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Which is best for you? GoHighLevel vs HubSpot?
GoHighLevel and HubSpot are two titans in the CRM and marketing automation arena.
Both platforms offer powerful features to help you transform your digital marketing strategies, streamline business activities, and drive sales.
At first glance, GoHighLevel and HubSpot may appear to be quite alike.
But their features and approaches are actually quite different and appeal to different business types and needs.
Read more: My Top Recommended Online Tools For Small Business.
Quick Summary
- GoHighLevel and HubSpot are two leading CRM and marketing solutions that can help automate and streamline digital marketing and other business processes.
- HubSpot is the better choice for any business type or size focused on enhancing and managing customer-related activities effectively.
- GoHighLevel is the superior choice for marketing agencies looking for an all-in-one white-label solution for digital marketing, CRM, digital product creation, and sales.
- HubSpot is the cheaper option, offering an impressive free plan that includes essential marketing, sales, service, content, and commerce tools. However, its complex paid pricing structure can be costly for large teams.
- Although GoHighLevel’s pricing plans are more expensive than HubSpot’s (starting at $97 per month), all plans encompass the platform’s entire suite of features.
GoHighLevel vs HubSpot
In this GoHighLevel vs HubSpot article, I’ve done all the hard work for you!
I’ve tried and tested both tools for myself so you can decide which is the best choice for you.
This honest and comprehensive comparison contrasts GoHighLevel with HubSpot in terms of key features, pricing, user experiences, and more.
By the end of this article, you should have a clear and concise overview of both platforms.
And as a result, there should be no doubt in your mind which has the potential to propel your business to a new level of success!
So, GoHighLevel vs HubSpot? Which is the best for you? Let’s find out.
Read more: 7 Best CRM For Small Businesses.
What Are They? GoHighLevel vs HubSpot
As mentioned, GoHighLevel and HubSpot are two leading digital marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.
GoHighLevel (also known as HighLevel) is an all-in-one marketing tool designed for marketing agencies or business owners looking to consolidate their tools into one platform.
From sales funnels to websites, landing pages, social media management, marketing automation, and more, GoHighLevel helps you generate leads, nurture relationships, and close sales more effectively.
With GoHighLevel by your side, you’ll simplify, enhance, automate, and streamline your entire marketing workflows and multi-channel marketing campaigns.
On the other hand, HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service management system that caters to various business sizes and types.
It’s well-known for its extensive suite of business tools, which include CRM, content marketing, social media marketing, customer service, SEO tools, and more.
Additionally, HubSpot offers a user-friendly interface, an impressive free plan, and extensive seamless integration options with third-party tools.
As you can see, both platforms aim to help streamline marketing efforts and enhance customer management.
However, their core offerings are slightly different, catering to different business needs! So, what are the main differences between the two platforms?
GoHighLevel vs HubSpot Key Differences
Both tools advertise themselves as ‘all-in-one’ solutions that offer dynamic sales, marketing, and CRM features.
However, we must explore a few key differences before diving in deeper:
- HubSpot is geared toward teams looking for a comprehensive CRM solution, while GoHighLevel is better for those wanting to focus on enhancing sales and marketing.
- GoHighLevel offers three simple paid plans, including a full suite of services for one simple monthly flat rate, while HubSpot divides its offerings into five distinct hubs.
- HubSpot has an impressive free plan with access to free marketing, sales, service, and content tools, whereas GoHighLevel only offers premium paid plans.
- HubSpot is suitable for businesses ranging from individuals to large enterprises, while GoHighLevel is better suited for marketing agencies and professionals.
Okay, now that we’ve covered the critical differences between GoHighLevel vs HubSpot, let’s discuss the specifics.
GoHighLevel vs HubSpot Ease Of Use
Both platforms offer no-code solutions, but which provides a more user-friendly experience? GoHighLevel vs HubSpot?
GoHighLevel features an intuitive interface that simplifies creating web pages, sales funnels, email campaigns, landing pages, sign-up forms, websites, and more.
However, due to GoHighLevel’s extensive range of features, new users may find the platform’s learning curve naturally steeper than HubSpot’s.
And although GoHighLevel’s page builders are straightforward, their automation and workflow features may also initially present challenges for beginners.
Additionally, GoHighLevel is continuously updating its platform (which, don’t get me wrong, is amazing). However, this often results in features being changed, moved, or updated.
This means you must constantly relearn where things are or how things work, which is pretty annoying!
On the other hand, HubSpot’s sleek and modern interface features easy-to-navigate dropdown menus, which allow users to easily find what they’re looking for.
Navigating HubSpot’s various ‘Hubs’ (marketing, sales, services, commerce, content, and operations) might seem daunting at the beginning.
However, after overcoming the initial learning curve, I promise you’ll find that HubSpot’s drag-and-drop interface, menus, and layouts are intuitively structured and straightforward!
HubSpot’s onboarding process is also excellent. It includes helpful checklists and tutorials that will guide you every step of the way.
This allows you to explore and understand the platform at your own pace.
Because of this, HubSpot is crowned the winner of this category!
Winner = HubSpot.
Read more: What Is GoHighLevel?
GoHighLevel vs HubSpot Pricing
As mentioned, the pricing structures of the two platforms differ significantly.
GoHighLevel’s simple three-tiered pricing structure is as follows:
- Starter Plan: ($97 monthly), one account with access to all GoHighLevel’s key features.
- Unlimited Plan: ($297 monthly), unlimited sub-accounts, users, and contacts, API capabilities, and a branded desktop app.
- SaaS Pro ($497 monthly) includes desktop and mobile white-label apps, ideal for SaaS teams looking to boost revenue.
Unfortunately, there’s no GoHighLevel free plan. However, you can try GoHighLevel’s features for free, thanks to their 14-day trial.
As mentioned, HubSpot offers a pretty impressive free plan.
HubSpot’s paid plans, on the other hand, are a little more complicated.
Basically, plans are divided across five different hubs (CMS, sales, marketing, content commerce, service, and operations).
Within each hub are tiered pricing plan options.
For small teams, I recommend starting with the free plan, as it includes a range of free tools that span across all five of HubSpot’s ‘Hubs.’
Once you’ve outgrown the free plan, simply upgrade to the HubSpot Customer Platform plan for more advanced marketing, sales, CMS, service, commerce, and operation features.
Pricing for the paid Customer Platform Hub are as follows:
- Starter Customer Platform: $20 per month per seat.
- Professional Customer Platform: Starts from $1170 per month (5 seats and $45 per additional seat per month).
- Enterprise Customer Platform: $4300 per month (7 seats and $75 per additional seat per month).
If you want to zone in specifically on one aspect of your business, you can choose a specific paid sales, marketing, commerce, operations, service, or commerce hub (plan).
If that isn’t enough, HubSpot also allows you to ‘Build your own bundle,’ which involves selecting the features that best fit your requirements!
With an impressive free plan and cheaper initial paid plans, HubSpot wins this round again!
Winner = HubSpot.
Read more: GoHighLevel Pricing.
GoHighLevel vs HubSpot Key Features
Content Marketing
Are you looking to up your content creation game? Well, GoHighLevel has all the tools you need to create dynamic, professional content.
With the handy drag-and-drop editing tool, you can build and customize content for everything from sales funnels to websites, landing pages, blogs, and more.
You can build these from scratch (or use GoHighLevel’s provided templates if you need a helping hand to get started).
Funnel templates, in particular, are super helpful, as they come with pre-designed sequences with all required funnel stages, streamlining the setup process.
Their robust course-building tool can help you design unlimited courses, lessons, modules, and membership sites to share with your members.
And with the ability to upload interactive documents, videos, and audio files, you can truly take your course materials to the next level!
HubSpot doesn’t offer course creation capabilities or sales funnels.
However, its full-featured website, blog, and landing page capabilities can help seriously help you drive traffic, boost sales, and generate leads.
HubSpot’s website creation toolkit includes themes, page templates, and a drag-and-drop editor that doesn’t require code.
Plus, HubSpot’s AI content assistant can help you create compelling copy in seconds for your website, emails, blogs, and more.
Other content marketing tools features include SEO recommendations to optimize your website pages on Google, memberships, and video and podcast recording capabilities.
However, it’s worth mentioning that these content creation tools are limited on HubSpot’s free and lower-tiered plans.
So, which platform wins this round?
If you’re looking for a robust and fully optimized website builder to help your website climb to the top of the SEO ladder, HubSpot can certainly get you there!
However, if your focus is creating membership sites and course content, GoHighLevel is the best choice.
Winner = Draw
Read more about HubSpot’s incredible website builder here.
CRM Capabilities
HubSpot is often hailed as the king of CRM, but how does it really compare to GoHighLevel?
Well, GoHighLevel offers a decent range of automated CRM features. And there’s no limit to the number of contacts you can have (regardless of your plan type!).
Here’s a list of GoHighLevel’s CRM features:
● Smart contact lists, which allow you to organize your contacts with tags for various campaigns.
● Unlimited calendars to automate bookings and schedules.
● An automated appointment scheduler with automatic availability and payment processing features.
● Unlimited pipelines for campaign management and customer journey progression.
● Direct communication with contacts via calls, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media.
● Automation workflows.
● Direct integration with Stripe or PayPal for payments.
● A comprehensive analytics and reporting dashboard.
Interestingly, HubSpot’s free plan used to allow you to store up to 1,000,000 contacts, but that number has recently dropped significantly to just 1,000!
In saying that, HubSpot’s free plan is still an excellent option for small teams after a comprehensive, free CRM solution.
You’ll get the meeting scheduler tool, sales pipeline capabilities, Facebook messenger integration, live chat with your website visitors, and more.
HubSpot’s complete list of CRM features includes:
● Contact management and list segmentation.
● Sales pipelines.
● Automation workflows for deal tracking.
● A meeting scheduler and live chat functionality for easy booking and real-time conversations.
● A comprehensive reporting dashboard.
● Payments and automation processes that allow you to handle payments in various currencies.
● Lead scoring and forecasting features.
As you can see, both offer extensive CRM capabilities.
The main difference is that GoHighLevel’s CRM tools and features are available on all plans (although they’re certainly not as advanced as HubSpot’s).
Although many of HubSpot’s CRM tools are locked behind higher-tiered plans, the platform still offers better CRM features overall, so HubSpot wins this round again!
Winner = HubSpot.
Read more: How To Setup HubSpot CRM?
Customer Service Tools
Which is the better platform for providing outstanding customer service to your contacts? GoHighLevel vs HubSpot?
GoHighLevel’s customer service tools predominantly revolve around SMS and social media interactions.
Thanks to the integrated chat widget, the platform seamlessly integrates with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, allowing you to interact with your customers in real-time.
Once embedded on your website, customers can contact you directly via the web app and chat widget.
After the first interaction, the conversation moves from the web app to a text conversation.
I personally love GoHighLevel’s standout AI chatbot feature, as it instantly replies to SMS communications from your customers on your behalf.
This means you don’t have to sit in front of your desktop all day waiting for customer-related messages!
Conversely, HubSpot dedicates an entire suite to customer service functionalities, including a customer portal where users can log in to create tickets or seek support.
Additionally, HubSpot’s live chat tool means you can engage with your customers directly and in real time.
HubSpot also comes with conversational bots that help send your customers to the right place.
And like GoHighLevel, you can communicate with your contacts from various channels, (including social media) from one unified inbox.
This streamlines the process of identifying and responding to urgent queries!
HubSpot also facilitates the tracking of inbound calls and the placement of outbound calls directly from its interface.
If that wasn’t enough, HubSpot rounds off its customer service offerings with a comprehensive ticketing system to ensure customer issues are managed efficiently.
With HubSpot, you can build a comprehensive customer service platform for your clients, which is why it trumps GoHighLevel in this round!
Winner = HubSpot.
Read more: 6 Best HubSpot Alternatives.
Sales and Marketing
Designed to enhance your campaigns and marketing efforts, it’s no wonder GoHighLevel offers a comprehensive suite of sales and marketing tools!
I’ve already talked about GoHighLevel’s robust sales funnel capabilities, appealing to sales-driven teams.
But what other sales and marketing tools does GoHighLevel provide?
With the built-in email campaign builder, you can craft sophisticated email campaigns and automated sequences to effectively target your email list.
Additionally, as I’ve discussed, their SMS marketing tool has an AI chatbot that helps turn leads into conversions.
The impressive ‘Workflow creator’ tool supports multi-channel campaigns, allowing you to build automated campaigns across email, SMS, voicemails, and sales funnel channels.
What’s more, GoHighLevel offers dynamic ‘Snapshots,’ which are pre-designed templates tailored to specific industries.
These templates transfer sales funnels, workflows, websites, and other marketing elements between sub-accounts.
And impressively, GoHighLevel allows you to completely rebrand and sell its platform as a SaaS product with your own prices and brand kit!
So, how does HubSpot stack up?
Although HubSpot offers a robust website builder (which I mentioned earlier), there’s no sales funnel functionality within the platform.
Despite this, HubSpot’s web pages can handle data collection forms and paywalls.
All plans include email marketing capabilities. However, advanced capabilities like A/B testing and automation are limited on free and lower-paid plans.
However, you can view your social media and Google Ads analytics in one dashboard within HubSpot, which is pretty useful!
HubSpot also offers deal pipelines and sales forecasting tools for tracking leads and predicting future revenue.
GoHighLevel’s sales and marketing resources are more advanced than HubSpot’s, offering limitless possibilities for campaign creation.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that they’re the winners of this round!
Winner = GoHighLevel.
Read more: How To Use HubSpot CRM App.
Automation
Automation can significantly impact the productivity, efficiency, and scalability of your business.
So, when choosing between GoHighLevel vs HubSpot, weighing out each platform’s automation capabilities is crucial.
GoHighLevel streamlines marketing and sales efforts through its comprehensive automation ‘Workflow Builder’ feature.
This indispensable tool enables you to create automated sequences that are activated after certain events, such as form submissions, appointment bookings, or purchases.
Additionally, you can effortlessly create and send automatic SMS and email nurturing campaigns to your clients.
And finally, its automation tools further extend to sending appointment reminders and review requests!
HubSpot’s automation capabilities include sending various email campaigns to contacts and adjusting CRM records based on customer behaviors and actions.
Basically, you can build an automation workflow by building a series of triggers based on actions such as form submissions, page views, or email interactions.
HubSpot can also allocate, prioritize, and manage customer support tickets automatically.
Both platforms support conditional logic in automation flows, enhancing workflow personalization and targeted email marketing strategies.
GoHighLevel and HubSpot also both offer capabilities for fully automated email A/B testing.
However, HubSpot sneaks in as the frontrunner due to its broader spectrum of automation capabilities across all features!
Winner = HubSpot.
Read more: HubSpot Pros and Cons.
GoHighLevel vs HubSpot Support
Who’s going to be there for you when you run into issues? GoHighLevel vs HubSpot?
GoHighLevel leverages its unique SMS support feature (which I mentioned earlier) for when you encounter problems with your GoHighLevel account.
This basically involves you initiating a support query through a chatbot on the web app, which then transitions the conversation to SMS.
However, based on several experiences, there can be a significant delay (sometimes a whole day or more!) before you receive a response.
In saying that, the GoHighLevel team is happy to jump on a Zoom call with you if you need to address complex issues.
This option is particularly beneficial for resolving intricate problems that are challenging to convey and solve via text!
In contrast, HubSpot offers 24/7 live chat, email, and phone support.
The live chat feature is pretty efficient, with a response time of around three minutes.
However, it’s worth noting that despite claims of round-the-clock availability, there were instances when live chat agents weren’t available, depending on the time of day.
Winner = Draw.
GoHighLevel vs HubSpot Who Are They Best For?
So, with everything discussed taken into consideration, which marketing automation platform should you choose?
Honestly, it depends on your business type, goals, and specific needs.
GoHighLevel is by far the best choice for marketing agencies, consultants, and small-to-medium-sized businesses looking for an all-in-one tool that simplifies operations.
I also believe it’s better for sales-driven teams that want to monetize their skills through paid content strategies such as courses and memberships.
The platform is particularly favored by those looking to scale quickly, offering customized solutions that can be white-labeled to maintain brand consistency across client accounts.
With its extensive and scalable inbound marketing, sales, and service software, HubSpot serves a broader audience, from small businesses to large enterprises.
If you’re looking to attract, engage, and delight customers across every stage of the buyer’s journey, HubSpot is hard to beat!
With its comprehensive CRM at its core, HubSpot also integrates deeply with various third-party marketing, sales, content management, and customer service tools.
This makes it a powerhouse for teams focused on growth through content marketing and lead nurturing!
Stews Final Thoughts
And that brings this GoHighLevel vs HubSpot comparison article to a close!
While both tools are powerful in their own right, deciding between GoHighLevel and HubSpot pivots on understanding your specific business needs, resources, and goals.
I believe HubSpot is one of the most robust CRM tools on the market, which is why I use it for my business operations.
In saying that, your business may benefit more from what GoHighLevel offers! In which case, HubSpot might not be the ideal solution for you.
When choosing between GoHighLevel and HubSpot, you should ask yourself: Which platform best aligns with my business strategy and workflow?
Only then you can decide between GoHighLevel vs HubSpot.
