Russell Brunson Is a G. His Software Is a 3 Out of 10.

Let me get something out of the way before I take this thing apart: I have real respect for Russell Brunson.

I'll crack a joke about him now and then, and the internet marketing crowd is an easy target. But as a founder? The man is a G. He bootstrapped ClickFunnels to $100 million in annual recurring revenue with no venture capital. Zero. He mastered one-to-many selling in a way most founders, me included, are still trying to learn. I started running a webinar partly because I watched what he could do from a stage. His grip on distribution is genuinely masterful.

This review is not about the man. It's about the product. And the product is a 3 out of 10.

Full disclosure: I have nostalgia for it

When I first started this company, I built my very first client website on ClickFunnels. Yes. Me. I'll admit it.

I did not know what I was doing. It wasn't even a funnel. It was a regular website jammed into a funnel builder, with a GoHighLevel form stitched onto the call-to-action button like a patch on a pair of jeans. It was the most atrocious thing you've ever seen. But it was live, a real business was using it, and I learned a lot from how bad it was.

So I'm not reviewing this from a distance. I've built on it, I've maintained it, and I've inherited client sites that were built on it. Here's what I found.

1. It's bad at SEO, and it won't let you fix that

I'll keep this simple. SEO is how Google decides whether to show your site when someone searches for what you do. A handful of basics matter a lot: your H1 tag (the main headline Google reads to understand the page), your meta tags, your Open Graph tags (the stuff that controls how your link looks when it's shared on social).

ClickFunnels barely lets you touch any of it. You get a shallow layer of control and the rest is sealed off. A client site I inherited on ClickFunnels barely ranks for anything, and there's not much I can do about it from inside the tool. It's like being handed a race car with the hood welded shut.

2. It's slow and clunky

Quick explanation for the non-technical crowd. A script is a little chunk of code a page loads to make something happen, a popup, a tracker, an animation. One or two are fine. ClickFunnels pages load a pile of them, and every one is a little extra weight the visitor's phone has to drag before your page shows up. Stack enough of them and the whole thing feels like it's wading through mud.

The editor itself isn't much better. It's a drag-and-drop builder that fights you. And mobile is where it really falls apart: what you see in the mobile preview is not what shows up when you actually load the page on a phone. So you tweak it in preview, publish, check your phone, and it's different. Repeat until you give up.

3. Everything around the pages is annoying too

Managing DNS through it (pointing your domain at your site) is a headache. The API, which is how other software talks to ClickFunnels, is very limited, so wiring it into anything real is a struggle. And the jump from ClickFunnels 1.0 to 2.0 was confusing enough that it threw me for a loop, and I do this for a living. I can only imagine what it did to a normal business owner.

4. The AI problem

Here's the one that actually matters long term.

Let me be clear, because I've said it loudly before: AI websites suck if you can't build the backend. A pretty page with nothing wired behind it is a brochure, not a business tool.

But the thing ClickFunnels sold for a decade was "you don't need a developer, drag and drop your funnel." That was the moat. And with AI and vibe coding, you can now describe a funnel and have it in seconds, instead of wrestling a clunky editor for an afternoon. The one thing ClickFunnels made easy is now easy everywhere. When your whole pitch is convenience and something else becomes more convenient, that's not a feature gap. That's a moat draining in real time.

It's not disappearing tomorrow. Too many people are locked in, and Russell will keep selling it better than anyone could. But it has lost a good chunk of what made it defensible.

The score: 3 out of 10

It's not complete garbage. I reserve that for Microsoft Power Automate, which earned a 2.5 and my promise to never touch it again. ClickFunnels clears that bar. It works. Pages publish. People have made real money on it, and I built my first client site on it, so I can't pretend otherwise.

But it's slow, it's clunky, it's outdated, it hides the SEO fundamentals you need to actually win, and the thing it was best at just got commoditized. If it were a lot cheaper I could see the value math working for some people. At today's pricing, it's a 3.

Respect to the founder. Pass on the product.