Ampfluence vs Kicksta: Is Ampfluence Worth All The Hype?

Instagram growth services like Kicksta and Ampfluence promise to grow Instagrammer’s follower counts. While there are many services that strive to achieve this goal, it can be tough to know which ones are the real deal.

In this article, we’re going to go behind the scenes and take an in-depth look at Kicksta and Ampfluence.

We’ll compare their sign-up process, features, targeting, reporting, pricing, and support and customer service to see whether these services can really help you grow your business. 

Creating An Account

The first thing you’ll do whether you’re using Kicksta or Ampfluence is sign up for an account. So, let’s take a look at what the account creation process looks like in each of them.

Ampfluence Signup

Ampfluence’s signup process is pretty straightforward. To get started, you just click the “Sign Up” button on the top right of its homepage:

From there, you’ll be able to select which plan you want to subscribe to. After that, you’ll simply need to checkout like you would for any other product you’d buy online:

And that’s that! Once you pay, your account will be set up. This process should be familiar to anyone who’s paid for a SaaS tool before. 

Kicksta Signup

Kicksta follows the same process as Ampfluence. To sign up, click the “Start my growth” button at the top right: 

You’ll be redirected to the plan selection page. After that, you’ll create an account and enter your Instagram username.

From there, you’ll select the focus of your goals with Kicksta and proceed to finalizing your plan selection and payment method. And voila – your 7-day free trial begins!

Features

Once you’re all finished setting up your account, you can start making use of Kicksta’s and Ampfluence’s follower-building features. 

Ampfluence Features

Ampfluence is not so much a tool as it is a mini-Instagram growth agency. Ampfluence focuses on a human connection: it advertises that there are no bots involved and all the growth is 100% human-powered. 

So, what exactly does Ampfluence do for you? Upon signup, you’ll have a consultation, during which you’ll discuss your audience. This will inform how Ampfluence performs its targeting. After that, the Ampfluence team will research what’s working with your target audience and identify accounts that other brands in your industry might follow. 

Once the strategy is set, Ampfluence begins engaging with other accounts through likes, comments and follows to grow your account. For an additional fee, Ampfluence will also schedule posts and create images for you. 

Kicksta Features

Kicksta uses artificial intelligence to engage with similar accounts in hopes that some of the people you engage with will follow you back. 

The process is quite simple: you start by providing Kicksta with a list of target accounts; these could be top competitors or ideal audience members. 

Kicksta will then engage with these accounts on your behalf. This engagement from your account will draw the attention of other Instagram users, causing them to take a look at your page. If you have high-quality content, then these users are likely to turn into followers.

Targeting

Targeting concerns how an Instagram growth service decides which users to interact with. If targeting isn’t precise, the service won’t get very far.

Ampfluence Targeting

When using Ampfluence, you’ll be relying on the people on the Ampfluence team to make targeting decisions. Unlike Kicksta, Ampfluence is not an app with a user interface, so you sacrifice some direct control for the potential benefit of having someone else make decisions for you. 

If the person running your account is experienced and skilled, this is a worthwhile trade-off. But unfortunately, there’s no way to tell before you give it a go.

Kicksta Targeting

Kicksta has a variety of filters that you can utilize when developing your account targeting in order to ensure that you are interacting with accounts that will provide you with optimal growth.

You can apply influencer and competitor targeting, along with account, hashtag, and location targeting to develop an ideal list of accounts for Kicksta to engage with on your behalf. Using these filters will lead to highly-specialized engagement, which is the most likely to generate Instagram growth.

Reporting

One of the most important parts of any marketing effort is the metrics that show you how you’re doing. Without seeing hard data, you won’t be able to tell if you’ve made any progress — or even gone in the completely wrong direction.

Ampfluence Reporting

Unfortunately, Ampfluence doesn’t provide any information about how its reporting works. Since the company is run more like an agency, it seems to provide a more hands-off approach, in which reports are considered internally.

For example, Ampfluence notes that its team will monitor what’s working to look for ways to improve and optimize its growth efforts. 

Ampfluence also advertises two levels of reporting: standard and custom. However, it doesn’t provide any information on what the difference between standard and custom reporting is.

Kicksta Reporting

To measure whether Kicksta is working, you need only rely on your follower count and Instagram’s built-in monitoring tools. Since you are in near full control of Kicksta’s targeting and growth efforts, you can change up your targeting settings if you see that you aren’t getting as many followers as you had hoped, if your new-follower rate is slowing down, etc. 

You can also see on your Kicksta dashboard how your target accounts are performing and how many new followers you have gained.

You can also see on your Kicksta dashboard how your target accounts are performing, how many new followers you have gained, and suggestions for new targets.

Pricing

The value of Instagram growth services comes from the time they can save you.

While you can manually grow your account by liking, commenting, and following other users, it’s a tedious task that can take up hours of your time. Because you can get the same results for free, Instagram growth services need to be priced so that you can make more money in your new free time than you spend on the service. 

Ampfluence Pricing

Ampfluence has three pricing tiers:

• Growth: Costs $249/month and includes:
  • An Average of 250+ Organic Followers
  • Targeted audience
  • Email support
  • No Hashtag Research
  • Standard Reporting
    
• Growth x2: Costs $349/month and includes:
  • An average of 500 organic followers
  • Targeted Audience
  • Priority Support
  • Hashtag research
  • Custom Reporting
    
• Growth & Content: Costs $1499/month and includes everything in Growth x2 plus:
  • 15 Social Media Posts ($279)
  • 15 Social Media Captions ($249)
  • 15 Social Media Posts Scheduled ($199)
    

One red flag to note with this service is that, despite putting a focus on the human connection, Ampfluence only offers email support for the first tier, and priority support (the details of which are unclear) is only available at the highest two tiers.

This is somewhat concerning given that the main benefit of Ampfluence over other services is that it’s powered by humans. 

Kicksta Pricing

Kicksta’s pricing is straightforward. There are three plans available: 

• Starter: Costs $69/month and includes:
  • No contract, cancel anytime
  • Organic Growth & Real Followers
  • Influencer & Competitor Targeting 
  • Account Targeting
  • Hashtag Targeting
  • Location Targeting
  • Follow/Unfollow
  • Whitelist & Blacklist
  • Automatic Whitelist
  • Like After Follow
  • Clean Home Feed
  • Analytics Dashboard
  • Low Growth Speed
    
• Advanced: Costs $129/month and includes everything in Starter plus:
  • Welcome DM’s
  • Story Likes
  • VIP Email Support
  • Gender Filtering
  • Targeting Suggestions
  • Medium Growth Speed
    
• Ultimate: Costs $219/month and includes everything in Advanced plus:
  • 2,000 Guaranteed Followers Per Month
  • Diversified Audience From Global Influencers
  • High Growth Speed

Interestingly enough, Kicksta’s pricing both undercuts Ampfluence’s and offers more detailed growth features.

Support And Customer Service

It’s inevitable that you’ll have questions when using a new service or software, so it’s important that you can easily reach someone to help you smooth out any kinks you encounter along the way. Here’s how Kicksta’s and Ampfluence’s customer service compare. 

Ampfluence Support And Customer Service

Despite its claim to fame as a human-powered service, Ampfluence doesn’t give all that many ways for you to actually get in touch with a real human. Unless you sign up for one of the highest-tier plans, you’ll only have access to email support.

After moving into the Growth x2 plan or the Growth & Content plan, you’ll gain access to priority support, but it’s not clear what that entails. 

Kicksta Support And Customer Service

With Kicksta, you’ll always have access to chat and email support 24/7, regardless of what plan you choose.

However, if you sign up with the Advanced plan or the Ultimate plan, you’ll unlock VIP email support, which will reduce response time and make it easier for you to get the help you need when you need it. 

Kicksta Vs Ampfluence: Which Should You Choose?

Kicksta and Ampfluence both hope to achieve the same goal but have very different ways of doing it. Kicksta lets users set their own targeting preferences to hone in on their audience, while Ampfluence puts that control in the hands of its internal team. 

While Ampfluence proudly advertises that it’s 100% human-powered, its features don’t seem to show that. Customer support doesn’t appear to be a priority, and the company’s strategies are a bit obscured due to the focus on the internal team. 

Kicksta forces users to get more involved in their own targeting but provides more customer support at a lower price. Additionally, the targeting process is very clear, unlike Ampfluence’s, which is somewhat shrouded in mystery.

Overall, Instagrammers will need to decide between a tool that speeds up their growth process while still giving them full control, or outsourcing the process entirely to someone who may or may not be able to do it better than you.