Kartra vs WordPress: How To Make A Choice? (2021)

Find out whether Kartra is better than WordPress or not Below!

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Trying to choose between Kartra and WordPress? OR looking to integrate their functionalities? You’ve come to the right place!

We shall look at what Kartra and WordPress are, the features they offer, their pricing plans, and eventually decide which one of these two is a better choice for your need. 

So, What is Kartra?

Kartra can simply be described as a marketing tool suite, but Kartra is so much more, as it brings together everything you need to start an online business at a single place. With Kartra, you don’t have to spend time integrating all the different systems as Kartra does it for you. It brings together templates, email automation, and much more all in one place. This helps you spend more time on developing your business and focusing on the customers. 

Features Offered by Kartra

Kartra can be described as a sales funnel software that gets you contacts and turns those contacts into customers. It offers features that help you attract customers and keep up with them. Kartra is more suitable for digital sales or online products (such as online courses and e-learning platforms) than selling tangible products. The following are the key features offered by Kartra that make it stand out from others in the field:

1. Kartra Helpdesk

Customers are one of the most critical factors for the success of any business initiative. Therefore, we begin by looking at the features that Kartra offers, which makes it more customer-friendly and makes it easier for hosts to stay in contact with the customers. One of the main ways for this is to have an excellent helpdesk service. 

The Kartra helpdesk helps you connect with your customers efficiently, hold live chat sessions, and clear queries. Kartra has its helpdesk host so that you do not have to rely on a separate platform to set that up and then link it to your business platform. Apart from that, the Kartra helpdesk also offers customer ticketing and makes the billing process hassle-free.

2. Kartra Calendars

Kartra offers the calendar feature, which can be used to schedule and book appointments with customers and markup events. An added benefit is that the customers can know your availability and take note of that while contacting you. 

3. Membership Portal and Affiliate Program

Kartra offers a membership program that monitors the members’ activities and gives you information about their interactions and interests. It also hosts an affiliate management system through which we may recruit and manage affiliates. 

4. Video Hosting

Kartra offers a video hosting feature, unlike other webpage platforms that require you to embed links from some other platform such as YouTube of Vimeo. You also have the choice of grouping your videos, as well as monitoring the customer reaction and activities to your video. You may also use CTAs and tags in your video.

5. Customizable Templates

Moving on from customer benefits, we now proceed to how Kartra makes your job easier as a person heading a business initiative. 

Kartra lets you host websites which can be designed from the easy to use templates provided. These templates can be tweaked and customized as per your preferences, with drag and drop tools. Once you get the hang of it (which you will pretty quickly), customizing your web page will be a piece of cake with Kartra.

6. Sales Funnels and Campaigns

Kartra offers many built-in campaigns that you may use to boost your sales. Some of these are brought to you directly by Frank Kern, a marketing legend who also provides you training in marketing when joining Kartra. For example, some campaigns help you launch a new product easily (quick launch campaign) or the 4-day cash machine, another battle that focuses on increasing your income from the business initiative in a manner of 4 days. 

Kartra also gives you the option of utilizing sales funnels to increase the traffic into your page and turn that traffic into potential customers by providing a smooth and attractive user interface to the visitors. 

7. In-built  Checkout/ Cart facilities

Without Kartra, you’d have to engage a separate host for featuring your shopping cart, and then redirect the customers to and from that platform. With Kartra, you are offered the cart within the same platform, along with the checkout tool. With this combination of features, you can personalize your checkout area, set various price points for your product, and, more importantly, add your customers to your mailing list at the end of checkout.

This feature also aids the email automation feature, which features excellent deliverability to the customers and does not end up in the client’s spam folders.

Now that we have reviewed the features offered, we shall look at the pros, cons, and pricing plans of Kartra to make our decision more effective.

Cost and Pricing Plans for Kartra

Kartra offers a 14- day free trial for $1. Other than that, these are the plans available:

• Starter Plan: $99 per month
• Silver Plan: $199 per month
• Gold Plan: $299 per month
• Platinum Plan: $499 per month

Pros and Cons of Kartra

Pros

•         The Kartra Helpdesk helps you establish a better relationship with your customers.
•         Kartra lets you host videos, hence avoiding the need to embed links from other platforms.
•         The membership portal helps you track the progress, activities, and preferences of your customers.
•         Kartra offers a calendar feature to schedule appointments and displays your availability to the customers.
•         The training modules by Frank Kern are available on Kartra, and these will help you progress and develop your marketing skills and strategies, along with effective advertising techniques and tutorials.
•         Kartra offers sales funnels and in-built campaigns that you can launch to increase sales.
•         The shopping cart feature offered by Kartra eliminates the need to depend on an external site for your cart hosting needs and then later engage in redirecting. 
•         Kartra also has an affiliate management program with which you can recruit and manage affiliates.
•         There are numerous customizable templates available which you may use according to your need.
•         Kartra also offers domain and hosting.

Cons

•         Kartra is not SEO friendly and does not take care of your SEO needs. 
•         It is not a publishing platform, therefore not friendly enough in terms of content publishing.
•         It is quite expensive, and you will need to invest if you’re looking for a complete solution for your startup.
•         Everything is restricted to a single platform.
•         A slight issue in the Kartra server will affect your trade.

Let’s move forward to the next side of the comparison- WordPress

What is WordPress?

WordPress.org is a content management system (CMS) that helps you set up your website after obtaining a domain name and subsequently hosting it using a web-hosting service. WordPress is the most commonly used platform for building websites and blogs and is also the most comfortable platform to use.

Let us look into a few of the main features that WordPress offers the users. Before moving on, it is essential to note that the same does not apply to WordPress.com; this is regarding WordPress.org.

Features Offered by WordPress

1. Faster Publishing, Ease Of Use and Versatility

WordPress can publish content much faster than Kartra, being built for that very purpose. Content editing is also effortless through WordPress.

WordPress is easy to operate, which is why it is a popular preference. It lets you save drafts and schedule publishing and offers versatility, as you can use WordPress to build any kind of site you want, whether it be a personal blog, a travelogue, or even a government website.

2. User Access Levels

WordPress allows you to give different levels of users access to various features such as post or publish the content. For example, administrators are responsible for running the page and managing it. Writers provide/input content, editors work with the content presented, and subscribers have the sole functionality of viewing the material, without any editing privileges. 

3. Domain Name and Website Host

Before starting a webpage on WordPress, you need to have a domain name that has to be purchased. Following this, you will need a website hosting platform, the most affordable being Bluehost, as it lets you host a website for as low as $2.75 per month. This is an affordable option, following which you will need to install WordPress on your host, and then proceed to build your site, not the other way around.

4. Search Engine Optimization

WordPress comes with a built-in search engine optimizer that helps you optimize your content for search engines. This means you will be able to boost the chances of your content coming up in a search. Apart from the in-built optimizer, you may also use plugins that take care of your SEO needs, such as Yoast SEO.

5. Plugins and Extensions

While we are on the subject of plugins, WordPress offers a directory of plugins that provide any unavailable feature on the original site. You may use these plugins to add features as well as make your job easier in various aspects.

6. Variety of Themes

Apart from a directory of plugins, WordPress also offers a theme directory, with free and paid themes. They offer three default themes, and you may even personalize and upload your own theme to have your site customized according to your idea of how you want people to view it.

Apart from this, when using WordPress, the entire control of your website comes under your responsibility, you control every aspect of that webpage.

7. Offered in Many Languages

This is another great feature that WordPress offers, the availability of 70 or more languages. This means you may start a website or blog in a language of your choice, without sticking to the commonly used languages such as English.

How Much Will it Cost to Setup a Webpage on WordPress?

As mentioned earlier, the versatility of WordPress means that the platform is used to develop websites of different kinds, ranging from personal blogs to an e-learning platform or a government website. The requirements of each of these vary, as a simple blog would work with a few plugins and a suited theme.

However, if you’re setting up a more complex website, we might need to use a page builder, which complicates things.

The cost of setting up a website using WordPress will vary based on these factors. Therefore, it might range from $200 to $2000 per year for maintaining the site. Before this, we will need to set up a domain name that will incur around $14 per year and find a suitable website host, which will cost about $7 per month (although Bluehost offers it at approximately $2.75 per month).

Pros and Cons of WordPress

Pros

• The website is SEO friendly and a great, if not the best choice, to start a blog.
• It is inexpensive to set up, and therefore more affordable when you’re a beginner.
• WordPress offers multiple themes that can be used to make your site more attractive.
• It is flexible and versatile.
• WordPress provides the option to add plugins to your website to ease your work and add any feature not offered in-built.

Cons

When it comes to cons, comparing to Kartra, WordPress does not have the in-built options available in Kartra, such as video hosting and helpdesk. Apart from that, the membership and affiliate programs, checkout, and cart facilities are also not available in WordPress.

Another issue is that the very plugins we use to ease off on our work might become a detrimental factor to the website you build. It might become slow if there are too many plugins and make your site more prone to attacks.

The setup of all the necessary plugins and tools might also be a bit difficult, requiring the help or aid of an experienced person.

So, the Big Question, Kartra or WordPress?

The answer depends on your need. If you are looking to host a business sales platform and use marketing techniques to sell products and develop the trade, Kartra is the platform you’re looking for. This is because Kartra offers everything you need to start and run new business with less effort. 

If this is not the case and you’re looking to start your own blog or website to publish written content, WordPress is the solution you’ve been searching for. It is SEO friendly and is an excellent deal for a starter in this field. All you need is a domain name and website hosting agent to get started.

Or, You Could Combine the Two!

This is also possible by using the Blank State plugin to integrate your Kartra pages with your WordPress site.

I hope you make a choice based on the read!