[00:00:00] Kajabi looks simple. GoHighLevel looks powerful. The real question is which one is going to help you grow your business? Before you choose any software, I want you to sit down and ask yourself five questions, especially if you're thinking about tech. Number one, what is the problem I am actually trying to solve?
[00:00:17] Don't buy software because everyone else is using it. Don't buy it because it's the shiny new thing. Guilty as charged. Buy it because it solves a specific problem in your business. Question number two, will this replace multiple tools or will it simply become another monthly subscription? Go and look at your current tech stack.
[00:00:37] If your software stack keeps growing, you're almost certainly adding complexity. The goal is fewer logins, not more. Number three, can I realistically use this platform myself? Oh man, I wish I'd asked this question. I'm a big fan of outsourcing, as you know. But if every single little change requires outside help, ugh, it becomes [00:01:00] expensive.
[00:01:00] You need to factor that into the real cost of the system or the platform, because the sticker price is never the true price, is it? Number four, what is the customer support actually like? When something breaks, where will you turn to? How quickly can you get it turned around? How do you actually get help?
[00:01:17] Who do you get help with? Are they in your time zone? Do they answer in hours or in weeks? Are they a big outfit so that you're lost as a number? Are they a smaller outfit so you get actually the proactive customer service? And number five, will this platform still work when your business doubles? Don't just buy for today's business.
[00:01:35] Buy what you can afford, yes, but also buy for the business that you're building, that you want in two years' time. Think about where you're heading, not just where you are right now. I wish I had done that. So we're gonna have a quick look at GoHighLevel versus Kajabi. First of all, starting price at, for GoHighLevel is 97 bucks a month.
[00:01:53] Kajabi starts at 149 bucks a month. Courses and memberships, they both do them beautifully. Yay, well done. [00:02:00] Customer relationship management system and pipelines, so good in GoHighLevel, limited in Kajabi. They both have sales funnel builders. They both do email marketing. I would argue GoHighLevel does it better.
[00:02:12] Just saying. GoHighLevel has native SMS and phone system included. Kajabi does not. Both of them have websites and blogs. Booking and calendars, GoHighLevel has this, Kajabi does not. Both of them have marketing automations. GoHighLevel, white label, as we've talked about, so you can rebrand and resell. Kajabi, not so much.
[00:02:32] Not at all, actually. Pricing model for both of them, flat rate for GoHighLevel, no contract caps, and it's a tiered system for Kajabi, which I hate. They would say GoHighLevel is best for an all-in-one product for agencies and creators. Kajabi, best for course creators. There are plenty of businesses that absolutely thrive on Kajabi.
[00:02:55] There are plenty of businesses who thrive on GoHighLevel and [00:03:00] ActiveCampaign and School. My job today is simply to help you work out which one might be right for you and for your business. That's all. And depending on the stage that your business is in, because that's the bit everyone forgets. The right answer for me nine years down the track might be completely the wrong answer for you two years down the track, and vice versa.
[00:03:21] Let me take you back a few years. A few years ago, I hired a consultant To review our entire tech stack. I knew I was not good at this type of stuff. Tech loves me, I love tech. And I did it really deliberately. I didn't want opinions from Facebook groups. I didn't wanna crowdsource the answer. I didn't want recommendations based on what was, you know, trendy that month or what was shiny, 'cause I've been there and done that.
[00:03:48] I wanted someone with cool, calm confidence to actually have a look at where our business was, where it was heading, and recommend the right systems for us. I paid for the [00:04:00] expertise because I didn't wanna make an expensive guess. So one of the platforms that was on my shortlist was GoHighLevel. Often shortened to GHL, is an all-in-one business platform, and it's designed to replace multiple pieces of software.
[00:04:16] So rather than having one system for your email marketing, another system for your customers or your clients, another one for your forms, another one for your contracts, another one for your automations, all the things, they are housed in the one system. One login, one place. There's one thing that's worth knowing about, because it does confuse a lot of people.
[00:04:41] GoHighLevel is often white labeled, and what that actually means is different businesses take the core software, wrap their own branding around it, and then often add their own training and their own support on top of it, right? So you may have heard of GoHighLevel, but you also may have [00:05:00] heard of names floating around like Ivory, Virtual Forte, or Automate Digital.
[00:05:05] They're all built on the GoHighLevel platform underneath. They've just been dressed up a little bit differently. So our version is called Automate Digital. The consultant came back. She didn't think that GoHighLevel was the right fit for us at that time, so we stayed with ActiveCampaign, our main email marketing system, and then we implemented Kajabi.
[00:05:27] This is actually about someone looking at our business from the outside in and offering us a solution. I genuinely think that she made the right recommendation for where we were at, for what she knew of our business at the time. So the mistake wasn't choosing Kajabi. The mistake was not reassessing that decision as our business grew and became a little bit more complicated.
[00:05:48] Because a decision that is right for your business today isn't automatically right for your business in two years' time. I wanna talk about Kajabi for a minute. How pretty is Kajabi? It looks fantastic. This [00:06:00] customer experience feels polished. The templates are lovely. Everything looks considered and delightful and premium It's a really strong platform, and I genuinely wanted to love it. I really, really did. But here's where we started to struggle a little bit. Without Kate, our platform specialist, I don't actually think we could have confidently managed the migration or the system, and I found the email automations really frustrating.
[00:06:29] I had set up issues that dragged on. The customer support was painfully slow. Not from Kate, from Kajabi themselves, and sometimes we would wait for weeks for an answer. Weeks. And then the pricing increased a lot. From memory, it felt like it was around a 30% increase just in a single year. You start doing the maths, and you start going, "Hang on a minute.
[00:06:54] What exactly am I getting for this?" Yeah? And we also tried [00:07:00] using Kajabi Live. That was a fail. That was an absolute fail. I wanted to run all the things from Kajabi. But for us, it was just simply not good enough. And so here's where it got a little bit silly. We ended up paying for Kajabi and Zoom and GoHighLevel all at once.
[00:07:17] When your technology stack starts growing instead of shrinking, it's usually your clue that something's not quite right. Good technology should be collapsing your costs and your logins, not quietly multiplying them, which is what was happening for us. And again, I know plenty of people who absolutely love Kajabi.
[00:07:40] They run their business off Kajabi. It works beautifully for them. I just ... I don't think it's the right, like, long-term fit for us and our business. That's all. So GoHighLevel. Today we're using Automate Digital, which is our version of GoHighLevel. It feels like a one-stop shop, and I don't [00:08:00] say that lightly, but that is exactly what I wanted.
[00:08:02] When we need support, we're talking to someone who is in our own time zone and someone who is responsive, someone who's awake when I'm awake, someone who is on the other end of an email. After the weeks-long wait that I had had in other places, I cannot tell you how much that matters to us when something breaks.
[00:08:22] When something breaks in your business, you wanna fix it immediately. You want a human. I want a human. I want someone in my hemisphere who can help me today, not tomorrow, not in a few weeks' time. Now, is every part of it beautiful? No, and that kind of kills me a little bit. Some parts definitely aren't as polished as Kajabi, and as I said I love pretty things, so this one kind of hits a little bit harder for me.
[00:08:47] But here's what I've come to accept: pretty doesn't grow your business, systems do. And I'd rather have a system that runs my business properly than a beautiful one that has me paying for three [00:09:00] tools that don't talk to each other and get in each other's way. One of the things I really love about GoHighLevel is how quickly it keeps improving.
[00:09:09] They are constantly releasing new features because they're trying, they're trying really hard to compete with the big boys and the bigger software firms, and they're trying to house all the things together. It tells me that the platform that I'm on today is going to keep getting better and better underneath me, and I really like that.
[00:09:30] I'm going to grow with it. Before recording this episode, I thought, "I'm not just gonna go by my opinion," because there are so many other people who know more than me about these platforms, far, far better than what I ever could. So I went and asked Kajabi Kate, and she is our Kajabi expert, and we cannot work Kajabi without her, I promise.
[00:09:49] But recently, we've asked Kate to look at GoHighLevel for us because she's techy, she's awesome to work with. We love Kate. She reckons that Kajabi, of [00:10:00] course, her name is Kajabi Kate, is still the best platform for courses and for memberships and for coaching products, and it's beautiful, and it's polished, and it's much easier for the average person to learn.
[00:10:13] You don't need a heap of technical knowledge to create something that looks really nice and really professional. Kajabi also includes unlimited email sends. It has podcast hosting, it has branded apps, and it has a whole lot of extras that, one, I didn't even know about, and most people don't even know are built in to the system.
[00:10:34] So there's real value there as well when you're actually using the system and all the components that it comes with. There is a little downside. According to Kate, ah, it is expensive. On the lower plans, there are limits around, um, your contacts and your products, and once your business starts to become a little bit more complicated or [00:11:00] you want to look into the CRM side or the automations, they're just not as powerful.
[00:11:05] And I found that myself. It's simply just not designed for managing a business that's managing multiple clients or complicated customer journeys, right? That's not what it was built for. It was built for course creators. And so then we talked about GoHighLevel. Kate actually said that she prefers... Now, I might be speaking out of school.
[00:11:26] Anyway, she prefers the backend automation. She reckons the campaigns feel a little bit more intuitive once you understand them, and she agreed with me that uploading content in the courses just feels much slicker than people expect, and certainly much easier than what I was expecting. And she also loves that it brings together the CRM, the funnels, the email marketing.
[00:11:49] You can do SMS. You can have your own number of landing pages, pipelines, all your client management stuff all under one roof, and I really love that, too. [00:12:00] Generally speaking, it's a bit cheaper. The catch, and Kate was really honest about this 'cause she's an honest gal, there's definitely a learning curve for GoHighLevel.
[00:12:10] The interface isn't as polished as Kajabi. Sometimes it can feel a little bit clunky, especially on the inside. It asks just a little bit more of you, but in return it gives you a lot more as well, and it's a bit more flexible. Then Kate made this really interesting point, and she basically said, "Whatever platform you choose, you still kind of need to understand your own customer relationship management system and your customer or your client journey."
[00:12:35] You still need to have good processes. You still need to know how your automations should actually work. Technology doesn't fix broken systems. It just automates them. So if your systems are a big crap house, they're still gonna be crap house. If your process is a mess going in, the technology will simply give you a beautiful mess.
[00:12:57] If you're selling courses or you're selling [00:13:00] memberships and you want something that is pretty, easy to use, and looks fantastic, Kate reckons Kajabi. Kajabi Kate. If you're running a service-based business or agency and you've got lots of moving parts, which we do, and you're happy to either learn a more powerful platform or hire someone who already understands it, she would lean towards GoHighLevel.
[00:13:24] Looking back on all of this, I think my real mistake was that I asked the wrong question. I asked which software is the best, but that's the wrong question because there is no single best.
[00:13:37] Best is kind of meaningless without context. And so the far better question I wish I was smart enough to ask is, "What's the problem I'm actually trying to solve?" If you've got a relatively simple business, Kajabi could be exactly what it is that you need And that would work for you. You don't have to overcomplicate it.
[00:13:58] You could keep it really simple. [00:14:00] If you've got multiple offers, if you've got sales pipelines, if you've got automations, if you send a lot of emails, contracts, documents, courses, got client interaction, client onboarding, all the things, and a growing team, especially a growing team, then an all-in-one platform like GoHighLevel starts making a bit more sense financially and emotionally so you don't tear your hair out.
[00:14:20] Because technology, it should be simple. It should reduce complexity. It should not create it. If a tool is adding logins and confusion and cost to your business, it's not doing its job, no matter how pretty it looks, and I love pretty. If there's one thing I'd love you to take away from today, it's this.
[00:14:38] Don't choose software because your favorite influencer loves it. Don't choose software because someone in a Facebook group that you're crowdsourcing the answer swears by it. Choose software that fits the stage of business that you're actually in and then supports the growth along the way. Come back to this.
[00:14:57] We've lived through this. It hurts changing platforms. [00:15:00] It costs a lot of time, energy, and money. So we don't want to outlay that without thinking that through. If this episode just helps one person make a more informed decision and avoid all the wobble that we went through, then it's absolutely worth recording.
[00:15:16] Thanks for joining me on Tea with the Queen. I hope you get your software. It's not really a software episode at all, is it? It's more a decision-making episode, wouldn't you say? Should've started with that. It's about slowing down long enough to ask the right question before you even get started, before you commit to someone, before you commit to an answer.
[00:15:33] Softwares will come and go. Your ability to make clear, intentional decisions is the thing that actually matters here, and it actually grows your business. and if you've had a completely different experience with either platform, any of the platforms I've talked about, I would love to hear about them.
[00:15:49] Hit me up in the DMs, carrier pigeon, send me a note, whatever works for you. Until next time, enjoy the software challenges. Hee hee hee. [00:16:00] I love tech. Tech loves me. Thanks for listening to Tea with the Queen. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help to get the word out.
[00:16:12] For more about me, please visit emmamcqueen.com.au and I look forward to your company next episode
