Salesforce vs HIghLevel

Choosing the right CRM can significantly impact your business's efficiency and growth. Salesforce and HighLevel are two popular platforms offering distinct capabilities tailored to different needs. Salesforce is renowned for its robust, scalable solutions ideal for large enterprises, while HighLevel focuses on streamlining digital marketing for agencies and smaller businesses. This article will guide you through a comprehensive comparison of their features, pricing, and benefits, helping you make an informed decision. We'll also introduce folk, a popular alternative to consider.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a robust CRM platform for large enterprises, offering tools for sales, marketing, service, and analytics, with extensive scalability.

Key features of Salesforce

• Comprehensive ecosystem: A unified platform offering CRM, marketing automation, customer service, and custom app development, suitable for the varied needs of large enterprises.
• Customization and scalability: Salesforce is highly customizable and scalable, allowing large organizations to tailor the platform to complex workflows and manage significant growth.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) integration: Salesforce Einstein offers AI-driven analytics and automation, providing insights that help large businesses optimize their strategies.
• Extensive integration capabilities: With Salesforce's AppExchange, large companies can integrate the platform with a wide range of third-party applications, ensuring seamless operation across different business systems.
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance: Salesforce provides robust security measures and compliance features, critical for large organizations handling sensitive customer data.
  

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.

Salesforce vs. HighLevel: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of Salesforce and HighLevel to take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, user experience and more.

1. Sales Pipeline Management

Salesforce's pipeline management feature, known as Pipeline Inspection, provides a comprehensive view of sales opportunities by consolidating key metrics, deal changes, and AI-powered insights into a single interface. HighLevel CRM’s sales pipeline management feature enables businesses to create pipelines tailored to their sales processes. It provides tools to track leads, monitor deal progress, and view opportunities through a dashboard.

2. Ease of use

Salesforce, known for its extensive features, may have a steeper learning curve, requiring users to invest time in mastering its capabilities. HighLevel, on the other hand, offers a more straightforward interface, designed for ease of use, making it accessible for users with varying levels of technical expertise.

3. Contact enrichment

Salesforce's contact enrichment feature leverages tools such as the Data Cloud to automatically enhance and update contact records in real time, drawing from verified data sources like LinkedIn and InsideView to provide real-time updates. HighLevel CRM does not appear to offer dedicated contact enrichment features.

4. Outreach

Salesforce's outreach solution is powered by its AI capabilities, particularly through the integration of Einstein AI, which allows users to see cross-sales paths and leads they need to engage with. HighLevel CRM includes outreach tools such as email campaigns, text messaging, and automated sequences, offering multiple ways to manage interactions.

5. Automation

Salesforce offers robust automation features, including workflow rules, flow builders, and AI automation through Einstein AI, streamlining business processes. HighLevel CRM provides automation tools for tasks like lead follow-ups and email campaigns, aiming to simplify repetitive tasks, though complex workflows may require more configuration time.

6. Integration

Salesforce integrates with a wide range of third-party applications through its AppExchange marketplace, allowing users to connect tools for marketing automation, customer service, analytics, project management, and finance, with popular integrations like Slack and Mailchimp. HighLevel also offers integrations designed to streamline operations by enabling users to connect HighLevel with their existing systems and tools. However, the range of integrations may require additional setup and configuration to align with specific business needs.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Salesforce CRM integrates AI through its Einstein platform, offering predictive analytics, intelligent recommendations, and automated insights to enhance decision-making. HighLevel CRM does not prominently advertise AI integration, focusing more on manual configuration and automation rather than leveraging AI for decision-making or optimization.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Salesforce and HighLevel.

Salesforce prices

Salesforce pricing ranges from $25 to $500 per user/month.

• Starter suite: $25/user/month.
• Pro suite: $80/user/month.
• Enterprise plan: $165/user/month.
• Unlimited plan: $330/user/month.
• Einstein 1 Sales: $500/user/month.

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 Salesforce and HighLevel

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk is extremely versatile, and can scale with you as your business grows. Thanks to its ability to support soloprenuers, small to mid-size teams, and large enterprises. folk can also be used across your business, from sales, marketing, recruitment, and more.

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.

Salesforce vs. HighLevel: What's the verdict?

Both Salesforce and HighLevel offer robust CRM solutions tailored to different business needs. Salesforce excels with its comprehensive ecosystem and scalability, ideal for large enterprises seeking extensive customization. In contrast, HighLevel focuses on digital marketing automation, making it a strong choice for agencies and small businesses.For companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free