VERDICT: For us, GoHighLevel came out as the clear winner across the majority of categories with better value for agencies and business owners. Whereas ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform that any business can use to run better, automated email marketing campaigns.

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Looking for a GoHighLevel vs ActiveCampaign review?

We’ll compare both tools side-by-side so you can discover which is right for you.

If you’re an agency owner, you’ll find GoHighLevel useful. The new platform has a value proposition to help digital agencies get more leads and customers with an all-in-one marketing suite.

This post reviews both tools to help you discover the best fit for your business and the one that provides the best value for your money.

Let’s dive in and begin the GoHighLevel vs ActiveCampaign battle!

GoHighLevel Vs ActiveCampaign - Summary

GoHighLevel is an all-in-one marketing platform built for agencies and marketers to get more sales and customers online.


ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing and customer experience platform that provides you with powerful email marketing, automation, and CRM tools.

Take a look at this google trend graph below to get an idea of the relative popularity of these two tools over the year (2022):

gohighlevel vs activecampaign google trend graph

To keep you informed, we've attached the latest Google Trends graph for 2023, which clearly shows that GoHighLevel has surpassed ActiveCampaign in popularity and usage.

GoHighLevel Vs ActiveCampaign Google trends

GoHighLevel Vs ActiveCampaign - Side By Side Review

In the section below, we’ll take a look at how GoHighLevel compares to ActiveCampaign. I have created this section with a side-by-side format so you can compare both platforms based on their features, ratings, integrations, pricing, and more with ease.

NOTE: this side-by-side horizontal comparison layout below is better viewed on desktop, not mobile.

Go High Level Logo

GOHIGHLEVEL™

GoHighLevel is an all-in-one marketing automation platform built for agencies.

How we rated GoHighLevel

Overall Rating

Ease of Use

Value for Money

Pricing

Customer Support

Who is GoHighLevel for?

GoHighLevel is a SaaS product built with agencies in mind. The platform offers a ton of useful tools and functionality to run your marketing agency. With GoHighLevel, say goodbye to duct-taping multiple individual tools to run your agency. According to them, you’ll be able to replace dozens of tools such as ClickFunnels, Mailchimp,Teachable, WordPress, Pipeline, Calendly Hubspot, SalesForce, Woodpecker and many more.

Notable feature: integrated calendar, funnel, and lead follow-up system perfect for agencies.

GoHighLevel Pros and Cons

Pros

  • 14 day free trial
  • Full website, funnel, membership site system
  • CRM, SMS, marketing automation included
  • Native email marketing system
  • Import ClickFunnels funnels

Cons

  • Lack of good landing page templates
  • Overwhelming feature set
  • Not many integrations
  • Less educational material

GoHighLevel Pricing Plans

GoHighLevel pricing starts at $97/month - $297/month

Agency Starter Plan - $97/mo - setup only a single account for your client or agency and get all tools.

Agency Unlimited Plan - $297/mo - ability to create unlimited sub accounts for your clients and other businesses.

Agency Pro Plan (SaaS Plan) - $497/mo - resell HighLevel under your own brand as your own SaaS product.

What to know before you sign up:

Free 14 Day Trial Available

$1 Trial For 14 Days

No Credit Card to Start

Freemium Account

Monthly Subscription

Annual Discount

Cancel Anytime

30 Day Money Back Guarantee

GoHighLevel Features

Landing page builder

Visual editor

Landing page templates

Sales funnel templates

Complete page hosting

Mobile responsive pages

A/B Split Testing

Funnel builder

Share funnels

Custom webhooks

Email Auto-responders

Affiliate tracking software

Membership Sites

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Included subdomain

Use your own domain

Checkout forms, shopping cart

Full website builder

Video marketing tool

Customer Helpdesk

Calendar scheduling tool

Agency Portal

GoHighLevel Integrations

Editors note: GoHighLevel natively connects with few third-party tools but has a functional Zapier integration that allows you to integrate your favorite third-party apps seamlessly.

Zapier + Webhooks

Membership software

Checkout software

Analytics

Webinar software

SMS / Texting software

Bot software

Calendar tools

Custom integrations / API

+ many more

GoHighLevel Affiliate Program

Yes. The GoHighLevel affiliate program gives a 40% monthly recurring commission for every customer you refer.

Company Information

Owner / Founder: Shaun Clark

Location: USA

Customer Support: support@gohighlevel.com

Founded: 2016

Website: Visit Website

What we love about GoHighLevel

When it comes to running an agency, getting customers, and retaining them, GoHighLevel is a game-changer. You get built-in marketing tools for creating landing pages, sales funnels, and websites so you can capture leads easily. And on the back end, you get a CRM and tools to nurture your leads into customers. You can create custom, automated follow-up campaigns to engage your leads via multiple channels including voice calls, email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and more. What really stands out about HighLevel? The White Label pricing plan is a huge differentiator to its competitors.

ACTIVECAMPAIGN™

ActiveCampaign is an advanced email marketing automation tool.

How we rated ActiveCampaign

Overall Rating

Ease of Use

Value for Money

Pricing

Customer Support

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform with powerful automation capabilities, landing page creation tools, and CRM tools to send personalized messages to your audience, run incredible email marketing campaigns, nurture your email list and automate your marketing processes to save time. 

Who is ActiveCampaign for?

ActiveCampaign was built for individuals, small and large businesses, or companies to send better-automated emails, nurture their leads, and provide an incredible, optimized email experience. The platform comes with powerful automation tools to run automated email processes, save time, and make more money for your business. If you're looking for the best in email marketing, go with ActiveCampaign.

Notable feature: a ton of intelligent tools to run automated email marketing campaigns and grow your business online.

ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons

Pros
  • 14-day full trial
  • Best in class for email marketing
  • CRM is great for pipeline development
  • Affordable pricing for the value
  • Best email automation features
Cons
  • Clunky user interface and email editor
  • Not friendly to affiliate marketing links
  • Not beginner friendly
  • Customer service is not great on the "Basic" plan
activecampaign dashboard

ActiveCampaign Pricing - How much does it cost?

ActiveCampaign pricing options start at $39/month - $187/month

Lite Plan - $39/month - pay $29/mo (billed annually) and comes with basic email marketing features for 1000 contacts

Plus Plan - $70/month - pay $49/mo (billed annually) to get automation maps, built-in CRM, and custom audiences for 1000 contacts. If you want 2,500 contacts in this plan, you would have to pay $99/mo (billed annually).

Professional & Enterprise Plan - $187/month - pay $149/mo (billed annually)- unlimited and custom features with custome audiences for 2,500 contacts.

ActiveCampaign Annual Discount: You pay $29, $49, $149 per mo (billed annually) for each of the plans above respectively, price may go up with the increase in custom audiences.

ActiveCampaign Pricing Info

Free 14 Day Trial Available

Free Trial For 14 Days

No Credit Card to Start

Monthly Subscription

Annual Discount

Cancel Anytime

30 Day Money Back Guarantee

ActiveCampaign Features

Landing page builder

Visual editor

Landing page templates

Sales funnel templates

Complete page hosting

Mobile responsive pages

A/B Split Testing

Funnel builder

Share funnels

Custom webhooks

Email Auto-responders

Affiliate tracking software

Membership Sites

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Included subdomain

Use your own domain

Checkout forms, shopping cart

Full website builder

Video marketing tool

Customer Helpdesk

Calendar scheduling tool

Agency Portal

ActiveCampaign Integrations

Editor's Note: ActiveCampaign was built to help you manage your email marketing campaigns and automation and you can connect to 290+ third-party apps to get results with email marketing for your business.

Email Marketing Integrations

Actionetics

ActiveCampaign

ConvertKit

Aweber

MailChimp

HTML forms

+ many more

Other Integrations

Zapier + Webhooks

Membership software

Checkout software

Analytics

Webinar software

SMS / Texting software

Bot software

Calendar tools

Custom integrations / API

+ many more

ActiveCampaign Affiliate Program

Yes, you can become an ActiveCampaign affiliate partner and earn a 30% recurring monthly commissions. Sign up and join the program here.

Company Information

Owner / Founder: Jason VandeBoom

Location: Chicago, USA

Customer Support: help@activecampaign.com

Founded: 2003

Website: Visit Website

What we love about ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an affordable, email marketing automation tool and one of our favorites amidst the many good options out there (In fact, it’s the tool we use for our own business). With features such as a drag-and-drop email editor to create beautiful emails with ease and a smart sales CRM to manage and nurture your leads. You also get better, smarter marketing automation features to build smart automated workflows with few clicks, nurture your contacts, and enable a better experience for them. 

What Stands Out For Us When Reviewing GoHighLevel Vs ActiveCampaign?

Here’s what we discovered while comparing GoHighLevel and ActiveCampaign.

GoHighLevel was built with a focus on helping digital agencies acquire customers and provide solutions to them. It’s a full-suite marketing platform that provides the right stack of tools, support, and resources to succeed as an agency owner or marketer.

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, is a platform that offers you the tools you need to manage email marketing and automation for your business, and is useful for any online business.

GoHighLevel’s platform is intuitive and gives you a variety of tools to run your agency and manage your clients. It's built-in CRM is very handy to manage all clients easily.

One such tool is a page builder to create full-featured websites, landing pages, sales funnels, surveys, and lead capture forms for your agency and clients.

GoHighLevel also has an email marketing and automation tool for running automated follow-up campaigns and nurturing your leads through a variety of channels (email, SMS, MMS, phone, voicemail, and Facebook messenger).

Other tools you get inside GoHighLevel include a built-in calendar to automate leads booking and a membership area for creating an online course (or community) for your agency.

When it comes to email marketing and automation, ActiveCampaign provides almost everything you need. They give you an intuitive drag-and-drop tool to build forms and landing pages for collecting leads.

You can then create awesome emails with their email builder and mobile-responsive templates and follow up with your leads.

Their advanced automation system, which is their most important feature, is simply unrivaled. It lets you run automated email messages, score leads, and automate your list management process.

Plus, ActiveCampaign comes bundled with a built-in CRM to manage your audience and a 'conversations' feature to send targeted messages to your website visitors.

Before we give our final verdict, let’s see how each tool delivers on individual features and use-case.

Which Is Best For Landing Pages & Sales Funnels?

With ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel, you get built-in tools to create landing pages and kickstart a delightful customer experience.

GoHighLevel gives you a drag-and-drop page builder to build mobile-responsive landing pages and sales funnels for your agency (and clients).

For each landing page built, you’ll be able to save it as a template, toggle SEO metadata, install a live-chat widget, and view analytics.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign comes with a drag-and-drop landing page designer to build landing pages for your business.

You also get various mobile-responsive templates that are easy to edit in minutes.

WINNER: Tie. Both platforms offer page builders that work similarly to create landing pages and deliver an awesome experience to your audience.

Which Is Best For Email Marketing & Automation?

For email marketing and automation, both GoHighLevel and ActiveCampaign offer you tools to save time and run automated email campaigns.

GoHighLevel’s email tool called Campaigns is where you run your email campaigns. The tool allows you to engage your contacts automatically via multiple channels including email, SMS, and voice call.

You can create ‘smart list’ segments, set goals, create an "if or when" automated condition, and terminate automation sequences when a goal is met inside GoHighLevel.

ActiveCampaign also offers you and your audience an unrivaled email marketing and automation experience.

The platform features a world-class email editor (and modern templates) to create personalized emails that will engage and delight your audience.

Their email automation functionality is hard to beat. It’s really powerful and helps you free up your time by automating your follow-up email campaigns.

With a user-friendly interface, ActiveCampaign lets you build easy-to-use automation workflow systems and set multiple if and when conditions.

The tool also includes pre-made automation workflows you can directly use or draw ideas from. Plus, ActiveCampaign lets you automate your contact management and segment your list the way you want.

WINNER: When it comes to email marketing and automation, ActiveCampaign has the edge, with extremely powerful email and automation capabilities.

Which Is The Best Price For The Money?

ActiveCampaign has various pricing tiers and an entry-level plan starting at $39 per month (for up to 1000 subscribers).

And if you want access to its landing page tool, lead scoring, machine learning, and in-built CRM, you’ll need to upgrade to the Plus plan at $70 per month.

With GoHighLevel, you’re offered two pricing plans to grow your agency; the Agency Starter plan for $97 per month and the Agency Unlimited Account for $297 per month.

And before even taking out your credit card, GoHighLevel give you a 14-day free trial to try out its features.

WINNER: ActiveCampaign is more affordable if you’re solely looking at running automated email campaigns for your online business. But if you need a platform to run your agency, GoHighLevel is a good bet.

Final Thoughts - Which Is Better, GoHighLevel or ActiveCampaign?

GoHighLevel and ActiveCampaign are great platforms you’ll need in building a profitable online business.

In a nutshell, GoHighLevel is suited to help agency owners with the tools and resources to grow and get more sales.

While ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one email marketing and automation platform built to help you save time, achieve better results, and get more customers.

If you’re confused on which platform to pick between GoHighLevel and ActiveCampaign, here are my final thoughts:

If you run a digital agency and provide solutions to local businesses and clients or need a platform to power your own sales and B2B efforts, then GoHighLevel is the right platform for you, considering its value proposition.

But if email marketing and automation are what you’re looking for and you don't want a full marketing suite, ActiveCampaign is the perfect standalone solution for your business.

About the author 

Sam Rexford

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