Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Brevo and HighLevel are two platforms designed to enhance customer engagement, each with a unique focus. Brevo specializes in multi-channel communication, offering tools for email marketing, SMS campaigns, and customer engagement. HighLevel, on the other hand, focuses on digital marketing automation and client management, making it a popular choice among agencies. In this blog post, we’ll compare their key features to help you decide which platform best fits your needs. Or if folk might just provide a more balanced alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options.
What is Brevo?
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.
Key features of Brevo
- Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
- Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
- Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
- Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
- Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.
What is HighLevel?
HighLevel is a comprehensive platform designed to streamline digital marketing efforts for agencies and businesses. It offers features such as lead capture, automated booking, customer nurturing, and membership site creation. The platform provides tools to help agencies build their digital marketing engine, automate workflows, and drive business growth. It also includes a white-label option for agencies.
Key features of HighLevel
- Lead capture tools: HighLevel provides customizable forms, surveys, and landing pages to help businesses effectively capture and manage leads.
- Automated workflows: Automate tasks like follow-ups, appointment scheduling, and reminders, saving time and ensuring consistent communication.
- Customer nurturing tools: Engage with leads through email campaigns, text messages, and automated drip sequences to convert them into loyal customers.
- Membership site creation: Build and manage membership sites directly within the platform, offering valuable resources or courses to clients.
- White-label platform: Agencies can fully brand HighLevel as their own, delivering a seamless experience to their clients.
Brevo vs. HighLevel: Feature Comparison
Let's break down the key features of Brevo and HighLevel, and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, user experience and more.
1. Sales Pipeline Management
Brevo's Pipeline feature offers custom deal pipelines, enabling teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate repetitive tasks, with support for bulk contact import to link contacts and deals efficiently. Basic analytics provide data insights, though further customization may be needed to meet specific needs. On the other hand, HighLevel CRM’s sales pipeline management allows businesses to create pipelines tailored to their sales processes. It provides tools to track leads, monitor deal progress, and view opportunities through a dashboard, helping organize sales workflows and offering visibility into the sales cycle.
2. Ease of use
Brevo is designed with user-friendliness in mind, offering intuitive navigation and straightforward features that cater to businesses of all sizes. HighLevel, while powerful, may present a steeper learning curve due to its extensive customization options, requiring users to invest time in mastering the platform for optimal use.
3. Contact enrichment
Brevo's Customer Data Platform excels in contact enrichment, unifying and syncing customer data for comprehensive profiles. Its Sourcing Library and Customer Analytics & BI tools enhance data insights, providing businesses with enriched customer information. HighLevel lacks specific contact enrichment tools, focusing more on other CRM functionalities.
4. Outreach
Brevo's Marketing Platform offers versatile outreach through email, SMS, and WhatsApp, with automation to optimize timing based on customer behavior. HighLevel provides email, text messaging, and automated sequences for outreach but may require more time to configure for specific strategies, offering flexibility for tailored communication.
5. Automation
Brevo delivers automation across its Marketing and Sales Platforms, enabling automated campaigns and task management with AI-driven personalization. HighLevel offers robust automation for workflows, including lead follow-ups and campaign management, though setup can be complex, requiring effort to fully leverage its capabilities.
6. Integration
Brevo integrates with over 150 digital tools, including CRM, CMS, and e-commerce platforms, ensuring seamless data synchronization and workflow enhancement. HighLevel's integration capabilities are not specified, suggesting a more limited approach compared to Brevo's extensive connectivity options.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Brevo incorporates AI in its Marketing Platform, enhancing email marketing with personalized and optimized content. HighLevel lacks prominent AI features, focusing on manual configuration and automation without leveraging AI for predictive analytics or intelligent decision-making, highlighting a different approach to CRM functionalities.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Brevo and HighLevel.
Brevo prices
Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month. And, the number of contacts. The following is an overview of their annual plan.
- Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
- Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
- Enterprise: Undisclosed.
HighLevel prices
High Levels has two price tiers for you to choose from.
- Starter: $97/seat/month.
- Unlimited: $297/seat/month.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Brevo and HighLevel
Looking for an affordable alternative? Consider folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform celebrated for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play system. Folk is versatile, supporting teams across sales, marketing, recruitment, and more, thanks to its highly customizable design. It’s also built to scale with your business, whether you’re a solopreneur, a small to mid-size team, or a large enterprise.
Key features
- Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
- Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
- Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
- Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
- Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
- Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
- Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
- Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.
Price and plans
folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.
- Standard: $20 per user, per month.
- Premium: $40 per user, per month.
- Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.
Brevo vs. HighLevel: What's the verdict?
When comparing Brevo and HighLevel, it's clear how both platforms offer robust CRM solutions tailored to different business needs. Brevo excels in multi-channel marketing and customer data management, while HighLevel focuses on automation and lead nurturing for agencies. However, for companies seeking a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk emerges as a flexible alternative. It combines ease of use with customization, making it an ideal choice for those who need a CRM that adapts to their unique workflows. Try folk today, free.
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses