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For anyone involved in digital marketing, ClickFunnels has likely appeared on your radar. ClickFunnels positions itself as a comprehensive platform for establishing and managing your entire online business operations.
The platform enables you to construct sales funnels, develop email marketing sequences, manage affiliate partnerships, and establish membership portals for delivering your digital courses and additional materials.
In this article, we’ll primarily focus on examining the ClickFunnels membership site capabilities.
Numerous ClickFunnels evaluations available online suggest it serves as an excellent solution for hosting your digital courses and membership programs.
While I certainly acknowledge ClickFunnels as a valuable tool for sales funnel creation, I find their membership site builder somewhat lacking in comparison.
Actually, I wouldn’t recommend utilizing the ClickFunnels ecosystem for developing your online course or membership community.
Allow me to outline my reasoning, and afterward, I’ll present several worthwhile alternatives for your consideration.
Let’s examine the limitations of utilizing ClickFunnels for your membership platform or digital course delivery:
Effective progress tracking stands as a fundamental requirement for any quality online learning platform. Unfortunately, ClickFunnels lacks robust functionality in this critical area.
As an educator or content creator, monitoring course completion rates represents one of your most valuable performance indicators—an insight that simply isn’t accessible when operating within the ClickFunnels environment.
Additionally, without proper tracking mechanisms, you’ll be unable to distribute completion certificates, send celebratory messages upon course completion, or even dispatch gentle reminders encouraging learners to complete outstanding lessons or modules.
A significant drawback stemming from this tracking deficiency is that ClickFunnels cannot record where participants paused their learning journey, thus preventing the system from automatically returning them to their previous position.
This represents perhaps the most concerning limitation of the ClickFunnels membership environment. The overall learner experience falls considerably short of professional standards, with particular usability challenges appearing on mobile devices.
The primary issue lies in the disconnected payment and registration processes. Participants must first complete a purchase transaction and subsequently register for course access in separate steps.
ClickFunnels attempts to reconcile these processes by matching purchase emails with registration emails, granting access only when these identifiers align perfectly.
Inevitably, you’ll encounter situations where customers purchase using one email address but register with another, creating frustrating access complications.
As previously mentioned, another significant limitation is ClickFunnels’ inability to automatically return learners to their last accessed position in your course materials.
The platform also lacks direct linking capabilities to specific lessons or modules within your educational content. This creates complications when implementing content dripping strategies or when attempting to notify students about newly available materials, as you cannot provide direct navigation to the precise relevant section.
If you’re planning to implement recurring revenue models through ClickFunnels, you should consider this significant limitation.
ClickFunnels lacks self-service subscription management functionality. When members wish to discontinue their subscription, they must contact you directly via email, requiring you to manually process their cancellation through your Stripe dashboard.
Furthermore, the platform provides no mechanism for members to modify or update their payment information independently, necessitating integration with external solutions such as Stunning (which connects with Stripe) to enable this basic account management function.
This creates unnecessary administrative burdens and delivers a frustrating experience for your members—challenges that are completely eliminated when utilizing more comprehensive platforms like Teachable or Kajabi.
Effective digital courses involve much more than simply delivering video content. Depending on your educational objectives, you’ll likely need assessment tools, community discussion capabilities, completion credentials, and other engagement elements.
The ClickFunnels membership environment notably lacks assessment creation tools and content-gating mechanisms based on learning progress—functionalities that many educators consider absolutely essential.
The platform also fails to provide native community interaction systems where participants can engage with fellow learners and instructors, pose questions, and receive valuable feedback.
Most ClickFunnels course creators resort to establishing separate Facebook Groups as workarounds for fostering community discussions among their members.
While ClickFunnels does accommodate smaller files (limited to 3 MB) such as PDF documents and Word files, it lacks integrated hosting for video and audio content—core components of modern online education.
To incorporate video elements into your educational offerings, you’ll need to invest in additional subscriptions to services like Vimeo, Wistia, or Amazon S3 storage.
When compared with leading membership platform solutions, which typically include unlimited Wistia-powered video hosting within their standard subscription packages, this limitation becomes particularly apparent.
This deficiency not only creates additional expenses but also significantly complicates the content management process. Adding videos to your membership areas becomes unnecessarily complex, and managing your educational assets becomes increasingly challenging as your content library grows across multiple platforms.
ClickFunnels lacks functionality for creating unified learning environments. Each individual course requires separate authentication credentials, forcing your students to establish multiple accounts if they wish to enroll in several of your educational offerings.
Additionally, the platform doesn’t preserve payment information, requiring learners to re-enter their payment details for each purchase (with the exception of immediate upsell transactions).
By contrast, platforms like Kajabi implement a centralized registration process for your entire educational ecosystem. Students create a single account and enter payment information just once—delivering the streamlined experience modern consumers expect.
Enhancing membership functionality clearly doesn’t rank among ClickFunnels’ strategic priorities.
While ClickFunnels has substantially upgraded its sales funnel creation tools in recent years, their membership site builder has remained largely unchanged, with no significant enhancements implemented for an extended period.
When compared with dedicated educational platforms, which typically deliver continuous improvements and feature expansions, the contrast becomes striking—most specialized learning platforms release at least ten times more enhancements than ClickFunnels in this critical area.
In conclusion, ClickFunnels performs inadequately when it comes to delivering online courses or membership experiences.
The platform suffers from fundamental user experience design flaws, lacks essential educational functionality, and demonstrates minimal commitment to improving its membership capabilities.
So what alternatives should you consider for creating and selling digital courses? I’ll explore several compelling ClickFunnels alternatives in the following section.
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Now that we’ve explored the limitations of ClickFunnels for membership sites and online courses, let’s examine some more suitable alternatives.
While numerous options exist in the marketplace, these three premier course creation platforms stand out as particularly worthy of consideration:
Kajabi functions as a comprehensive ecosystem for developing and monetizing membership communities and educational content.
From a course development perspective, the platform offers exceptional versatility with support for diverse content formats including professional video integration. The learning environment features sophisticated design elements and incorporates advanced educational tools such as knowledge assessments, participant surveys, vibrant community spaces, and a dedicated mobile application—all contributing to an engaging and effective learning experience for your members.
Beyond educational delivery, Kajabi enables you to establish a complete digital presence with customizable website templates, sophisticated sales funnel systems, comprehensive email marketing capabilities, and content marketing through blogging—making it particularly valuable for entrepreneurs seeking to consolidate their entire educational business within a single platform.
Regarding investment considerations, subscription packages begin at $149/month, with their most popular service tier priced at $199/month, positioning Kajabi as a premium solution rather than a budget option in the online education market.
Nevertheless, Kajabi stands as the most comprehensive and feature-complete course creation ecosystem available, delivering exceptional value relative to its extensive functionality and operational benefits.
For those interested in a more detailed exploration of this platform, you can examine our comprehensive Kajabi platform analysis, or if you’re prepared to experience it firsthand, you can initiate a complimentary trial period by selecting the button below.
Thinkific represents another highly regarded option in the course creation landscape, though it differs from Kajabi by maintaining a more specialized focus on essential educational delivery functions. The platform concentrates specifically on core course creation and distribution capabilities rather than offering expanded marketing features such as blogging tools, funnel building systems, or email campaign management.
Despite this focused approach, Thinkific delivers an impressive array of educational development and delivery tools, including integrated video hosting, comprehensive assessment creation, assignment submission management, scheduled content release, dedicated community spaces, and professional learning environment presentation.
Furthermore, Thinkific offers robust website development capabilities and provides all essential commerce tools necessary for processing payments and effectively marketing your educational offerings.
From a cost perspective, Thinkific presents an attractive value proposition. You can begin with their no-cost starter option and upgrade as your requirements evolve. Their entry-level paid subscription (Basic Plan) requires a $49/month investment, while their more comprehensive PRO Plan is available at $99/month.
Teachable stands as another widely adopted learning management solution that closely parallels Thinkific regarding both functionality and investment requirements.
The platform enables comprehensive educational website development, integrated content and media hosting, streamlined course creation, and engaging delivery mechanisms. Additionally, it supports critical educational features including knowledge assessments, completion credentials, scheduled content distribution, and learning progress enforcement protocols.
Teachable also delivers powerful revenue generation capabilities. The platform features a conversion-optimized purchasing experience, supports recurring subscription models and installment payment options, while offering practical marketing tools like promotional discount systems and product bundling functionality.
Teachable presents an accessible pricing structure that accommodates educators across experience levels and business stages. You can either establish a free foundation account or upgrade to their more comprehensive paid subscription tiers (beginning at $39/month).
For a comprehensive analysis of this platform’s capabilities, you can explore our detailed Teachable platform evaluation which provides an exhaustive examination of all features and benefits.
ClickFunnels undoubtedly ranks among the most recognized and capable digital marketing solutions available today. While it excels at developing sales conversion pathways and creating high-performing landing pages, its membership environment capabilities remain significantly constrained.
As we’ve thoroughly examined, the participant experience falls considerably short of professional standards, and the platform lacks numerous essential educational features including progress monitoring, knowledge assessment tools, and community engagement capabilities—all critical factors that substantially limit ClickFunnels’ effectiveness for delivering professional educational programs.
Therefore, I cannot recommend implementing ClickFunnels for developing your educational offerings or membership community. Instead, consider adopting a purpose-built learning platform such as Kajabi, Teachable, or Thinkific.
Option #1: If you prefer streamlined operations and value consolidated platform management, consider implementing Kajabi for both educational content hosting and marketing funnel development.
Option #2: If you currently utilize or plan to implement ClickFunnels or alternative solutions for your conversion funnels, consider selecting Thinkific or Teachable for educational content hosting and delivery requirements.
Please share any questions regarding ClickFunnels membership capabilities or any of these alternative platforms in the comments section below.
Daniel NicFounder, SellingOnliceCoursesGuide.comis an entrepreneur and digital education specialist who founded sellingonlinecoursesguide.com, a platform dedicated to helping creators and educators successfully navigate the online course marketplace. Through his website, he shares insights and strategies for developing, marketing, and monetizing online educational content. His work focuses on empowering course creators to build sustainable online businesses while effectively sharing their knowledge with students worldwide.
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Copyright © 2024 by SellCoursesOnline
Daniel Nic is an entrepreneur and digital education specialist who founded sellingonlinecoursesguide.com, a platform dedicated to helping creators and educators successfully navigate the online course marketplace. Through his website, he shares insights and strategies for developing, marketing, and monetizing online educational content. His work focuses on empowering course creators to build sustainable online businesses while effectively sharing their knowledge with students worldwide.
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