# HighLevel vs Kartra (2026) · Campaign Buyer > Source: https://campaignbuyer.com/compare/gohighlevel-vs-kartra Head-to-head ## HighLevel vs Kartra By [Dana Rourke](/authors/dana-rourke), Lead reviewer. Reviewed by [Campaign Buyer Editorial](/authors/editorial). Updated 24 September 2026\. **Disclosure:**We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It never affects our rankings. ### Quick answer Pick HighLevel if you run an agency that resells marketing to clients and want a CRM at the center with email, SMS and voice, per-client sub-accounts, and the option to white-label the platform and rebill it as your own; pick Kartra if you sell your own courses, coaching or memberships to an audience you build and want funnels, checkout, email and a member area running under one flat monthly bill with no usage fees. HighLevel, from $97/mo. Kartra, from $59/mo. ### Side by side | | HighLevel | Kartra | | -------------------- | -------------------------- | ----------------------- | | What it is | Agency operating system | Bundled creator suite | | Best for | Agencies serving clients | Selling your own offers | | Core strength | CRM, pipelines, SMS, voice | Widest tool bundle | | Manage clients | Per-client sub-accounts | Not its job | | White-label resale | Yes, on $497 tier | No | | Courses, memberships | Included, basic | Included, deeper | | Affiliate manager | Yes | Yes | | Usage fees | Phone, SMS, email, AI | None, flat rate | | Cut of sales | None (usage fees apply) | 5% entry, 0% above | | Track record | Since 2018, large | Since 2018, 60k+ | | Entry price | $97/mo | $59/mo | If you have narrowed the whole market to HighLevel and Kartra, you have already made the big decision: you want one platform to run the selling and the follow-up, not a funnel builder wired to a separate CRM, a separate email tool and a separate checkout. Both do that. Both build the pages, take the order, message the buyer and deliver a course or a membership. The reason to keep reading is that they were built for two different people, and the wrong pick either charges you for a whole client-management layer you never open or leaves out the operations you actually run on. ### The one question that decides it: serve clients, or sell your own offers? Answer that before you compare a single feature. HighLevel is an operating system for a marketing agency. Its center of gravity is a CRM you run per client, with funnels, email, SMS, voice and automations wired around it, plus the option to rebrand the whole platform and resell it as your own software. Kartra is a bundled suite for a creator. Its center of gravity is running your own business, pages, email, SMS, memberships, courses, an affiliate program and a helpdesk, from one flat monthly bill. If your problem is that you manage marketing for several clients and want them separated and rebillable, that points one way. If your problem is that you pay for six tools to sell your own courses and want them collapsed into one, that points the other. Everything below is a version of that split. ### HighLevel: an operating system for an agency HighLevel, still widely called GoHighLevel, has run since 2018 out of Dallas and is one of the larger agency platforms going. For an agency, the pitch holds up: a CRM with pipelines, a funnel and website builder, email, SMS and voice, calendars, reputation management, automations, courses and payments, all organized into per-client sub-accounts. The value long-term users point to is not any single feature being the sharpest in its category. It is consolidation. HighLevel retires three to six subscriptions a small agency usually rents piecemeal, and contacts and users are unlimited on every plan, so the bill does not climb with your client count the way a per-seat CRM does. The standout that no single-purpose funnel tool matches is resale. The $497 Agency Pro plan turns on SaaS Mode: rebrand the platform as your own software, auto-create client accounts, and rebill phone, SMS and email usage with your markup. That is a business model, not a marketing line. The regret risks are specific. Email deliverability is fragile on the shared sending pool, and users report open rates falling and mail landing in spam even with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set correctly, so serious senders move to a dedicated SMTP or IP. Reliability wobbles across modules; the vendor's own status page logged repeated 2025 incidents across workflows, forms, SMS, email and the Social Planner, and when you white-label the platform you become the support desk. The learning curve is steep, and the sticker is not the whole bill: phone, SMS, email and premium AI are usage-based on top of the $97 to $497 subscription. ### Kartra: the whole creator business under one login Kartra, run by Kartra Inc., part of Genesis Digital, since 2018 and listing more than 60,000 customers, bundles the creator business rather than the agency. On top of pages, funnels and a selling checkout, it includes email and SMS, memberships and courses, a calendar, an affiliate manager, a helpdesk and video hosting. The pitch is that a coach, consultant or course creator runs the whole path from first click to paid customer, and the tools around it, in one account rather than renting five subscriptions that half-talk to each other. Billing is flat-rate with no usage fees stacked on top, which makes the monthly cost predictable in a way HighLevel's is not. The checkout is the strongest part, built for selling with branded order forms, coupons, Klarna installments and one-click upsells aimed at raising average order value. The funnel mapper lets you plan and simulate a multi-page journey, and share or export the map, before you build a page, and more than 100 done-for-you campaign templates mean you rarely start from a blank page. Where users report regret is support and the builder. Slow human support is the single most repeated complaint, with Trustpilot reviewers in 2025 describing waits of up to a week, which hurts most during a launch. The editor is capable but slow, with reported lag and glitches. And the entry Essentials plan at $59/mo takes 5% of every sale and caps you at 500 contacts, five pages and one product, so most real businesses start at Starter, $119/mo, where the cut disappears. It is also not a full CRM: it tracks contacts, tags and purchases, but there are no deal stages or forecasting if a sales team lives in a pipeline. ### The real split: client operations versus your own business Strip away the shared surface and the difference is who each one optimizes for. HighLevel optimizes for the operator who runs marketing for other people: separate client accounts, a CRM at the center, SMS and voice for outreach, and a resale model that turns the platform itself into revenue. Kartra optimizes for the operator who sells their own courses, coaching or memberships and wants the widest bundle, email, SMS, memberships, affiliates and a helpdesk, under one predictable bill with no usage metering and no per-client machinery. If your day is managing several clients, HighLevel does work Kartra was never built for. If your day is packaging and selling your own program, Kartra replaces more of your stack and costs less to run once you clear the Essentials cap. Neither is a worse product. They solve two different versions of one platform. ### If you buy your own paid traffic, a third option Both of these sell to an audience you build or to clients you serve: a list, a following, a book of local businesses. If your growth instead comes from bought media, affiliate campaigns or product launches run on Meta, Google and TikTok, neither is built around the ad click, and a platform that is may fit better. ElasticFunnels is a funnel platform aimed at teams that buy their own traffic. It builds the pages and hosts the checkout with order bumps, one-click upsells and multi-MID payment routing, and it keeps every session, order, rebill and refund on one record with reporting on the same data, so you are not reconciling exports from separate tools to see which angle actually made money. Its distinguishing feature is testing under one URL: variants rotate server-side behind a single campaign link, so the ad platform keeps its learning and a test never sends the ad back through review. The honest caveat is that ElasticFunnels is newer than both HighLevel and Kartra, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against, so until you run real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word for how it holds up. That is what you would expect of a platform this young, and it matters most if you lean on years of public reviews before you trust a tool, where HighLevel and Kartra each have a long public record to read first. A 14-day trial that takes no card lets you prove it on your own funnel before you commit. If you sell to an audience you build, this is not your tool and the choice stays between HighLevel and Kartra; if you live on cost per acquisition from cold traffic, it belongs on the shortlist. ### Which one for you **You run an agency serving several clients:** HighLevel. Per-client sub-accounts, a CRM you manage per client, unlimited contacts and users, and the SaaS Mode resale on the $497 Agency Pro plan are built for exactly that, and no cut of your sales. Budget real setup time, start from a snapshot rather than a blank account, and test email deliverability on a live list before you trust it with a client's audience. **You sell your own courses, coaching or memberships:** Kartra. The widest bundle under one flat bill, a selling-focused checkout, deeper membership delivery and no usage fees make it the better buy for the creator who genuinely uses that breadth. Start on Starter rather than the crippled Essentials plan, and stress-test the builder and support on the 30-day money-back window before you move a business inside it. **You buy your own paid traffic to cold offers:** look past both to a platform built around the ad click, such as ElasticFunnels, with the newness caveat above in mind. ### HighLevel ##### What works * Consolidation is the win. It replaces a stack a small agency usually rents piecemeal, a CRM, a scheduler, a funnel and website builder, email and SMS, pipelines and automations, and long-term users say the value shows up when it retires three to six other subscriptions rather than in any one feature being the sharpest in its category. * White-label resale is a real business model, not a marketing line. The $497 Agency Pro plan turns on SaaS Mode: rebrand the platform as your own software, auto-create client accounts, and rebill phone, SMS and email usage with your markup. No single-purpose funnel tool offers that. * Contacts and users are unlimited on every plan, and sub-accounts are unlimited from $297, so your bill does not climb with your client count the way a per-seat CRM does. * Snapshots, an industry template library and a large active community make repeatable client onboarding fast once you have built your own setup. ##### What to watch * Email deliverability is fragile on the shared sending pool. Users report open rates falling and mail landing in spam even with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured correctly, and serious senders end up moving to a dedicated SMTP or IP. Test a real campaign before you trust it with a client's list. * Reliability wobbles across modules. The vendor's own status page logged repeated 2025 incidents affecting workflows, forms, SMS, email and the Social Planner. If you white-label the platform to non-technical clients, you become the support desk when something breaks. * The learning curve is steep. Workflows, triggers, snapshots and A2P SMS registration take real setup time, and that time can eat the savings if you build everything from scratch instead of starting from a snapshot. * The sticker is not the whole bill. Phone numbers, SMS, email and premium AI are usage-based on top of the $97 to $497 subscription, so your monthly cost is variable and grows with sending volume. ### Kartra ##### What works * Genuinely covers the whole creator business under one roof: pages and funnels, email and SMS, a checkout, memberships and courses, calendars, affiliates and a helpdesk, so you stop paying for and wiring together five separate tools. * Checkout is designed for selling, not just collecting money. You get branded order forms, coupons, buy-now-pay-later through Klarna, and one-click upsells aimed at lifting average order value. * The funnel mapper lets you plan and simulate a multi-page journey before you build it, and more than 100 done-for-you campaign templates mean you rarely start from a blank page. * Established and widely used. Kartra Inc. (Genesis Digital) has run it since 2018, with 60,000-plus customers, and billing is flat-rate with no surprise usage fees stacked on top. * Plans above the entry tier take 0% of your sales, and a 30-day money-back guarantee lets you build a real funnel before you commit. ##### What to watch * Support speed is the loudest complaint from long-term users. Trustpilot reviewers in 2025 report waits of up to a week for simple questions, which hurts most during a launch when something breaks. * The editor is capable but slow. Reviewers describe lag and glitches, and simple edits taking too many steps. Stress-test it on the trial before you build anything real. * It is expensive unless you use the whole suite. Buy it for one job, a landing page or email alone, and cheaper single-purpose tools win on price. * The entry Essentials plan takes 5% of every transaction and caps you at 500 contacts, 5 pages and one product, so most real businesses need Starter at $119/mo or higher. * It is not a full CRM: it tracks contacts, tags and purchases but has no deal stages, forecasting or task management if a sales team lives in a pipeline. And building everything inside one platform means lock-in, since the work does not transfer cleanly if you leave. ### Pricing HighLevel: from $97/mo. Three published plans, billed monthly or annually (annual saves about two months): Starter at $97/mo (3 sub-accounts), Unlimited at $297/mo (unlimited sub-accounts, rebilling with no markup, basic API), and Agency Pro at $497/mo (SaaS Mode and white-label resale, rebilling with markup, advanced API). A custom Enterprise plan adds HIPAA compliance, a white-label mobile app and a dedicated success manager. Every plan includes unlimited contacts and unlimited users. Usage-based charges for phone numbers, SMS, email and premium AI apply on top of the subscription. A 14-day free trial is available on any plan; a card is required and billing starts automatically when the trial ends unless you cancel. Kartra: from $59/mo. Four monthly plans, with annual billing saving up to 22%. Essentials, at $59/mo, allows 500 contacts, 10,000 emails, five pages and one product, but takes a 5% cut of your sales. Starter, $119/mo, lifts that to 2,500 contacts with unlimited email and SMS, unlimited pages, products and courses, and no such cut. Growth, $229/mo, adds automations, affiliate management and funnel simulation for up to 12,500 leads. Professional tops the range at $549/mo, reaching 25,000 contacts and real-time funnel analytics. Annual pricing works out to $52, $99, $189 and $429 a month. There is a 14-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Only the entry plan charges that 5%; every tier above it keeps your revenue whole. Pricing verified against each vendor on 2026-09-24\. Check before you buy. Our pick ### HighLevel HighLevel is the pick if you run an agency that resells marketing to local clients and wants a CRM, funnels, email, SMS and a white-label client portal in one place. It is real and widely used, but it rewards setup time, its shared email sending needs babysitting, and usage fees for phone, SMS and AI sit on top of the subscription. ### Frequently asked questions HighLevel or Kartra: which should I use? Pick HighLevel if you run an agency that resells marketing to clients and want a CRM at the center with email, SMS and voice, per-client sub-accounts, and the option to white-label the platform and rebill it as your own; pick Kartra if you sell your own courses, coaching or memberships to an audience you build and want funnels, checkout, email and a member area running under one flat monthly bill with no usage fees. Which is cheaper, HighLevel or Kartra? HighLevel starts at $97/mo and Kartra at $59/mo. Both open cheap, but the shape of the bill differs. HighLevel climbs to $497 for the white-label SaaS Mode and meters phone, SMS, email and premium AI on top of the plan, so its real monthly cost is variable and grows with sending volume. Kartra bills flat with no usage fees, but its $59 Essentials plan takes 5% of every sale and caps you at 500 contacts, five pages and one product, so most sellers start at Starter, $119/mo, where the cut disappears. Price each on the tier that carries what you actually need. Which is better for an agency serving multiple clients? HighLevel. Per-client sub-accounts, a CRM you manage per client, unlimited contacts and users, and the SaaS Mode resale on the $497 Agency Pro plan are built for exactly that. Kartra has no per-client structure or white-label reseller mode, so an agency using it ends up running each client in a separate account or managing client data in another tool. Budget real setup time for HighLevel, and test email deliverability on a live list before you trust it with a client's audience. I sell courses, coaching and memberships. Which one? Kartra. It leans harder into the whole creator business: memberships and courses, email and SMS, an affiliate manager, calendars and a helpdesk under one flat bill, and reviewers rate its membership delivery well. HighLevel includes courses as one module among many, and its strength is the CRM and client operations around the sale rather than the course experience itself. If the program is the product, Kartra is the closer fit, though a dedicated course platform still beats both on the student experience. Does either take a cut of my sales or charge usage fees? Kartra takes 5% of every sale on its entry Essentials plan and 0% on every plan above it, and it charges no usage fees, so above Essentials the bill is flat. HighLevel takes no cut of your sales on any plan, but it meters phone numbers, SMS, email and premium AI on top of the subscription, so its bill is variable and climbs with sending volume. Your own payment processor's fees apply either way. I buy my own paid traffic to cold offers. Which one? Neither is built for that. Both are tuned for selling to an audience you build or to clients you serve, not for chasing cost per acquisition on bought media. If your growth comes from Meta, Google or TikTok spend, look at a platform built around the ad click, such as ElasticFunnels, which tests under one URL without resetting the ad platform's learning and ties the click to the sale on one record. The trade-off is that it is far newer, with little independent review coverage yet. ### Sources #### Other sources 5 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context. 1. \[bugs\] [Anyone else experiencing issues with GHL? ](https://www.reddit.com/r/gohighlevel/comments/1ihb7f8) Reddit 2. \[value\] [Anyone here using GoHighLevel long-term? Curious about real pros/cons ](https://www.reddit.com/r/gohighlevel/comments/1pviseq/anyone%5Fhere%5Fusing%5Fgohighlevel%5Flongterm%5Fcurious/) Reddit 3. \[stack\] [GoHighLevel Review: Is It Really Worth It for Your Business? ](https://www.reddit.com/r/gohighlevel/comments/1l3wxka/gohighlevel%5Freview%5Fis%5Fit%5Freally%5Fworth%5Fit%5Ffor%5Fyour/) Reddit 4. \[smtp\] [GHL's Lack of Email Throttling is Breaking Deliverability for Users with Custom SMTP ](https://ideas.gohighlevel.com/lcemailsystem/p/urgent-issue-ghls-lack-of-email-throttling-is-breaking-deliverability-for-users) Blog 5. \[status\] [Previous incidents | Public GHL Status Page ](https://status.gohighlevel.com/incidents/2025-02/2025-04) Blog [HighLevel review](/reviews/gohighlevel) [Kartra review](/reviews/kartra) [Best ad tracker ranking](/best) [All head-to-heads](/compare) Written by Dana Rourke Lead reviewer Dana Rourke is the lead reviewer at Campaign Buyer. She owns the tracker and attribution coverage: reading what long-term users report about each tool, checking its documentation and pricing, and verifying prices with the vendor before writing the verdict. Keeping the rankings honest mostly means writing down what the top pick gets wrong, so she does that first. [danar@campaignbuyer.com](mailto:danar@campaignbuyer.com) Last checked 2026-09-24 --- [ Campaign Buyer ](/) Independent reviews of the trackers, page builders, attribution tools and ad-spy software media buyers pay for. Every pick names what it is bad at. [contact@campaignbuyer.com](mailto:contact@campaignbuyer.com) We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It never affects our rankings. © 2026 Campaign Buyer. Independent and reader-supported.