Active Campaign vs. GohighLevel

Disclaimer 

Let’s start with a disclaimer. I am not affiliated with GoHighLevel in any way or receive any compensation for this review. This post is purely a firsthand account of our experience migrating from ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel. I aim to provide unbiased documentation of our transition, but I recognize that every business has different priorities. What mattered most to us may not be as important to you—for example, cost wasn’t a significant factor in our decision, but it might be for you. I encourage you to do your own research and evaluate both platforms based on your specific needs before deciding.

Introduction

When asked which two applications our business couldn’t function without, my answer is immediate: Slack and ActiveCampaign. -By the way, the third one would be Elementor/WordPress, but I will keep that as a topic for the next post. Slack is our lifeline for communication, keeping our team and clients connected globally. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, is the backbone of our marketing automation, responsible for nurturing inbound leads, guiding them down the funnel, and ultimately converting them into customers.

To put things into perspective, we have 54 different engagement points across our websites, all feeding into ActiveCampaign. That level of integration makes any Marketing Automation an incredibly sticky platform—one that isn’t easily replaced without careful evaluation. Yet, despite its importance, we decided to migrate away from ActiveCampaign, and we documented the entire process as it happened.

Keep reading to understand the key differences between ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel—and why we switched. The same may or may not be accurate for some of you. Please check the same points before moving to any conclusion.

In Active Campaign, we were in plan: Pro of $5,870.16 yearly cost

In GoHighLevel we are in plan: unlimited of $2,970 yearly cost, but to be fair, we need to add the extra $1.200 per year for sending out the emails (that are charged on top), which makes the total cost: $4.170

Interface (UI)

Aesthetics may be subjective, but when it comes to the user interface, what truly matters is efficiency and ease of use for both internal teams and stakeholders. A well-designed UI should be fast, intuitive, and optimized for productivity—and this is where GoHighLevel stands out.

Speed & Efficiency

One of the biggest frustrations I had with ActiveCampaign was its sluggish performance—especially when managing a large contact database. The UI often felt slow and clunky, which led to inefficiencies in everyday workflows. GoHighLevel, on the other hand, feels significantly faster, even though it houses more features and a richer interface.

Feature Organization & Accessibility

The screens I use most often are:

• Contact Management
• Opportunities (Pipelines & Deals)
• Automations
• Campaigns

While campaigns and automations are equally strong on both platforms, contact management and opportunities are far superior in GoHighLevel. The way data is displayed, filtered, and accessed in GoHighLevel makes day-to-day operations smoother and more efficient.

A Shift Back to the Web Interface

Because I found ActiveCampaign’s UI frustrating, I adapted my workflow by relying more on Slack integrations and their mobile app to complete routine tasks. However, with GoHighLevel, I’ve naturally shifted back to using the web interface—simply because it is efficient, intuitive, and helps me get work done faster.

Email Sending Velocity

One of the biggest pain points I had with ActiveCampaign over the years was the delay in email delivery. When users submitted a form, they expected an almost instant confirmation email, but in reality, emails would often take 2 to 4 minutes to arrive—sometimes even 5 to 6 minutes in extreme cases. This led to users submitting the form multiple times, thinking something was broken, which created frustration and a terrible user experience.

Despite numerous support tickets, ActiveCampaign was never able to fully resolve the issue. Even after acquiring Postmark (a last-mile email delivery service similar to Mailgun), the improvement was limited, as Postmark was primarily designed for transactional emails rather than marketing automations.

GoHighLevel, on the other hand, completely eliminated this issue. Emails are sent instantly, ensuring that leads receive timely responses without any delay. This seemingly small change made a huge difference in how we engage with leads, finally solving a problem we had been battling for years.

Speed in working with the interface (UX)

Another long-standing pain point with ActiveCampaign has been its slow and clunky interface, especially when dealing with large contact volumes (100K+). Navigating through the system often felt sluggish, sorting didn’t always work as expected, and overall, the experience was frustratingly inefficient.

In contrast, GoHighLevel is noticeably faster. Whether it’s due to better caching, superior technology, or something else entirely—I honestly don’t know, and I don’t even care. What matters is that working with GoHighLevel feels smoother and more responsive, while ActiveCampaign often made even simple tasks feel like a chore.

Over time, this difference became more than just a minor inconvenience. I found myself avoiding ActiveCampaign more and more simply because of how slow and frustrating it was. GoHighLevel, on the other hand, became my go-to platform—not because I forced the switch, but because it was simply easier and faster to use. And that alone speaks volumes.

Email builder

Both ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel offer robust email builders with similar features and capabilities. They both provide:

• Pre-built templates for easy customization
• Dynamic fields for personalization
• Drag-and-drop design elements

While both platforms perform well, there are a few key aspects that make GoHighLevel’s email builder stand out:

1. Conditional Visibility Based on Custom Fields – In GoHighLevel, you can set elements to be visible only under specific conditions, where custom field values determine what a recipient sees. This allows for more advanced personalization within emails.
2. Direct Video Embedding – Unlike ActiveCampaign, which requires workarounds, GoHighLevel allows you to embed videos directly into emails, making engagement easier.
3. Built-in FAQs & Countdowns – GoHighLevel provides FAQ sections and countdown timers that can be configured and inserted directly into emails. This is especially useful for time-sensitive promotions and enhancing interactivity.
4. Easier Design Previews – The preview options in GoHighLevel make it easier to see how emails will look across different devices before sending.

Email deliverability

As you will notice from the diagrams below of a similar weekly email, we got the same deliverability and open rates despite the reason that those two platforms are following totally different approach in email delivery.

Let me explain.

Active Campaign sends your emails via your own domain and it enhance your SPF records to include their emailers.

Gohighlevel cannot do that if you already use your domain with other mailers, i.e., google (which you most probably do), and it proposes to create a dedicated domain (we created hello.growthrocks.com) to take care of the emails that have been send via mailgun. Then it adds all the records in your DNS for this to work.

While GoHighLevel is giving us the same reports as I was getting from Active Campaign, there is one key reporting feature I miss from ActiveCampaign:

Hourly Open Trend Tracking

ActiveCampaign provides a granular breakdown of email opens per hour, allowing you to:

• Identify peak engagement times and adjust future send times accordingly.
• Analyze recipient behavior trends to improve automation timing.
• Measure real-time campaign performance and make data-driven decisions.

Tracking Third Party Sides

Since I have no plans—at least for now—to move away from my WordPress websites and Elementor forms that we host on our datacenters, tracking user behavior across these sites remains a top priority. Understanding which articles and pages our visitors engage with helps us identify their interests and segment them accordingly for personalized follow-ups.

With ActiveCampaign, this was straightforward: we simply added a tracking snippet to the website’s header, allowing us to capture real-time events in the backend whenever a visitor browsed specific pages. This level of insight was invaluable for refining our marketing automation.

GoHighLevel, on the other hand, offers a similar tracking functionality—but only for WordPress sites hosted on their infrastructure. That’s not an option I’m willing to consider. We contacted GoHighLevel’s support team, who confirmed that tracking for externally hosted WordPress sites is on their roadmap, expected in early Q2 of 2025. Until then, this remains a notable limitation of GoHighLevel compared to ActiveCampaign.

Zapier Integration

Both ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel offer Zapier integration, allowing for seamless automation with other tools. ActiveCampaign’s Zapier app is simply called “ActiveCampaign,” while GoHighLevel’s app is branded as “LeadConnector.” Both connect via an API key and cover the essential tasks you’d expect from a marketing automation platform.

However, ActiveCampaign’s Zapier integration is significantly richer—both as a trigger and as an action—meaning it supports a wider range of activities and transactions. This makes it more flexible when building complex workflows.

One thing that stood out to me about LeadConnector is that it appears to be a side project rather than a core product of GoHighLevel. A prime example of this is the omission of the “Company Name” field from the available update fields—a surprising oversight for a CRM-related tool. The workaround? You can create a custom field and map it manually through Zapier.

Is this a deal-breaker? Not necessarily. Both integrations support the fundamental automation needs equally well. However, for more complex workflows, LeadConnector can create friction and require additional workarounds—something to keep in mind if you rely heavily on advanced automations

Slack integration

Slack is a crucial part of our workflow, so having a solid integration with our marketing automation platform is a big deal. Both ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel offer Slack apps, but the difference in functionality is quite noticeable.

ActiveCampaign’s Slack integration is far more robust. It not only allows for notifications but also lets you trigger automations directly from Slack messages. For example, when an inbound lead reaches out via Slack—especially if they haven’t used the proper form—you can manually add them to an automation, ensuring they’re properly nurtured before assigning the next step. This feature is extremely useful for moderating and qualifying leads on the fly.

GoHighLevel’s Slack integration, on the other hand, feels more like a side project. It exists, but it lacks the depth and flexibility of ActiveCampaign’s version. While basic notifications work, the ability to take action directly from Slack is missing—making it less effective for handling inbound leads that require immediate attention.

Webhooks Support

When evaluating webhook capabilities, the key questions are:

1. Does the platform support incoming webhooks? In other words, can I send data directly to my marketing automation system without needing Zapier or another middleware?
2. Does the platform support outgoing webhooks? Can I trigger a webhook to send data to a third-party app, passing along all necessary parameters?

The primary reason for wanting native webhook support is simple: cost. If a marketing automation platform can directly handle incoming and outgoing webhooks, it eliminates the need for Zapier or similar tools, reducing expenses and simplifying workflows.

How GoHighLevel Handles Webhooks

GoHighLevel is clearly more advanced in this area. It supports both incoming and outgoing webhooks, allowing for:

• Receiving data from external sources by generating a unique webhook URL that can be used to feed information into the system.
• Sending data to third-party applications using GET or POST methods, ensuring that all relevant information is passed along seamlessly.

This flexibility makes GoHighLevel much more powerful for custom integrations and advanced automation setups.

How ActiveCampaign Handles Webhooks

To ActiveCampaign’s credit, while its webhook functionality is more limited, it does offer native endpoint integrations for Elementor and other WordPress builders. These integrations can handle basic tasks without requiring webhook configurations. In many cases, this is sufficient for simple automations, reducing the need for external webhook calls. However, for more advanced integrations, ActiveCampaign’s webhook capabilities are more restrictive compared to GoHighLevel.

Mobile app

ActiveCampaign provides a basic mobile experience, primarily focused on contact management and campaign monitoring. While you can access automations, reports, and email campaigns, the interface feels limited and not optimized for full-scale management. Performing advanced tasks on mobile is cumbersome, making it more of a companion app rather than a fully functional tool.

GoHighLevel’s Mobile App

GoHighLevel, on the other hand, has a much stronger mobile experience. Their app is designed to allow users to fully manage contacts, pipelines, automations, and even messaging on the go for all the subaccounts. See subaccounts as brands of the same company or different clients and you will immediately realize how powerful that is. Unlike ActiveCampaign, where mobile access feels secondary, GoHighLevel treats mobile as an extension of the platform, allowing real-time management without needing a desktop.

Another major advantage of GoHighLevel’s mobile app is its ability to handle conversations, track leads, and manage appointments seamlessly, making it a more powerful tool for sales teams and agencies that need real-time access.

Automations

When evaluating automations, we focus on three key aspects:

1. The Automation Builder
2. Triggers & Actions
3. Reporting, Monitoring & Enrollment Controls

Regarding core automation capabilities, both ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel perform equally well. They each offer a visual automation builder, a wide range of triggers and actions, and overall flexibility for building complex workflows. However, because GoHighLevel is noticeably faster, it is quicker to set up and adjust automations compared to ActiveCampaign.

What GoHighLevel Does Better

• Speed – Since GoHighLevel is overall faster, the process of building automations is smoother and more efficient.
• Webhooks & Spreadsheet Integration – If you frequently send data to webhooks or write automation results to spreadsheets, GoHighLevel handles this more effectively.
• Automation Reporting & Monitoring – GoHighLevel excels at tracking automation performance, providing better visibility into how contacts move through your workflows.
• Auditing & User Tracking – If you need detailed logs of who entered an automation, when, and why, GoHighLevel provides more substantial auditing features than ActiveCampaign.

A Major Drawback in GoHighLevel

One frustrating limitation of GoHighLevel is that you cannot skip automations when importing contacts. In ActiveCampaign, when you import a list, you can exclude contacts from automations, preventing unnecessary actions from being triggered. GoHighLevel lacks this feature, leading to an issue where I accidentally sent 2,000 unnecessary emails because I couldn’t prevent imported contacts from being automatically enrolled in active workflows.

Bonus: Better Automation Search
While searching isn’t the same as reporting, one standout feature in GoHighLevel is the ability to search within automations. If you’ve ever managed 254 automations (like we do), you know how frustrating it is to track down a specific one in ActiveCampaign. GoHighLevel’s search feature is a game-changer, making locating and troubleshooting automations easier without wasting time.

Integrated Features 

For years, while using ActiveCampaign, I always needed third-party tools to fill in the gaps—Calendly for scheduling meetings and Typeform for advanced forms, quizzes, and interactive engagement points. These essential tools required additional integrations, costs, and manual syncing with ActiveCampaign automations.

So, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that GoHighLevel comes with built-in alternatives that match (or even exceed) the capabilities of these third-party tools—while being natively integrated into the platform.

Calendar & Scheduling – GoHighLevel includes a full-fledged calendar system, comparable to Calendly, but with even more advanced features. It supports:

• Appointment booking (one-on-one or group)
• Payment collection (perfect for paid consultations)
• Pixel tracking (for ad retargeting)
• Direct automation triggers (instantly adding leads into workflows)

Quizzes & Forms – Instead of relying on Typeform, GoHighLevel provides an advanced form and quiz builder, allowing us to:

• Create interactive quizzes that dynamically trigger different automations based on user responses
• Capture all form and quiz fields as custom fields—ensuring that every piece of data is stored, accessible, and usable within the CRM

The Best Part?
With GoHighLevel, all collected data—whether from forms, quizzes, or the calendar—seamlessly integrates into automations without the need for third-party tools or complex integrations. This not only saves money but also eliminates friction in the workflow, making everything more streamlined.

Security / Privacy

When evaluating a marketing automation platform, privacy, security, and monitoring (auditing) are non-negotiable. The key questions to ask are:

Can I control user roles and permissions?
A critical security feature is an ability to assign custom roles with specific permissions—limiting access to contacts, automations, and sales pipelines, and most importantly, preventing unauthorized users from exporting your contact list, which is a valuable business asset.

• ActiveCampaign allows for role-based access, but the flexibility in assigning permissions varies depending on your plan.
• GoHighLevel does not allow you to create entirely new roles, but it does allow customization of existing roles by enabling or disabling specific features, giving you a fair level of control over what each team member can access.

Is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) available? Can I enforce session expiration?
Ensuring that only authorized users can log in is crucial. Ideally, a system should enforce 2FA at every login and allow admins to configure session expiration times for added security.

• ActiveCampaign supports 2FA at every login, adding an extra layer of protection.
• GoHighLevel takes a different approach—it doesn’t enforce 2FA on every login but does require it on first-time logins for sub-accounts and supports 2FA through its mobile app.

Can I track user activity through audit logs?
Auditing is essential, especially if you work with clients who demand transparency and accountability when things go wrong. A detailed activity log ensures that you can track every action taken by users.

• ActiveCampaign used to have a proper audit log feature but dropped it a few years ago, which was a disappointing move.
• GoHighLevel excels in auditing—its detailed and robust logs leave no room for speculation, making it much easier to track exactly what happened, when, and by whom.

Reporting

Reporting is a critical feature for any marketing automation platform used by an agency. At the end of the day, we all care about answering a few key questions:

• How are our campaigns performing?
• How is our contact list growing month over month?
• How well is our funnel converting?

Of course, once you start analyzing data, you’ll end up with hundreds of other questions, but these three are the core insights every agency needs.

Unfortunately, ActiveCampaign’s reporting system has always been extremely limited. Generating even basic reports required workarounds, forcing us to use third-party tools just to visualize essential metrics. Their API for exporting data is restrictive, making it challenging to extract meaningful insights. To work around this, we had to manually piece together data using webhooks, spreadsheets, and Looker Studio, just to get a clear picture of how our funnel was performing.

GoHighLevel, on the other hand, eliminates this struggle. Reporting is built into a powerful dashboard, providing real-time insights on campaign performance, contact growth, and funnel analytics without needing third-party tools.

Portability

This was one of the biggest surprises when switching from ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel.

With ActiveCampaign, everything is tied to a single account. If you’re managing multiple clients, you need separate accounts for each, and nothing is portable between them. That means, if you create a high-performing automation, email template, or campaign for one client, you can’t quickly transfer it to another account. Instead, you’re stuck rebuilding everything from scratch—a huge time sink.

GoHighLevel, on the other hand, solves this beautifully with its Agency Mode. This mode allows you to:

• Create multiple sub-accounts under your agency
• Control feature access per account (customizing permissions and tools for each client)
• Assign users to specific sub-accounts
• Seamlessly port automations, campaigns, and templates from one account to another

This last point is a game-changer, especially for agencies that use playbooks like we do. Instead of reinventing the wheel for every new client, we can clone proven campaigns and automations from our template account and apply them instantly to new sub-accounts.

For agencies handling multiple clients, GoHighLevel’s Agency Mode is a lifesaver. It makes onboarding new clients incredibly efficient, saving hours of repetitive work and allowing us to focus on delivering results instead of rebuilding the same processes repeatedly.

Pricing Structure / Cost

ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel take very different approaches when it comes to pricing. There’s no right or wrong model—it all comes down to what makes sense for your business.

ActiveCampaign’s pricing is based on two main factors: the number of contacts you have and the features you need. The more contacts you accumulate, the more you pay. Additionally, if you want to unlock features like sales pipelines or add more team members, you’ll need to move up to a higher-tier plan. This structure allows for predictable budgeting, as there’s no variable component beyond your contact count and chosen feature set.

GoHighLevel, on the other hand, takes a flat-rate, all-inclusive approach. It doesn’t charge based on the number of contacts or the features you use—everything is included in a single plan. However, the variable cost comes into play when sending emails. While this can be more flexible for scaling businesses, it does mean that your expenses will fluctuate depending on how many emails you send each month.

So, the key difference is:

• ActiveCampaign = Fixed pricing, but scales up as your contact list and feature needs grow.
• GoHighLevel = Flat pricing, but with a variable cost for email sending.

Ultimately, the best choice depends on your growth model and how you prefer to manage expenses.

Support and Customer Success

Regarding customer support, ActiveCampaign and GoHighLevel take entirely different approaches.

As you can probably tell from this post, we use marketing automation to its full extent. Because of that, having reliable, responsive support is critical for us. On average, we have one or two interactions with support per week.

ActiveCampaign’s Support Approach

ActiveCampaign provides support via chat, a more traditional way of handling customer inquiries. While it gets the job done, there are a few drawbacks:

• Long wait times – Getting someone on chat often takes a while as the queue progresses slowly.
• Back-and-forth text-based support – While chat is helpful, it can be inefficient when explaining complex issues, as typing everything out takes time.
• Expected delays – Given the number of clients ActiveCampaign has, long support queues are understandable.

That said, I don’t fault them for the delays, but it was often frustrating when we needed quick resolutions.

GoHighLevel’s Support Approach

GoHighLevel does something completely different—they don’t have a support chat queue. Instead, they handle support through Zoom calls.

• Immediate face-to-face interaction – Instead of waiting in a long chat queue, you can jump on a Zoom call with support.
• Easier troubleshooting – Screen sharing makes it much easier to reproduce issues in real time and get actionable advice.
• Personalized help – The support team doesn’t always know more than you do, but they try their best to help, and the interactive nature of Zoom makes it easier to communicate.
• Shorter wait times – So far, we’ve never had to wait more than 5–10 minutes to get on a call.

Overall

Unfortunately for you, dear reader, there is no final verdict at this post’s end. Not because we don’t have one, but because it wouldn’t be fair to hand over a conclusion as if it applies universally to everyone.

When choosing a marketing automation platform that will become the backbone of your business, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Quick decisions based on someone else’s experience might not serve you well in the long run.

Instead, my advice is simple:

1. Go back through the article.
2. Read each section carefully.
3. Ask yourself which aspects are essential to you.
4. Weigh the importance of each aspect based on your needs, which depend on your stage, maturity, team composition, and financial situation.

Once you do that, your verdict will be apparent to you.

Keep in mind that I may have missed a feature, or perhaps a functionality does exist but went unnoticed during our migration. Additionally, marketing automation platforms evolve constantly—what isn’t supported today may very well be introduced in a future update.

Lastly, this comparison focused only on the most important features that influenced our decision. There are many other tools in GoHighLevel that have made my daily workflow easier—such as QR codes, dynamic links, forms, funnels, and A/B testing—but those are topics for a deeper dive in another post.

Enjoy!