ClickFunnels vs SamCart 2026: Checkout Tool or Funnel Builder?

ClickFunnels vs SamCart comes down to one question: do you need a checkout, or a whole funnel? SamCart is a checkout-and-course tool from $79/mo, while ClickFunnels is a funnel builder from $97/mo with email, CRM, courses and checkout bundled. SamCart’s order bumps and one-click upsells start on its $199/mo Pro plan, and email marketing is not on any SamCart plan, so for one digital product and no email tool yet, ClickFunnels is usually the cheaper stack. SamCart wins if you already run a website and an email platform and only want a checkout, or if you want your own affiliate program for less than $297/mo.

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SamCart is not an affiliate of ours, so we earn nothing if you pick it. We checked every price below on the vendors’ own pricing pages on 14 October 2026.

Quick verdict: SamCart or ClickFunnels, which fits you?

Pick by what you already pay for, not by the sticker price. ClickFunnels makes sense when you are starting from zero and want the pages, checkout and email follow-up under one bill. SamCart makes sense when the pages and email already exist and the only missing piece is a good checkout.

Pick SamCart if you already have a site you like, an email platform with your sequences in it, and you want a checkout with a course area attached. Pick it too if an affiliate program is the main thing you are shopping for. SamCart is not for you if you have no email tool yet, because you will be buying one on top.

Pick ClickFunnels if you are building the whole path from opt-in page to sales page to checkout to email follow-up and want one login for all of it. ClickFunnels is not for you if you already pay for a website and email platform and have no plans to move them. Then most of what you’d pay for duplicates what you have.

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What is the real difference between ClickFunnels and SamCart?

The two tools start from opposite ends of the sale.

SamCart starts at the payment page. Its core product is the checkout, and it has added pages, sites, link-in-bio pages, opt-in pages and a course area around it. The question it answers is “how do I take money for this product?”

ClickFunnels starts at the funnel. You build an opt-in page, a sales page, a checkout, an upsell page and the email follow-up as one connected sequence, and the checkout is one element inside it. The question it answers is “how does a stranger turn into a buyer?”

One correction to a lot of ranking pages: SamCart does have a page builder now. Its June 2026 plans guide puts Pages, Sites, Link-in-Bio and Opt-in Pages on every plan, so “SamCart needs a separate page builder” is out of date. What SamCart still lacks is email marketing. Its pricing page and plans guide list no broadcast or sequence feature, and email runs through its Integration Engine to tools like Kit, ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp.

Put shortly, SamCart is a checkout you plug into the marketing tools you already have, and ClickFunnels tries to replace those tools with one subscription.

ClickFunnels vs SamCart pricing: what does a year really cost?

The entry prices are $79 for SamCart and $97 for ClickFunnels. Neither number is what you will actually pay, so here are the plans first and the full stack second.

Current plans (checked 14 October 2026)

SamCart’s annual prices come from a “Yearly (25% OFF)” toggle on its pricing page and the amounts in its plans guide. SamCart also sells a “Dedicated Live Support” add-on for $19/mo on any paid plan. No revenue cap appears on SamCart’s pricing page today.

On the ClickFunnels side, funnels, pages and visitors are unlimited on every plan, though the pricing page marks unlimited funnels as “Limited Time”, so read that as currently unlimited. If you are torn between the first two tiers, our Launch vs Scale breakdown covers it, and ClickFunnels pricing, plan by plan has the rest. ClickFunnels also runs a new-customer promo of 3 months of Scale for $99, with no trial and $197/mo after that.

Year one for one digital product

None of the pages ranking for this comparison adds an email tool to SamCart’s price, so here is that math. Assume one digital product, fewer than 1,000 email subscribers, annual billing, and Kit’s Creator plan as SamCart’s email tool ($390/yr at 1,000 subscribers on Kit’s pricing page). Card processing is 2.9% + 30¢ on both sides for one-off sales through Stripe or SamPay, so it cancels out and is left off.

SamCart Core plus Kit Creator already costs $130 more than ClickFunnels Launch, and it still has no order bumps. Get the same checkout features on SamCart and the stack costs $2,180, more than twice the ClickFunnels figure.

SamCart is genuinely cheaper in one case: SamCart Core with Kit’s free plan, at $710 a year. You get a checkout, pages and a course area, with no order bumps and no email sequences. Kit’s free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers but has no email sequences or visual automations, so you would be sending broadcasts by hand. That works for a creator with a small, warm audience and no plans to upsell. The moment you want a welcome sequence or a $27 add-on at checkout, ClickFunnels wins on price.

Monthly billing tells the same story. ClickFunnels Launch is $1,164 a year at $97/mo. SamCart Core is $948 a year and Pro $2,388, each plus whatever your email tool costs monthly.

If the real goal is the lowest possible bill, neither tool is the answer. Read ClickFunnels vs Systeme.io or our list of free ClickFunnels alternatives first.

Ignore these old prices and claims

Several pages that rank for ClickFunnels vs SamCart quote plans that no longer exist.

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ClickFunnels checkout vs SamCart: bumps, upsells and fees

SamCart’s marketing leans hardest on its checkout, and this is where its $79 price misleads most. On SamCart, order bumps, one-click upsells, A/B testing and Subscription Saver (its failed-payment recovery) are all Pro features at $199/mo. On ClickFunnels, the order bump is a component of the Smart Checkout element, and the help article for it lists no plan restriction.

Order bumps sit inside Smart Checkout on ClickFunnels and are Pro-only on SamCart. One-click upsells and downsells work the same way: ClickFunnels supports them on upsell pages, and SamCart keeps them for Pro. The ClickFunnels help article lists one requirement worth knowing, a Payments AI-configured account. ClickFunnels includes A/B testing, while SamCart puts it on Pro.

Two smaller differences. SamCart Core’s checkout is SamCart-branded, and you need Pro to customize the branding. ClickFunnels works with Payments AI, Stripe, PayPal and NMI, while SamCart Core uses SamPay and Stripe and saves Braintree, Authorize.net and Easy Pay Direct for Pro.

SamCart claims higher checkout conversion on its comparison page but publishes no method. Treat that as marketing until you test your own checkout.

Payment fees on a $100 sale

Neither platform takes a cut of your revenue. ClickFunnels’ pricing FAQ says you keep every penny, and SamCart’s Terms say it does not charge a percentage of your revenue. Card processing is 2.9% + 30¢ through SamPay or Stripe, and you can connect Stripe directly to ClickFunnels without Payments AI. The differences are the extras:

If you sell subscriptions, SamCart is cheaper per payment: no added fee on SamPay, against ClickFunnels’ +0.5% when recurring payments run through Payments AI. On a $47/mo membership that is about 24¢ a payment. Since ClickFunnels’ one-click upsells need Payments AI configured, check its fee schedule before you plan a heavy upsell flow. SamCart also charges a small extra fee if you use its tax collection.

Selling physical goods rather than a digital product? Shipping and inventory change this math, so read ClickFunnels for physical products instead.

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Email, courses, affiliates and team seats

Email: bundled vs bring your own

ClickFunnels includes email marketing on every plan. Launch covers 10,000 contacts and 50,000 emails a month, enough for one product and a growing list for a long time. Scale raises that to 75,000 contacts and 300,000 emails.

SamCart sends your buyers to an email platform through its Integration Engine. The listed options include Kit, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Drip, Mailchimp, Ontraport and Maropost. If you already use one of them and like it, that’s a point for SamCart, not against it. If you don’t, it is another bill and another login.

Courses

Here SamCart has an edge. The Courses App and members area come with every SamCart plan, and no course limit is listed. ClickFunnels caps courses by plan: 3 on Launch, 6 on Scale, 10 on Optimize. For one digital product, 3 is plenty. If you plan a catalogue of courses, compare course-first platforms too, starting with ClickFunnels vs Kajabi.

Affiliate program

This is where SamCart wins on price. Its Affiliate Center comes with Pro at $199/mo ($1,790/yr). On ClickFunnels, the Affiliate Center starts on Optimize at $297/mo ($2,970/yr). If recruiting affiliates is central to your launch, SamCart saves you $98 a month on that feature.

Team seats

On the entry plans ClickFunnels gives you one more seat. If a VA or a partner needs their own login, SamCart Core can’t do it. On the next tier up, SamCart Pro’s 10 seats beat ClickFunnels Scale’s 5.

How long can you test each one before you pay?

The risk terms differ more than the prices. ClickFunnels gives you a 14-day free trial plus a 30-day money-back guarantee, 44 days in total. A card is required at signup and is charged on day 14 unless you cancel. Here is how the 14-day trial and 30-day refund window work in detail.

SamCart gives you 7 days. Its Terms say you are billed the full price of the plan on the day the trial ends, and cancelling before that first charge means you are not charged. After that, the Terms are strict:

Seven days is enough to build a checkout. It is not enough to send traffic and see whether anyone buys. If you start SamCart on a monthly plan, judge it inside that week, because the first monthly charge cannot be refunded.

ClickFunnels gives you room to make a mistake: forget to cancel on day 14 and you can still ask for a refund. SamCart doesn’t. Either way, set a reminder two days before the trial ends.

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When does using SamCart with ClickFunnels make sense?

Rarely, for a single-product seller. The pattern is simple: copy the embed code from a SamCart product’s Share > Embed tab and paste it into a custom HTML element on a ClickFunnels page. SamCart says its embed code can go “onto any page”. There is no documented native integration between the two, so treat this as a pattern to test, not a supported setup.

The cost is the problem. Getting one-click upsells in both places means ClickFunnels Launch at $97 plus SamCart Pro at $199, so $296 a month before email limits. That is $1 less than ClickFunnels Optimize, which already has the Affiliate Center and more contacts.

It does make sense for two people:

1. A ClickFunnels user whose merchant account runs on Braintree, Authorize.net or Easy Pay Direct. Those processors are on SamCart Pro, not on ClickFunnels’ gateway list.
2. A SamCart seller who wants bundled email and funnel pages without leaving SamCart’s checkout. ClickFunnels Launch adds email for 10,000 contacts, which may beat paying for a separate email tool at your list size.

If you go this way, buy your own product end to end before launch, and check that the purchase reaches your email list and course area. For everyone else, one tool is enough, and a single checkout is easier to test properly.

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Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Look first at what you already pay for. Starting from zero with one digital product, ClickFunnels Launch is the better buy: $970 a year with order bumps, upsells and email included, against $1,100 for SamCart Core and Kit with no bumps at all. Already running a website and an email platform you like? SamCart Core at $79/mo is the leaner choice. Want an affiliate program on a budget? SamCart Pro beats ClickFunnels Optimize by $98 a month.

For most single-product sellers, the deciding fact in ClickFunnels vs SamCart is the test window: 44 days on ClickFunnels against 7 on SamCart. Build the funnel, run one real sale, and decide with your own numbers. Our full ClickFunnels review covers the rest.

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