GoHighLevel vs Kajabi, ClickFunnels and Kartra: When Migrating Is Worth It for a Coaching Business

Key takeaways

• Migrate to GoHighLevel when your bottleneck is follow-up: texting, pipelines, booked calls and fewer integrations.
• Keep Kajabi, or another course host, when the course experience is the product. CRM-first vs course-first is the real decision.
• Move only the funnels that got traffic in the last 90 days. In our experience that's 20% to 35% of them.
• No official importer we found moves subscriptions or payment history. Keep the old billing running until the new billing and access are tested.[1]
• Count the tools you'll actually cancel. If it's fewer than two, the move probably isn't worth it.

Migrate to GoHighLevel when your bottleneck is follow-up: texting, pipelines, booked calls and fewer integrations. Stay on Kajabi, or keep it as the course host, when the course experience is the product.

Either way, the decision is narrower than most comparisons make it. Before any cutover, move only the funnels that got traffic in the last 90 days, export the fields that carry revenue history, keep billing where it is until you've tested the new setup, and count the tools you'll cancel. If that count is under two, stay put.

"Do we have to leave our current platform?" is the tech question we hear most on discovery calls. Here's the test we run.

CRM-first vs course-first: the real decision

Kajabi, ClickFunnels, Kartra and GoHighLevel overlap on paper. All four build pages, send email and sell products. What differs is the center of gravity.

• Kajabi is course-first. It reports $9 billion in cumulative creator revenue on the platform (a company figure from early 2025).[3]
• ClickFunnels is funnel-first. It says it has helped more than 100,000 businesses build funnels.[4]
• Kartra is a creator all-in-one. Its site claims 60,000 customers, on an undated page.[5]
• GoHighLevel is CRM-first. Contacts, pipelines, calendars, texting and email are the core; pages and courses come after.

All of those scale figures are vendor claims with no method. They tell you each platform is established, nothing more.

So the question isn't which platform has more features. It's which job is your bottleneck. If buyers stall because nobody texts them, nobody calls within the hour and no-shows vanish, that's a CRM problem. If students churn because the course experience is clunky, that's a course problem, and moving to a CRM-first tool won't fix it.

There's a cost to running both, and it's real. A 2025 BCG survey of large companies found 39% of best-of-breed users spend more than 20% of their IT budget on integration, against 29% of suite users.[6] That's an enterprise sample, but the principle holds for a coaching business: every connection between two tools is something you maintain.

Price and limits, side by side

Platform	Plans (monthly)	Notable limits
GoHighLevel	$97, $297, $497 ($970, $2,970, $4,970 a year)[7]	Texting, email and AI billed as usage on top
Kajabi	Basic $179 ($143), Growth $249 ($199), Pro $499 ($399)[8]	2,500, 25,000 and 100,000 contacts; 2%, 1% or 0.5% extra fee on third-party payment providers
ClickFunnels	Launch $97 ($81), Scale $197 ($164), Optimize $297 ($248)[9]	10K, 75K and 150K contacts; 50K, 300K and 750K emails a month; 3, 6 and 10 courses
Kartra	Essentials $59 ($52), Starter $119 ($99), Growth $229 ($189)[10]	500 contacts and 5% transaction fees on Essentials; 2,500 contacts and 0% fees on Starter
Keap	From $299[11]	Price scales with contact count

Monthly list price, with the annual-billing monthly equivalent in brackets. Recheck on the day you decide; vendors change prices and limits often.

A few details change the math. Kajabi Payments in the US costs 2.9%, 2.8% or 2.7% plus $0.30 per transaction depending on plan, and any third-party payment provider adds 2%, 1% or 0.5% on top.[8] Kartra's Growth plan covers 12,500 contacts, and going over the cap auto-upgrades you with a mid-cycle reconciliation fee.[12] ClickFunnels' Dominate tier is $5,997 a year, billed annually only.[9]

And HighLevel's plan isn't the bill. In our experience, the plan fee is only 25% to 40% of a texting event business's monthly HighLevel bill. There's no industry benchmark for that; set it beside HighLevel's published usage rates. We do the full math in the true cost of GoHighLevel.

Texting is the tiebreaker

For a coaching or event business, the biggest practical difference is how each platform sends texts.

• GoHighLevel texts natively. US texts cost $0.00747 per segment plus carrier fees.[13] You also register for A2P 10DLC: a one-time $22.50 or $64.00, then $1.50 to $10.00 a month per campaign.[14]
• ClickFunnels sends SMS through its MessageHub inbox, which connects to your own Twilio or Bandwidth account.[15] That's a second vendor, a second bill and a second place to debug.
• Kajabi doesn't list SMS on its pricing page.[8]
• Kartra lists email and SMS on its Starter plan.[10]
• Keap includes 500 text messages, with extra tiers from $24 to $279 a month.[11]

Native texting matters because reminders drive show rates. With trigger links on the brand's own domain and a fresh number registered to the brand's A2P campaign, we see 95% or more of reminders delivered. We haven't found a method-disclosed industry benchmark to compare that to.

The migration test

Framework

The four-question migration test

1. Which funnels got traffic in the last 90 days? Only those get rebuilt.
2. Is the course experience the product? If yes, keep the course host.
3. Which fields carry revenue history, and where does billing live? Map them before the cutover, and keep billing running until it's tested.
4. Which tools will you actually cancel? Fewer than two, and the move probably isn't worth it.

Victory's migration checklist for course and coaching businesses. Pipeline design follows Alex Hormozi's lead-stage thinking.

Move only funnels with traffic

Most course businesses we migrate have a graveyard: launch pages from three years ago, test funnels, an old webinar nobody runs. Rebuilding all of it is wasted work. In a typical course-business migration, only 20% to 35% of funnels have had traffic in the last 90 days, and those are the ones we rebuild. That's our experience, not an industry figure.

Pull the traffic data before you scope the move. The rest can be archived or exported as reference.

Keep the course host if the LMS is the product

HighLevel's course builder covers modules, lessons, quizzes and assignments, with access through the Client Portal.[16] For a coaching program where the course supports the calls, that's usually enough, and one login for course and community is a real advantage.

If students pay for the course experience itself, keep it where it is and connect the CRM. There's no prize for consolidating a tool your customers love.

Map the fields that carry revenue history

A plain contact export often carries little more than name, email, phone and some tags. The fields that matter (purchase history, payment-plan status, program start dates, net worth or deal size for high-ticket leads) need deliberate mapping. HighLevel's contact import takes CSV files up to 50MB, and custom fields must exist before you can map extra columns to them.[17]

Poor data costs money. In Validity's 2025 survey of 602 CRM users, 37% said they had lost revenue as a direct result of poor data quality, and 76% said less than half of their CRM data was accurate and complete.[18] That's a data-quality survey, not a migration failure rate, but it's why we build the field map before we move a single record.

Design the pipeline you're moving into around lead stages, not around the old tool's tags. Hormozi's lead-stage thinking applies here: define who the person is now and what must happen to move them forward, then map every old tag to one of those stages.

Keep billing where it is until you've tested it

This is the step most comparisons skip. HighLevel's ClickFunnels migration guide moves products by CSV and has you rebuild courses and sites, and its Kartra guide moves contacts by CSV and has you rebuild the pages.[1][19] Neither documents a transfer of members, subscriptions or payment history.

If you move subscriptions, Stripe's own guidance is to create the new subscriptions first, then cancel the old ones before they charge, so you don't bill anyone twice.[20] Moving card data between accounts goes through Stripe's own migration processes.[21]

Our rule: the old platform keeps billing and granting access until a test buyer has paid, received access and been charged correctly on the new setup. Payment plans with installments left are the last thing to move.

Count the integrations you'll retire

Fewer tools is the main financial case for moving. In our experience, a migration into HighLevel retires three to five tools: email, SMS, a scheduler, forms and a separate pipeline tool. There's no industry benchmark for that.

Tool spend varies widely. In a 2024 Kit survey of nearly 3,000 creators, 45% spent under $100 a month on their tech stack, while 28% of full-time creators spent more than $500.[22] That data is over two years old, so treat it as a direction. If you're in the first group and would cancel only one tool, the migration costs more than it saves.

What the importers move (and don't)

Source	What moves	What doesn't
Kajabi course importer	Videos, text and images from published lessons; contacts by CSV[23]	Quizzes, assignments and unpublished lessons
ClickFunnels funnel importer	Standard funnel pages: opt-ins, sales, thank-you[24]	Membership areas
ClickFunnels migration guide	Products by CSV; courses and sites rebuilt[1]	No documented transfer of members or subscriptions
Kartra migration guide	Contacts by CSV, including custom fields; pages rebuilt[19]	No documented subscription or card transfer
HighLevel snapshots	Configuration: pipelines, workflows, funnels[25]	Contacts, conversations, Stripe connections, integrations

On Kajabi, contacts come out through a bulk export from the Contacts tab, emailed as a CSV.[26] HighLevel's guide doesn't mention student progress, so assume it doesn't move and tell students before the switch.

Ignore the speed claims in vendor comparisons. ClickFunnels' own GoHighLevel comparison says its pages load in under 1.5 seconds "per our own testing".[27] That's a competitor's self-test with no method. Measure your own pages instead; our approach to that is in funnel conversion rate optimization.

How we run a migration at Victory

The pipelines, tags and automations we install on day one are in the GoHighLevel setup checklist. For where HighLevel falls short after you move, read our GoHighLevel review, and for the full system-of-record map, the GoHighLevel guide.

If you're weighing a move and want a second opinion on what to keep, book a strategy call.