In this article, we’ll be taking a look at two popular ecommerce platforms – Samcart vs Kartra.
Both of these platforms market themselves as ecommerce solutions. However, unlike popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, these tools are both well suited to selling digital products and physical products online.
Both Kartra and SamCart have a lot of offers, and although they share a lot of the same features, there are a lot of differences between the two.
SamCart offers some great options for creating unlimited pages for your products to sell online. Kartra, on the other hand, has all the tools you need to run your entire business from one platform.
Throughout the article, we’ll compare key features, pros and cons, pricing, and more to determine which of these platforms is the best for your business. Let’s get started by taking a look at what each platform has to offer and what they can be used for.
Table of Contents
What Is SamCart?
SamCart is an e-commerce platform that was built with creators in mind. SamCart can be used to sell both physical and digital products, but it’s mainly geared towards digital sales of products like online courses, memberships, ebooks, and more.
SamCart is a quick and easy solution that can help you to start accepting online orders in just a few clicks. In addition to its ecommerce tools, SamCart also features a course app that allows you to create and manage online courses from one simple dashboard.
What Can SamCart Be Used For?
SamCart has a range of useful features, but it can mainly be used to create landing pages for your products, accept payments, create courses and cross-sell products.
Unlike all-in-one ecommerce solutions, it doesn’t have an extensive range of email marketing or automation features, but it does integrate with many major tools and marketing automation platforms.
SamCart is a useful tool that can form a key part of your ecommerce tool stack.
What Is Kartra?
Kartra is an all-in-one ecommerce solution that has everything you need to run an online ecommerce business. Kartra was founded in 2018 and is one of the most popular solutions for selling digital and physical products online.
In particular, Kartra is a good option for creating membership sites and selling digital products like online courses.
What Can Kartra Be Used For?
As an all-in-one solution, Kartra can be used to manage just about any aspect of your online e-commerce business.
It includes checkout features, lead generation features, a funnel builder, built-in email marketing, and much more.
Kartra also offers agency features, allowing digital agencies to manage all their client accounts from one unified dashboard.
SamCart vs Kartra Key Differences
Before we jump into our in-depth comparison, let’s take a look at some of the key differences between SamCart and Kartra to get a better idea of the tools we are comparing. Here they are:
- Kartra is an all-in-one solution with email marketing, funnels, and agency features built-in. Whereas SamCart focuses mainly on checkouts, sales, and conversions and requires integrations for email marketing and automation.
- SamCart is cheaper than Kartra, but it does require additional integrations like email marketing software.
- SamCart is a simpler tool to use and has fewer features. Kartra is full-featured, and therefore it is a little more complicated to use.
- SamCart is well known for making the one-page funnel popular and it’s easy to create it on their platform!
SamCart Vs Kartra Features Compared
Now that we’ve covered the basics let’s look at how the two tools compare when it comes to key features.
Checkout Features
SamCart is a great tool for building seamless checkout pages that are optimized for conversions. Not only can you choose from a range of great templates, but you can also add unlimited products and create unlimited checkout pages with ease.
Once your checkout page is set up, you can add a range of payment options, including payment installments, subscriptions, recurring payments, paid and free trials. SamCart also allows you to optimize your product and checkout pages with key elements like pre-purchase order bumps and one-click upsells.
Another great feature that SamCart offers is Prospect capture. This feature captures the details of customers that abandon their cart, and this can be used to send automated emails when integrated with an email automation solution.
Kartra markets itself as a replacement for SamCart when it comes to checkout features. It offers everything SamCart offers and more, including order bumps and upsells and one-click transitions.
Kartra also offers buyer tagging, which automatically assigns buyers a lead score and includes them in automated follow-up sequences.
Overall, the two tools have very similar checkout features; however, Kartra’s all-in-one functionality makes it a little easier to follow up with customers and set up abandoned cart email sequences.
Page Builders
Both SamCart and Kartra feature intuitive and easy-to-use page builders. They both have drag and drop functionality too, meaning that no coding is required to create professional-looking, high converting landing pages.
SamCart includes a selection of premade templates that are proven to be high converting. You can select a template that works for you and customize it to your needs in just a few clicks.
Similarly, Kartra also comes complete with over 500 page and section templates that skilled graphic designers have created.
You have a ton of customization options, too, meaning you can switch up the location of elements and change fonts, logos, colors schemes, and more to suit your site’s branding. Kartra also boasts that all landing pages are 100% mobile responsive.
Overall, both tools are great for building high-converting landing pages, but Kartra has a wider range of premade templates for you to choose from.
Course and Membership Features
SamCart and Kartra both provide options for creating online courses and membership sites. Both tools have a ton of well-designed templates that can help you build and launch courses and membership sites with ease.
You can use the Memberships tool to create courses and membership sites with Kartra. This tool includes tons of useful features to create high-converting and professional courses such as course templates, content drip features, and more.
You can also create multiple membership tiers and multi-membership portals.
With SamCart, you can create and deliver unlimited online courses with the Courses app. The courses app includes features like drip content, student management options, task automation, and more.
You can also use the Courses app to cross-sell products and auto-enroll students, so you don’t miss out on subscriptions and engagement.
Out of the two, Kartra offers more features when it comes to membership and course management. You can use Kartra to create any type of membership site, whereas SamCart is more geared towards online courses specifically.
Marketing Tools
SamCart offers a few different marketing tools, but it’s nowhere near as extensive as Kartra when it comes to marketing.
Useful marketing features it does have include A/B testing options and upsell funnels which can help you to determine the best place to place upsells and downsells in your checkout process.
Kartra, on the other hand, has a full range of marketing features that can help you optimize every aspect of your lead generation and sales processes.
In addition to built-in email marketing functions, Kartra has a full-scale funnel builder that will allow you to sequence and launch automated funnels by simply dragging and dropping events.
You can customize your funnels in any way you like and set up your own trigger actions and required consequences based on your business needs.
Kartra also includes lead generation features like lead scoring and tagging, as well as behavior-based automation functions and intelligent split testing features.
Out of the two tools, Kartra definitely comes out on top when it comes to marketing. With SamCart, you’ll likely want to integrate separate marketing tools for automation and email campaigns.
Integrations
Both SamCart and Kartra have a long list of available integrations, but SamCart is much more reliant on integrations than Kartra is. Thankfully, SamCart supports the integration of most common email and marketing tools and also integrates with Zapier.
Realistically, you don’t need to connect any extra tools to Kartra to run all aspects of your online business, but if you do choose to, you can connect popular marketing tools and other digital software, including Kajabi, Mailgun, and more.
When it comes to payment gateways, SamCart only integrates with PayPal and Stripe. Whilst these are both good options for payment processing, Kartra does offer more options. You can also use Authorize.net and Braintree for payment when using Kartra.
Kartra also offers custom integration options, so if you want to code your own integration, you can use the API, IPN, and Custom App systems to link them up.
Support Options
SamCart has a range of different support options available depending on the plan you choose. All plans include standard email support as well as a virtual onboarding webinar. As the price increases, so too does the level of support offered.
The Grow plan includes 1-day email support and a launch call with a SamCart expert, and the Scale plan includes on-demand support from your own dedicated SamCart expert.
You can also find tons of useful information as well as troubleshooting guides in the SamCart knowledge center. SamCart also offers free training sessions and runs an extensive blog
Similarly, Kartra offers a lot of support options. Firstly, you can learn more about Kartra’s tools using Kartra Academy.
The Academy includes how-to guides, courses, and more relating to Kartra and resources about building online businesses in general. Kartra also has a support help desk where you can get live chat and ticket support.
Out of the two, SamCart offers the best support options, especially if you opt for one of the more expensive plans.
SamCart Vs Kartra Pricing
Both SamCart and Kartra have a lot of similarities and tons of features to offer. However, the price point of the two tools is slightly different. Here’s a breakdown of SamCart and Kartra’s pricing plans.
SamCart Pricing
SamCart offers three affordable pricing plans and a range of packages that are suitable for different types of businesses.
The cheapest of the three is the Launch plan, which starts from $79/month. The Launch plan is suitable for 1 admin user and includes unlimited product and landing page creation, unlimited course creation, and 0% transaction fees.Â
The Launch plan also includes all standard 3rd party integrations. If you opt for the Launch Plan, you can also select the Business Success Package, which includes additional features such as custom billing options, dashboard and sales reports, and weekly webinars.
SamCart’s Grow Plan starts from $159/month and is suitable for up to 3 admin users. As a Grow Plan customer, you get access to all Launch Plan features plus extra perks like email customer support, 1:1 launch support, enhanced integrations, and more.Â
You can also access additional features from the Profit Accelerator, Conversion Accelerator, Marking Accelerator, or Insights Accelerator packages which include key tools like Order Bump Collections and a Built-in SEO Engine.
The Scale Plan is the most extensive SamCart plan, and it starts from $319/month for up to 10 users. The Scale plan gives you access to all Launch and Grow plan features, plus perks like help from a dedicated SamCart expert, CRM and API integrations, priority support, and more. Â
The Scale plan starts from $292/month billed annually. For this price, you get access to all Launch and Grow plan features for up to 10 users.
In addition to this, you get custom CRM and API integrations, priority email support, virtual onboarding webinars, and a dedicated SamCart expert.
The Scale Advanced package also includes key features like A/B testing, an affiliate center, cart, subscription abandonment features, and more.
=> Visit SamCart’s pricing page here.
Learn more about SamCart prices in our breakdown article.
Kartra Pricing
Kartra offers four different plans at multiple price points: Starter, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.
The Starter plan starts from $79/month, and this includes up to 2,500 leads, 1 custom domain, and 15,000 emails per month. This plan also includes up to 50 GB bandwidth, 100 pages, 50 videos, 2 membership sites, and 20 products. The Starter plan is suitable for individuals as it includes 1 helpdesk and 1 team member.
The Silver plan starts from $149/month. This plan includes up to 12,500 leads, 3 custom domains, unlimited monthly emails. You also get unlimited bandwidth, page creation, videos, membership sites, and products with the Silver plan. You can also have an unlimited helpdesk and team members, and you get access to all Kartra Agency features.
The Gold plan starts from $229/month and includes everything in the Silver plan plus up to 25,500 leads and 5 custom domains.
Finally, the Platinum plan starts from $379/month and includes all the features in the cheaper plans plus up to 50,00 leads and 10 custom domains.
As you can see, SamCart is the more affordable option. You can create unlimited products and courses, even on the cheapest available plan. However, if you plan to run a large-scale operation and need to include more domains, the Kartra might be a better choice.
=> Visit Kartra’s pricing page here.
Learn more about Kartra prices in our breakdown article.
SamCart Pros and Cons
We’ve already looked at SamCart in a lot of detail, but here’s a quick summary of the main pros and cons of the platform.
Pro #1 – SamCart Includes Some Useful Checkout Optimization Features
It’s super easy to create a seamless checkout process for your customers using SamCart. It is also packed with useful features to optimize sales like order bumps, upsells, etc.
Pro #2 – SamCart Is Very User-Friendly
If you’re new to ecommerce, SamCart is a simple and easy-to-use platform to get started with. Although it isn’t as full-featured as Kartra, it’s easy to get the hang of and has tons of templates to help you build high-converting landing pages.
Pro #3 – SamCart Offers 0% Transaction Fees
Transaction fees can be problematic for businesses, especially if you’re running on a tight budget. Thankfully, SamCart offers 0% fees on transactions. However, you will need to pay applicable fees applied by PayPal or Stripe.
Con #1 – SamCart Lacks Marketing Features
Unlike Kartra, SamCart doesn’t come with a ton of built-in features for marketing. For example, it doesn’t have built-in email marketing options.
However, SamCart does have a powerful integration engine that will allow you to link up your favorite marketing tools and create effective automated marketing campaigns.
Con #2 – SamCart Doesn’t Have A Funnel Building Feature
One of the main perks of Kartra is its funnel-building tool. Unfortunately, there is no funnel-building feature included with SamCart. You can, however, integrate a tool with funnel-building features like GetResponse or Kajabi.
Kartra Pros and Cons
Here’s an overview of some of the best and worst aspects of Kartra.
Pro #1 – Kartra Is An All-in-One Solution
One of the best things about Kartra is that it has everything you need already integrated, and it can be used straight out of the box. Unlike other tools, including SamCart, you won’t need to pay for other tools like email marketing software to integrate with your ecommerce solution.
Pro #2 – Kartra Has Advanced Funnel Building Features
Unlike SamCart, Kartra offers great funnel-building features. It’s quick and easy to set up automated sales-oriented funnels using Kartra.
Pro #3 – Kartra Agency Makes It Easy to Work With Clients
For Agencies, Kartra is a great option, as the Kartra Agency features make managing client accounts extremely simple. It allows you to run and manage all your client accounts from a centralized platform, making it easy to stay organized and offer a great service.
Con #1 – Kartra Doesn’t Integrate with Some Email Marketing Solutions
Kartra comes preloaded with its own email marketing features. However, it’s not possible to integrate some common email marketing solutions.
If you already have an email marketing solution that you’d like to use alongside your ecommerce platform, then it may be best to opt for SamCart, which has more options when it comes to integrations.
Con #2 – Kartra Is More Expensive Than SamCart
Although Kartra is full-featured, it is quite expensive in comparison to SamCart and some other popular ecommerce platforms. In order to access unlimited product creation features, you need to opt for at least the Silver Plan, which starts at $149/month.
For entrepreneurs and small businesses, this can be a little expensive. However, for agencies, it still represents an affordable option.
SamCart vs Kartra FAQs
Still, want to know more about SamCart and Kartra? Here are the answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about the platforms.
Does SamCart Have An Abandoned Cart Email Feature?
Yes, SamCart offers cart abandonment features. You can also set up an abandoned cart email automation by integrating an email marketing platform with SamCart.
You can use the SamCart integration engine to automatically add ‘prospects,’ such as people that have filled their cart, to an email follow-up list.
Then you can use your email marketing tool to send them automated abandoned cart emails.SamCart integrates with tons of popular email marketing tools, including MailChimp, ConvertKit, and ActiveCampaign.
You can also use Zapier to integrate tools that aren’t listed as a supported integration on SamCart. If you want to learn more about setting up abandoned cart emails on SamCart, check out this article from their Knowledge Center.
Does SamCart Or Kartra Have A Mobile App?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Neither SamCart nor Kartra has a mobile app. While this seems like a negative, the features offered on these platforms would likely be hard to navigate on mobile, so it’s probably a good thing that you can only access the platforms from your PC.
Which Payment Gateways Does SamCart Support?
SamCart integrates with the popular payment gateways PayPal and Stripe. You can connect your Stripe and PayPal accounts to your online store to easily and securely take payments from your customers.
The great thing about using PayPal and Stripe is that both of these payment gateways are well-known and trusted by consumers. As we mentioned earlier in the article, SamCart offers 0% transaction fees; however, any payments you take will be subject to PayPal or Stripes transaction fees.
Is SamCart Good For Beginners?
Yes. SamCart is really easy to set up, and thanks to its affordable pricing options and a free trial, even individuals and small businesses can make use of the platform.
Features like the drag and drop page builder, and landing page templates mean that even beginners with no design experience can design high converting landing pages in just a few clicks.
It also offers unlimited page and product creation on all plans, making it super simple to get used to the platform and try out the tools. Also, SamCart offers a range of support options and a knowledge center, making it perfect for beginners.
Is Kartra Easy To Use?
Kartra is quite easy to use. It has an intuitive dashboard, and features such as the page builder have drag-and-drop functionality, so you don’t need any coding skills to get started. However, it’s slightly more full-featured than SamCart, and therefore, it has quite a steep learning curve for beginners.
If you think Kartra is the right product for you, don’t be deterred by this. Kartra has an extensive knowledge center and great support options, so it’s easy to troubleshoot issues and learn how to use all the features that the platform has to offer.
SamCart Vs Kartra – Which Is Ultimately Best?
SamCart and Kartra share a lot of similar features and can both be used to create ecommerce sales pages and sell digital and physical products. However, which tool you think is best will depend on what your business needs.
Based on our review, Kartra comes out on top. It has more marketing features than SamCart, like funnel building and email options, and it has all the same features as SamCart, including checkout pages, a membership site builder, a drag and drop page builder, and more.
However, it’s also a lot more expensive, with its cheapest plan starting from over $50/month. For some businesses, SamCart will be a better option simply due to its lower price point, but it does offer significantly less when it comes to features. Here’s a quick rundown of who each tool is right for:
Choose SamCart if you want a simple but affordable ecommerce tool that will allow you to build pages, create unlimited products, and includes optimization features like A/B testing and order bumps.
Choose Kartra if you want a more advanced all-in-one ecommerce solution that can be used to create pages, manage marketing funnels, create email marketing campaigns, and more.
Hopefully, this SamCart vs Kartra review has helped you decide which tool to choose.
If neither one seems right for you, check out some of our other articles relating to ecommerce and online course platforms.
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