Comparison of GoHighLevel vs ActiveCampaign

GoHighLevel and ActiveCampaign are two popular software solutions among marketers and small business owners. Both promise excellent CRM, sales, and marketing tools. But which one to choose? This in-depth comparative article reveals the strengths and weaknesses of each platform to help you make the right choice.

We will review their key features, including website creation options, email and SMS marketing, automation tools, available integrations, customer service, and much more. We will also assess crucial aspects such as affordability, user-friendliness, and value for money to determine which solution best suits your needs.

Key Features

Before diving into the details, here’s a quick overview of the main strengths and weaknesses of each platform:

GoHighLevel

• Excellent value with unlimited features
• Comprehensive tools for funnel and website creation
• Powerful automation capabilities with AI
• Allows creating and selling courses/subscriptions
• Dated interface and steep learning curve

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ActiveCampaign

• Exemplary user-friendliness and helpful guides
• Strong for small email and SMS campaigns
• Many available integrations
• Limits the number of contacts and features
• Expensive at scale for large audiences

Pricing and Affordability

When it comes to pricing, GoHighLevel and ActiveCampaign take very different approaches. With GoHighLevel, you pay a fixed price every month and get full access to all features. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, charges separately for each module and limits certain key elements like the number of contacts, unless you pay a high price to lift these restrictions.

Specifically, GoHighLevel offers two plans:

• Pro Plan at $97/month
• Business Plan at $297/month

Both include all features with no limits and offer up to 500,000 and 1 million leads per month, respectively. A 17% discount is even offered for annual commitment.

On the ActiveCampaign side, the offer is more fragmented with a choice between:

• CRM alone starting at $9/month
• Automation (email and SMS) alone starting at $14/month
• Bundled CRM + Automation starting at $29/month

The catch is that all these plans severely limit the number of accessible contacts, respectively to 500, 1,000, and a maximum of 2,500. You have to spend a lot more beyond that… up to $1,306/month for the bundled plan with 50,000 contacts!

In short, GoHighLevel clearly wins in terms of budget by offering extensive features right from the start for an unlimited number of leads. Even at the highest price, ActiveCampaign severely restricts certain uses unless you break the bank…

Funnels, Websites, and Landing Pages

Creating attractive web pages is essential for converting your visitors. Let’s see what our two solutions offer.

GoHighLevel gives you access to an intuitive editor to design complete websites, sophisticated sales pages (funnels), or standalone landing pages. You save precious time thanks to its extensive library of conversion-oriented templates.

Regarding customization, you can easily insert interactive elements (popups, surveys, videos, etc.) and completely redesign the pages to your liking. The tool is highly versatile for generating e-commerce sites, blogs, registration pages, and many other formats according to your marketing goals.

With ActiveCampaign, you are limited to individual landing pages. It is impossible to create complete websites or sequences of automated pages. Its editor remains user-friendly with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and a handful of responsive templates suitable for mobile devices.

However, its capabilities are basic compared to the extensive range offered by GoHighLevel for building sales funnels or entire websites.

Templates

Nice templates make the task easier when creating pages or marketing campaigns. We give a slight advantage to ActiveCampaign in this regard.

Although GoHighLevel has a vast library of templates, many of them look alike or have typos/layout issues. You often need to adjust these templates before using them. The overall design also looks a bit outdated compared to current web trends.

ActiveCampaign’s templates are fewer in number but meet modern quality standards. They are perfect for simple pages or effective newsletters without requiring major modifications.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is essential for nurturing your audience, generating leads, and boosting your revenue. ActiveCampaign stands out in this regard.

Even though GoHighLevel includes a complete email editor, the interface appears a bit outdated, with a library of templates that can be improved.

However, the system is still powerful for creating sophisticated automated campaigns triggered by various user actions (sign-up, purchase, etc.).

ActiveCampaign offers a more streamlined experience for quickly designing beautiful newsletters, welcome sequences, transactional notifications, etc. The software guides you step by step with helpful contextual advice.

Combine this with a nice selection of responsive templates and proven split-testing tools, and you get a truly optimal email marketing solution.

SMS and Phone Marketing

Mobile notifications are a high-impact channel for capturing your prospects’ attention. And in this regard, GoHighLevel has decisive advantages.

First of all, the platform integrates highly advanced SMS and voice messaging features. You can enrich your campaigns with automated alerts sent to your prospects’ and clients’ mobile phones at strategic times.

The major advantage lies in the embedded conversational artificial intelligence. This allows you to create interactive SMS chatbots capable of qualifying leads, answering their questions, confirming appointments, and more, 24/7.

ActiveCampaign also offers SMS tools but on a smaller scale. You can integrate mobile messaging into your automated marketing scenarios, but it lacks conversational capabilities with natural language processing.

Automation

Automating your marketing and sales actions to the fullest becomes essential once you reach a certain audience threshold. And in this regard, GoHighLevel is unbeatable.

Thanks to its powerful workflow editor, you can orchestrate highly elaborate scenarios triggered by a multitude of trigger events from A to Z. For example, automatically sending a nurturing email sequence when a prospect downloads a whitepaper.

Admittedly, mastering this sophisticated tool requires some investment. But productivity gains quickly follow.

ActiveCampaign also offers quality automation capabilities, primarily focused on managing email campaigns. Its more intuitive interface speeds up the creation of recurring scenarios with predefined workflow templates.

However, the solution is less flexible and advanced than GoHighLevel’s custom automation engine.

Courses and Subscriptions

Monetizing courses or exclusive content through a subscription model can be lucrative. Only GoHighLevel allows this without the need for other tools.

Although it can be improved, GoHighLevel’s online course editor offers the essentials for creating comprehensive coaching modules. You can integrate videos, PDF files, additional web pages, etc., and protect access with a password.

These courses can be sold individually or through a recurring subscription site generating lasting passive income.

Unfortunately, ActiveCampaign does not offer any features to create and sell courses or subscriptions. You will need to subscribe to a third-party platform like Thinkific or Podia if this use case interests you.

CRM Tools

Having a centralized customer database is crucial for optimizing customer relations. In this regard, GoHighLevel once again takes the lead.

Unlike ActiveCampaign, which severely limits the number of importable contacts, GoHighLevel allows unlimited capacity due to its “flat” pricing strategy.

The platform also excels in analytics with extremely comprehensive reports on your prospects. The CRM module also helps automatically qualify and score your leads before directing them to appropriate conversion scenarios.

Although user-friendly, ActiveCampaign’s CRM appears limited in comparison in crucial aspects such as contact volume and advanced statistics.

Integrations

No software excels in all areas. Fortunately, integrations with third-party applications fill any potential gaps. And from this perspective, ActiveCampaign stands out.

Its open platform allows direct connections with over 900 external services! These include e-commerce tools (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.), marketing (Facebook Ads, MailChimp, etc.), payment (Stripe, PayPal, etc.), and project management (Trello, Asana, etc.), among others.

GoHighLevel also offers strategic integrations (CRM, web analytics, etc.) but to a much lesser extent. Fortunately, most essential needs are directly covered without requiring external gateways.

User Experience

Software ergonomics strongly influence team productivity. In this regard, ActiveCampaign undoubtedly takes the lead.

The clean interface, guided workflows, and rich tutorial offerings allow you to quickly grasp the essential features.

GoHighLevel, on the other hand, faces a steeper learning curve due to the density of available options. Expect a longer adaptation period to fully exploit its potential and master the intricacies of advanced automation.

Customer Service

Responsive after-sales service is essential when managing sensitive online activities. In this regard, both of our solutions hold up well.

GoHighLevel offers live chat with the option to switch to SMS exchanges in case of initial unavailability. Response times are reasonable without being exceptional. Email support is also efficient.

ActiveCampaign relies on an extensive knowledge base that answers most questions. For more complex requests, specialists take over via email or through a phone call back, depending on the urgency.

Overall, both brands demonstrate good responsiveness and quickly resolve the majority of issues.

Final Verdict

In the end, GoHighLevel emerges as the winner in many critical aspects. The platform excels, particularly due to its functional richness combined with an excellent value for money. It is primarily aimed at professionals with extensive needs, such as web agencies or complex marketing teams.

ActiveCampaign remains an option to consider for small organizations seeking an easy-to-use solution focused on email and simple SMS campaigns. However, its contact limits and restricted features quickly render it obsolete once a certain user threshold is crossed.

In summary:

• GoHighLevel for its unbeatable value for money and functional depth.
• ActiveCampaign for its ease of use in basic use cases.

We hope that this comprehensive overview of the respective strengths and weaknesses of GoHighLevel and ActiveCampaign enlightens you on the solution best suited to your business ambitions!