ClickFunnels and GoHighLevel have always had a heated rivalry.
It turned legal when ClickFunnels sued GoHighLevel.
CF claims that GHL ripped off its funnel-building system. GHL has also drawn some former ClickFunnels employees, adding to the tension.
While the legal disputes add intrigue, they also showcase the unique approaches each platform offers.
If you’re wondering which one is the right fit for your digital business, I’ve had hands-on experience with both.
So, take a couple of minutes, and I’ll help you determine whether GoHighLevel or ClickFunnels is the better choice for you.
Overview
What does GoHighLevel do?
HighLevel (often called GoHighLevel) positions itself as an all-in-one powerhouse for agencies, providing a comprehensive suite of tools to manage every aspect of client campaigns.
One standout feature is the ability to rebrand the platform and resell it to your clients at a markup—something I’ll dive deeper into later.
Essentially, HighLevel seeks to consolidate many of your existing tech subscriptions into one powerful solution, making it an attractive option for those looking to streamline their operations.
We’ll see about that.
What does ClickFunnels do?
ClickFunnels used to focus primarily on funnel building.
That changed in 2023 when it added new capabilities to make it more competitive.
Truth be told. That was a good call, considering the fierce competition from the likes of GoHighLevel, Kajabi, Systeme, and Kartra.
This was the result:
Did you get it? Let’s break that down further.
What I like about GoHighLevel 👍
- Multi-channel marketing: I love that GoHighLevel makes it seamless to integrate SMS texts, voicemail drops, Facebook Messenger, and even WhatsApp messages into email campaigns and funnels.
- Comprehensive platform: All of the functionality you need is available in one place. For example, HighLevel also includes reputation management, appointment booking, and a social media planner, which can replace dedicated tools such as Buffer, Yelp!, and Calendly.
- Unlimited everything: Expect unlimited emails sent, funnels, contacts, courses, students, users, and more. GoHighLevel alternatives such as ClickFunnels, Kajabi, and Kartra often have limits.
- Reputation management: Pull online reviews from Google, Facebook, and Yelp!, review, and respond to dissatisfied customers privately — right from the GoHighLevel app.
- Reseller/White label program: Get the SaaS Pro plan, resell the GoHighLevel platform to as many customers as you want with your own branding, charge a minimum of $97/month/customer, and keep the profit.
👎 What I don’t like about GoHighLevel: Like most comprehensive platforms, you’ll need to invest time and effort to learn the system and overcome overwhelm. You may not be able to take advantage of all that GoHighLevel has to offer, especially if you’re not a digital agency or have several businesses on the platform.
What I like about ClickFunnels over GoHighLevel 👍
- ClickFunnels 2.0 is all-in-one: Since 2023, ClickFunnels has added ecommerce pages, courses, customer hubs, and other tools to make it a more complete platform.
- Easier to use: ClickFunnels feels better organized in tabs and pages than GoHighLevel. It makes it easier to find what you’re looking for and keep track of what you’re doing.
- Specialized funnel builder: Yes, ClickFunnels also integrates SMS, voicemail drops, and calls into its funnels. However, it tends to offer superior funnel and email templates, as well as more robust funnel analytics.
- Handy conversion optimization tools: Look forward to 1-click upsells and downsells, order bumps, optimized ecommerce pages and stores, and more.
- Polished branding tools: ClickFunnels offers more branding tools than HighLevel, including a diverse range of premium templates, colors, and elements for free.
👎 What I don’t like about ClickFunnels: CRM capabilities are relatively basic on the platform, and businesses that need advanced CRM or cross-functional workflows might need to find supplementary tools. ClickFunnels integrates well with many third-party platforms but offers much fewer native integrations with popular tools compared to GoHighLevel. Although the templates have a premium look and feel, customization options are somewhat limited.
Upfront bottom line
ClickFunnels is polished and designed for efficient funnel building, which can lead to higher sales conversions. Check out my in-depth, hands-on ClickFunnels review here for more.
However, if you’re a digital agency or software reseller managing multiple client accounts and looking to rebrand and resell the platform for profit, GoHighLevel is the more suitable choice. Here’s my full GoHighLevel review for more.
But let’s not jump ahead. As we dive deeper into this ClickFunnels vs. GoHighLevel review, you’ll discover key differences in their approaches, particularly regarding email marketing, funnel building, and pricing.
Key difference #1- ClickFunnels offers a more polished website builder
Both platforms provide a solid range of page builders and elements, including countdown timers, testimonials, and FAQ sections, all of which can improve your conversion rates.
However, I personally prefer ClickFunnels for its more polished and organized layout.
ClickFunnels boasts more polished web and landing page options, including features like landing page gradients and refined corner and border styling.
On the other hand, GoHighLevel excels in ease of use with its page builder. It allows you to quickly select, customize, and publish your web pages with minimal hassle:
You can also customize your pages with this variety of HighLevel elements and content blocks:
Both ClickFunnels and GoHighLevel let you connect your WordPress site. However, integrating GoHighLevel requires an additional integration or plugin, while ClickFunnels 2.0 offers seamless compatibility with WordPress without any extra steps.
Key difference #2. Funnels and workflow automation
ClickFunnels delivers the more polished funnel templates here. Check this out.
Additionally, ClickFunnels offers premium templates for squeeze, opt-in, and product launch funnels.
Moreover, the ClickFunnels AI assistant can generate a complete funnel based on the information you feed it (including sales copy).
While it can spark new ideas and help tackle procrastination, the content generated isn’t flawless. The silver lining is that you can quickly refine it based on your expertise right after.
On the plus side, ClickFunnels allows you to incorporate 1-click upsells, downsells, and various order bumps into your sales funnels. Like GoHighLevel, it offers unlimited funnels, contacts, and pages, which is a huge advantage.
For those of us who thrive on automation, ClickFunnels’ WorkFlows feature is a game-changer. These trigger-based automations can initiate multiple actions across different funnels with just one trigger, making campaign management even smoother.
You can also leverage A/B split testing to fine-tune your funnels for better conversions and increased sales.
But that’s not all—ClickFunnels allows you to set funnel access permissions for your team members. This feature lets your team collaborate on creating, reviewing, and optimizing funnels in a way that’s similar to Google Docs—while keeping sensitive information secure. GoHighLevel doesn’t offer this.
On the flip side, GoHighLevel funnels excel in multi-channel marketing, integrating two-way SMS/MMS, voicemail drops, emails, appointment booking, call tracking, and Facebook messages. Talk about multi-channel marketing at its finest!
Plus, you can easily build a GoHighLevel sales funnel from scratch. Even if you’re a beginner, the funnel builder is user-friendly and straightforward to navigate.
And, if building funnels from scratch isn’t your jam, you’ll love that GoHighLevel offers more funnel templates to choose from than ClickFunnels.
As you can tell, the templates’ quality (they are customizable, too) will do the job. However, I agree that ClickFunnels offers the more polished bunch (although far fewer in number).
That said. GoHighLevel Snapshots are a must-try.
Essentially, GoHighLevel Snapshots lets you clone and reuse the settings of one sub-account in another. Here are examples:
A snapshot can capture and transfer over 20 aspects of a sub-account to the destination account. These can include:
- Funnels
- Automation workflows
- Trigger links
- Calendars
- Custom fields
- SMS campaigns, and
- CRM settings.
This feature is a must-have for me. It takes some effort to master, yes. But, if you run a digital agency, cloning fully functional marketing and sales systems for different clients is a time-saver. And time is money!
Better yet, you can import your ClickFunnels workflows with the ClickFunnels to GoHighLevel importer. ClickFunnels doesn’t offer a similar importer.
Key difference #3. Although ClickFunnels 2.0 brought improvements to CRM, HighLevel goes all-out
Compared to the classic version, ClickFunnels 2.0 shows significant improvements. For instance, you can now build detailed contact lists, segment contacts, and send two-way SMS messages. Plus, it includes AI rewrites for features like SMS and custom fields, making it even more user-friendly.
However, GoHighLevel shines with its native WhatsApp integration, social media planner, and call tracking tools, offering more value in these areas.
For example, while ClickFunnels allows you to call your contacts, it lacks call tracking, which GoHighLevel provides. Additionally, the GoHighLevel social media planner is robust enough to replace subscriptions to tools like Buffer, HootSuite, or CoSchedule.
That’s not all! While ClickFunnels offers a more organized and intuitive appointment booking system, GoHighLevel allows your leads to schedule appointments from various sources, including funnels, web pages, blogs, and more.
Key difference #4. Email marketing and pipelines in GoHighLevel vs ClickFunnels
It’s no surprise that they both offer autoresponders, including welcome and thank you emails. They also support behavior-based triggers for campaigns/automated sequences based on how prospects interact with your channels.
That said, I prefer that GoHighLevel email campaigns integrate live chat messages, WhatsApp integration, SMS, appointment booking, voicemail drops, webhooks, and more.
This means you can capture more leads by considering their location, preferred communication style, and engagement levels.
Meanwhile, ClickFunnels excels in email deliverability, open rates, and conversions—a significant advantage! Plus, you can easily track your email marketing results on a dedicated dashboard:
Conversely, my friends and I had mixed feelings about GoHighLevel’s email marketing. One thing is certain: you’ll need to integrate Mailgun to send bulk emails and improve deliverability in GoHighLevel.
That said, if you want to split-test your emails, GoHighLevel is the only way to do it here. But if beautiful, modern email templates can compensate, ClickFunnels offers plenty of them:
ClickFunnels takes the lead in organizing its templates into intuitive categories like promotions, newsletters, and order confirmations.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if it’s just my account, but I couldn’t find any templates to jumpstart my campaigns in GoHighLevel, even after checking multiple times.
I ended up using these basic “templates”:
Here’s how the “Strategic Planning” template looks from the inside:
Simple does it here.
Of course, you are free to build templates from scratch. Once you do, you can turn them into templates for future use:
Overall, the visual email sequence creators on GoHighLevel and ClickFunnels’ email builders are quite similar. Email campaigns are also fairly straightforward to build, even for marketers with little experience.
Key difference #5. GoHighLevel offers superior course, community, and memberships tools
Courses are a fresh add-on in ClickFunnels 2.0.
Like its landing pages, ClickFunnels offers a wider range of polished customization options for course pages compared to GoHighLevel. You can easily add features like surveys, product carousels, and checkout pages within a course.
More importantly, ClickFunnels allows you to organize your course curriculum into modules and lessons, mirroring the structure found in Kajabi.
Check this out:
Here’s what you are seeing there:
- Lock course content – Ideal for restricting access to paid members only, for example.
- Drip feed – Allow learners to follow the course at a good pace without overindulging or skipping key points, topics, or sections.
- Track learners’ progress – Handy for figuring out where learners get stuck so you can help (certainly one way to improve your ratings and attract more course sales).
- Automated workflows, such as adding a student to a course upon payment, sending timely notifications, etc.
GoHighLevel offers that and even more, beginning with its collection of course templates:
You can create both paid and free courses within your HighLevel community, featuring drip feeding, content locking, and automated workflows.
You’ll also benefit from unlimited video hosting, students, users, workflows, and more.
The more here includes:
- Kajabi Importer – Transfer your existing Kajabi course to GoHighLevel with ease.
- Course completion certificates – Great for learners who want to showcase their new skills at work, at home, or with friends.
- Course comments – Promotes peer discussions, highlighting their understanding of the material.
- Assignments and quizzes – Great for testing comprehension. You can use this to ensure course compliance, such as requiring students to pass an assessment before unlocking the next module.
Currently, neither HighLevel nor ClickFunnels supports importing files from Dropbox, YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo. Additionally, they both lack the e-learning gamification tools offered by platforms like Kajabi and LearnWorlds, such as social profiles, leaderboards, badges, and events.
Key difference #6. GoHighLevel includes online reputation management
This is exclusive to HighLevel.
This is a thoughtful addition. Online reviews can significantly impact your marketing efforts. And that can affect both your credibility and local search rankings when potential leads look you up online.
On that note, GoHighLevel enables you to pull, consolidate, and manage reviews from Facebook, Google My Business, and Yelp! directly from your HighLevel account, making it easier to maintain your online reputation.
You can also:
- Automatically send custom SMS and email review request messages right after a transaction.
- If a customer doesn’t respond to the first request, GoHighLevel sends a gentle reminder after a set period.
- See trends and metrics related to your online reputation, including the number of reviews, average rating, and review frequency over time.
- Negative feedback is automatically routed to a private feedback form, protecting your public ratings while obtaining constructive feedback.
Ultimately, you do not need third-party review managers when you have HighLevel. It just works, and you’ll soon wonder how you lived without it.
Key difference #7. HighLevel offers more diverse integrations
You’ll notice that ClickFunnels’ main focus is on integrations that complement its funnel-building capabilities.
A few examples here are MailChimp, HubSpot, and LeadPages, but you can extend your connections with Zapier as well.
However, for CRM and client management tools, ClickFunnels lacks GoHighLevel’s integration depth and variety.
On the flip side, integrating CRM, email marketing, invoicing, social media, and other tools with GoHighLevel is a breeze. This streamlined approach lets you consolidate multiple functions onto one platform, helping you avoid overwhelm and the (expensive) pitfalls of SaaS creep.
GoHighLevel also stands out with more native integrations for widely used apps like WhatsApp, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Slack.
Its robust API further enhances functionality, minimizing the need for third-party software and the extra fees that come with it.
Plus, API access is included in all GoHighLevel plans, unlike ClickFunnels, which restricts it to just one plan at $297 per month. This extensive range of connections makes HighLevel a great choice for integrating various marketing tools.
Key difference #8. GoHighLevel offers more responsive support and account setups
You get free access to a welcome course and onboarding video tutorials (which I recommend you don’t miss).
Once you sign up for a free trial, you’ll receive a phone number for support. I reached out to Travis when I needed help with configuring sub-accounts, and he got back to me within 24 hours. His follow-up was great, and he clearly knew the platform inside and out.
On the other hand, ClickFunnels provides onboarding calls, thorough documentation, and learning hubs. I really like the help videos that are strategically placed above the email and funnel templates—they make finding guidance much easier.
Additionally, ClickFunnels offers live training sessions. GoHighLevel has a couple of options as well: for $299, you can get done-with-you accounts, and specialized training is available for $97. If you’re pressed for time, these options could be a real lifesaver.
While the chatbots on both platforms can be handy, they often complicate the process of reaching a live person, and it can take some time to get a response. However, once you do connect with the support teams, they know their stuff and can assist you accordingly.
Key difference #9. Pricing between ClickFunnels and GoHighLevel
Consider this:
And now this:
Alright, here’s the thing:
- GoHighLevel offers unlimited everything; contacts, users, funnels, courses, students, emails sent, etc. All ClickFunnels plans offer unlimited pages, products, email sequences, and workflows.
- Each offers a 14-day trial, but you can get a 30-day GoHighLevel free trial here. Then again, ClickFunnels’ 30-day money back guarantee makes it feel like there’s even less risk involved.
- HighLevel offers more flexibility with three plans, two of which support white labeling, including mobile apps for IOS and Android. ClickFunnels no longer offers a Funnel Hacker plan (here’s what it used to offer, in case you are wondering)
- GoHighLevel has a reseller plan, a hit with digital agency owners. This SaaS Pro plan is priced at $497 per month. It lets you rebrand and resell the platform to unlimited clients for a minimum of $97 per month. With just five paying customers, you can break even and start keeping the extra revenue as profit.
Are there any hidden costs to GoHighLevel or ClickFunnels?
Not quite! But you’ll have to manage GoHighLevel’s $0.01 per email charge for broadcasts, which can add up depending on your email list size.
Plus, there are additional costs for email validation, WhatsApp messages, SMS texts, and calls, which are deducted from your billing option in pre-selected batches, like $20, whenever you hit a certain spending threshold.
ClickFunnels has similar charges, too, including:
- $0.01 for integrations
- $0.10 per video hosted
- $10 per 1TB of video bandwidth when someone watches your videos.
GoHighLevel vs ClickFunnels Verdict
Ultimately, the decision between ClickFunnels and GoHighLevel depends on your specific needs.
If your priorities are email and funnel building efficiency, customizability, and quick deployment, ClickFunnels could be the way to go.
However, for agencies or businesses looking for comprehensive client management, multi-channel integration, and online reputation management, it is not even close. GoHighLevel’s extensive features provide substantial long-term value and scalability.
