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HighLevel vs. ActiveCampaign – What’s The Right Marketing Automation Platform For You?

Choosing the right marketing platform for your business can be a daunting task, especially when faced with multiple options like HighLevel and ActiveCampaign.

Both platforms offer powerful features that cater to different types of businesses, making it essential to understand their strengths and weaknesses before making a decision.

In this article, we’ll provide an in-depth comparison of HighLevel and ActiveCampaign in a way that’s easy to understand, even for the new business owner.

We’ll examine their features and functionality, integration capabilities, pricing, ease of use, customization, customer support, success stories, and target audience.

Our goal is to help you determine which platform is best suited for your unique online business and needs, allowing you to make an informed decision that can drive growth and success for online and local business.

Whether you’re a small business owner looking to streamline your marketing efforts and get in front of more leads or an agency owner managing multiple clients, we’ll break down the key differences between HighLevel and ActiveCampaign to help you navigate the decision-making process.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of what each platform has to offer and how they can benefit your business.

So, let’s dive in and explore the world of HighLevel vs. ActiveCampaign, and discover the perfect marketing platform to propel your business forward.

Features and Functionality

To begin comparing the platforms to determine which one is the best for you, it’s essential to understand the core features and functionalities each platform offers.

By evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and how they align with your business needs, you can make a more informed decision.

HighLevel’s Features and Functionality

HighLevel is an all-in-one marketing platform with a comprehensive suite of features for marketing agency owners and business owners and marketing strategists.

We have written a comprehensive assessment of HighLevel you can read here.

As a full-suite marketing platform it has many features and tools, however, some of its key functionalities include:

CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)

HighLevel’s built-in industry leading CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) powers your contact management and organization, deals, and sales pipelines effectively.

The platform offers detailed contact profiles, lead scoring, and customizable views for better lead management.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation: With HighLevel, you can create automations (called Workflows) based on triggers and actions.

This enables you to streamline your marketing efforts by automating tasks such as email follow-ups, lead nurturing

Email Marketing

Email Marketing: HighLevel’s email marketing tools and email builder help you design professional emails, create segmented lists, and track the performance of your campaigns.

The platform also offers built-in templates and a drag-and-drop editor for easy customization.

HighLevel's email template library.

SMS Marketing

SMS Marketing: HighLevel allows you to send targeted SMS messages to your contacts, making it easy to engage with your audience through text messaging.

This feature is particularly useful for time-sensitive promotions or appointment reminders.

Website Builder

Website Builder: HighLevel’s website and funnel builder (landing page tool) enables you to create landing pages, sales funnels, and customize responsive websites without any coding knowledge.

With a library of pre-built desktop and mobile responsive templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily build a professional online presence.

HighLevel's funnel template library

Reputation Management

Reputation Management: HighLevel offers reputation management tools that help you monitor and respond to online reviews, gather customer feedback, and improve your online reputation.

Analytics

Analytics: Intuitive analytics enable business owners to easily gather insights on call tracking, where their customers come from, what marketing campaigns and channels are the most effective, and gain a better pulse on their business.

Memberships

Memberships: Host courses and communities with HighLevel. A great alternative to most other LMS (learning management systems), or online course platforms, you can easily create membership sites, courses or programs for your customers or create your first digital product.

ActiveCampaign’s Features & Functionality

ActiveCampaign is a native email marketing system and automation platform that focuses on providing advanced, email marketing campaigns and CRM tools. Its core features include:

CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)

CRM: ActiveCampaign’s CRM system allows you to manage contacts, deals, and tasks in one place.

With features like lead scoring, segmentation, and custom pipelines, you can better organize and prioritize your leads.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation: ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation tools enable you to create complex workflows based on triggers, actions, and conditions.

This allows you to automate processes such as lead nurturing, follow-up sequences, and more.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing: ActiveCampaign offers a robust email marketing solution with features like list segmentation, split testing, and advanced tracking.

The platform also provides a wide variety of email templates and a drag-and-drop editor for easy customization.

SMS Marketing

SMS Marketing: Similar to HighLevel, Active Campaign allows you to send targeted SMS messages to your contacts.

This feature helps you reach your audience through a different channel and drive engagement.

Landing Page Builder

Landing Page Builder: ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder helps you build creative, conversion-optimized landing pages without any coding knowledge.

With its drag-and-drop editor and pre-built templates, you can easily design landing pages that align with your marketing goals.

ActiveCampaign's landing page builder example

Both HighLevel and ActiveCampaign offer powerful features to help you manage your marketing efforts.

While HighLevel focuses on providing an all-in-one solution for businesses and digital marketing agencies, ActiveCampaign excels in advanced marketing automation and email marketing.

Consider your specific needs and priorities when choosing between these two platforms to ensure the best fit for your business.

Integration Capabilities

Both HighLevel and ActiveCampaign offer extensive integration capabilities, enabling you to connect with popular third-party tools, automate moving data from point a to point b, and enhance your email marketing and automation efforts.

HighLevel integrates with platforms like Zapier, Make, WordPress, Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, Shopify, Facebook, and Google Analytics, to automate workflows, manage your website, accept payments, move customers through your pipelines, and track online performance.

Additionally, HighLevel provides an open API and webhook options for further customization and integration possibilities.

HighLevel's Zapier integration

ActiveCampaign also boasts a wide range of integration options, including Shopify, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and Zapier.

These integrations enable you to sync customer data, manage leads, track website performance and automate processes across multiple platforms.

One of ActiveCampaign’s standout features is its deep integrations with select eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Square and Shopify.

Both platforms are pretty much the same when it comes to their integration and automation capabilities.

In 2023 and beyond, you should primarily be focused on whether your technology platforms integrate with Zapier or Make and possess the functions you need to move data and automate processes.

When comparing the two, consider which integrations are most essential for your business and assess how each platform’s offerings align with your specific needs.

Pricing

Pricing is a key consideration for businesses, especially for startups and small-to-medium sized companies.

It’s important to consider when comparing pricing that each platform may include different features that may not be available on the other platform..

HighLevel’s Pricing Plans

HighLevel offers tiered pricing plans to cater specifically to the number of locations, lines of business or clients and whether or not you intend to whitelabel and resell the platform as your own.

The platform’s pricing is generally higher compared to ActiveCampaign, but the inclusion of additional features like white-labeling customer relationship management, reselling, memberships (courses), justify the cost for most businesses

Starter Plan:

Unlimited Plan: 

Pro Plan: 

HighLevel's first two pricing plans.

ActiveCampaign’s Pricing Plans:

ActiveCampaign provides what appears at first glance to be a more affordable pricing structure with four tiers based on the number of contacts and features required.

This makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller businesses but quickly becomes a pricier option as your contact list and business grows.

Marketing Lite: 

Marketing Plus: 

Bundle Plus: 

Bundle Professional: 

Ease of Use

Simply put, both of the platforms are designed for more intermediate and advanced users.

However, tools like automation maps make it easy to navigate some of the more advanced features and with a little effort even a beginner to build powerful campaigns in no time.

Let’s take a deep dive into the ease of use of both platforms.

HighLevel’s Ease of Use

HighLevel is designed with user-friendliness in mind, making it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes, including those with limited technical expertise.

The platform’s intuitive interface allows users to navigate through its features with ease, streamlining the process of setting up and managing marketing campaigns.

However, due to the vast number of features and tools available on the platform, some users may find HighLevel’s navigation confusing at times.

HighLevel's sometimes confusing navigation system

This is a minor drawback considering the platform’s overall ease of use, and most users can quickly familiarize themselves with the interface as they spend more time on the platform.

The drag-and-drop editor for email templates, workflows and funnels (landing pages) simplifies the process of visually creating appealing content without any coding knowledge.

HighLevel’s extensive library of pre-built templates for websites, funnels, and emails, along with the step-by-step guides and tutorials available, further contribute to the platform’s ease of use.

To help new users get acquainted with the platform, HighLevel offers HighLevel University, a comprehensive training course that covers all aspects of using the platform effectively.

HighLevel's University Courses for New Users

ActiveCampaign’s Ease of Use

ActiveCampaign’s sleek design and well-organized layout makes it easy for users to navigate through its diverse features, enabling them to efficiently set up and mange their campaigns.

The platform’s drag and drop landing page builder and email builder allow user’s to create beautiful and visually engaging content from scratch, or start with a template.

To make the platform even more accessible for new users, ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of pre-built templates for emails and landing pages, catering to different industries and marketing objectives.

Alongside these templates, users can find step-by-step guides and tutorials to help them get started.

ActiveCampaign’s comprehensive support resources, such as its extensive knowledge base, video tutorials, and webinars, ensure that users can quickly familiarize themselves with the platform’s features.

The platform provides live chat and email support to address any questions or issues that may arise while using the platform.

Both platforms offer platforms that are more geared towards the intermediate user.

With a little bit of effort just about anyone can learn how to effectively use the tools and features.

Both platforms offer sufficient knowledge bases, guides and tutorials.

To take it even one step further, there are many users actively creating content and tutorials on YouTube for the platforms as well.

Customization and Scalability

Customization capabilities and scalability are crucial factors that can significantly impact your business’s ability to grow and adapt to changing marketing conditions.

A platform that offers a high degree of customization enables you to tailor your marketing strategies to better meet the unique needs of your audience, while a scalable platform ensures that the software can accommodate your business’s evolving requirements as it expands.

In this section, we’ll dive into the customization and scalability features by both HighLevel and ActiveCampaign.

By examining each platform’s ability to adapt to your specific needs and support your business as it grows, we’ll help you determine which marketing platform is best suited for your long-term success.

We’ll discuss the platforms’ functionality, as well as their capacity to handle increasing workloads, contacts and integrations.

HighLevel’s Customization and Scalability

HighLevel demonstrates a strong commitment to customization and scalability, making it an attractive choice.

As a multi-channel communication platform, HighLevel already supports a variety of channels and has plans to incorporate even more, such as WhatsApp, further expanding its reach and versatility.

One of HighLevel’s strengths is its ability consolidate multiple tools into a single platform.

With features like Memberships, Social Planner, Affiliate Manager, Funnel and Website Builder, and more, HighLevel offers a comprehensive suite of tools that can replace several standalone applications.

HighLevel’s managed SMTP (email marketing platform) services are another notable aspect of its customization and scalability.

These services ensure that your emails are delivered effectively to recipients’ inboxes while allowing you to separate transactional emails from marketing email campaigns.

This separation helps maintain optimal deliverability rates and makes it easier to manage different types of email communications.

Systemwide custom values and contact custom fields further contribute to the platform’s customization capabilities, making it simple for businesses to create highly personalized customer journeys and automated email campaigns.

As an all in one platform these features enable users to store and manage custom data related to their contacts, ensuring that each interaction is tailored to the individual’s preference, history and behavior.

This level of personalization increases the effectiveness of automated email messages, sms messages, and marketing campaigns.

This drives engagement and fosters stronger customer relationships.

Lastly, HighLevel’s publicly available API enables seamless integration with a wide variety of other platforms.

This universal integration capability allows businesses to connect HighLevel with their existing tools and systems, making it a highly adaptable and scalable marketing solution.

ActiveCampaign’s Customization and Scalability

ActiveCampaign also offers a range of features that enable businesses to customize and scale their marketing efforts.

However, it is worth noting that HighLevel’s extensive suite of tools may provide a greater degree of customization and scalability for some users.

One of ActiveCampaign’s key features is its conditional workflows, which allow you to deliver the right message to the right customer at the appropriate time.

By setting up specific triggers and conditions, businesses can tailor their marketing campaigns to target individual customer needs and preferences, making them more effective and personalized.

Additionally, ActiveCampaign’s segmentation capabilities empower businesses to track and categorize their customers based on their level of engagement and interest in their product or services.

By identifying the most engaged users and those who may not be interested, businesses can refine their marketing strategies to better target their audience and optimize their campaigns for improved results.

In summary, while ActiveCampaign offers some powerful customization and scalability features, it’s essential to consider whether these capabilities align with your business’s unique needs and priorities.

Comparing the offerings of both HighLevel and ActiveCampaign it is clear that HighLevel provides a great degree of long-term scalability and customizability for your customer’s journeys.

Customer Support

When it comes to support, both HighLevel and ActiveCampaign strive to provide their users with the help and resources they need to succeed.

However, there are some differences in their approach that are worth considering when choosing between the two platforms.

HighLevel offers chat support and an option for premium chat support, which gives users priority access to assistance.

This can be particularly valuable for businesses that need quick and efficient solutions to any issues that encounter.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign does not offer premium chat support, and their wait times for assistance can be longer than those experienced with HighLevel.

It’s worth mentioning that due to HighLevel’s rapid growth over the past few years, their email support response times may be slower, but their team is known for providing effective and helpful solutions.

ActiveCampaign also provides reliable support, ensuring that users receive the assistance they need.

Digital agencies and business owners who require substantial support or prefer a more hands-on approach will find both companies to be reliable options.

However, HighLevel may have an edge in this area, as their extensive library of tutorials, guides, articles and training materials created by their user base can be particularly beneficial for users seeking additional resources and guidance.

While both HighLevel and ActiveCampaign offer solid customer support, it’s essential to consider your specific needs and preferences when selecting a platform.

HighLevel’s premium chat support and wealth of educational materials may make it the preferred choice for some businesses, but it’s important to weigh these factors against the support offerings of ActiveCampaign to make an informed decision.

Target Audience

Understanding the target audience for each platform can be crucial in determining which marketing platform best aligns with your needs.

HighLevel is specifically designed and caters to growth-minded entrepreneurs, digital marketing agencies, and local business owners.

The platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools and features that help businesses scale their marketing efforts efficiently and effectively.

By providing an all-in-one solution, HighLevel enables users to streamline their marketing processes, automate tasks, and manage multiple clients or campaigns with ease.

On the other hands, ActiveCampaign may be better suited for businesses or entrepreneurs with smaller lists, limited revenue, or those in the early stages of growth who are seeking a cost-effective solution.

The platform focuses on providing advanced email marketing and CRM tools, making it an ideal choice for businesses that prioritize these specific aspects of their marketing strategy.

ActiveCampaign’s more affordable pricing structure can be particularly attractive to small businesses looking to minimize costs while still benefiting from powerful marketing automations.

HighLevel is an excellent choice for growth-focused entrepreneurs, digital agencies, and local business owners.

ActiveCampaign may be more suitable for businesses with smaller lists and budgets who prioritize email marketing and CRM tools.

Value

HighLevel, when fully leveraged, has the potential to save the average business owner over $800 per month in subscriptions.

By providing an all-in-one marketing solution, HighLevel eliminates the need for multiple subscriptions to different tools and platforms, reducing overall costs for businesses.

Platforms that can be effectively replaced with a HighLevel subscription.

Additionally, HighLevel’s comprehensive functionality decreases the amount of time business owners need to spend on setting up and managing third-party integrations, allowing them to focus on other essential aspects of their business.

ActiveCampaign offers a lower entry point in terms of subscription cost, making it an attractive option for businesses with smaller budgets.

While it may not provide the same level of all-in-one functionality as HighLevel, ActiveCampaign is still a powerful and effective marketing automation platform, particularly for those who prioritize email marketing and CRM tools.

Overall, HighLevel is the clear, more valuable pick for businesses that want to streamline their marketing efforts, save on subscription costs, and manage multiple aspects of their marketing strategy in one platform.

I recommend HighLevel over ActiveCampaign for businesses seeking an all-in-one marketing solution.

For those with smaller budgets or a specific focus on email marketing, ActiveCampaign remains a great and powerful alternative.

Conclusion

While both platforms offer powerful marketing tools, HighLevel stands out as the better choice for growth-minded entrepreneurs, digital marketing agencies, and local business owners, thanks to its comprehensive all-in-one functionality, potential for significant cost savings, and extensive training resources.

HighLevel is an excellent option for businesses looking to streamline their marketing efforts, save on subscription costs, and manage multiple aspects of their marketing strategy in one platform.

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level I highly recommend you to check out HighLevel.

Here’s my invite to you to start a 14-day trial and see for yourself how this powerful marketing platform can propel your business forward.

Want to learn step-by-step how to build a profitable & passive white label SaaS in less than 4 weeks?
About Hunter Neeley

With a strong background in entrepreneurship and growth hacking, Hunter Neeley is an experienced writer and expert on business strategy, marketing, and lifestyle design. His insights and advice have helped countless entrepreneurs and professionals achieve success and fulfillment in both their personal and professional lives.

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