Today, we will discuss two eCommerce platforms, SamCart Vs Kartra, and compare them with each other.
SamCart and Kartra offer many tools and functionalities to help you grow your business. In this SamCart Vs Kartra comparison, we will dig into the two platforms, scan their features, analyze pricing plans, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.
By the end of this comparison, you will know which platform is a better option for your business.
SamCart Vs Kartra
Let’s start with SamCart.
What is SamCart?
SamCart is a popular eCommerce platform launched in 2014 by co-founders Brian and Scott Moran.
When the two brothers tried to sell products online, they faced many difficulties and found loopholes in the existing eCommerce platforms. They decided to build a software platform that makes online selling easy. And this is how SamCart was born: to help small businesses and entrepreneurs sell products online.
SamCart fulfilled the promise, and today it offers a range of features that help creators create and sell digital products, physical products, and courses, which we will find out in the later segments.
What is Kartra?
Kartra is a popular all-in-one marketing platform specializing in sales funnel creation. The platform is a Genesis Digital software product that was launched in 2018.
Kartra is popular for providing a comprehensive set of eCommerce and marketing features. Kartra helps businesses, be they small or large.
Features: SamCart Vs Kartra
Let’s find out what these two powerful eCommerce platforms have stored for us in their features section.
SamCart
Checkout and Landing Pages
SamCart lets you create checkout and landing pages and connect with your domain. With its drag-and-drop editor, you get a handful of modern templates ranging from fitness, software, and service niches to further editing as per your brand colors and designs.
All pages built with SamCart are mobile-friendly, so customers checking out your products from a cell phone will use them as easily as they can on their desktops.
Cart Solution
SamCart is well known for providing a robust cart solution. SamCart’s checkout solution is considered to be the fastest checkout available at this time. It enables your customers to make purchases from SamCart within 8 seconds. In the cart solution, you find many options to optimize your carts. You can add order bumps and upsell products to encourage your customers to buy more from you.
It also provides features to recover abandoned carts visitors leave while buying. You can contact them through automated emails, offering discounts or coupons.
You can offer multiple pricing options for your membership sites. You can offer them bundles, a free trial, or multiple subscription options to offer as much convenience to your customers as possible. These checkouts are easily embeddable and mobile-friendly.
SamCart helps you enable modern payment methods like digital wallets and traditional methods like card payments, PayPal, and Stripe. You can enable your customers to pay via UPI, like Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Microsoft Pay.
Pay What You Want
Along with digital wallets and various subscription facilities, SamCart offers the Pay What You Want option, letting your customers pay you as they will.
This is beneficial for donation sites, but if you can enable this for one of your services or products, it would be a great experiment to increase sales as it helps build a bond between you and your customers.
Subscription Saver
This feature helps you save on subscription sales. When a subscription is due, and the saved card or payment method is blocked or expired, SamCart notifies the customer and asks them to change their payment options to renew the subscription on time. This is how you save a subscription and how the affiliates that brought you the subscription sale save their commission.
Native Payment Processor
SamCart offers a native payment processor, “SamPay.” This allows you to collect payment natively without integrating with any third-party payment processor like Stripe. SamPay is available on all SamCart plans, and it comes with flexible payment features like Buy Now Pay Later, 1-Click Checkout, and other customizable payment solutions.
Kartra does not offer this feature.
Course Creation
It was a newly added product in June 2021. Not that new, right? But yes, SamCart started as a checkout solution but later added course creation features to help teachers reach out to many students online, as they never will in offline coaching.
You can create a course by uploading video, audio, and image text files. You can also provide downloadable resources for your students and assess their progress with the help of quizzes that SamCart lets you easily create.
Apart from these basic features for course creation, SamCart provides some other useful features, like auto-enroll, which helps students enroll when they purchase your course without login credentials.
You can feature a course in the course library, and it also has a cross-course sale, which lets you advertise your other courses on your student dashboard to entice them to purchase your advertised courses.
You can also create different content tiers where you can bifurcate your course and make them upgrade to a higher plan to avail of the next level of lessons.
Customer Hub
The Customer Hub enables you to manage all your customers in one place. No, this is not a CRM! Customer Hub is a customer portal where your customers can go and update their login and subscription payment information without the assistance of the support team. This process is very secure and safe and gets done with the help of magic links technology, which brands use to protect sensitive data.
Affiliate Centre
You have an affiliate center where you can manage your affiliate sales and marketers’ commissions who are vouching for your products on your behalf. SamCart enables you to create custom URLs that smoothen the process of trackability of your affiliates, and you can pay them at the agreed commission rates easily.
Reporting
SamCart not only lets you perform various actions, but it also lets you keep track of your business’s performance. It gives insights into your sales, revenues, customer behaviors, and everything else you need to see through real-time advanced reporting, a/b testing pages, and Smart Pixel social tracking functionality.
Integrations
SamCart lets you integrate with other applications that you love using. It lets you integrate with over 1,000 third-party applications. You can connect with payment gateways, team communication platforms, email marketing platforms, CRMs, and whatnot.
Kartra
Kartra Pages
Kartra Pages gives you 500+ page templates stored in their template library that you can use to build your convertible page.
You can connect the page with your domain and make it yours only; you can further optimize it per your brand’s color and styling.
All your pages are responsive and editable with a drag-and-drop editor.
These pages can be optimized easily through customization and analytics that give you insight into page visits, user devices, and time spent on pages. You can also split your page and use the most effective page. Karta Pages lets you split it into four splits.
Kartra Checkout
Kartra Checkout lets you sell unlimited products, giving you many gorgeous checkout templates. You are provided with dozens of checkout templates that are easily customizable. You can edit it and keep the necessary fields as you see fit. These pages are mobile-friendly and 256-bit encrypted. You can add a one-click upsell option and attach order bumps to your checkout page to boost sales.
Kartra lets you provide flexible payment plans to your customers. That lets you give your customers trial plans or any customized plan.
You can further give discounts to your customers. It also helps you save your subscription by informing your customer beforehand when their card or payment option fails. Kartra lets you do everything you want for your business’s growth.
Tracking Leads
Kartra gives insight into a lead, which further helps you convert leads into customers. Kartra captures user behaviors and notes how they land on your site, the links they click, and where they exist.
Having such insights is a blessing for any business, as this helps in contacting the lead with the right content that will hit all the right chords and make them a paying customer.
Kartra records their behavior, tags your lead, and scores them based on their activity, and then you can further contact them with the products they are interested in.
Kartra Funnels and Campaigns
A funnel is a roadmap we create that includes processes or a series of steps that are strategically crafted to convert a lead into a paying customer. The first step of this funnel is lead capturing through landing pages or pop-ups, and the last step is the checkout page or a thank-you page.
Kartra helps you build such a funnel from start to finish. They also help you create and automate email campaign sequences with which you communicate with leads.
To make tasks easier, they also provide us with many campaign templates created by other marketers, and you can customize the campaign with your content.
Speaking of which, on Kartra, you can earn money by selling your campaigns to other Kartra customers. Check the Kartra marketplace for this.
Kartra Mail
With Kartra email, you can create email campaigns and send them to your contact list. They give you pre-designed email templates, which you can easily edit with the email builder.
Kartra also helps you set your campaign’s “ifs and then” automation; you can further add sequences in the workflow builder and automate your emails accordingly.
Kartra further lets you A/B test your emails to send the best ones to your customers.
Kartra Membership
You can create funnels, send emails, design pages with Kartra, and create courses. Kartra’s membership tool can replace course creation platforms like Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, LearnWorlds, and SamCart.
You can structure your lessons and upload videos, images, documents, or audio files.
You can drip your courses, create multiple tiers, enable cross-selling promotion, and track your student’s progress.
Kartra Helpdesk
Kartra also gives you helpdesk tools to manage customer tickets in real-time. You can assign multiple customer support agents to respond to customers in real-time. Kartra also lets you save those logs, so you can always come back to them.
Kartra Integrations
Kartra provides all the tools to help you sell your products and services with added marketing support, but if you may need other third-party tools you love. Kartra lets you integrate with those tools.
Kartra Affiliate
Like SamCart, Kartra also has an affiliate center where you can manage your affiliates.
Winner
Kartra provides more features than SamCart as it is a Sales Funnel platform, and SamCart is only a cart solution and course builder.
So Kartra is a clear winner in features comparison.
Plans and Pricing: SamCart Vs Kartra
SamCart
SamCart has three plans you can subscribe to monthly or yearly. The per-month rates for the monthly subscription are 79 USD for the Launch plan, 159 USD for the Grow plan, and there is a scale plan that is a done-for-you plan. You will have to book a consultation plan to know the pricing of the Scale plan.
And in the yearly subscription, the per-month pricing of the Launch and Grow plan is reduced to 59, 119 USD per month.
One thing I like about SamCart is that it has core features that include many decent features in all its plans. This means a customer subscribed to the basic plan will get these along with those subscribed to the two higher plans.
Click here to visit SamCart Pricing
Check the below-mentioned core features:
- Unlimited products and pages
- Embedded Checkout capabilities
- Express Checkout capabilities
- Drag & drop page builder
- Ready-to-use template library
- Unlimited courses
- Unlimited memberships
- Unlimited video uploads
- Student assessments and quizzes
- 0% processing fees
- No additional fees
You must upgrade to the highest plan for better email support, advanced integrations, and some of its best features.
SamCart also has a VIP plan that helps you with the following capabilities:
- Personalized Strategy
- White-Glove Migration
- Implementation Services
Like the Scale plan, you must book a free consultation with their team to learn more.
Kartra
Speaking of Kartra’s plans, it has three pricing plans, excluding the Enterprise plan: “Starter,” “Growth,” and “Professional.”
The monthly pricing plans are 119, 189, and 549 per month. This pricing is for monthly subscribed customers. If you subscribe yearly, you get access to the plans at a discounted rate, and the monthly prices are reduced to 99, 149, and 429 USD per month.
Here’s a sneak peek at what you are getting on each plan.
Winner
There is no winner in this section. Though SamCart is cheaper, it has fewer features than Kartra. Kartra offers many features, so the price is higher than SamCart.
Support: SamCart Vs Kartra
SamCart
SamCart comes with a bunch of resources to help its customers help themselves. They have tutorials, blogs, and guides. And for customer support, they have a dedicated team ready to hear all you have to say. They provide support via two modes: email and live chat. The support’s availability is from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET from Monday to Friday.
Usually, their email response time is within 24 hours, but how fast you hear from them depends on your plan.
For email support, you can write to [email protected].
Kartra
In terms of support, Kartra has done a better job than SamCart. They have FAQs answered. You get Facebook community support, and you get Kartranaut. Kartranaut is a learning center of Kartra where Kartra will teach you how to use Kartra step-wise.
You get 24/7 customer support.
Winner
Kartra wins this round.
Similarities between SamCart and Kartra
- Both software lets you create customizable and high-converting checkout pages.
- Both let you sell unlimited products.
- Both give you several tools and come with a drag-and-drop editor.
- Both SamCart and Kartra let you save your subscription.
- Both provide a course builder.
- Both offer you a cross-course sell feature.
- Both have subscription saver.
- Both have an affiliate center.
- Both let you A/B test.
- Both offer a free trial.
- Neither of the plans offer a free plan.
- Both has excellent uptime status of 99+%
Difference between SamCart and Kartra
- SamCart does not offer a helpdesk; Kartra does.
- SamCart does not have a dedicated training program like Kartranaut. However, it has Creator U, which comes with a cost, whereas Kartranaut is free.
- SamCart does not offer email marketing, while Kartra does
- SamCart does not allow creating a complete website, while Kartra does
- SamCart has a native payment processor, “SamPay,” while Kartra has none.
- Kartra provides a 30-day free trial, whereas SamCart’s free trial is for just 7 days.
What do I like about SamCart?
- SamCart has a 99.9% uptime. Great for a software product.
- It has mobile responsive sales pages.
- It has a zero transaction fee policy.
- It has an intuitive interface.
- It provides you with an in-depth knowledge base.
- SamCart offers a free trial.
- Cart solutions are better.
- SamCart allows flexibility with its given features.
What do I not like about SamCart?
- Limited features as compared to Kartra.
- It does not have a free plan.
- Best features are available only in the highest plan, such as subscription saver, affiliate center, A/B testing, etc.
What do I like about Kartra?
- The set of tools it provides. Make it truly an all-in-one.
- Kartranaut is awesome.
- Its helpdesk tool helps many entrepreneurs.
- It provides marketing features.
- It offers a 30-day free trial.
- Kartra lets you create unlimited memberships and pages, even on the basic plan.
- Kartra also has a webinar builder that lets you host sessions.
- Kartra has a 99.99% uptime status
What do I not like about Kartra?
- The prices are on the higher side.
- It has a steep learning curve.
SamCart Vs Kartra FAQs
Q: What is SamCart?
SamCart is an eCommerce platform designed to help you sell digital and physical products online, online courses, and create membership sites.
Q: What is Kartra?
Kartra is an all-in-one sales funnel and marketing platform that includes features for building landing pages and websites, creating sales funnels, email marketing, membership sites, etc.
Q: How are SamCart and Kartra different?
While both platforms offer eCommerce capabilities, SamCart focuses on helping businesses sell products, while Kartra provides an all-in-one marketing solution. Kartra includes features that SamCart doesn’t, such as email marketing and membership site creation, while SamCart offers more robust checkout page customization options.
Q: Which platform is better for selling digital products?
Both SamCart and Kartra are suitable for selling digital products. SamCart’s focus on eCommerce means it has more specific features, such as order bumps and upsell/downsell pages. However, Kartra’s email marketing capabilities may make it a better choice for businesses that want to build an email list and sell to their subscribers.
Q: Can I use SamCart or Kartra for physical products?
Both platforms support selling physical products. SamCart’s focus on eCommerce makes it a good choice for businesses that sell physical products. In contrast, Kartra’s all-in-one marketing capabilities may make it a better choice for businesses selling physical and digital products.
Q: Is there a free trial for SamCart or Kartra?
Both platforms offer a free trial to try out the features before committing to a subscription.
Q: Can I integrate SamCart or Kartra with other tools?
Both platforms offer integrations with various other tools, such as email marketing services, payment processors, etc. SamCart offers integrations with over 750 apps and services, while Kartra offers integrations with over 300.
Q: Which platform is better for funnel building?
Kartra has a better funnel builder, as it comes with a comprehensive set of features.
Q: Which platform is more affordable?
SamCart has more affordable pricing for you as compared to Kartra.
SamCart Vs Kartra: Which Platform Should You Use?
It depends on your requirements. If you have an existing website and are looking for a shopping cart solution to sell your products or want to sell your courses on your website, SamCart is the best solution.
However, if you want a complete solution to run your online business, Kartra is the best choice.
Conclusion
This is where this SamCart Vs Kartra comparison ends. You should use both platforms’ trial plans and select the one that meets your requirements.
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links, and I will earn a commission if you purchase after clicking. Please understand that I recommend these resources because they are useful, not just because of my commissions. Please do not purchase unless you need the materials to achieve your goals. Read the disclaimer.
I am Mohammad Fahad Usmani, B.E. PMP, PMI-RMP. I have been blogging on project management topics since 2011. To date, thousands of professionals have passed the PMP exam using my resources.
