HighLevel vs. ClickFunnels Comparison

HighLevel and ClickFunnels are fairly different platforms. They focus on different aspects of online business and do not have the same end goal. On top of that, they are geared toward different audiences entirely. Let’s look at the differences and similarities between the two.

ClickFunnels is primarily focused on being a platform that excels at building good sales funnels. Sales funnel building is its specialty, and it comes at the expense of other features to a certain extent.

HighLevel, on the other hand, is mainly CRM system software. Its focus is on customer relationship management. It enables agencies to help business owners cultivate their communication with customers and develop more successful business relationships. 

Why You Need a Sales Funnel

Just as running an in-person business requires certain skills, the same goes for running an online business. That’s what good sales funnel software provides you with. A sales funnel automates the operations that would traditionally require a dedicated sales team. It works in the background, capturing leads around the clock without you having to monitor it constantly.

Creating and integrating a good sales funnel into a wider sales and marketing campaign is far from a breeze, though. Hence, more and more platforms are developing solutions for this issue. 

HighLevel is one of them. It has developed into a full suite of one-stop sales and marketing solutions and has carved out a niche for itself in the sales funnel-building field. In that respect, it’s comparable to other well-known funnel builders, like ClickFunnels.

In that regard, a comparison of HighLevel and ClickFunnels really makes sense. Both are excellent funnel builders, both platforms operate within the same wide field of sales and marketing, and both include various tools in one place.

Let’s explore and compare these two platforms and see which one makes a better overall solution for today’s online businesses.

Pricing

HighLevel

HighLevel offers a 14-day free trial (credit card needed), two regular pricing plans, and a special upgrade on top of the highest-tier plan. 

Let’s explore the HighLevel pricing system more closely.

1. Agency Starter Account: $97/month.

This is some basic info on the Agency Starter Account:

• A single account.
• Twilio is a cloud CPaaS (communications platform as a service) that enables multiple kinds of communication, text messaging, and phone calls.
• Mailgun is a communication platform for sending and receiving emails. These are fundamental CRM services, so naturally, they’re available with the lowest-tier HighLevel plan.

2. Agency Unlimited Account: $297/month.

While the Agency Starter Account is perfect for a marketing agency run by one person, the Agency Unlimited Account is more for a team. Here are the basics of what the plan includes:

With this intermediate plan, you have more creative control and a wider scope of possibilities.

3. Upgrade 

This last option is not a typical pricing plan but an upgrade designed for Agency Unlimited Accounts. It’s not cheap – it costs an additional $497 on top of the usual monthly fee for the Agency Unlimited Account. 

However, it offers so many features in terms of customizability and control that it’s worth it:

This advanced upgrade gives you the opportunity to get a custom-built mobile app that fully reflects your branding and allows you to add whichever integration you want through Zapier.

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels offers a 14-day free trial and three pricing plans:

1. ClickFunnels – the Basic Plan

The basic plan costs $147/month, or $127/month if paid annually. 

• 20 shareable funnels
• Up to 100 sub-pages within a funnel
• One sub-user
• 10,000 contacts
• Three different payment processors
• One custom domain
• Access to FunnelFlix (sales and marketing training courses)
• Live chat support

2. Pro – the Intermediate Plan

The intermediate plan is priced at $197/month, or $157/month if paid annually.

• 100 sales funnels, pages, and follow-up funnels
• Five sub-users
• 25,000 contacts
• Nine different payment processors
• Three custom domains
• A ton of training and courses
• Weekly peer review hackathons and coach guidance
• Priority support

3. FunnelHacker – the Special Plan

A special new plan called FunnelHacker is currently discounted from the full price of $497 and offered at $297/month (paid monthly), which saves you $200/month, or $208/month (paid yearly) for a savings of $3,468/year.

This pricing plan includes everything from the Pro plan, but in larger quantities.

• Three websites
• Unlimited funnels
• 15 sub-users
• 200,000 contacts
• 27 payment processors
• Nine custom domains
• Special training and courses
• VIP phone support
• Advanced analytics

Ultimately, a big drawback of the ClickFunnels pricing system is that its basic plan lacks a fundamental sales and marketing tool, such as an automated email service. Another even bigger issue is that, depending on the number of your clients, ClickFunnels can be extremely pricey – the platform allows you to have only one client per account.

Support

HighLevel

HighLevel provides 24/7 support, and you can find a solution to your problems in many different ways.

For starters, there’s a support portal, full of articles on frequently asked questions related to the platform. It includes topics like onboarding, general topics, email, phone calls, campaigns, trigger links, funnels, etc. 

There are also tutorial videos on how to set things up when you’re starting with the platform. There’s a ticket system, email support, phone support, and live chat. Along with this, you can find useful tips on the community forums or join the Facebook community.

Users have an overwhelmingly positive experience with how HighLevel handles customer issues. The live chat support is great, the support team is friendly, responsive, and helpful, and it has very high overall customer ratings. 

HighLevel's customer service is widely regarded as one of the platform’s greatest assets.

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels also offers help to its customers and general audience through multiple channels.

There’s a support page where you can find countless articles, guides, podcasts, video training, courses, and similar. There’s also a ClickFunnels blog with a lot of useful information on various sales-and-marketing topics like GDPR compliance, upselling and cross-selling, advertising, and more. 

You can join the official ClickFunnels group on Facebook or write to the platform’s support chat (bot) available to anyone who visits the official site of ClickFunnels.

Besides this, ClickFunnels provides phone support and live chat support exclusively for its priority customers (live chat is with real humans).

Overall, despite the multiple-channel support, the ClickFunnels customer service is not up to par with HighLevel. Several users have reported slow replies and unpleasant experiences with the customer support team. Some even cite the ClickFunnels customer support among the reasons that made them switch to another platform.

Features

HighLevel

HighLevel is a robust platform that offers high-quality features. The fact that it was mainly built for marketing agencies gives it an edge over the ClickFunnels competition because it offers functionality not easily found anywhere else.

These are some noteworthy features that HighLevel offers:

• White labeling – enables you to use your own logo and domain. 
• The possibility to include a live chat widget into your funnel.
• Tools for course creators, like a membership builder.
• A HighLevel dashboard – track conversion rates and create different types of marketing campaigns.
• Marketing campaigns – customize, duplicate, or build from scratch.
• Reputation management.
• Unlimited business accounts – have a separate account with your branding for every single client.
• The option to build a website from templates or from the ground up. 
• Drag-and-drop editor – add countdown timers, navigation menus, buttons, and pop-ups. Alternatively use the custom code editor.
• The ability to move a lead from a less successful campaign to a more promising one.
• Automated marketing and follow-up campaigns.
• The ability to communicate with leads in many different ways – through SMS messages, Messenger, over the phone, emails, and voicemail messages.
• The ability to build sales funnels and pipelines.
• Trigger links.
• The option to duplicate an account, when there are similar clients.
• Broadcast messaging.
• The option to import and export contact lists.
• Detailed call information.
• Snapshots – account templates built for different industries that include forms, landing pages, and triggers.
• Forced calls.
• Appointments and calendar tool.
• Analytics and reporting.
• Two-way texting.
• An affiliate program that is simple and, with a 40% payout, very generous.
• AI and machine learning system that powers the platform.

The one really special feature of HighLevel is that it allows you to copy the link of a ClickFunnels funnel and start using it. You can either use it as is or with some modifications on HighLevel. 

This is an option available on your dashboard that you can use whenever you find it appropriate for building a new sales funnel. Of course, it’s not recommended to use the exact same specifications of the ClickFunnels funnel, but it’s your choice. 

One caveat though: if you’re copying someone else’s sales funnel, be sure that you have permission to use it.

If you do decide to copy from ClickFunnels, keep in mind that the HighLevel version of the sales funnel won’t be an exact copy of the original, but the bulk of the things you need will be there. By the way, the “migration” process is pretty quick and simple.

HighLevel covers everything ClickFunnels does. The difference is that HighLevel is a much more integrated platform with native software solutions for different facets of modern-day business. At the same time, its features are simpler, more up-to-date, and, generally speaking, of better quality.

ClickFunnels

We already mentioned some ClickFunnels features when we explored the pricing plans. Now, let’s have a look at other notable ClickFunnels features:

• Different types of page templates (landing, form, squeeze page, etc.). However, they’re all very similar, so in terms of design aesthetics, they’re not the best. In terms of functionality, they’re pretty good.
• Membership sites and membership areas.
• Webinars.
• Actionetics – an email marketing and automation tool developed by ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels also offers email templates and lets you manage email lists. The marketing options are limited to email only.
• Affiliate program – one of ClickFunnels saving graces.
• Your own affiliate program as part of a funnel.
• Drag-and-drop editor/page builder that’s easy to use and has a fair number of customization options – padding modification, color adjustment, and custom CSS.
• One-click upsells.
• Analytics and reporting.
• A/B split testing.
• Broadcasts.
• The option to add both physical and digital products to your funnels. 
• Software for building different types of funnels like video sales letter funnels, launch funnels, and follow-up funnels. This is definitely the best selling point of the platform. In addition to this, ClickFunnels offers great sales funnel templates for various types of businesses.

There are some things that are missing from the ClickFunnels repertoire of built-in features. It would be nice if ClickFunnels offered video hosting, a help desk service for clients’ sales funnels, and a booking/scheduling tool. 

Currently, these functions are available only as third-party integrations, and there haven’t been any notable innovations on the ClickFunnels side in a long while. It looks like the platform is stuck where it was a few years ago, but let’s hope that this changes in the near future.

ClickFunnels is not a highly integrated all-in-one platform like HighLevel, which, unfortunately, makes it a bit clunky, glitchy, and slow.

Integrations

HighLevel

HighLevel doesn’t offer many third-party integrations beyond those available via Zapier. At this time, these are the integrations found on the official HighLevel site: 

• Facebook (social network)
• QuickBooks (accounting)
• ManyChat (communication, chatbots, marketing, customer care)
• ActiveProspect (communication, consent-based marketing)
• Zoom (video conferencing, webinars)
• Stripe (payment processing)

There are no other payment gateways available besides Stripe, which some may find a bit inconvenient. As you’ll see shortly, ClickFunnels offers more payment processors and other integrations than HighLevel does. 

However, Zapier comes to the rescue. You can add a custom selection of Zapier-available apps. Apart from this, HighLevel allows integration with other software through embed codes. A clear example of how seamless this process can be is DropInBlog, a cutting-edge blogging tool.

One downside to HighLevel is that it doesn’t include a blogging function in its repertoire. We all know that blogging can be a vital component of business success, as the long history of WordPress clearly shows. 

So, you may be wondering how you can add a blog to your or your client’s HighLevel website. At this moment, the best option for blogging on HighLevel is to add DropInBlog. It doesn’t take long to do this and get everything up and running.

If you think that not having many options in terms of integrations is a significant drawback, keep in mind that there may be some rationale behind it. Presumably, this is the case because the software that runs natively on HighLevel replaces so many third-party apps, so it makes having a plethora of integrations unnecessary.

But not completely – as blogging and DropInBlog clearly show.

ClickFunnels

When it comes to third-party software integration, ClickFunnels offers many options. The complete list of available ClickFunnels integrations is quite lengthy.

Some of the integrations ClickFunnels allows are: 

• Mailchimp (email marketing)
• Twilio (calls and text messages)
• Shopify (e-commerce)
• ActiveCampaign (email marketing, sales automation, and CRM)
• AWeber (email marketing and autoresponders)
• EverWebinar (webinar automation)
• Facebook (social network)
• HubSpot (lead generation and CRM)
• Kajabi (courses and training)
• Salesforce (CRM, sales, marketing, and commerce)
• ShipStation (online shipment and order fulfillment)
• SlyBroadcast (voice messages)
• WebinarJam Studio (webinar hosting, surveys, polls, Q&As)
• Zapier (additional integrations)
• Zoom (video conferencing and webinars)

The platform is especially strong in the payment software integration department. There are a dozen payment tools compatible with ClickFunnels, some of which are: 

• Apple and Android Pay
• Stripe
• PayPal
• Authorize.net
• ClickBank

All in all, ClickFunnels performs pretty well as far as third-party integration is concerned. The platform doesn’t have as many built-in features as HighLevel, but it fills the holes with the many available integrations.

FAQs

Final Thoughts

The bulk of the reviews we explored, when giving their final verdict on HighLevel vs. ClickFunnels, favored the former. On the other hand, ClickFunnels has been around for longer and it’s the more popular platform, statistically speaking. As these stats from SimilarWeb show (be aware that the numbers change every month), ClickFunnels has far more traffic. 

However, the average time visitors spend on the HighLevel website is much longer, the number of visited pages is higher, and what's especially important, the bounce rate is low. That indicates that visitors are finding what they want with HighLevel.

ClickFunnels may still be the undisputed champion in the sales funnel division, but it hasn’t offered anything like a breakthrough in a long while. Despite HighLevel being the lesser-known platform, it’s dishing out some serious competition to ClickFunnels. It’s our prediction that you can expect to hear and see more positive reviews about HighLevel in the near future.