Head-to-head
Kartra vs SamCart
Pick SamCart when the cart is the bottleneck. Pick Kartra when email, courses and affiliate tools are part of the work.
Quick answer
Pick Kartra if you want pages, email, checkout, memberships and affiliates on one login and will actually use most of the bundle; pick SamCart if checkout conversion, order bumps and one-click upsells are the bottleneck and you already have (or do not need) a separate email platform.
You are down to two products. Kartra is a marketing account with a cart inside it. SamCart is the checkout. Bumps and upsells sit on a higher plan.
See Kartra's plan tiers before you treat Essentials as the bill you will actually pay.
Side by side
The two tools you are choosing between, plus one more worth knowing if you run paid ads.
| Tool | Free trial | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Kartra | 14 days | Established coaches and creators who want pages, email, checkout and memberships in one account |
| SamCart | 7 days | Sellers whose bottleneck is the checkout |
| ElasticFunnels | 14 days, no card | Teams running paid traffic |
What you are really choosing between
You want the payment taken, and you want to know what else that login is supposed to do on Monday morning.
Kartra keeps pages, funnels, email and SMS, checkouts, courses, calendars, a helpdesk and affiliates in one account. The cart is one module in that set. Its checkout page lists post-sale upsells, downsells and bumps, along with mobile pay and Klarna through Stripe. The same page says the current checkout loads 50% faster than the version before it. That speed figure is Kartra's.
SamCart's homepage describes a digital business platform aimed at checkout conversion, subscriptions and pages built with AI. It says the checkout was built from $8 billion in transaction data. That figure is SamCart's claim, printed on the homepage. On the pricing page, Core includes unlimited pages, products and checkouts, the courses app, cart abandonment and one team seat. Upsells and bumps are listed under Pro, with A/B testing, Subscription Saver, the Affiliate Center, an API and third-party processors.
A Kartra user on r/EcommerceWebsite describes the upsell path in practical terms. They pick the page design in Kartra and stack upsells and downsells in any order. They group SamCart with Systeme.io and ThriveCart as carts that offer preset ways to wire an upsell, and they call those paths limited. The same person says the extra control is harder to learn if you wanted a step-by-step checkout.
On r/digital_marketing, someone weighing order-upgrade carts calls this style of checkout plain and adequate. That is a comment on the cart itself. Whether a bump is even switched on depends on the plan, which the pricing page settles.
SamCart's pricing feature list covers pages, checkout, courses and integrations. A broadcast tool is not named there. If the list and the sequences already live in another product, that gap is a bill you already pay. If they do not, Kartra Starter is the plan where unlimited email and SMS are included.
Both vendor pages aim this software at digital products, courses, coaching and subscriptions. Core still includes a courses app, so a file or a lesson can be delivered from the cart account. Kartra's course allowance is a single course on the entry plan and unlimited courses from Starter.
Where each one wins and loses
Kartra
What works
- One platform genuinely replaces the stack. You get pages and funnels, email and SMS, checkout, memberships, courses, a calendar, a helpdesk and an affiliate program under a single login. They share one database, so a sale and its follow-up email stay on the same customer record. Reviewers single out the detailed analytics and how convenient built-in affiliate management and payments are once everything sits in one place.
- Checkout and memberships are strong for selling knowledge. The checkout supports upsells, coupons and several payment processors, and the membership and course tools host your content and drip it out. For a coach selling a course or a membership, that is the core job done without plugins.
- No transaction fees on the main plans. Starter and the higher tiers charge 0% on sales. Essentials charges 5% on sales.
- The drag-and-drop builders, more than 100 ready-made campaigns, and Kartra AI let a creator publish a funnel, emails and a checkout in a few hours, without hiring a developer.
- You can try it before a long commitment. Kartra has a 14-day trial page and a 30-day trial page. A subscription payment can be refunded within 30 days. A card is required to create the account, and billing support says the trial fee is non-refundable.
What to watch
- Bugs across the builders are the top complaint. Long-term reviewers describe a page builder that malfunctions, with frequent logouts and glitches in the email, page and membership tools. It is usable, but expect rough edges, and some reviewers feel updates polish the surface while core problems linger.
- Getting a reply from a person is the slow part. Kartra's contact page offers an assistant at any hour, and you can be transferred to a person in that chat. The page lists no phone number. Trustpilot reviews through 2025 still describe chats that never start and tickets that take a day or longer.
- It is overkill for beginners. Kartra bundles eight to twelve tools. If you only need one or two, you still pay for the whole set and still have to learn your way around it. Reviewers repeatedly say beginners find it overwhelming. They point those readers toward simpler, cheaper tools. It pays off for established businesses that use most of the bundle.
- The entry plan offers very little and carries a fee. Essentials looks cheap, but it caps you at 500 contacts and 5 pages while charging a 5% transaction fee. Unlimited pages, zero transaction fees and video hosting start on Starter. Automations and affiliates start on Growth.
- Kartra hosts your pages, and those pages cannot be exported. Everything lives on Kartra's servers. If you leave, set aside time to rebuild the pages. Your contacts export as a CSV file, and your pages stay behind.
SamCart
What works
- Core covers unlimited pages, products and checkouts, plus the courses app, cart abandonment and one team seat.
- Pro adds upsells, bumps, A/B testing, Subscription Saver, the Affiliate Center, an API and third-party processors.
- SamPay's rate is printed on the pricing page for Core and for Pro, so the card fee is not a surprise at launch.
- Operators comparing checkout carts have described this style as plain and adequate.
What to watch
- Bumps, upsells and the affiliate center sit on Pro. Core is the cheaper plan, and those offers wait for the higher one.
- Broadcast email and automations are not on the pricing feature list, so the list lives in another subscription.
- A Kartra user groups SamCart with carts that only offer preset upsell paths, and calls those paths limited.
- Core includes a single team seat, which is tight the moment a second person needs to edit the cart.
What they cost
Match the plan you would still be using after the launch, not the cheapest sticker on each site.
SamCart Core is an unlimited checkout account: pages, products, the courses app and cart abandonment. It is a poor stand-in for a Kartra account you would use to send email and host a course, because the bump and the upsell are listed on Pro. Pro is also where A/B testing, Subscription Saver, the Affiliate Center and third-party processors appear. Yearly billing on Core advertises a discount.
Kartra's real fork is Essentials against Starter, then Starter against Growth. Essentials caps pages and products and keeps a percentage. A second product, or a page beyond that cap, belongs on Starter. Starter is the plan to compare when you sell more than one offer: unlimited pages, products and courses, unlimited email and SMS, video hosting and calendars, and the platform fee drops off. Growth is the step after that. Marketing automations, affiliate management, funnel simulation and helpdesk support join, and the contact allowance jumps.
Put Pro beside Starter when the same login has to send the mail. Put Pro beside Growth when that login also has to pay affiliates and run automations. Core has no bump. Essentials limits how many pages you can publish and still takes a cut.
Kartra's checkout FAQ says it does not charge transaction fees. The plans page still prints a fee on Essentials and lists none from Starter upward.
Paid Kartra plans list 14 days free, and the plans page advertises a 30-day money-back guarantee. The guarantee is a refund window after you have paid. SamCart's pricing page offers 7 days free.
| Kartra | SamCart | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Essentials $59/mo ($52 annual): 500 contacts, 5 pages, 1 product, 5% on sales | Core $79/mo. Yearly billing advertises 25% off |
| Working plan | Starter $119/mo ($99 annual), or Growth $229/mo ($189 annual) | Pro $199/mo on monthly billing |
| Bumps and upsells | Listed on the hosted checkout | Pro, with upsells |
| Unlimited email and SMS from Starter | Not named on the pricing feature list | |
| Affiliate tools | Affiliate management on Growth | Affiliate Center on Pro |
| Card rate | Klarna via Stripe | SamPay 2.9% + 30¢. Tax collection 50 bps on Core, 35 bps on Pro |
| Trial | 14 days free, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee | 7 days free |
A third option, if you run paid ads
Paid traffic changes the job. A team buying clicks on Meta, Google or TikTok needs the ad click, the order, the rebill and the refund on one timeline. A cart in one account and email in another still leaves someone reconciling exports to see which angle made the money.
ElasticFunnels is a funnel platform for teams that run paid traffic: affiliates, product vendors, agencies and ecommerce brands. Teams already buying ads look at it when the checkout and the test need to share a record. Variants rotate on the server under one campaign link, so Meta, Google and TikTok keep the learning already on that link. The checkout can take a bump, an upsell and a subscription. An AI builder can generate a page from a prompt or clone one from a URL. Sessions, orders, rebills and refunds share the timeline, and the CRM, automations and call center read it too.
Every feature is on every plan. The plans differ by page views, brands, domains, team seats and automation runs. Starter is $97 a month for 50,000 page views, Growth is $197 a month for 250,000, and Scale is $497 a month for 500,000. Paid yearly, those totals are $937, $1,891 and $4,771. Extra page views are billed. The account stays on its current plan. Bot, datacenter and test traffic is not counted. Revenue processed on ElasticFunnels' own checkout carries a 0.5% fee. That checkout charges through Stripe, NMI, PayPal, Klarna or Authorize.net. Sales you send to an outside checkout or a network are not charged the fee. A split across several merchant accounts is NMI only: each first sale is weighted across the merchant's NMI accounts, and the upsell and the rebill stay on the account that took the sale. Stripe, PayPal, Klarna and Authorize.net each connect as a single account.
The trial runs 14 days and asks for no card. Pages, funnels and a custom domain can be set up during the trial.
ElasticFunnels is newer than the platforms it competes with, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against. Until you run real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word for it. Independent coverage is still thin because the product only dates back to 2023. That limits how far the split tests and the attribution can be checked before your own traffic is in the account. The pages, the checkout and the CRM can be used while you check those claims on your own traffic.
Between these two, SamCart is the default when the sale happens on the cart and the email platform already has a home. Override it for Kartra Starter when that same login has to send the mail and host the course. Override it for Kartra Growth when affiliates and automations have to live there too.
My take. A Kartra subscription used only as a cart is the expensive way to buy a checkout. SamCart Core, bought because you expected upsells, is the cheap way to buy the wrong tier. Decide which of those mistakes you are closer to, then use the free window on that product before a live offer moves.
Our default pick
SamCart
SamCart Pro is the checkout to run when bumps, upsells and Subscription Saver are what you are paying for. Core is the wrong plan if those offers are why you showed up.
Frequently asked questions
Does SamCart include email?
Which plan includes a bump at checkout?
Which plans are a fair price comparison?
Can I run Kartra and SamCart together?
How do the free periods differ?
Is the upsell path the same on both?
Who should look past both?
What we read about Kartra
From Kartra
- https://kartra.com/
- https://kartra.com/feature/funnel-mapper-simulator/
- https://kartra.com/feature/shopping-cart-software/
- https://kartra.com/plans-and-pricing/
- https://support.kartra.com/en/articles/15368928-intro-to-integrations
Other sources
7 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context.
- [r-eco-vs-tc] Kartra vs ThriveCart on Reddit
- [k-vs-tc-upsell] Kartra upsell notes on Reddit
- [k-pricing-page] Kartra Plans and Pricing
- [tp-chat-2025-04] Kartra reviews on Trustpilot
- [tp-hours-2025-01] Kartra reviews on Trustpilot, Canada
- [tp-ticket-2025-01] Kartra reviews on Trustpilot, Canada
- [capterra-support] Kartra vs Builderall on Capterra
What we read about SamCart
From SamCart
Other sources
4 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context.
If the buyers are coming from ads, open ElasticFunnels and run one campaign link through the checkout before you judge the test.
Related reading
The Kartra review covers the bundle, and the Kartra pricing guide puts every tier on one page. If the other name on your list is a course platform, a funnel builder or an email tool, read Kartra vs Kajabi, Kartra vs ClickFunnels or Kartra vs ConvertKit (Kit). For a paid-traffic team weighing Kartra, read ElasticFunnels vs Kartra and the ElasticFunnels pricing page. If you have already ruled Kartra out, the Kartra alternatives page ranks what people switch to. Other matchups are on the comparison hub. The ranked list covers the best funnel tools for startups.
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