Leadpages is a landing page builder that enables you to design professional-looking landing pages to improve your website experience or generate leads for your business or blog. At the beginning of my career, landing page builders like Leadpages didn’t exist.

The only way marketers and online business owners could make custom, high-converting landing pages was with the help of engineers and designers.

Landing pages today are different...

Today, even I can make some decent looking landing pages that encourage my users to take an action!

Great landing page software should make your life stupid simple. The best solutions:

• Have a clean and intuitive user interface, so you can create pages fast
• Are drag-and-drop (no code)
• Have integrations with tools like Mailchimp, Salesforce, Marketo, Zapier, etc.
• Have collaboration features in order to work across teams
• Allow you to publish your pages to your website quickly and easily
• Should be fairly-priced

I’ve used landing page software since it launched in 2012. For the last three years I’ve used Leadpages' competitor, Instapage.

Instapage is super simple, has plenty of out-of-the-box templates and it integrates with any other tool I’ve ever needed.

So when I finally decided to review Leadpages, I had to put down my Instapage biases and give it a fair review. I did that and took Leadpages for a spin.

Starting with Leadpages

When you begin sign up with Leadpages, you choose a URL for your landing pages to live on — a subdomain of lpages.co. Naturally, I chose growthmarketingpro.lpages.co.

After registering you are asked to choose a template for your first landing page.

I chose “Free E-book Opt-in Page” template and dove into the editor.

All landing page software has an editor. This is where you will build your landing page creations.

Maybe I’m a snob (definitely am) but I found the user interface to be very average.

One of the reasons I love Instapage is that the editor is very sleek and intuitive. Still though, I found the Leadpages editor relatively easy to navigate. The editor has a few key features: widgets, page layout, page styles and page tracking.

The features I liked most about LeadPages

When you’re using landing page software, you often have a very specific need, like:

• Capturing email leads
• Promoting an event
• Selling products
• Showcasing a product with a beautiful landing page

So it’s important that your landing page generator is able to do some pretty table stakes things like:

• create forms for lead capture
• insert text and images
• integrate with some tools you might use for email marketing or CRM
• and a lot of other stuff

I played around with nearly every feature in Leadpages, keeping all of my use cases in mind. I liked a lot of what I saw!

Good landing page software has plenty of drag-and-drop widgets that allow you to add cool features to your page — like text, forms, images, videos, etc. These are the bones that build your page into a masterpiece. Leadpages has some great widgets. The three I liked the best:

1. A countdown timer widget! Have you ever been to a website with a countdown timer prompting you to act fast save the date for an event? Leadpages has a feature that allows you to drag and drop a countdown timer on your page.
2. Progress bar widget: progress bars convert users. It’s a fact. So if you’re building a landing page with several pages in succession — like a signup flow — you should drop this widget in.
3. Checkout widget! This is my favorite feature in all of Leadpages. It’s a drag-and-drop widget that allows you to take payment. This is something neither Unbounce or Instapage has.

I like the analytics dashboard. When you make a landing page and start directing web traffic to it, you will want to see how many people view the page and maybe how many fill out a form or click a button. Leadpages allows you to view all of this. Good landing page software should have an analytics dashboard so you can understand how users are behaving on your pages.

Features I didn’t like

There was some stuff I didn’t like.

1. I had trouble getting past the user interface. It looks like it’s 10 years old. It’s difficult to build your most beautiful landing page creation in an editor that isn’t so pretty itself.
2. Mobile: I cannot find a mobile editor. I have no idea what my Leadpage creation looks like on mobile until I physically take out my iPhone and navigate to my page. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see it anywhere!
3. Publishing pages: landing page software should let you publish your creations to your own website. I don’t want my page living on an lpages.co domain forever. After some serious searching I finally figured out how to publish a page to WordPress. But it doesn’t appear there’s any option for publishing easily to any other platform.
4. Integrations: Leadpages is a little light on integrations. There is an integration with Mailchimp, which covers my largest use case — sending leads I capture to my email list in Mailchimp, triggering emails to these subscribers. But there aren’t many more.
5. Blocks: Instapage allows you to drag blocks onto your landing page to create new sections. If you look at most landing pages, there are natural breaks in the page that feature different colors, topics or designs. Instapage’s “Instablock” solution makes it easy to create more complex, scrollable, engaging pages. This PlushCare landing page below illustrates.

Leadpages pricing

The pricing for Leadpages is good. Very good.

I chose the $48/month Professional plan for my trial.

The prices are lower than Instapage and Unbounce.

Conclusion on Leadpages

Leadpages is a good product. For those looking for landing page generator to make simple landing pages to capture leads or advertise a product, Leadpages is just fine.

However, if you care about beautiful designs, Leadpages isn’t your tool.

I think the suite of design widgets, fonts and methods of manipulating pages are too limited to make top notch landing pages.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive landing page generator to make rudimentary designs and capture leads, Leadpages is just fine.

For my money, I would choose Instapage every time. Leadpages misses the mark on design, mobile editing, integrations with other tools and publishing pages on other domains. It’s a fine tool, but it’s inferior to Instapage. If you’re willing to shell out a bit more per month for a better product, go with Instapage.