Leadpages vs Instapage [2024]: Key Differences, Pros, & Cons

If you’re looking for a way to build, optimize, and publish high-converting landing pages to use in your marketing campaigns, both Leadpages and Instapages will do the trick.

The question is: which platform should you choose?

In this comparison of Leadpages vs Instapage, we’ll try to answer that question for you. First, we’ll look at the key differences between each landing page builder and highlight some of their main features.

Then, we’ll try out all of the tools each platform has to offer and compare their performance in various categories. We’ll also take a look at their pricing structure to see which is better value.

And finally, I’ll give my overall verdict about which is the better platform and in which scenarios you should choose one over the other.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Key Differences Between Leadpages vs Instapage

I know you might be short on time, so right off the bat, I’m going to share what I think are the most important differences between Leadpages and Instapage. Here we go:

Instapage is an enterprise-level solution targeting agencies and corporate teams, whereas Leadpages is built for solopreneurs and small business owners.
Instapage has more advanced features, whereas Leadpages focuses on ease of use.
Leadpages is much more affordable. With plans starting at less than a fifth of the cost of Instapage, it’s the natural choice for budget-conscious users.
Leadpages uses a grid-based landing page editor, whereas Instapage is grid-free (more on this later).
Instapage contains collaboration tools that make it suitable for teams, whereas Leadpages doesn’t – it’s only suitable for single users.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at each platform’s highlight features so that you know what to expect, starting with Leadpages.

Leadpages Highlight Features

Grid-based landing page editor – Create landing pages using an easy drag-and-drop editor (no code required)
200+ drag and drop templates – All templates are rigorously tested to ensure they convert as well as possible; just open up one you like and customize it to fit your campaign.
Extensive integrations – You can hook Leadpages up to your favorite third-party tools, including email marketing software, webinar platforms, payment gateways, and more.
Hosted landing pages – Leadpages can host your landing pages and lead magnets for you.
Easy split testing – Set up page variants and run A/B tests to optimize your pages in a few clicks.
Detailed analytics – Keep track of the metrics that matter most to you from your Leadpages dashboard.
Easy publishing – Publish pages on a Leadpages subdomain or directly to your domain via HTML or a WordPress plugin.
Website building – Don’t stop at landing pages; build your entire website on Leadpages using whole-site templates and an easy drag-and-drop builder.
Pop-ups and Alert bars – Use Leadpages’ conversion toolkit to create eye-catching pop-ups and alert bars that help you to convert more visitors to leads and leads to customers.

Instapage Highlight Features

Grid-free landing page editor – Design your landing pages with complete freedom using Instapage’s flexible, freeform drag-and-drop interface.
500+ free templates – Browse one of the largest selections of high-converting landing page templates on the market to kickstart your campaign.
Plenty of integrations – Connect Instapage’s to your existing stack, including third-party email marketing tools, analytics, CRMs, ad platforms, and more.
Hosted landing pages – Like Leadpages, Instapage will host your landing pages for you and makes it easy to publish pages to your own domain with a dedicated WP plugin.
Hassle-free split testing – Quickly create and execute A/B tests to find out which page variations perform best.
Powerful analytics – Keep track of your KPIs and gather insights with in-dashboard analytics, heatmaps, and more.
Team collaboration tools – Instapage is the best solution for teams with a host of tools to help you collaborate, like on-page feedback, real-time edits, and secure sharing.
AdMaps – Synchronize Instapage with your ad campaigns by connecting targeted post-click landing pages to individual ads.

Ease of Use

Both Leadpages and Instapage are very easy to use.

All of the tools that each platform provides are designed to be completely intuitive and beginner-friendly.

You don’t need to be a tech whizz, know how to code, or spend weeks learning the ropes – you can just sign up and start building your pages straight away.

Here are some features that are common to both platforms and make them easy to use:

No-code, drag-and-drop editors. You can build your pages entirely on the front end by simply dragging and dropping elements onto the page. A visual preview lets you see the changes you make in real-time.
Pre-made templates. Both platforms provide a ton of templates for different kinds of landing pages, which you can customize. It’s a lot quicker and easier to work with templates than starting from scratch!
Tutorials, guides, and documentation. Leadpages provides an extensive knowledge base, while Instapage provides a large help center. Both of these function as knowledge repositories where you can find instructions on how to use all the different tools and features each platform comes with.

Leadpages also provides a setup wizard and a step-by-step walkthrough for beginners to help with onboarding. Instapage doesn’t provide this kind of in-dashboard guidance, which is one area we thought they could do better in.

We also personally found Leadpages dashboard and page builder a little easier to work with overall (although both have very similar interfaces).

The Leadpages landing page builder layout seemed more intuitive to use with its neatly organized sidebar. We’ll talk more about each platform’s landing page editors shortly.

It’s tough to pick a winner in this category, but on the whole, Leadpages edges it out.

Leadpages vs Instapage Landing Page Templates

When building a page with Leadpages and Instapage, you can choose to start from a blank slate or from a pre-made, professionally-designed template. Most of the time, you’ll want to do the latter.

Each platform offers a wide selection of free templates for you to choose from. Here’s how they compare.

Leadpages Templates

Leadpages currently offers over 200 landing page templates. Here’s what the template library looks like:

There are templates for many different types of pages, such as:

About and bio pages
Checkout pages
Event pages
Contest and giveaway pages
Lead capture pages
Newsletter and sign-up pages
Offer, discount, and coupon pages
Thank you and confirmation pages
Sales pages
Coming soon pages
Webinar pages

Plus more!

You can filter pages by industry, type, collections (e.g. Holiday templates), style, color, or – my personal favorite – conversion rate.

Sorting them by conversion rate will bring the templates that are proven to generate the greatest conversions, based on thousands of tests – it’s a really neat feature.

Instapage Templates

Instapage has a larger template library than Leadpages, with over 500 templates to choose from.

Page templates are categorized by use case, such as:

App download
Case study
Daily deals
Demo requests
Competitor comparisons
Product launch
Event registration
Appointment scheduling
Product sales
Special promotion
Thank you
Trial sign up
Webinar registration
Etc.

You can only filter pages by use case – you can’t sort them by conversion rate, design, or industry like you can with Leadpages.

Verdict: Who Wins?

We can’t pick a winner here as it comes down to what you value most highly: quality or quantity.

Instapage undoubtedly has the largest template library, with a more varied selection to choose from – but quantity isn’t everything.

The fact that you can sort Leadpages templates by conversion rate makes it easier to find the best-performing page templates for your needs without having to wade through a ton of sub-par options.

The Landing Page Editors

Both Leadpages and Instapage provide drag-and-drop landing page editors that you can use to create and customize your pages.

However, there are a few important differences between them. Let’s take a closer look at each to find out what those differences are.

Leadpages

With Leadpages, you open up the page editor by navigating to Landing Pages > Create a new landing page and then selecting a template. It looks like this:

This layout should be familiar to anyone who’s used generic WordPress page builders before. On the left, you have a sidebar, from which you can change the layout and drag and drop in different sections and widgets.

There are a bunch of pre-made sections to choose from, organized by type:

In the preview screen, you can drag and drop different elements to move them around the page. However, you can only move elements into set positions on the page:

This is because Leadpages uses a grid-based layout. The page is split up into a framework of rows and columns, and every element on the page has to sit neatly within one of these rows or columns. As we’ll see next, this is the biggest difference between Leadpages and Instapage’s landing page editor, the latter of which doesn’t use a grid system.

There are some advantages to the grid system. Namely, it helps to ensure all the elements on the page are properly aligned, so you don’t make any major design mistakes. However, the disadvantage is that it can feel restricting and inflexible.

Aside from that, there are a couple of other things worth mentioning about Leadpages landing page editor.

At the top of the screen, you’ll see the Leadmeter. This is a feature unique to Leadpages – it gives you actionable tips and feedback on how you can better optimize your page as you’re building it.

You can preview your pages in full-screen and tab between different views to see how they’ll look on different devices. Unfortunately, though, you can’t edit how your pages will look on different devices independently like you can with Instapage.

Instapage

Instapage’s landing page editor looks a little different:

responsive landing pages — Instapage landing page builder

The left sidebar contains a list of all the main elements/widgets you might want to drag onto the page, like images, paragraphs, buttons, forms, and headlines.

Instead of sections, Instapage has ‘Instablocks.’ These are essentially pre-made page sections that are already filled out with text, images, and widgets. You can access Instablocks from the sidebar:

There are over 1000 Instablocks to choose from that are organized into categories based on the use case. There’s a much wider variety of Instablocks than Leadpages offers in their ‘sections’ tab. This makes it a lot easier to build pages quickly.

If you want to, you can also save and reuse your own Instablocks, which is a huge time-saver if you build a lot of pages that use the same elements.

The biggest difference between Instapage and Leadpages, though, is the drag and drop function.

Instapage’s landing page builder has a ‘free-form’ drag and drop editor (grid free), which means elements don’t snap into set positions like they do with Leadpages. You can move them around with complete freedom, and they’ll stay exactly where you let go – down to the exact pixel.

I prefer this kind of flexibility and precision editing. Instapage still offers suggestions to help you align the elements properly on the page, but you can ignore them if you want to.

Another big difference between the tools is that Instapage lets you edit your pages’ desktop and mobile versions independently. You can tab between them from the top of the editor. This is something you can’t do on Leadpages.