Why people consider the change
It is almost always the bill. HubSpot charges per contact and per seat, and the curve steepens exactly when the company starts working: more leads in the database, more salespeople using it, and an annual renewal that rises without anything changing in what you actually do with the tool.
The second reason is that half of what you pay for sits in modules you never use, while what you do need (WhatsApp, landing pages, bulk sending) requires a higher plan tier or yet another tool.
GoHighLevel plays it the other way round: flat fee, no practical contact limit, no user limit, and WhatsApp, email, landing pages, forms and calendars inside the same price. Above a certain volume the difference runs into thousands per year.
That said, here is the warning nobody gives you: if your problem with HubSpot is that the team does not use it, changing tool will not fix it. What goes unused in HubSpot goes unused in GoHighLevel. That is a process and training problem, and it travels with you to the new tool.
What migrates and what does not
This is the part worth being clear on before signing anything, because it determines how much work there really is.
Migrates relatively easily:
- Contacts and companies, with their standard and custom fields, as long as you map them one to one before importing
- Deals or opportunities, if you rebuild the pipeline stages in the destination first
- Notes and assigned owner, which can come across as fields or as activity
- Lists and segments, rebuilt as tags or smart filters
What has to be rebuilt by hand
And this is what nobody tells you until you are already inside:
- Automations. There is no bridge between HubSpot workflows and GoHighLevel ones. They are rebuilt one at a time, and this is the bulk of the project
- Email templates. The editor is different. They get rebuilt, and it is a good moment to throw out the ones unused for two years
- Custom reports. Dashboards are built again with the new tool's logic
- Detailed activity history. Opens, clicks and visits from past years do not transfer. Export and archive them in case they are ever needed
- Integrations. Every connection to invoicing, e-signature, payment gateway or your website is rebuilt pointing at the new system
The order that works
We have run this migration with over 2,000 managed clients and five sales pipelines in production, for a company operating across several countries that could not afford a single day of downtime. This is the order, and the order matters.
Week 1. Audit and cleanup. Before moving anything, look at what is there: how many real contacts, how many duplicates, how many invalid emails, which custom fields are genuinely used and which have been empty for years. Clean at the source, not afterwards. Migrating dirty data is the fastest way to make the team distrust the new system from day one.
Weeks 1 and 2. Redesign the process, do not copy it. This is where a migration becomes an improvement or a carbon copy of the old problems. Pipeline stages are redesigned with the sales team based on how they sell today, not on how HubSpot was configured three years ago. In the project mentioned above, five distinct pipelines emerged because there were five distinct sales processes, something nobody had ever written down.
Week 2. Data migration. Contacts, companies and opportunities, with fields mapped one to one and a test import of a hundred records before the real one. If the mapping is wrong, it fails with a hundred, not with twenty thousand.
Weeks 2 and 3. Automations, in order of impact. First the three or four that hold the business up: new lead alert, sales follow-up, appointment confirmation. The rest afterwards. Automating everything at once guarantees something misfires and somebody gets four emails in two days.
Week 3. Training with real cases. Not a tool demo: the team's own cases, with their contacts and their pipelines. Half a day per role, with the recording available for whoever joins later.
Weeks 3 and 4. Parallel running. Both systems live at once, with the new one as primary. Two weeks. If something breaks, the old one is still there. Switching HubSpot off the same day you switch GoHighLevel on is the most expensive decision in this whole process.
The three things that go wrong
As a vaccine, these are the ones we keep seeing:
- Copying pipelines as they are. You migrate the tool and bring the broken process with you. If you are going to make the effort, do it properly: this is the only occasion in years when the sales team will be willing to review how they sell
- Migrating without cleaning. Duplicates, bounced emails and inconsistent fields landing in the new system. The second time a salesperson calls a number that does not exist, they stop trusting the whole CRM
- Switching the old system off too soon. Something is always missing: a report someone checked every Monday, a forgotten integration, a history needed for a dispute. Two weeks of parallel running costs little and avoids the scare
How long it takes and what you need on your side
A standard migration, with a mid-sized database and a sales process that is not exceptionally complex, takes three to four weeks. With many custom integrations or several countries running different processes, it goes to six or eight.
Three things are needed on your side, and none of them is technical:
One person who genuinely knows the sales process and can make decisions. They do not need to be technical, they need the authority to say "this stage is unnecessary".
Admin access to HubSpot and to everything connected to it.
Two hours of the sales team for training. It is the highest-return time investment in the project: without it, a technically perfect migration ends in a parallel spreadsheet.
If you want us to look at it with you
We have run this migration with pipelines in production, across several countries and without stopping operations, and we have also come in to fix other people's migrations done in a hurry. The difference between the two is always the same three things: clean first, redesign instead of copying, and do not switch the old system off too soon.
Book a thirty-minute call. Tell us what you have in HubSpot, how many contacts and which automations cannot go down, and we leave with a concrete migration plan and a timeline. No strings attached. And if we look at it and GoHighLevel does not fit you, we will say so: changing CRM to end up worse helps nobody.
Frequently asked questions
Contacts, companies, opportunities, notes and custom fields transfer if the mapping is done properly. What does not transfer automatically are automations, email templates, custom reports and the detailed history of opens and clicks. Those are rebuilt, or exported and archived. That is why we recommend running both systems in parallel for two weeks before switching the old one off.
Three to four weeks in a standard case: one for audit, cleanup and pipeline redesign, one to migrate data, one for automations and training, and one of parallel running. With many custom integrations or several countries running different sales processes, it goes to six or eight weeks.
Above a certain volume, yes, and the difference is usually thousands per year. HubSpot charges per contact and per seat, so the bill grows as your database and your team grow. GoHighLevel works on a flat fee and includes WhatsApp, email, landing pages, forms and calendars in the same price. If you have few contacts and two salespeople, the difference may not justify the migration work.
Technically yes, but it is rarely a good idea. Keeping two CRMs permanently in parallel means no salesperson knows where the truth about a client lives, and you pay for both tools. Parallel running makes sense as a two-week transition phase, not as a stable model.
Every connection to invoicing, e-signature, payment gateway or your website has to be rebuilt pointing at the new system. It is work, but it is usually also the chance to fix the ones that were half done. In every migration we have run, at least one integration turns up that had been failing silently for months without anyone knowing.
Not if nothing else changes. A team not using the CRM is almost never a tool problem: it is that the pipelines do not reflect how they sell, that nobody trained them properly, or that logging activity costs them more than it gives them. That is fixed by redesigning the process with them and training them on their own cases. Do that and the tool change works. Skip it and you have only moved the problem.