intention behind the product.
Kartra replaces your email marketing platforms. So it doesn’t have email marketing Integrations with Actionetics, ActiveCampaign, Convertkit, MailChimp, HTML forms, and other email marketing platforms.
But it has other valuable Integrations like Zapier + Webhooks, membership software, checkout software, analytics, webinar software, bot software, calendar tools, and custom Integrations API.
Shopify
Unlike kartra, Shopify allows integration with multiple third-party tools like google Sheets, salesforce, intuit QuickBooks, wave, ClickFunnels, slack many more useful apps.
Shopify has integrations with Actionetics, ActiveCampaign, Convertkit, MailChimp, and HTML forms.
Other remarkable integrations are Zapier+Webhooks, membership software, checkout software, analytics, webinar software, texting software, calendar tools, custom Integrations, and many more integrations.
Results
Though Kartra can save you money with its built-in tools, Shopify is my favorite because I like having total control over my operations. When using Kartra you are, to some extent, limited by the lack of integrations.
It can be an advantage for inexperienced sellers and creators, but for seasoned digital creators, the lack of integration can be disappointing.
Advanced Tools and Developer Features
The next spot on our list goes to the advanced tools and developer features.
Both platforms are similar, because they will help you build your website and your online stores without coding skills, but you do not pay for software only for its popularity, or for a couple of features.
Kartra – all the tools
For this category, I will go feature by feature to provide a wider scope of what Kartra can do for your e-commerce business.
- The membership site builder helps you create membership sites to organize and offer safe transactions.
- The product builder, a tool that helps you create and add new products to your ecommerce store.
- The checkout page has built-in tools to help you maintain your transactions secured. It also has multiple options to improve the visuals on your checkout page.
- Kartra has a funnel builder to create high-converting funnels to convert visitors into loyal clients.
- The split Testing tool allows you to run testing variations of your pages, funnel, colors, and headlines to help you build your visuals and strategies.
- Kartra has native email marketing tools like email broadcasting, tagging, sequences & automation to help you with your marketing strategy.
- With the email automation feature, you can create and send customized responses to your audience.
- Using the built-in shopping cart you can upload, launch and sell your products online.
- The affiliate marketing feature allows you to partner with affiliate marketers to promote your products.
- Kartra’s video hosting enables you to embed your videos directly on the page.
- Built-in analytics enable you to track and assemble essential data from your site and marketing campaigns.
Shopify
Now it is the turn of Shopify to show its numerous features for digital sellers and creators.
- Their exquisite storefront themes will make your storefront look gorgeous and professional, with minimum effort.
- When you use the “Express” theme you can create an online store quickly and easily.
- The shop app feature helps your customers find their favorite Shopify stores and products, so they can find you easily the next time they shop.
- The Shopping cart integrates with secure payment methods and flexible shipping rates to help you provide the best customer experience.
- Marketing tools & SEO features to help potential customers find your online store by browsing search engines.
- Unlimited web hosting bandwidth.
- Shopify analytics for an in-depth insight into your data to help you make the best decisions for your Shopify store.
results
Unquestionably Shopify offers an outstanding app store, but Kartra has all the essential features that can benefit all types of online businesses.
The variety of native apps that come with Kartra, without extra or hidden fees makes me give this point to kartra.
Blogging Features
All digital marketers are aware of the impact a blog can have on their entire business. Creating just an ecommerce store to sell products online is not enough. You have to build a community and offer content of value for lead generation.
Kartra
Kartra helps you to create a blog but does not offer a complete blog management system. Which is fundamental for every online marketing business.
Shopify
Unlike Kartra, Shopify offers blogging features to help you conduct your blog from the content marketing approach. It helps you drive organic traffic using search engine optimization techniques, bringing leads into your store.
Results
The winner for this category is Shopify because it offers a comprehensive and complete set of blogging tools and features.
Email marketing
Email marketing is your best ally because it helps you stay in contact with your customers and website visitors.
Your regular customers will appreciate being updated with the latest products, promotions, and discounts, helping your customers be satisfied.
Kartra
Kartra offers autoresponder tools you can use to send newsletters, and emails, and automate workflows based on your buyer’s Behavior, leads, split-testing, and more.
Shopify
Shopify integrates email marketing tools to help you engage with your customers using effective communication. With these tools, you can send newsletters, offers, discounts, and more.
Results
Shopify email marketing tools offer great email marketing features but since Kartra provides a high deliverability rate and advanced features, the absolute winner for this category is Kartra.
Kartra Vs Shopify Results
The results of this Kartra vs Shopify feature-by-feature comparison is Shopify. However, every case is different, so make sure you use your criteria to make a comparison.
Kartra is ideal to
- Build and grow your online business.
- Membership sites for online courses.
- Sell digital products or services.
- Build high-converting landing pages and sales funnels.
Shopify is ideal to
- Sell eCommerce products.
- Build and grow your online eCommerce business.
- In a nutshell, Shopify is the top platform for selling digital products.
Does Kartra Integrate With Shopify?
Yes, it does. You can integrate Kartra and Shopify using a plugin called AppTrends. Another option when using Kartra is to build your funnel to send your customer Shopify within the funnel.
Your third option is to integrate both platforms using Zapier.
What can you sell in kartra and Shopify?
Kartra marketing platform allows you to sell Sell unlimited products and services.
It can be digital or physical products, memberships, training courses, etc.
Sell also digital and physical products, services, memberships, consultations, event tickets, and digital gift cards using Shopify.
Kartra Vs Shopify- Final Considerations
Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages. I have considered the basic features for this Kartra Vs Shopify showdown but in the end, the decision will depend on the ecommerce business you have.
Online business owners must consider their business needs before making a final choice.
