HighLevel and HubSpot are all-in-one sales and marketing platforms with a lot of emphasis on CRM (customer relationship management). HubSpot is very innovative, but the same can be said about HighLevel.
HighLevel was not always the one-stop sales and marketing platform it is today. It started in 2018 as an agency and grew into a full-fledged business solution. The platform still continues to grow very fast and is getting more and more popular by the day.
Similarly, from its inception in 2006, HubSpot was solely a marketing automation platform. Today, it’s one of the biggest players in the sales and marketing game. Compared to HighLevel, it’s a much bigger company, and it keeps expanding.
In 2019, PieSync, a software that allows live and historical data synchronization, was acquired by HubSpot. This merger made the platform even more competitive.
In this article, we’ll inspect the most important and interesting facets of these two platforms. Let’s get started.
| A quick comparison: | ||
| HighLevel | HubSpot | |
| Best for | Agencies or large, established companies | Large or small business owners |
| Pricing |
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| Integrations |
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| Customer Support | Customer support is rated very highly and comes in the form of:
| HubSpot customer support is equally well reviewed and includes:
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Table of Contents
Who Is HighLevel for?
There’s no doubt who HighLevel caters to. Its motto is “for agencies, by an agency.” The company itself started as a marketing agency but transformed into a full-suite sales and marketing solution over time.
However, they never forgot their roots and, as such, wanted to share their experience with other agencies to help them achieve success.
HighLevel is definitely not for the newcomer or the inexperienced. It takes time and some hands-on knowledge to reap the full benefits.
Also, generally speaking, it’s not well-suited for end-users. As some reviewers note, the only situation where HighLevel would work for an end-user would be in a franchise environment.
Who Is HubSpot for?
HubSpot, on the other hand, definitely works for end-users. In fact, it would work well for any type of business owner.
However, according to the stats from a large study published on Enlyft, the bulk of businesses that use HubSpot belong to the category of small businesses, both revenue-wise and based on the number of employees. In second place come medium-size businesses, with large businesses making up the least percentage.
The study also shows that the platform is mainly used in these three industries: computer software, marketing & advertising, and IT.
It can be said that the company is best suited to small businesses, but it can be equally well suited to medium-sized businesses – certainly anyone in the IT or marketing industry. HubSpot works well for businesses in their initial phase as well as for growing businesses because it’s extremely scalable.
Pricing
HighLevel
HighLevel offers two plans or, as it calls them, accounts. There’s the Agency Starter Account and the Agency Unlimited Account.
Agency Starter Account
Starting at $97/month, the Agency Starter Account is the most basic plan. It includes a single account that you can use either for your own agency or to set up one client. In addition to this, you get access to two integrations: Twilio and Mailgun.
Twilio is a cloud-based platform that allows different types of communication, like text messaging and phone calls. Mailgun is a communication platform that takes care of your email communication.
This plan is best suited for an agency run by one person.
Agency Unlimited Account
The intermediate Agency Unlimited Account costs $297/month and includes all the tools found in the basic plan, plus unlimited sub-accounts and a branded desktop app. Let’s elaborate on this a bit.
Unlimited sub-accounts means you can have as many clients as you want, all with separate accounts at no additional cost. This is one of the most incredible things about the HighLevel pricing system. Normally, with other platforms, you or your clients need to pay for each account. With HighLevel, this isn’t the case.
On top of this, as an agency (owner), you’ll be free to charge your clients whatever sum you want for your service.
This plan gives you a lot of control. You can use your own custom domain and customize the platform to not only look the way you want but also to look like you own the software. This is possible thanks to HighLevel's white labeling feature, which enables you to make the platform look completely in line with your branding – your logo, your colors, and everything else.
In contrast to the Agency Starter Account, the Agency Unlimited Account is more suited for a team.
White Label Mobile App + Custom Zap Upgrade
Another exciting option with HighLevel is an upgrade designed to supplement the Agency Unlimited Account. It’s called White Label Mobile App + Custom Zap Upgrade. Wordy, but very descriptive.
With it, you get a fully-branded HighLevel mobile app tailored specifically to your needs and access to a custom collection of the integrations available through Zapier – customized towards your business needs.
However, it’s not cheap to enjoy the benefits of all these features. A subscription to the Agency Unlimited Account is a prerequisite for the upgrade. You will have to pay an additional $497 on top of the regular monthly fee for the Agency Unlimited Account.
Free Trial
Luckily, none of the plans require a long-term commitment, so you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel any time you want. If you want to take HighLevel for a spin before making a decision, there’s a 14-day trial period. However, this does require your credit card and personal information in order to get started.
HubSpot
The HubSpot pricing system is a bit complex, so let’s break it down, starting with the free tools.
Free Tools
The good news is that HubSpot offers free tools and a large number of them. They’re great for someone who is just starting out. You’ll have access to a range of tools covering the areas of CRM, marketing, and business operations.
The free tools are divided into five groups:
- CRM
- Marketing
- Sales
- Service
- Operations
There are no free CMS features, but since there’s a significant overlap between the groups, to avoid repetition, we’ll list the tools without mentioning any of the groups’ names.
These are some noteworthy free HighLevel tools and features:
- Contact management
- Contact website activity
- Calling
- Messenger integration
- Email tracking and notifications
- Meeting scheduling app
- Forms
- Tasks and activities
- Ticketing
- Prospects
- Email marketing
- Landing pages
- Reporting dashboard
- Ad management
- HubSpot mobile app
- Live chat
- Conversational bots
- Email templates
- Data sync
- App Marketplace integration
The complete list is much longer, but even the set of tools we listed here is a pretty impressive selection – considering that it’s free. Next, we’ll explore the paid plans.
Five Hubs
The paid plans for HubSpot tools are divided into five different “hubs”:
- Marketing
- CRM & sales
- Customer service
- CMS (content management system)
- Operations
Every category is further broken down into separate plans.
Marketing
Starter Plan
The Marketing Starter plan costs $45/month. With it, you get the free marketing tools, 1,000 marketing contacts, plus some more advanced features for attracting an audience, gaining a better understanding of your leads, and engaging your leads.
When it comes to automation, the Starter plan is not recommended. It doesn’t support the level of automation needed for running a serious business. The only real automation capabilities you have are form and email automation. You will lack the ability to automate across multiple marketing channels or automate your ABM reporting tools. These additional automation features can really streamline operations and make business easier.
It’s worth noting that if you pay upfront for a whole year you’ll receive a 10% discount.
Professional Plan
The Marketing Professional plan is priced at $800/month – it’s a big price jump. That said, this plan includes everything from the Starter plan along with 2,000 marketing contacts, marketing automation tools, functionalities that make your marketing more personalized, a blog, SEO tools, A/B split-testing, custom reports, and more.
In terms of system automation and advanced functionality, the Professional plan will most certainly do the trick. With the Professional plan, you’ll also receive a 10% discount if you pay up front for the whole year.
Enterprise Plan
The Marketing Enterprise plan includes everything from the previous plan plus 10,000 marketing contacts, tools to manage your teams and brands, possibilities to extend the platform (say, with webhooks), advanced reporting, etc. This plan costs $3,600/month. It’s expensive, but it’s an enterprise-level plan, so that’s to be expected.
Sales
Starter Plan
The Sales Starter plan costs $45/month. With it, you get the ability to organize your sales (like pipelines), different ways to connect with prospective customers (call, live chat, schedule a meeting), tracking and reporting tools, and more.
Professional Plan
The CRM & Sales Professional plan costs $450/month. Like their marketing and customer service counterparts, this plan also includes a 10% discount on the annual subscription.
This Professional plan includes tools for managing a large team, such as separating accounts by team. It also provides functionality that gives your sales efforts a more personalized touch, like personalized videos and much more.
Enterprise Plan
The CRM & Sales Enterprise plan costs $1,200/month. This plan allows you to customize anything related to sales and CRM. It’s almost limitless.
Customer Service
Starter Plan
The Customer Service Starter plan includes a ticket system, live chat, phone calls, a meeting scheduler, various types of reports, and so on. It costs $45/month.
Professional Plan
The Customer Service Professional plan includes various ticket-related tools and customer experience surveys and reporting. It also includes functionality that will help your customers resolve issues more efficiently on their own. For example, there’s a knowledge base that answers your clients’ FAQs.The monthly fee for this plan is $450.
Enterprise Plan
The Customer Service Enterprise plan is priced at $1,200/month. It enables you to provide outstanding and dependable customer service, as well as manage many teams and customers.
CMS
Starter Plan
The CMS Starter plan is a new addition to the hub and is priced at $23/month. It includes all the free tools plus a live chat function and payment processing, but only for US-based customers. You’ll have all the functions you need to build and secure your website.
Professional Plan
The CMS Professional plan costs $360/month, and it allows you to build different types of pages and websites. You can also boost your traffic with the HubSpot SEO tools, which will help you achieve higher conversion rates with tools like split testing. Moreover, there’s around-the-clock monitoring and threat detection to keep your site secure.
In addition to all this, the Professional plan lets your customers enjoy fast page load speeds, thanks to the built-in CDN. HubSpot gives you a 10% discount on this plan if you pay annually.
Enterprise Plan
The CMS Enterprise plan costs $1,200/month, and it gives you access to powerful features like memberships, custom CDN configuration, single sign-on, and the possibility to utilize powerful AI-based testing.
Operations
Starter Plan
The Starter Operations plan includes everything from the previous plan, plus more advanced features specifically related to data synchronization. It costs $45/month.
Professional Plan
The price of the Professional Operations plan is $720/month. Some interesting features here are webhooks, which enable real-time communication between web apps mainly via JSON. Also, there’s the possibility to use JavaScript for automation purposes, custom reporting, and data cleaning tools.
Enterprise Plan
The Enterprise plan gives you all the Professional plan features plus advanced data management options and customization potential. It will cost you $2,000/month for the benefits.
Bundles
But that’s not all, folks. The interesting part is that HubSpot allows you to combine different hubs, or pricing plans, according to your needs. You have two options – either select a bundle suggested by the platform or create your own.
You can find three bundles proposed on the HubSpot site:
Clearly, these are great cut-price offers, but if none of them tickles your fancy, you can combine different types of plans into a bundle that best fits your requirements. HubSpot calculates the price for your custom bundle immediately.
In addition to this, the company has special offers with discounts of up to 90% for startups. You need to apply to check if you’re eligible for HubSpot for Startups.
Thoughts on the HubSpot pricing system
In contrast to HighLevel, where you simply get everything – sales, marketing, and pipelines for just the monthly subscription fee – HubSpot has a very different approach.
You may pay a hefty sum for your advanced marketing tools, and that still doesn’t mean you’ll get access to all the sales tools you want. If you want tools of different types, you'll need to pay more. If you want access to tools from every hub, it gets pretty pricey. Trying to get a broad suite of tools could end up costing you more than $1,500 per month.
This is one of the reasons experienced users suggest that you schedule a live demo before doing anything on HubSpot. There’s also a possibility to sign up for a 14-day trial with the plans from the CMS hub and the Professional Operations plan. That way, you’ll gain a better understanding of what features you really need and only then make a decision.
Integrations
HighLevel
HighLevel doesn’t have anything along the lines of an app store. There’s a very simple reason: the number of third-party integrations – not counting those available via Zapier – is very small.
On the HighLevel site, you can find the following apps:
- Facebook (social network)
- QuickBooks (accounting)
- ManyChat (communication and marketing)
- ActiveProspect (communication and consent-based marketing)
- Zoom (webinars and video conferencing)
- Stripe (payment processing).
Zapier fills the holes, but at a greater financial cost since it’s available only with a special upgrade.
But that’s not all – HighLevel also integrates with other software through embed codes, allowing you to address certain deficiencies. For example, if you need blogging functionality, HighLevel doesn’t come with a blogging tool. You’ll also find that none of the above-mentioned integrations are in any way related to blogging.
In short, to blog on HighLevel, you need third-party software, but that isn’t necessarily bad, especially when there’s such a great solution.
Without any hassle, you can integrate HighLevel with DropInBlog. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better blogging option on the market. DropInBlog allows you to create a blog on HighLevel in a few easy steps.
HubSpot
Unlike HighLevel, HubSpot has a very rich store of third-party integrations. There are 1,000+ apps in the HubSpot App Marketplace divided into five categories:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer service
- Productivity
- Finance
Each of these categories is further divided into various subcategories.
Some of the apps are free; others need to be paid for. Some of the paid ones require a monthly fee, while others have a yearly fee. One-time and pay-as-you-go apps are also not uncommon, and then there are others that require you to contact customer service to get a price.
Some of the most popular apps, by the number of installations, are Gmail, Facebook Ads, Mailchimp, Calendly, Salesforce, Typeform, Hotjar, and Zapier.
Clearly, in terms of integrations, HubSpot offers far more than HighLevel. It can be great to have a wide range of options available, even if you don’t use them. On the other hand, too many options can become overwhelming.
Customer Support
HighLevel
HighLevel provides day-and-night support via several channels:
- Support portal: Rich with articles on anything related to the platform, including general questions and onboarding. The onboarding series includes videos, too.
- Community forums
- Facebook community
- Ticket system
- Email support
- Phone support
- Live chat
The HighLevel customer service is professional, highly responsive, and overall works great. Therefore, it rates very highly in users’ reviews of the company.
HubSpot
When it comes to customer help, support, and care, HubSpot has taken things to another level. There are so many ways to get help, learn about the platform, and resolve problems:
- HubSpot Academy: Where they teach you about their platform and sales and marketing features for free. Everyone has access, and when you finish a course, you are awarded a free certificate.
- Help Center: Where you can find links to the academy, documentation, HubSpot community, the knowledge base, customer blogs, and HubSpot partners.
- ChatBot: Available to any visitor of the HubSpot site.
- Email: For those subscribed to a Starter plan.
- Chat with a real person: Available only with a Starter account.
- Phone: Only with Professional and Enterprise plans.
- Twitter.
- Chat with the sales team.
- Online meetings.
- HUGs (HubSpot User Groups).
The HubSpot customer support team is extremely helpful and knowledgeable and responds quickly. The HubSpot customer service team is described by clients as "amazing," "top-notch," "excellent," and generally all good things.
Features
HighLevel
HighLevel offers a lot of features. For what it includes, it’s extremely cost-effective.
This is part of what the platform provides its customers:
- Multi-channel communication: SMS, Messenger, phone, email, voicemail, etc.
- Smart lists
- Call recording, detailed call information, forced calls, and a power dialer
- Webhooks
- White labeling
- Live chat widget
- Membership builder
- Conversion rate tracking
- Ability to create different types of campaigns: sales, marketing, follow-up, and more
- Reputation management
- Unlimited business accounts
- Website builder and some pre-designed templates
- Automated marketing
- Sales funnels and pipelines builder
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Trigger links
- Broadcast messaging
- Ability to import and export contact lists
- Snapshots
- Appointments and calendar tool
- Analytics and reporting
- Two-way texting
- Affiliate program
- AI and machine learning-powered system
- The ability to copy a ClickFunnels funnel
- No limitation on the number of custom domains or websites you can build for your clients
- Ability to follow your clients’ communication with their clients and their sales and marketing campaign
- Excellent reporting dashboard
- Email builder (not that good)
- A very good form builder
HubSpot
HubSpot offers so many tools that it’s simply not possible to detail them all here. As a result, we’ll list only the best.
These are some of the things that HubSpot offers:
- Contact management
- Gmail and Outlook integration
- Reporting and analytics
- Email tracking
- Email builder
- Scheduler
- Canned snippets
- List of the most relevant information about leads and customers and timeline of interaction
- Ability to create tasks that you get timely reminders about
- Great SEO functionality
- Partner program that lets you resell HubSpot to your customers
- History of recent email conversations and leads’ activity on social networks
- Open-source software and open-source development (more on that here)
- Very tidy and user-friendly dashboard
- Ability to make calls from the browser
- Separate template page with a myriad of responsive and customizable templates, many of which are free
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Smart landing pages that show content depending on the user’s profile
- Blog
- Split-testing
- AI and machine learning-powered system
- Pipelines
FAQs
Which marketing platform is better for small businesses – HighLevel or HubSpot?
Overall, we believe HubSpot to be better suited to small businesses and those just establishing themselves in the market. HighLevel is more complex to get your head around and includes many advanced features that are simply too much for the beginner. Don’t worry, though – HubSpot is highly scalable and can grow with you as your business grows.
Can I use HubSpot CRM along with HighLevel?
It is possible to integrate HubSpot CRM with HighLevel. However, this could end up being very expensive unless you’re combining your free HubSpot plan with HighLevel. Either way, you might find better value for money by choosing the platform that best suits your needs outright.
Do Zapier integrations work with HubSpot?
Zapier integrations most certainly do work with HubSpot. You can find more information on the Zapier integrations page.
Do Zapier integrations work with HighLevel?
Yes, it’s definitely possible to integrate Zapier with HighLevel. In fact, there are so few integrations available with HighLevel that you almost need to consider Zapier. To get assistance with Zapier integrations on HighLevel, see the HighLevel support page.
Final Thoughts
We saw how similar HighLevel and HubSpot are. They are defined in the same way, and they offer comparable features. However, even though the overall number of HubSpot features may be larger, HighLevel offers a lot for much less money. On the other hand, HubSpot gives you access to many tools for free.
HubSpot offers a lot more integrations, while HighLevel offers simplicity. HubSpot has a very clean and tidy dashboard that makes it a more intuitive platform, but it’s not as if HighLevel lags far behind on that front.
Generally speaking, HubSpot is more powerful than HighLevel, so in a way, it does have a slight advantage in the HighLevel vs. HubSpot comparison.
However, the most important thing to keep in mind here is that these two platforms are geared toward different audiences. HighLevel is strictly built for agencies, while HubSpot works perfectly for end-users. With that in mind, the better platform is the one that fits your specific needs better.