ClickFunnels vs Shopify: Funnel Builder or Store Platform?

ClickFunnels and Shopify both take money online, but they start from different objects. ClickFunnels starts from a funnel: a sequence of pages that walks one buyer toward one offer. Shopify starts from a store: a catalog, a cart and a checkout that serve many products across several channels. Which one fits depends less on the feature list than on what you sell, how many things you sell, and where your customers already are.

Funnel Builder vs Store Platform: What Each One Is

ClickFunnels' pricing page lists sixteen apps under "Included for free in every plan": Landing Pages, Survey Workflows, Countdown Funnels, Courses, Community, Store, Email, Automations, Message Hub, Appointments, Opportunities, Analytics, Discounts, Payments AI, Short Links and Affiliate Center. The plan-by-plan table on the same page marks Countdown Funnels, Automations and Appointments from Scale up and Affiliate Center from Optimize up, so the page contradicts its own heading. ClickFunnels' homepage leads with its funnel builder and lists Store as one of its apps.

Shopify starts from the catalog instead. There is no restriction on how many products a store sells, the same store can sell in person through Shopify POS and to other countries through Markets, and its checkout and payments are built in. Funnel-style pieces, such as a dedicated landing page or an upsell after payment, are things you add to a Shopify store; the section on building the funnel inside Shopify shows which are native.

If your offer is a course or a membership rather than goods, the real choice may be a course platform against a store, not ClickFunnels against Shopify; our guide to selling courses on Shopify weighs when a course platform is the better tool.

ClickFunnels or ClickFunnels Classic: Which One This Compares

ClickFunnels runs two products side by side, with separate logins: ClickFunnels, which parts of its help center still call ClickFunnels 2.0, and ClickFunnels Classic. Prices, apps and payment rules in this article are for the current product unless a sentence names Classic. If you created a 2.0 account on or after January 18, 2026, the feature that links it to a Classic account is not available to you.

Classic has not been retired. Its help center keeps a ClickFunnels Classic pricing chart updated on July 31, 2026, and that page still invites you to sign up for Classic today, so Classic is still offered, at least according to its own help center. With both versions on sale, when a review tells you ClickFunnels connects to Shopify, check which ClickFunnels it means.

How Much Does ClickFunnels Cost Compared With Shopify?

The two price ladders are not like for like. A ClickFunnels plan includes the funnel builder and companion apps that grow in number on higher plans; a Shopify plan buys the store and its checkout, and the upsell step of a funnel comes from an app. Compare what you would actually use, not the headline numbers.

ClickFunnels plans

Every plan includes funnels, courses, community, email, a store and Payments AI; up the ladder rise the caps on workspaces, team members, contacts, monthly emails, courses and stores. Launch costs $97 a month on monthly billing, so the cheapest way into a ClickFunnels store is a single store on Launch.

Take the yearly total from ClickFunnels' pricing help page, which lists annual prices, rather than multiplying the per-month annual figure by twelve: the plan card prints that figure rounded and states only the yearly saving. Dominate has no monthly option at all, and its plan card offers a demo booking beside the sign-up button.

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and ClickFunnels adds a 30-day money-back guarantee after the trial ends, 44 risk-free days in total by its own count. The plan cards mark unlimited funnels as a "Limited Time" offer, so don't build a plan around that line lasting. Older accounts may still sit on a legacy plan: ClickFunnels says it changed its pricing structure in June 2025 and that legacy accounts can keep their plan or move to a new one.

Shopify plans

Shopify Basic is $39 a month, or $29 a month billed yearly; Grow is $105 and Advanced $399 a month on monthly billing, in USD. The full breakdown of plans and the costs around them is in our Shopify pricing guide.

The plan buys the store, the checkout and the sales channels, and the plan's card rate sets what each order costs to process, which the next section works out. The upsell step after payment comes from a post-purchase app rather than the subscription; the section on building the funnel inside Shopify shows which pieces are native and which are apps.

Who Processes the Payment, and What Each Order Costs

On a funnel or a store, the buyer's card is charged by a payment processor, and the processor's rate is the cost you pay on every order. The platforms differ in which processors they let you use and in whether they add a charge of their own.

How ClickFunnels takes payment

ClickFunnels' help center names Payments AI as the recommended payment processor. Through it you can take payments on Payments AI's own gateway or connect Stripe, PayPal, NMI, Coinbase and Klarna, though Coinbase and Klarna don't work with the ClickFunnels Checkout element. New workspaces connect Stripe through Payments AI, and a direct Stripe connection is available on request from ClickFunnels Support. Signing up for Payments AI is free; transaction and gateway fees apply once it processes payments.

On its own cut, ClickFunnels is explicit. Its pricing FAQ answers "Does ClickFunnels take a percentage of my sales?" with a plain no, and its payments documentation puts it this way:

The rate table under that sentence lists Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30 and Payments AI's base rate at the same 2.9% + $0.30, with Stripe's billing, invoicing and tax add-ons priced on top; Payments AI's full tariff sits on a separate policy page. One default matters on Stripe: existing direct Stripe installations create a Stripe invoice for every order, while new Stripe installations start with Direct Payments on for one-time orders. On an existing installation you can switch one-time purchases to Direct Payments and skip the 0.4% Stripe Invoicing charge; subscriptions and payment plans always run through Stripe Invoices.

PayPal takes only PayPal Business accounts, works with the newer Checkout element, and has no sandbox mode for test payments.

How Shopify takes payment

Shopify's own processor, Shopify Payments, charges per online card sale by plan for standard US cards: 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced and 2.25% + 30¢ on Plus. International cards, issued in a different country or region than your business, add 1% on every plan.

Card payments through Shopify Payments carry no Shopify fee on top; on stores created on or after May 12, 2025, the part of an order paid with store credit or gift cards carries the third-party fee even with Shopify Payments, except on POS orders, as our answer on third-party fees on gift card and store credit payments explains.

The extra cost appears when you keep another provider. Shopify's pricing page, read in October 2026, lists a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus when a third-party provider accepts the customer's payment, and it comes in addition to whatever that provider charges. Shopify says the fee covers a secure checkout platform and the integration with external payment providers.

Here ClickFunnels is the less restrictive of the two: it takes no cut whichever processor you choose, while Shopify adds its own fee when you use another provider instead of Shopify Payments. If your business depends on a particular processor, price that fee in before you choose; it is one of the costs our review of Shopify's genuine disadvantages examines.

What Does a $100 Order Cost to Process on Each?

One order, worked once: a $100 sale paid online by card in the US, on the entry tier of each platform. The arithmetic is the percentage of the order plus the fixed part.

On the base rates, processing is a wash: $3.20 on either side, before the Stripe invoice charge in the second row. The other difference is the subscription, $97 against $39 a month, and on Shopify whether you keep Shopify Payments. Shopify's card rate also falls on higher plans, as the rates above show.

Physical Products: Where ClickFunnels Stops and Shopify Starts

ClickFunnels does sell physical goods. Its homepage pitches the Store app as a way to "build a professional store to sell physical products", and its help center documents inventory, shipping, tax and fulfillment. What decides the fit is where each of those stops.

What ClickFunnels handles for shipped goods

Run one product with flat or live-rate shipping and that list covers the job. The edges show as the catalog grows: stock is counted only for products built inside ClickFunnels, and within each shipping option checkout shows only the cheapest carrier rate, so faster delivery needs its own shipping option.

What Shopify brings to a growing catalog

If your plan is one product today and a range next year, the store side matters more than the funnel side. Shopify's documentation covers four things that grow with the catalog, and the last one is also a cost to plan for once sales pass the threshold.

Can You Use ClickFunnels With Shopify?

The answer depends on which ClickFunnels you run, and on how much of the link you need documented rather than improvised. What each side documents is set out below, version by version.

The documented route: Classic sells, Shopify ships

ClickFunnels' English help article on Shopify is written, by its own subtitle, for ClickFunnels Classic, and it splits the work between the two platforms in one sentence:

ClickFunnels Classic's help article has you create a custom app in the Shopify admin with Admin API access to products, orders and fulfillment, then give ClickFunnels Classic your store URL and that app's Admin API access token. Those admin-created custom apps are legacy custom apps: since January 1, 2026 you can no longer create new ones in the Shopify admin. A legacy custom app created before that date keeps working, and its Admin API access token can be revealed in the admin only once.

A custom app created now comes from the Dev Dashboard, and its access token can't be copied from the Shopify admin: a developer has to generate it, as our answer on how a developer generates that token explains. No source we read on October 22, 2026 says whether ClickFunnels Classic accepts a token generated that way. Either way the custom app is yours rather than an App Store listing, and ClickFunnels' own steps, in the article quoted above, follow the admin flow.

The English article we read does not describe importing products or inventory from Shopify, name a Shopify plan the connection needs, or say how Shopify treats the payment. You create the product in ClickFunnels and point it at the Shopify product by SKU.

Two more notes appear only in ClickFunnels' Spanish-language articles in the Classic help center, which don't name a product version in their text: the Shopify integration sends shipping information but does not accept payments, and each product ordered in the funnel is sent to Shopify separately. The same article recommends a single Shopify integration per account and points to Zapier for a second store.

Plan the domains as well. A domain or subdomain works with one platform at a time, ClickFunnels' help center says, so a domain connected to Shopify can't also serve ClickFunnels, and the funnel and the store need separate domains or subdomains.

What the current ClickFunnels documents

For the current ClickFunnels, no page we read in its English help center or on clickfunnels.com on October 22, 2026 describes a Shopify integration, meaning what it syncs, in which direction or what it needs (search boundary in the box above). Shopify appears there only in passing: in examples about connecting domains, in a webhook example, in the Supliful dropshipping article, and in the Zapier guide, which names Shopify among the apps Zapier can connect to ClickFunnels. Zapier is a general automation tool rather than a Shopify integration, so anything built on it is your own setup to maintain.

ClickifyPro is a third-party connector, not a ClickFunnels product

In our search of the Shopify App Store on October 22, 2026, the one ClickFunnels listing that came up was ClickifyPro for Clickfunnels, built by a third party. Its developer describes it as bringing ClickFunnels orders into Shopify and consolidating a customer's main purchase, order bump, upsell and downsell into a single order for fulfillment. On that date the listing showed one plan at $29 a month with a 30-day free trial, named both ClickFunnels 2.0 and ClickFunnels Classic, and dated its launch to October 7, 2022.

That description is the developer's, not ClickFunnels' or Shopify's. Before you send volume through it, place test orders that include an order bump and an upsell, and confirm on the listing which Shopify plan and permissions it needs.

Does Shopify charge its third-party fee on funnel orders?

Shopify's rule is written from the checkout's side. The fee applies when you use a third-party payment provider to accept customer payments, and it comes in addition to that provider's processing fees. It doesn't apply to POS orders or to manual payment methods: cash on delivery, bank deposits, checks, test orders, and draft orders marked as paid or pending. The Help Center states the scope of the rule this way:

A funnel order fits neither description cleanly. The payment was processed in ClickFunnels, and the order reaches Shopify through the Admin API, whose orderCreate mutation creates an order with customer information, line items and addresses; the transaction's gateway field is simply the name of the gateway the payment went through. Neither page mentions third-party transaction fees, and no Shopify page we read on October 22, 2026 says whether such orders carry one (see the box above).

Until Shopify answers that in writing, treat it as an open cost: push one real order through the connection, read the transaction-fee lines on your next Shopify bill, and ask Shopify Support before your volume depends on the answer. The cases where the surcharge does not apply are worked through in our guide to Shopify payment gateways.

The reverse direction: Shopify's checkout on a website built elsewhere

The other way to combine the two platforms keeps Shopify's checkout and moves only the page. The Buy Button sales channel is included in all Shopify plans and shows product pictures, descriptions and prices on another website while letting customers buy without leaving it; it needs a supported payment gateway, and Buy Buttons aren't compatible with apps from the Shopify App Store. Where the channel stops is mapped in our Buy Button guide. If you mean to place it on a ClickFunnels page, check it in the page Preview before you send traffic there.

Creator platforms raise the same question, and we answer it for one of them in can you sell physical products on Kajabi with Shopify.

Can You Build the Funnel Inside Shopify Instead?

If you already sell on Shopify, or the store side won the comparison, the main pieces of a funnel have Shopify equivalents. None of them is a funnel builder; together they cover the path from the ad to the upsell.

The landing page. On a compatible theme you can create a new template based on one that already exists to display particular pages differently, so an offer page gets its own layout; you can have up to 1,000 templates in total across products, collections, pages, blogs and blog posts. Building one is covered step by step in our landing page guide.

The upsell after payment. Shopify's checkout takes post-purchase apps that add customer surveys or upsell offers, and the Help Center says some apps that customize checkout are available from the Basic plan up. This is where Shopify asks more of you than ClickFunnels: the step is an app you install, not part of the plan, and our comparison of post-purchase upsell apps and custom builds prices the options.

The single-offer storefront. A funnel sells one thing at a time, and a Shopify store can do the same with a short catalog and a theme set up around one hero product, which our one-product store guide builds out.

The Bottom Line

At the base rates ClickFunnels lists for Payments AI and Stripe, and with Shopify Payments on Basic in the US, an online standard card payment costs the same 2.9% + 30¢, so the decision is not about processing. It is about what you sell today and what you expect to sell next year.

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