Unbounce Review: Is This the Landing Page Builder You’ve Been Looking For?

Launch Your Online Business in Just 7 Days

What do you do if you don’t know how to build a landing page? You become best of friends with a landing page builder!


Today we’re going to focus on Unbounce — a landing page builder that has really made an impression on the market.


Earning 4.6/5 on Capterra, Unbounce is a force to be reckoned with.


But is it worth the hype? Are there better alternatives to consider?


In this Unbounce review, we’ll take an in-depth look at Unbounce’s features and pricing to help you decide whether or not this is the landing page builder you’ve been looking for.

1. What is Unbounce?

Unbounce home page

Source: Unbounce

The story begins in 2009 when online businesses were just getting off the ground.


Oli Gardner, Carl Gilchrist, Justin Stacey, Jason Murphy, and Carl Schmidt joined forces with Rick Perrault.


They saw the demand for marketers to bypass developers and build their own campaigns.


But how can you build a campaign without any technical coding skills?


The answer — a landing page builder.


And so, Unbounce was born!


Since then, it’s become one of the leading landing page builders, supporting over 15,000 brands (including Amazon, Canon, LinkedIn, and Vodafone).


But does Unbounce’s ancient beginning mean that it’s no longer relevant?

1.1. Who’s it for?

Unbounce categories

Source: Unbounce

Unbounce specifically caters to certain types of business — with its features and, unfortunately, with its price too.


If you fall into one of the following categories, we’d recommend taking a good look at what Unbounce can offer you.

1.1.1. Software as a Service (SaaS)

If your business sells software, and your developers are constantly working on improving your software, how can they find the time to build your landing pages too?


That’s why Unbounce created its landing builder to be accessible to everyone (no HTML knowledge needed).

1.1.2. Agencies

As an agency, you have to be able to respond quickly to your clients’ needs while showing results.


Unbounce allows you to build a landing page within minutes and showcase your results with reports and analytics.


Unbounce also offers a Partner Program where agents can sell landing pages and earn 20% of the lifetime recurring revenue for every client they refer to Unbounce.

1.1.3. Ecommerce

You need to be able to update your sales pages, fast.


Just think about the switch from Black Friday to Cyber Monday and how much money you could lose if that transition isn’t smooth.


Unbounce’s testing options and smart tech may give you an edge to ensure that your landing pages are effective at converting leads.

2. Features

Unbounce Features

Source: Unbounce

This section is where you can start to get a sense of whether or not Unbounce is the right landing page builder for you.


Unbounce has had a long time wracking up an extensive list of features that can come in handy for most businesses.


When looking at these features, it’s important to consider conversion rate optimization (CRO).


Every landing page is built to convert visitors into leads and eventually paying customers.


This is achieved by optimizing your landing pages for the highest possible conversion rate.


So keep this in mind when approaching each feature and assessing whether they’ll hurt or help your CRO.

2.1. Landing Pages

Landing Pages

Source: Unbounce

If your landing page isn’t well-designed and optimized, you won’t convert leads — it’s as simple as that.


Unbounce covers most of its bases, but there are still a few features that need some attention.


Here’s a list of all of Unbounce’s main landing page features:

  • Drag-and-drop builder: just a couple clicks, and voilá, your page is done!
  • 100+ templates: you have access to over 100 customizable templates, plus the option of purchasing a customizable template from Themeforest
  • Clone and edit, copy and paste: easily manage multiple landing pages by cloning and copying across different pages
  • Lead-gen form builder: generate more leads through captivating forms
  • 100% mobile responsiveness: switch between desktop and mobile view to make sure your page looks great on all devices
  • Publishing: you can publish to your own custom domain or to your WordPress page
  • Snazzy AI: a newly acquired tool that uses AI to help you write high-converting copyno more writer’s block!

These features help back up Unbounce’s claim of being the best, all-rounded landing page builder.


However, some of these features do miss the mark.


The lead-gen form builder looks great on paper, but the functionality is extremely limited. So much so, that it might as well be regarded as insignificant.


And while mobile responsiveness is an essential feature, with Unbounce, you have to manually adapt each landing page for mobile use which takes time and effort.


Unbounce also has some effective and handy customization features:

  • Choose from 950 Google fonts
  • Add free images from Unsplash
  • Embed video anywhere on your page, including your page backgrounds
  • Prevent images from slowing down your pages by using high-quality SVG images and the auto image optimizer
  • Use your own custom code if you want to add some extra flair to your page
  • You can always ask the support team to help you write your personalized code — however, this might prove trivial as their support team isn’t the best

Unbounce has maxed out its arsenal of features, and some may see this as overwhelming.


Sometimes the simpler, the better especially for beginners.


Unbounce offers no website building functionality, so if you need a website, you might want to consider other options — like systeme.io!

2.2. Popups and Sticky Bars

Popups and Sticky Bars

Source: Unbounce

How are you supposed to catch your viewers’ attention and entice them to take action?


Popups are great at catching the reader’s eye by popping up a screen or form.


Sticky bars work more subtly — tickling the reader by placing a lingering bar with a call-to-action on the side that follows the reader as they scroll.


To build your popups and sticky bars, Unbounce offers you the same building features as with the landing pages, such as a drag-and-drop element, plus loads of templates.


On top of that, you also get access to some features that will make your popups pop like a balloon and your sticky bars stick like fresh honey:

  • Two-step opt-in form: turn any button, image, or link into a popup form
  • Triggers: choose exactly when your popups and sticky bars are triggered
  • Targets: decide who sees what by targeting by URL, referring URL, location, and cookies
  • Schedules: ensure your popups and sticky bars stay relevant and align with your seasonal campaigns

This popup and sticky bar builder gives Unbounce an advantage over other landing page builders who mostly don’t have this as a separate feature.


However tempting it may be, you don’t want to go crazy with this feature and overwhelm your visitor with offers.


In fact, putting multiple offers on your landing page can reduce your conversion by 266%.


You want to use it wisely and in moderation.

2.3. Dynamic Text Replacement and Accelerated Mobile Pages

Dynamic Text Replacement and Accelerated Mobile Pages

Source: Unbounce

Two other notable features are the Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR) and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which play a major role in search engine optimization (SEO).


SEO plays an integral part in getting more traffic to your site by increasing your ranking on organic search results — leading to more conversions.


DTR allows you to personalize your copy in your PPC ads, plus match them to your landing pages.


This makes your landing pages more relevant to hook different viewers onto your site, enticing them to take action and convert, plus increasing your search engine ranking.


Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) also improves your SEO by boosting your pages’ loading time on mobile devices.


Conversion rates drop by 4.42% for every extra second it takes a page to load, with most people abandoning a page after 3 seconds.


Mobile pages can take 5 times longer to load — can you see where the problem comes in?


Unbounce counters this with their AMP which uses simplified HTML templates, allowing your mobile page to load almost instantly.


These seem like very helpful features, but they’ll only help you if your plan is above the cheapest plan.


If you’re a small business on a tight budget, Unbounce deems you unworthy of these features — another important thing to consider.

2.4. A/B testing

A/B testing

Source: Unbounce

A/B testing is an indispensable feature of a landing page builder.


While Unbounce’s A/B testing is unlimited, it’s also exempt from their cheapest plan entirely.


Their A/B testing does work pretty well (for those that can use it).


Just duplicate a page, edit it, activate it as a variant, and voilá!


You can also adjust the flow of traffic to each variant — whether it’s 50/50 or 80/20, for example.


A/B testing works great with Smart Traffic™ — an Unbounce original!

2.5. Smart Traffic™

Smart Traffic™

Source: Unbounce

Why try to optimize your page manually and submit to human error when you can let a specialized AI algorithm do it for you?


From the second your website starts receiving traffic, Smart Traffic™ gathers data and starts optimizing after only 50 visits!


It looks at your visitors’ attributes and sends them to the best possible landing page, leading to more conversions.


This machine-learning is proving to be more accurate than any human-powered test.


All you have to do is:

  • Turn Smart Traffic™ on
  • Create your variants that Smart Traffic™ can choose from
  • Publish your landing pages and let the traffic flow
  • Sit back, let Smart Traffic™ optimize, and watch the conversions rise

This is an incredible feature, raising Unbounce’s credibility.


Unfortunately, this is yet another feature that’s not found on the cheapest plan.

2.6. Integrations

Integrations

Source: Unbounce

Unbounce’s list of integrations goes on and on.


They can be split into 3 categories:

  • In-app: these are built into Unbounce for effortless use, including tools like WordPress, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign
  • Zapier: with a Zapier account, you get instant access to 60+ helpful integrations, including Slack, Gmail, Hubspot CRM, and Excel
  • Compatible: these tools aren’t built-in, but you can copy and paste custom scripts over to your Unbounce pages and includes Google Ads, Facebook, Kissmetrics, and Uberflip

If you know which tools want to use, and you have the budget to pay for an abundance of tools — then this looks like a good option.


If you’re like most business owners who are running on limited time, money, and resources and can’t afford to pay for an abundance of tools — you might want to reconsider.


Doesn’t an all-in-one platform sound like a much better option?


One with all the tools you need for one price, or better, for free?

2.7. Reports and Analytics

Reports and Analytics

Source: Unbounce

What’s a landing page builder without an extensive reports and analytics feature?


This is where Unbounce Conversion Intelligence™ supposedly comes in.


Unbounce boasts that this feature is a fundamental change in how you approach marketing.


It combines marketing intelligence and artificial intelligence to form one really smart machine.


You can get insights into your landing page, on top of helping you create and optimize your landing page.


While this feature has the best intentions, unfortunately, it doesn’t follow through.


The insights may be smart, but they’re incredibly limited, only supplying the basic metrics.


If you’re looking for a bit more, your only option may be to integrate with Google Analytics.


But even this has been proven to be difficult and unreliable.

Overall, we aren’t very impressed with Unbounce’s reports and analytics.

2.8. Support

Support

Landing page builders need to establish effective support options that prevent customers from getting lost within the sea of features.


Here’s a list of Unbounce’s main support features:

  • Chatbot: this is always ready to help you navigate your way through the site and the building process
  • Blog and marketing resources: this provides an extensive catalog of conversion tips, marketing guides, and updates in the landing page world
  • Landing Page Basics and Examples: beginners get an easy 10-step guide on how to build a landing page, plus some great examples to get them inspired
  • Help center: you can find technical articles to answer all your nitty-gritty questions
  • Community: here you connect and discuss everything marketing with experts and beginners alike

Additionally, you can phone, email, and live chat with the support team between 1 am - 8 pm on weekdays, but only email from 9 am - 9 pm on weekends.


These restrictions extend to the chatbot as well.


But what happens when your landing pages go down late into the night or early in the morning?


Though their 99% uptime contests this issue, it certainly is an issue for some users.

2.9. Extras

account management and security

Source: Unbounce

Two final features worth discussing — account management and security.


You can have unlimited users for your account, with a single sign-on (SSO), plus give every team member access.


As an agent, you can manage multiple clients, copy pages between clients, archive or transfer accounts, and export your clients’ leads to a CSV file.


Audit logs and version control are also available.


Unbounce’s security is iron-tight.


Most importantly, it’s GDPR compliant, has automatic SSL encryption, and two-step authentication.


With this comes data privacy, password security, auto-session timeouts, domain protection, and user permissions.


Now that we’ve rounded up all of Unbounce’s features, it’s time to ask the big question — how much is this going to cost you?

3. Pricing Plans

Unbounce Pricing Plans

Source: Unbounce

If not for its landing pages, Unbounce is known for its pricing.


Unbounce is notoriously known for its high prices, offering four plans.


All plans come with unlimited landing pages, popups, and sticky bars.


Let’s break down each of them to see if you’ll get bang for your buck.


The main differences can be seen above. However, there are few more features separating these plans:

  • The Launch Plan comes with 2 users
  • The Optimize Plan comes with unlimited users, Smart Traffic, A/B Testing, and DTR
  • The Accelerate Plan comes with everything in the Optimize Plan, plus AMP and advanced targeting and scheduling
  • The Scale Plan offers practically the same features as the Accelerate Plan

Unbounce also offers the Concierge Plan where you can cater your plan to your business, plus get a 1-on-1 onboarding and training program.


To take it for a test drive, you can sign up for their 14-day free trial.


These prices might be justified if Unbounce offered every tool your business needed.


Instead, you have to pay these soaring prices, plus more on every other tool needed to run your business.


Can you see how this starts to wrack up?

4. Pros and Cons

Pros and Cons

You’ve been given a tsunami of information, so let’s put it into something simple and easy to understand — what we like and what we don’t.

Pros

  • Easy-to-use landing page builder
  • Easy-to-use landing page builder
  • Mobile-friendly pages
  • No coding skills required
  • Smart Traffic™ and A/B testing
  • Extensive integrations
  • Impressive security

Cons

  • You have to manually adapt your pages to mobile pages
  • The extensive landing page builder features can be overwhelming
  • A lot of users ask for a wider variety of templates
  • No A/B testing, Smart Traffic™, or Dynamic Text Replacement in the cheapest plan
  • Support is only offered between limited hours
  • Limited reports and analytics
  • Unless you’re a large corporation, the prices are out of your budget’s reach
  • No website-building feature

There are valid points on either side of the scale. The question is — in which direction does it weigh for your business?


For us, the price is far past the point of reasonability, especially for a tool that only covers a fraction of your business’ needs.


That’s why we recommend systeme.io!

5. Unbounce alternative — systeme.io

Systeme.io logo

Source: systeme.io

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing platform where you can run your entire online business — no need for countless integrations and extra tools!


This platform is perfect for beginners! It has all the tools you’ll need while still keeping it simple.


Plus, its price is an added bonus!

5.1. Features

Let’s take a look at systeme.io’s key features:

As you can see, systeme.io can basically do everything.


Now prepared to be shocked at how much this will cost you!

5.2. Pricing plans

Systeme.io Pricing plans

Source: systeme.io

Yes, you saw that right — systeme.io offers a forever-free plan.


You’ll never be forced to upscale like with those pesky 14-day free trials.


Click here for a detailed look at what each of the 4 plans can offer you.


The contrast with Unbounce’s prices is strikingly obvious.


Unbounce’s cheapest plan is only slightly cheaper than systeme.io’s most expensive plan.


If you still aren’t convinced, check out what other people are saying on our testimonials page!

6. Conclusion

It’s hard to deny that Unbounce isn’t a great landing page builder.


It’s had a lot of time to perfect its product with its vast variety of features and innovative ideas.


But is it the best?


It really depends on the needs of your business and your budget.


For most, the asking price is just too high, especially with what you’re getting.


So why not go for a cheaper tool that offers you more?


Create your free systeme.io account today and set your business on a trajectory towards success!

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