The 5 Best Landing Page Builders for Startups I Use (and Recommend)
Jason Quey
September 25, 2020
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Landing page builders are the backbone of success for startups at every stage.
There are over 600 posts on landing pages just on Reddit’s startup subreddit. And there are thousands of posts when you check out the entrepreneur, marketing, web dev, and other subreddits.
Do you want to validate a new product? You can do so with a landing page.
Or maybe you have a handful of paying customers. After positioning your startup by creating a unique sales proposition, you now want to master product marketing to scale up growth. Chances are, your go-to-market strategy will include creating a landing page. Or several landing pages.
Finding the best landing page software will help your startup move faster.
Several “best landing page” lists you on the Internet are by writers who don’t do marketing. Many of them have never touched a landing page tool beyond grabbing a few screenshots.
I curated this list to help guide you through the landing page buying process. I also share why I may use one landing page over another.
I’ll start by defining what a landing page builder is and why they’re valuable for your startup. Then I’ll share more details about my favorite landing page builders for each use case. Before I do so…
So, what exactly is a landing page builder? And why should you pay for a landing page builder rather than doing it yourself?
Here’s a simple definition: A landing page builder will help you create landing pages without needing a developer. Unlike website pages, landing pages add or remove elements to improve your conversion rates.
Every page on your website should have a primary goal.
For example, the main goal of an article could be to increase traffic. The main goal of your home page is to introduce your brand and help a visitor decide where to go next.
A landing page, sales page, or squeeze page has the main goal of converting traffic. Usually to convert your audience to become a member on your email list. Sometimes a marketer may ask for the sale instead of joining an email list.
Typically these tools do this by making it easier for a website visitor to take a specific call-to-action (CTA).
Some common landing page features you’ll find include the ability to:
Sometimes there are exceptions to what each landing page builder includes. But the goal of the landing page is the same: reduce a visitor’s decisions to increase your conversion rate.
A landing page builder allows you to create beautiful landing pages fast. Without a landing page builder, it is time-consuming to create your own landing page from scratch.
Thus a landing page builder saves you the cost of hiring a web developer for $36 to $80 an hour. And depending on the landing page software and your skills, it may save you the cost of hiring a graphic designer for $23 to $30 an hour too. Or you can do even more manual work and code everything yourself using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
Sure, there’s a learning curve when you start using any landing page tool you pick. That’s true of any new marketing tool you begin to use. But you should use tools that save you time and money.
Let’s start with my recommended landing page builder for PPC campaigns.
Unbounce is my ideal choice if you want to create landing pages fast for PPC campaigns. It doesn’t matter if you plan on doing Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or any other social media ad campaigns.
They set out to empower marketers to launch marketing campaigns faster and maximize conversions.
Further, they have over 125 mobile-responsive templates in their library to help you get off the ground faster.
Unbounce allows you to copy elements from different templates and paste them together into a master design. This makes it easy to keep the best elements across your portfolio of landing page campaigns.
Dynamic Text Replacement allows you to personalize your message to the right people.
How does Dynamic Text Replacement work?
Let’s pretend you had a vacation home by the beach you want to rent out. You might target ad keyword phrases like, “holiday resort,” “vacation rental,” or “beach vacation home.”
You could create three different landing pages with slightly different messages for each keyword.
With Unbounce’s Dynamic Text Replacement, you only need to create one landing page. Then your selected text changes, depending on what ad and keyword someone clicked.
Why is Dynamic Text Replacement valuable for PPC campaigns?
One of the best ways to improve your ad campaigns is by creating message match. Message match helps your customer know she’s in the right place because the same message is shown in each step of the journey.
Let’s say someone sees your ad to rent a beach vacation home in the middle of July. If she sees your landing page talking about your holiday resort, you’ll confuse her because she is not planning to go on a holiday.
Dynamic Text Replacement reduces that confusion by changing the text to better fit the ad.
Millions of users browse the Internet using a mobile device. As such, your landing pages must look good on phones, smart pads, and other devices.
Unlike Leadpages, Unbounce has a design interface that makes it easy to make changes to your mobile device.
The problem is, one simple change to the desktop version changes the mobile view too. As a result, both look weird. Changes you make to one should not affect the other version too.
Unbounce does have an article on how to edit a landing page in a mobile view without affecting the desktop design. However, this is not as simple to do as using Webflow’s design tool.
Unbounce pricing starts at $72 per month on an annual plan. While they do not have a free version, Unbounce offers a 14-day free trial with every plan.
Unbounce has four pricing plans:
If you want higher limits or one-on-one training, Unbounce offers concierge services too.
Unbounce offers a 14-day free trial with every plan.
What if you prefer to scale using SEO instead of PPC? In this case, I would recommend using Leadpages.
Leadpages is my favorite landing page tool to scale SEO campaigns.
The designs are fresh and designed for conversions right out of the box. Leadpages is clean, beautiful, easy to use, and integrates well with WordPress.
Lead generation is simple and you can redirect users after signing up to any page.
Some people use it not only as a landing page but to host their entire site on it as well!
Almost all the big landing page tools limit how much traffic, conversions, or total landing pages you have in any plan. For PPC campaigns, this isn’t an issue because it takes a lot of money to reach those limits. But for an SEO campaign, you could hit those limits a lot faster. This is one reason why I prefer Leadpages for SEO campaigns.
Leadpages has a settings panel to make it simple to change the meta titles and descriptions for your landing pages. These changes are important when increasing your search traffic. It’s similar to using Yoast’s SEO plugin if you’ve used this tool for WordPress.
This is the second reason why I prefer Leadpages for SEO campaigns.
Most of the landing page tools I recommend cost between $80 to $300 per month. Leadpages is the only tool that offers a $37 a month plan. Or you can save 39% off with an annual plan, which breaks down to $25 per month.
Want to automagically send a lead magnet without buying and integrating another email marketing tool like ConvertKit? This is easy to do using Leadpages’s Lead Magnet Delivery System. Again, this is a great feature if you are doing content marketing.
Would you like to increase your odds of closing a qualified lead by nearly seven times as much?
In a study by Harvard Business Review, researchers studied the response times of 1.25 million sales leads. The companies that contacted leads in an hour of receiving a lead were nearly seven times as likely to close the sale.
This is hard to do without some kind of automation. Using Leadpages’s Lead Notification will allow you to send instant lead notifications to make more sales.
A free domain is a small cost. But getting a free domain with an annual plan is a nice added bonus if you want to validate a new business or product idea.
As of 2019, 40.1% of all internet usage is on mobile devices. Yes, Leadpages allows you to preview landing pages on mobile. But it takes more effort to build your pages right from the beginning.
Leadpages is a great landing page tool if you’re not design-savvy. But if you want pixel-perfect design, Leadpages isn’t the landing page tool for you. Instead, I’d recommend looking at Webflow or Unbounce.
Related Article: Leadpages Pricing
Leadpages pricing starts at $25 per month on an annual plan. While they do not have a free version, Leadpages offers a 14-day free trial with each pricing plan.
Leadpages has three pricing plans:
Learn more about Leadpages’s pricing and if the features are worth the cost.
What if you want to scale your startup using a sales funnel? Then ClickFunnels is the way to go.
Sales funnels are the “treasure maps” to building an unstoppable business.
Here’s a simple example of why mastering a sales funnel matters:
Most startups aim to get a customer for a 3rd of their lifetime value. This is your customer lifetime value ratio (or, CAC to LTV).
So if your average customer LTV is $3,000, you should be happy to get a customer for $1,000.
This has an LTV to CAC ratio of 6:1, which is a solid return on investment.
If the price stays the same, you get more profit per customer.
And as advertising costs continue to increase, you can afford to spend more to get a customer. All while your competition is scrambling to figure out what’s next while you maximize your profit.
This sales funnel has an LTV to CAC ratio of 7:1, which is a better return on investment. And it gets even better when you add more items into your sales funnel.
Your sales funnel will allow you to better cross-sell, upsell, and down-sell your customers to increase their lifetime value.
And ClickFunnels is an excellent tool to help you create your sales funnel.
ClickFunnels has a dashboard to allow you to view your sales funnel analytics:
This dashboard allows you to visualize your sales funnel. With an overview of your sales funnel, you know what the potential value is when improving any step.
Marketers tend to be shy about asking for the sale. This goes double if they do content marketing.
But just like marketing, sales can be done with integrity. Or it can be done in a spammy way.
Some ClickFunnels features which help accelerate sales include:
The ClickFunnels landing page design is slow and clunky. Sure, you can do just about anything with ClickFunnels. But it feels slower than almost any other popular landing page tool on the market.
I do not doubt for a moment the value of ClickFunnels. But everything about their messaging feels sleazy. It appeals to the get-rich-quick mentality of the Internet. While I’m sure it works well for them, it’s a turn-off for me.
The messaging is an area I decide to not “judge a book by its cover.”
ClickFunnels pricing starts at $97 per month. While they do not have a free version, ClickFunnels offers a 14-day free trial with every plan.
ClickFunnels has three pricing plans:
Landing page tools are great for PPC campaigns, SEO campaigns, and to create sales funnels.
But what if you want one to validate a product or your business idea? In which case, I recommend using Google Docs.
Let’s get real for a moment.
Google Documents are not your typical landing page tool.
But when you want to validate your business, your only goal is to find out if people are willing to pay for what you offer.
You do not need A/B testing because your traffic is too small to matter. You also do not need a fancy design tool to create the page, though it may help.
All you need to do is find out if someone will pay for your product, ideally before you build it.
You do not need a fancy design to pre-sell your product. I’ve sold thousands of dollars of products using a Google Doc. And I know agencies that use Google Docs to sell six-figure contracts.
Yes, design can improve your conversions and brand. But design does not matter if you do not have the right messaging for the right audience.
To do this, you should first talk to your customers, find out their willingness to pay for your product, and validate what the customers’ needs are.
Save the design step until you have some customers.
Sometimes when you promote your website, it will come across as intrusive. But if you include the same information in a Google document, it’s one less alarm going off in someone’s head. This approach isn’t bulletproof, but it can help.
Plain and simple, Google makes its billion-dollar business off of other tools we use. Google offers free tools to get you hooked into the Google system of paid and free products. As a result, Google Docs is the most likely tool to have a free version forever.
When validating your business, scaling it is the LAST thing you should be thinking about.
But once you get a handful of customers who pay for your tool, you can begin to entertain the thought of how to scale your startup.
When someone does not know you, your brand is more important. Using a Google Doc will make your offer appear less credible and trustworthy. As a result, once you have paying customers, you should consider investing in your business and getting a proper landing page tool.
Before you get a paying customer, potential customers who have a big enough pain care less about fancy designs. What they want is for someone to solve their problem.
But what happens after you’ve validated your business?
You’ll want a website builder that will give you the professional edge to impress customers. Speaking of which...
In 2018, I had the privilege to do marketing for a small non-profit organization (NPO). The website was on GoDaddy’s clunky website builder. Like most NPOs, the site looked like it was made a decade ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was...
After a few business friends were raving about Webflow, I decided to give it a try. After some tinkering, I soon saw that Webflow is a BEAST of a tool. Especially for creating landing pages or building an entire website.
You have to see and try the software for yourself to understand why I switched Growth Ramp from WordPress to Webflow. For now, you should find this Webflow review will help you decide if it’s worth taking Webflow for a test drive.
With Webflow, you can build and design whatever your heart desires with almost no code skills required. I’ve struggled with getting WordPress pages to look exactly how I want them. Design is not my strong suit. With Webflow, everything is a breeze.
Furthermore, the design functionality is impressive. Some projects would take days or weeks to complete in WordPress. But those same projects I could finish in an hour with Webflow all by adding an element or collection.
The first email course I created was to help entrepreneurs validate their product by teaching them how to pre-sell it. It’s a 10-day course with in-depth articles on how to go from idea to your first few paying customers.
After fleshing out the content and basic design in a Google Doc, it took me 2-3 hours to design and build it in Webflow.
I estimate this project would take me 2-3 weeks in WordPress. Even worse, the design would not have looked the way I wanted it to.
Furthermore, creating a product marketing course was even easier. After copying the landing page template, I gave the project to my assistant to copy and paste the text. It took her about 20 minutes.
With Webflow, creating landing pages is a breeze. Not to mention, Webflow scales with your startup.
Webflow is a website builder first. As such, it’s MUCH easier to create a beautiful website for your startup in Webflow than a traditional landing page tool.
Webflow gives you the freedom to make creative and functional websites that actually work and look good, fast.
This means once you validate your product, it’s easy to use Webflow to scale your business using the same tool.
Webflow is so easy to use, even if you don't have any in-depth web development or design experience!
Plus, there’s a ton of free learning in Webflow University. This is an incredible library of resources that are easy to follow and understand.
Not only do they have videos in here for just about everything, but they are also enjoyable to watch and filled with comic relief. You’ll be hard-pressed to find long, boring, and drawn out how-to videos the marketing team threw together to get it done.
If you’re new to creating websites or landing pages, Webflow is hands-down the easiest way to get started.
After creating a page for desktop, you can switch to the tablet and mobile views.
Rather than redesigning an entire page, you can manage, rearrange, and save content and designs for each device.
With Unbounce, LeadPages, or ClickFunnels, getting desktop and mobile pages to look the right way is a royal pain-in-the-neck. It’s a lot easier to get everything to look right across every device with Webflow.
First, Webflow has a free plan.
If you don’t mind a little Webflow branding and using a free Webflow subdomain (i.e. yoursite.webflow.io), you can validate your business at no cost.
With the free plan, you get two live projects and two static pages.
Second, the Webflow price point for paid plans includes hosting in addition to the design tool. For $192 a year or $16 per month, I get hosting, a website design tool, and a landing page tool.
With WordPress, HubSpot, or another CMS, I would expect to pay:
Webflow gives you a lot more bang for your buck compared to other website builders.
If you’ve built your website on another platform, it may be difficult to want to make the switch. After all, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right?
My recommendation is to create a side project on Webflow. If you find it saves you and your team time, it’s easier to make an informed decision.
Like almost every tool on this list, you will have to want to learn a new method and process.
This is why I also recommend Google Docs. It’s easy to validate a business by writing inside of Google Docs.
Webflow has three types of pricing plans: Site plans, Account plans, and Enterprise plans.
Site plans come in two flavors: Site plans and eCommerce plans. There are four Site plans and three Ecommerce plans.
Then there are Account plans. There are also two types of Account plans: individual and team plans. There are three individual plans and two team plans.
And for the adventurous, there are the Enterprise plans.
I’ll explain all the plans up in the next section to clarify the confusion.
My quick advice? Use the CMS Site Plan if you have a blog. Or use the Basic Site Plan if you do not plan to start a blog immediately.
As you grow, Webflow will give you reminders to tell you it’s time to upgrade.
Webflow pricing starts at $12 per month on an annual plan. Webflow does offer a free version for you to try their product.
Webflow has three primary pricing plans:
Let’s start by discussing the Site plans.
Site plans are necessary for every website you have.
If you plan to use a blog or plan to scale a lot of landing pages, get the CMS plan. If you have a simple website, do not plan on using a blog or other content-driven website, sign up for the basic plan.
Next up, Ecommerce plans.
Each Ecommerce plan includes the CMS Site plan. If you decide to scale with content, Webflow has made it easy for you to do so.
Next up, the account plans.
The account plans are valuable if:
To keep it simple, here are the five account plans:
Again, if you’re not sure where to begin, get the CMS plan if you plan to create a lot of content. If you have a simple website, do not plan on using a blog or other content-driven website, sign up for the basic plan.
There are dozens of affordable landing page tools on the market.
Some of these landing page builders I’ve used, but prefer other tools. Others I have not fully tested and vetted because there are dozens of landing pages and website builders out there. Depending on how well entrepreneurs like you enjoy these reviews, I may test these tools too.
Here is a (nearly) complete list of alternative landing page tools to consider:
Do you have a WordPress website? Do you want a landing page tool with a plugin to make it easier to add landing pages? This is the list for you.
Here are 16 landing page tools that work and integrate with WordPress:
Startups and small businesses are starting to want a marketing platform that “does it all.”
I’m tempted to say if you’re not using Webflow, don’t even bother looking at another website builder. (At least try Webflow’s free plan, okay?).
But as experience has taught me, there are other reasons why you may want to consider another website builder.
So here’s a list of website builders:
There is something true that you get what you pay for. Furthermore, people often value products more when they pay more. Sure, there isn’t a perfect correlation between what you pay, what you get, and what you value. But there’s a hidden cost to always being cheap.
Still, I’m a fan of using a free trial or free plan when I get started with a new business.
With that, here are the landing page tools that offer free plans:
The goal of some landing pages is to help you get email leads. Thus, some email marketing tools offer landing page software to better integrate the two tools together.
Here are 8 email marketing tools that offer landing page software:
Finding the best landing page tool can help your startup get up-and-running faster than doing everything yourself.
But as you see, deciding which landing page tool is best is easier said than done.
As a quick summary, here are the landing page builders I recommend:
Whether you want to validate a new product or you’re scaling growth with product marketing, landing pages are often important to getting traction with your go-to-market strategy.
When in doubt, pick a landing page tool and use the free trial to see if it’s good enough.
Because it’s better to ship something good enough than to stall as you attempt to find the “perfect” landing page tool.
