Systeme.io vs. GoHighLevel: Which is the Better Platform?

For this Systeme.io vs GoHighLevel comparison post, I took some dedicated time to sign up for each platform and explore all of its features.

Both platforms are popular, all-in-one software solutions in the sales and marketing industry. They come with features for sales funnel, course builder or email marketing, and automation for your business.

While they have a similar lineup of marketing tools stacked under one roof, I found out their core difference is in brand positioning.

GoHighLevel is strictly for marketing professionals and agency owners while Systeme.io targets small business owners, freelancers, and individual creators. Pricing is another clear differentiation, with Systeme.io offering a free plan and affordable tiers.

But if you want to know which option is best for your particular use case, I have done a detailed comparison review below highlighting their features and stating who wins different categories.

Let’s dive in and see who wins the GoHighLevel vs Systeme.io battle.

Systeme.io Vs GoHighLevel - Summary

Systeme.io is a comprehensive marketing solution built for creators, freelancers, and small business owners at an affordable price to create funnels, run targeted marketing campaigns, and manage your business.

GoHighLevel is a user-friendly, all-in-one solution built with the right tools, support, and resources to help grow your marketing agency.

Take a look below to see the relative popularity of these marketing software throughout the year 2023.

Systeme.io Vs GoHighLevel - Side By Side Review

What is Systeme.io?

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing platform built with a suite of essential tools suited for freelancers, creators, and small businesses.

The platform allows you to build website/sales tunnels, send emails, create courses, and manage an army of affiliates for your business.

Company Information

• Owner / Founder: Aurelian Amacker 
• Location: Ireland
• Customer Support: —Contact Page
• Founded: 2017
• Website: Visit Website

Who is Systeme.io for?

It's best suited for freelancer, creator, consultant, or small business owner, you’ll find the tools incredibly useful for your business. One good part is that you don't need technical expertise to use the tool in managing every single part of your online business.

Notable features: drag-and-drop funnel builder, course builder, webinars, and automation system for small business owners.

Systeme.io Integrations

Editor's note: Systeme.io lets you integrate natively with some third-party tools that you use in your business. But you can also rely on the but has a functional Zapier integration to integrate your favorite third-party apps seamlessly.

Email Marketing Integrations

• Actionetics — No
• ActiveCampaign — Yes
• ConvertKit — Yes 
• Aweber — No
• MailChimp — Yes
• HTML forms — Yes
• + many more — Yes

Other Integrations

• Zapier + Webhooks — Yes
• Membership software — Yes
• Checkout software — Yes
• Analytics — Yes
• Webinar software — Yes
• SMS / Texting software — No
• Bot software — No
• Calendar tools — No
• Custom integrations / API — Yes

Systeme.io Affiliate Program

Systeme.io has an affiliate program that rewards you with a 60% lifetime commission for every customer you refer. You don’t need to be a customer to promote the software.

What do we love about Systeme.io?

This marketing software offers a wide bunch of essential marketing tools to build funnels, create courses, send emails, create blogs, create virtual communities, and set up automation workflows for your business.

If you have a tiny budget and need a comprehensive platform to run your business, Systeme.io will be a game-changer for you.

What else? You also get the ability to organize evergreen webinars and start an affiliate marketing program so you can promote your products to a wider audience.

What I love most is its pricing tiers. First, you get a free tier that offers insane value at no cost. And the remaining paid plans are affordable, starting at $27 per month.

There’s also a 30% annual discount on its annual plans.

What Stands Out For Us When Reviewing Systeme.io Vs GoHighLevel?

Systeme.io and GoHighLevel are both amazing all-in-one sales and marketing platforms.

They come with a similar wide range of features you’d expect in any tool for running an online business.

But they are positioned differently. GoHighLevel is built to support marketing agencies and help them grow their client base while Systeme.io is a perfect fit for individual creators, freelancers, and small business owners.

Systeme.io has the set of tools to grow a small business, whether you want to create an online course for your fans, sell physical/digital products, or even set up your affiliate program. No technical expertise is needed to use the platform.

Systeme.io gives you a drag-and-drop page builder and design templates to create multi-step funnels. You can use this funnel to promote your products or get leads for your services. Apart from funnels, you can also build a website, course, landing page, blog, or virtual community for your business. 

To engage your leads, Systeme.io has an integrated email marketing tool to create personalized emails and send them to your audience. If you want to run your business on autopilot, there are different automation rules and workflows you can set up for this.

Systeme.io has an affiliate management tool where you can recruit affiliates for your business to increase your sales and manage their payouts in one place.

For anyone on a tiny budget, the platform is affordable. You can get started for free or upgrade to a paid tier for as low as $27 monthly.

On the other hand, GoHighLevel offers the right tools, support, and resources you need to grow your marketing agency. The platform comes with a mix of tools to do essentially three things: capture leads, nurture leads into customers, and close sales.

To capture leads, the platform has an intuitive drag-and-drop page builder that’s fully featured and helps you create sales funnels, landing pages, and websites. You can also build forms, surveys, courses, and membership areas to be integrated with your website or funnel.

For nurturing leads into customers, GoHighLevel supports you with an email system, appointment booking, and automation builder to launch multi-channel follow-up campaigns. You’re able to engage your contacts and follow up via email, phone, voicemail drops, SMS/MMS, and even Facebook Messenger.

To close more deals, GoHighLevel supports you with built-in features for pipeline management, appointment scheduling, payment processor, and analytics.

All these tools are integrated in one place. So no need to spend money buying several tools to run your agency. Plus, you can even white-label the platform as yours and sell it to your client for extra income.

Compared to Systeme.io, the GoHighLevel pricing plan is a little on the high side. You’re given a 14-day free trial to test out its features and you can upgrade later to either $97 or $297 monthly.

Which is Best for the Sales Funnel?

Systeme.io does provide a funnel builder and templates to create multi-step funnels.

With drag-n-drop builder, you can build different types of funnels for sales, lead generations, and webinars. The templates provided are quite basic that's why you shouldn't expect anything extra stylish. 

It’s pretty easy to build a funnel inside Systeme.io. While you’re in your user dashboard, here’s what you need to do:

• Click on the Funnel tab.
• Click the Create button to build a new sales funnel.
• Fill out the pop-up form by adding a name for the funnel and the funnel domain.
• Select a funnel goal (build an audience, sell, evergreen webinar, or custom) and choose a currency.
• Finally, click the Save button. You’ll be taken to the funnel builder to pick a design template and begin editing.

The funnel editor is drag-and-drop so it works the way you’d expect. Add page elements, audio, and video files to your funnel pages, and edit them with the feel of your brand.

Automation can be integrated into each funnel page. And if you want to try out new strategies, you can take advantage of split A/B testing.

GoHighLevel comes with a builder and various templates for you to create sales funnels and landing pages.

Within the page editor, there’s a drag-and-drop tool you can use to edit templates and place desired blocks or elements into a page.

You can also upload brand materials to customize the template. Don’t want to use a design template? You can design from an empty canvas as well.

One thing I like is its ease of use. GoHighLevel funnel builder requires no technical expertise. For each funnel, you can integrate an automation workflow, set up custom meta tags, add a booking calendar, and add a live-chat widget.

Winner: GoHighLevel wins this race, as it provides high-end funnel templates tailored to many specific businesses and niches. Even if you are not familiar with coding or using these tools, you can still build a sales funnel for your business.

Which Provided Better Marketing Automation?

If you want to automate lead generation and engagement in your funnel, Systeme.io has automation features to help you save time and stay organized. 

In one place, you get tools to automatically capture leads from your integrated website/funnels, send automated emails for products or courses, and add automation rules to any part of your website.

You can simply start by setting up Automation Rules, a one-time trigger and action. So when a particular event happens in your funnel, a particular action is taken automatically by the system.

Also, Systeme.io lets you create an Automation Workflow which is a chain of automation rules that a single contact will pass through.

For each step in the workflow, you can either add an Action (perform an action), a Decision (decide based on contact segment), or a Delay (hold on for a given period) for any contact.

On the other side, GoHighLevel is also stacked with a set of automation features to run your business on autopilot.

With Campaigns, you can engage your contacts seamlessly and automatically run your campaigns for different channels —  emails, SMS, and voice calls. Businesses of all sizes can use this feature to automate when to send marketing messages and add a "when" or "if" automation condition on which actions to take on a contact certain donations are met.

One great feature in GoHighLevel is "Next Campaign" which allows you to funnel leads from an underperforming campaign to a separate nurturing one. Another is the ability to set automation goals and turn on the "Stop on Response”  feature so the system terminates an automation sequence once your set goal is met by the lead.

Plus, you also automate contact segmentation. GoHighLevel lets you automatically categorize your contact lists with Smart lists, send tailored email/SMS messages to a specific category list, and save your automation triggers and workflow in a folder for use next time.

Winner: I think GoHighLevel edges out Systeme.io a bit on this. The automation functionality you get in HighLevel is superior. And the best part is that you can use it in multiple channels — SMS, email voice, and even social media.

Which is Best for Selling Courses?

Systeme.io also allows you to create an online course to profit from your knowledge.

With its built-in course builder, you can upload your training videos or audio files, structure your topics, add relevant documents, and integrate payment processors.

After setting your course, you can build a promotional funnel to promote and get more sign-ups. Otherwise, you can run an automated email campaign that sends marketing emails to your audience over a period.

There’s a basic community feature in Systeme.io that lets you manage a community for your students and foster a virtual engagement. Your students can post about what they’re learning in the course and also engage other posts by commenting.

Building and selling your course can be done in minutes, all in one place. No need to spend money on Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, or any external course builder.

With the GoHighLevel course builder, you can create online courses with ease by uploading your training videos, images, documents, and audio files into their storage.

To enhance the learning experience, you can also structure your course into lessons or modules, and add quizzes or assessments as well. Courses in GoHighLevel can be sold on a monthly subscription basis or you charge a one-time fee for it. 

Lastly, there’s a built-in community feature for student engagement. This lets your students engage with each other and cultivate a deep relationship with you. 

Winner: Systeme.io has a better set of features for courses and community. You can set up an online course for unlimited students, even on the free plan. And you can build tunnels or run email campaigns for it. Everything is done and integrated within one platform.

Which has a Better Website Builder?

If you want to create a website for your agency or business, GoHighLevel comes with a unique website builder for that.

The tool relies on the same drag-and-drop functionality as the funnel builder which lets you add page elements to the canvas and edit them.

And if you want to save time, there are loads of website templates available to get started with. Each template can be edited using the website builder.

Unfortunately, Systeme.io isn’t up to par in the website builder department. The platform does not have a standalone, fully-featured website builder.

You only get the funnel or blog builder which works quite differently from what you’d expect from a website builder.

With the blog builder, you can create individual blog posts that’ll be nested on a single blog page. 

Winner: GoHighLevel comes with a stand-alone drag-and-drop website builder along with various well-designed templates to get started quickly.

Which Software is More Affordable?

Systeme.io wins this round. With a generous free forever plan, the all-in-one platform provides you with marketing functionality to run your business at zero cost.

When your audience increases significantly, you can upgrade to any of the paid plans which start at $27 monthly.

Systeme.io pricing plans are affordable compared to other competitors. And if you pay yearly, you get a 30% annual discount to save money.

On the other hand, GoHighLevel is quite pricey for agencies and business owners on a small budget. You'll have to shell out at least $97 every month to afford the lowest Agency Starter Plan.

They don’t give you a free plan; only a 14-day free trial to take the platform for a two-week spin. And their annual discount is 18%, saving you some money in the long run.

Winner: Systeme.io. They offer one of the cheapest pricing plans for platforms in the sales and marketing industry. Even with zero budget, you can still get started on their free plan and grow your business.

Which is Best for Agencies? Systeme.io, or GoHighLevel?

GoHighLevel is undoubtedly the best pick for marketing agencies.

The platform was built by a marketing agency for other agencies that need different tools in one place to scale their business.

You get functionality for funnels, websites, appointment booking, lead generation, email campaigns, automation, and CRM. All these tools are stacked under one roof, giving you a serious advantage. And you can white-label the platform and sell it as your own.

Systeme.io has a similar suite of marketing tools but it’s well-suited for creators, marketers, freelancers, consultants, and small business owners. 

Winner: Of course, GoHighLevel is the perfect choice for marketing agencies. As an agency owner, the platform was built with the tools and resources you need to get more sales and engage your clients.

Which of Them Provides White Labeling?

One unique feature of GoHighLevel is the ability to white-label the entire platform, rebrand it, and sell it to your clients as your own.

They have a special offer for this called the White Label Mobile App & Custom Zapier Upgrade option. This option goes for an additional $497 monthly, works only with the Agency Unlimited plan, and comes with a customized mobile app & customer zap for your business.

On this option, you can rebrand the HighLevel software into your SaaS product and resell it to your clients. Doing this would allow you to serve your clients efficiently, retain them for a long time, and increase your overall revenue.

Systeme.io lacks any white-label option for now. Maybe in the future, they would allow you to repackage their software and sell it as your own SaaS product.

Winner: When it comes to white-labeling, GoHighLevel is a go-to option. They provide a White Label Mobile App & Custom Zapier Upgrade option for an additional $497/month so you can rebrand and resell the entire software solution to your clients.

FAQs

Should You Choose Systeme.io or GoHighLevel?

My Personal Recommendation: I Choose Systeme.io as it is easy to use, more affordable, and has better features suited for my small business.

Systeme.io is a good fit for freelancers, marketers, and small business owners like myself. It combines the exact range of features I need for my business in one place so I can seamlessly stay organized.

Whether it’s creating funnels to sell my digital products, hosting my course, or recruiting affiliates, Systeme.io does it all and More. Even though the software gets glitchy sometimes, it’s mostly up to par with alternatives out there. 

The best part about Systeme.io is its pricing. As a small business owner, you can use the software and later upgrade to any paid plan, starting at $27 monthly. If you pay yearly, there’s a 30% annual discount waiting for you.

GoHighLevel is an awesome all-in-one platform as well but it’s suited towards marketing agencies. It comes with the tools and resources that agencies need to tow their customer base. It's easy to use and will save you time and money, running your agency from one place and replacing a host of other tools you use.

If you’re a beginner just starting and need a centralized software solution for your business, I believe Systeme.io is the choice for you.