HighLevel vs Keap: Small Business Automation Compared

Keap has been helping small businesses automate their follow-up since 2001, back when most people knew it as Infusionsoft.

HighLevel only arrived in 2018. Today it powers over 2 million businesses.

So when somebody asks me about HighLevel vs Keap, they're not really asking which one sends emails. Both do. They're asking which one they should build their business on for the next five years.

That's a different question. And it gets a different answer.

Keap is a solid small business CRM with automation, and it now belongs to Thryv. HighLevel is a whole business system, and a platform that agencies can rebrand, resell and build on. Apps. Snapshots. Unlimited sub-accounts.

For most small business owners and agency owners I talk to, that difference decides it.

HighLevel vs Keap at a glance

Here's the short version before we get into the detail. Every Keap fact below comes from Keap's or Thryv's own pages, linked further down.

That table tells most of the story. But not all of it. Let's go through it properly.

What Keap is today, and what changed with Thryv

Keap started life in 2001 as Infusionsoft, in Arizona. It rebranded to Keap in January 2019 alongside a major change to its software. If you were in small business marketing in the 2000s and 2010s, you'll have heard the name. It was one of the early players that taught small businesses what automated follow-up could do.

Then came a big change.

On 29 October 2024, Thryv Holdings, a company listed on NASDAQ, announced it was buying Keap for a total transaction value of $80 million, paid in cash. In the same announcement Thryv said Keap generated approximately $85 million of revenue in the twelve months to 30 June 2024. The deal closed on 31 October 2024.

Thryv's own transition page confirms Keap now sits under Thryv. Existing accounts and logins carry on. Support has moved to Thryv's learning site, and Keap Academy is now Thryv Academy. I haven't seen any official statement that Keap is being retired, so I won't suggest it is.

I'm not raising any of this to score points. Companies get bought all the time, and plenty do well after it. But if you're choosing the platform you'll run your business on, who owns it and where it's heading is a fair thing to know.

Where Keap is genuinely good

Credit where it's due.

Keap has been doing this for over twenty years. Its pricing page says "Say goodbye to feature-based plans", and it means it: one all-in platform with CRM, lead scoring, landing pages, funnels, forms, email broadcasts, a sales pipeline, an appointment scheduler, quotes, invoices, checkout forms, payments, Google review requests and reporting. Its "When, Then, Stop" Easy Automations are simple to get your head around. And every plan comes with a dedicated Customer Success Manager, plus required implementation services.

If you're a single small business owner who wants one plan, a guided set-up and somebody to call, Keap is a reasonable choice. I'd never tell someone it's a bad product. It isn't.

But "reasonable" and "the best place to build" are two different things.

HighLevel vs Keap feature by feature

Both platforms cover the basics of small business automation. The gap opens up when you look at how much of the customer journey each one handles, and how many channels you can actually reach people on.

CRM, pipelines and automation

Keap gives you a CRM, lead scoring and a sales pipeline. Its automation is built around Easy Automations and pre-written templates, which you'll find on all plans according to its feature comparison.

HighLevel gives you a CRM, multiple sales pipelines, lead scoring, smart lists and segmentation, custom objects and a full Workflows builder. Workflows are the engine room of HighLevel. They connect everything else: forms, calendars, messages, pipelines, reviews, payments and AI.

It's not just "if this, then send that". It's the whole journey wired together.

Messaging: email, SMS, phone and social

This is one of the biggest differences.

Keap's pricing page lists email broadcasts and US-only text marketing with a business phone line, sold in usage tiers.

HighLevel puts SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp and live chat into one consolidated conversation stream, alongside email. You can broadcast by email, SMS, WhatsApp or Messenger. And then there's the phone side: call tracking, missed call text-back, ringless voicemail and automated outbound call connect.

Why does that matter? Because your customers don't live inside one channel. They see a Facebook ad, ignore three emails, reply to a WhatsApp at 9pm and book on their phone. If your platform only reaches them one or two ways, you're leaving the rest to chance.

Funnels, websites and booking

Keap has landing pages and multi-page funnels, plus an appointment scheduler. That covers a lot of small business needs.

HighLevel has full websites, funnels, landing pages, webinar funnels, blogs, forms, surveys, quizzes and QR codes. Its calendars come with appointment reminders and paid calendars, so you can take money at the point of booking.

Reviews, courses and payments

Keap does Google review requests. HighLevel does reputation management properly: automated review requests, AI review replies and video review capture.

Keap's pricing page doesn't list courses or memberships. HighLevel has membership offers, courses and communities built in.

On payments, both are strong. Keap has quotes, invoices, checkout forms and payments. HighLevel has estimates and proposals, invoicing, Text-2-Pay, Tap-2-Pay, order forms with upsells, gift cards, loyalty programmes and an affiliate manager.

AI

Keap includes AI content and campaign assistants.

HighLevel goes further: Voice AI that answers calls, Conversation AI on chat, AI review replies, Content AI and AI Studio. Its homepage now calls it "The AI-powered business operating system". That's a big claim, so here's the why: the AI sits inside the same system as your contacts, calendars and Workflows, so it can act, not just write.

Still, AI is only as good as the person using it. Put it behind a weak offer and you'll just be wrong faster.

HighLevel is a platform you can build on

This is the bit most comparisons skip. And for me it's the most important.

A CRM is a tool. A platform is something other people can build on top of. HighLevel is very clearly the second.

The HighLevel App Marketplace

The HighLevel App Marketplace lists 1,500+ apps. Third-party developers register, build an app and publish it when it's ready, against HighLevel's App Review Guidelines.

What makes it work commercially is how the money flows. HighLevel handles billing directly with agencies, collects the payment and pays the developer. Developers can charge free, subscription, one-time, freemium or usage-based, and HighLevel says it currently does not deduct any commission. Agencies can even resell those apps to their sub-accounts with their own markup.

So developers build for HighLevel because there's a real market there. Agencies buy because apps install natively into the account they already use. And the whole thing keeps getting better.

Snapshots

Then there are Snapshots. HighLevel describes them as "reusable templates that capture selected configuration assets from a HighLevel sub-account".

Look at what one can carry: workflows and triggers, AI agents, calendars, pipelines, custom fields and values, funnels and websites, forms, surveys, email and text templates, dashboards and reports, membership products, review settings, WhatsApp templates and more. You can share a Snapshot by link, load it into an existing sub-account (choosing what to import and what to skip), or create a brand-new sub-account from it.

And third parties can sell them. Agency admins can sell Snapshots to other HighLevel agencies on the App Marketplace, one-time, monthly or yearly. Buyers push the Snapshot straight into their locations from their HighLevel dashboard.

What Keap offers on both counts

Keap has a marketplace too. Its integrations page lists "over 230 native and supported integrations". Keap's partner FAQ says "only Keap Certified Partners or Developer Partners are listed in our Marketplace", and there's a Developer Partner programme for building integrations. I couldn't find official text confirming that third-party developers can sell paid apps through it.

On templates, Keap had a Campaigns Marketplace for years. That has now gone. Campaign export was disabled from 1 December 2025 and the old marketplace and Partner Edition were sunset on 9 January 2026.

Its replacement is called Solution Launchpad. To be fair to Keap, it's more than a single template. Partners can package automations with their dependencies, or bundles of appointments, checkout forms, custom fields, emails, forms, landing pages, pipelines, tags and more, then push them to accounts or share them by link. That's closer to a Snapshot than a one-off recipe.

But there are three differences that matter:

• It's labelled alpha in Keap's own help article.
• It's available only to Keap Certified Partners and Keap Certified Consultants. Standard users can install a solution but not create one.
• The documentation doesn't mention selling solutions.

HighLevel's Snapshots have been in use for years, any agency can build one, and there's a working marketplace for selling them. One is a feature that's just arrived. The other is an ecosystem.

That's why I build on HighLevel. Build something better and let the customer decide. HighLevel lets people like us do exactly that.

How our apps help you get more out of HighLevel

I've always believed no platform is perfect. If HighLevel does 90% brilliantly, the 10% that's missing is where we exist.

When I first got into HighLevel, its line was "Capture, Nurture, Close". Great. But where's the prospecting? Where's the outreach? Where's the market creation? Nobody was filling that gap, so we started building.

Every one of our apps for HighLevel is built as though HighLevel had built it. They use what's already there: Workflows, Contacts, Tags and Conversations. No API wrangling. No Zapier, Make or n8n in the middle. Once installed, they're simply a piece of your HighLevel account.

We built our apps into HighLevel, rather than as a complement to it.

Here are the ones most relevant if you're coming from a small business automation tool like Keap.

LinkedIn for HighLevel

Keap, like most small business CRMs, is built for people who've already raised their hand. LinkedIn for HighLevel goes one step earlier. It brings LinkedIn prospecting into your HighLevel sub-accounts, with email enrichment, imports and outreach.

It started because one client needed it. The other LinkedIn tools all offered the same basic outreach, and none sat inside HighLevel. Adding email enrichment meant you could find your ideal customer, enrich their email, reach them on LinkedIn and by email, then nurture them in HighLevel. Agencies can white-label it and resell it to their clients.

WhatsApp for HighLevel

Keap's text marketing is US-only. A lot of businesses talk to their customers on WhatsApp, wherever they are.

WhatsApp for HighLevel connects your existing WhatsApp or WhatsApp Business number by QR code. Chats land in HighLevel Conversations, and your Workflows can send messages and follow up automatically. No Meta API approval needed. There's a standard version and an agency white-label version, and both install from the HighLevel App Marketplace. If you want the detail, I've written about how the WhatsApp HighLevel integration works.

For agency owners: Agency Customizer and Custom Value Forms

If you're an agency, Keap's partner programme pays you commission. HighLevel lets you run the platform under your own brand. Our apps help you make that brand feel like yours.

The HighLevel Agency Customizer lets agency owners customise their agency and client sub-accounts (branding, menus, languages) without writing code.

Custom Value Forms gives you branded forms whose answers save straight into Custom Values in your clients' sub-accounts. So onboarding information goes exactly where it needs to go. No Zapier, Make or webhooks.

You don't need more software. You need the software you've got to do more.

Snapshots make starting on HighLevel much easier

Here's the honest truth about any powerful platform. The power is also the problem.

HighLevel can do almost everything a small business needs. But a blank account is a blank account. Somebody has to build the funnels, the forms, the workflows, the pipelines, the calendars, the emails, the texts. And connect them in the right order around the customer journey.

That's where a lot of people get stuck. The Tinkerer builds forever and never launches. The Rusher launches something half-wired. The Magic-Bullet Believer buys another tool.

A Snapshot fixes that.

What a NexGenHighLevel Snapshot actually is

Our Snapshots are complete, fully built-out business systems for a niche. A business system in a box. Loaded into your HighLevel account, you get funnels, forms, workflows, pipelines, calendars, emails and texts and AI features, all connected around the whole client journey, from first enquiry to paying customer and beyond.

It's not a starter pack. It's the system.

And not all Snapshots are equal. A typical Snapshot out there might be a couple of funnels, a few workflows and one pipeline. That's a head start, but it still leaves you building most of the business yourself. I've written more about this in what a HighLevel Snapshot business in a box really means.

Who they're for

Each Snapshot works for two people.

The business owner in that niche, who wants to run their own marketing and follow-up without hiring an agency. And the agency serving that niche, who wants to deliver a proven system to every new client instead of rebuilding from scratch each time.

Some of our live Snapshots:

• HVAC Snapshot for heating and cooling businesses and the agencies that serve them.
• Landscaping and Lawn Care Snapshot for outdoor service businesses.
• Social Media Marketing Agency Snapshot for SMMA owners running their own agency on HighLevel.

You can see them all on our HighLevel Snapshots page. More niches are being built.

Clients have used Snapshots to skip months, if not years, of trial and error building a system. That's the point. Your time is better spent on your customers than on wiring Workflow number 47.

Compare that with Keap. There, a pre-built multi-asset solution has to come from a certified partner through a feature that's still in alpha. On HighLevel, it's an established way of working, and you can get one loaded on day one.

HighLevel's growth vs Keap over the last five years

Growth isn't everything. But when you're choosing a platform, momentum tells you something about where the investment, the features and the developers are going.

Here's what each company has actually published. HighLevel is private and doesn't publish its own revenue. Keap doesn't publish its own figures any more either; Thryv reports some of them. So this isn't a perfect like-for-like, and I'll say where it isn't.

HighLevel's numbers

HighLevel's own about page gives a year-by-year timeline. It grew to 10,000+ customers in 2021, surpassed 20,000 in 2022 and exceeded 60,000 in 2023. By October 2025, Dallas Innovates reported about 110,000 customers and over 2 million businesses using HighLevel.

Simple arithmetic: from 10,000+ customers in 2021 to about 110,000 in 2025. That's roughly eleven times as many customers in four years.

On revenue, HighLevel doesn't publish a figure, but it has been ranked on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 three years running: revenue growth of 3,362% from 2019 to 2022, 1,176% from 2020 to 2023, and 781% from 2021 to 2024. It also made the Inc. 5000 in 2025, its third year in a row.

When General Atlantic made its minority investment in April 2024, HighLevel said it had grown more than 5x over the previous three years while staying profitable. The co-founders remain the largest shareholders.

Keap's numbers

Keap's figures now come through Thryv. At the time of the deal, Thryv said Keap generated approximately $85 million of revenue in the twelve months to June 2024.

In its fourth-quarter 2024 results, Thryv guided that Keap would contribute $75 to 78 million of revenue for 2025. Its full-year 2025 results then reported Keap SaaS revenue of $69.6 million for the year.

Those are different reporting periods, so I won't turn them into a percentage. I'll just put the numbers side by side: about $85 million before the deal, $75 to 78 million guided for 2025, $69.6 million reported for 2025.

Thryv doesn't publish a standalone Keap client count, and its 2026 results don't give a separate Keap revenue figure. So I can't tell you what's happened since, and I won't guess.

What it means for you

Keap has a long history and a real customer base. That counts for something.

But the direction of travel is clear in the figures HighLevel publishes. More customers, more businesses, more apps, more developers building for it. When you pick a platform, you're betting on where it'll be in five years, not where it was ten years ago.

Who should choose Keap, and who should choose HighLevel

Let's be fair to both. Keap vs HighLevel isn't a fight between a good product and a bad one. It's about fit.

Choose Keap if

• You're a single small business, mostly in the US, and you want one all-in plan with a guided implementation.
• Your marketing is mainly email, with some US text messaging.
• You value having a dedicated Customer Success Manager on your account.
• You're already on Keap, it's working, and you don't need more channels, courses, a full website or an agency model.

Choose HighLevel if

• You want your whole customer journey in one place: website, funnels, booking, SMS, WhatsApp, social messages, calls, reviews, courses, payments and AI.
• You're an agency, or you'd like to become one. HighLevel lets you run unlimited client sub-accounts on the higher plans, white-label the platform under your own brand and custom domain, and even sell it as your own software in SaaS mode.
• You want a team to work in the system without paying per seat. HighLevel's pricing is a flat agency price with unlimited users.
• You want to start with a fully built system for your niche through a Snapshot, rather than build from nothing.
• You want a platform with a real ecosystem of apps that install natively.

It's not Keap or nothing. It's a CRM, or a whole business system.

For most of the small business owners and agency owners I speak to, HighLevel is the better Keap alternative, and it isn't especially close. If you're also weighing up other options, I've compared HighLevel vs ActiveCampaign too.

Switching from Keap to HighLevel

Moving platforms sounds scarier than it is. Here's what it involves in practice.

1. Export your data from Keap

Start with your contacts, tags and any notes you need. Export them to a file you can import into HighLevel. Take a list of your products, pipelines and running automations too, so you know exactly what has to exist in the new account.

2. Rebuild, or load a Snapshot

This is where most of the work used to be. You'd rebuild every automation, form, landing page and email by hand.

A Snapshot is the fastest way to stand up the new account. Load a complete system for your niche, then adjust the wording, branding and offers to fit your business. One thing to know: Snapshots carry configuration, not live data. Contacts, conversations, appointments and integrations don't come across in a Snapshot, so you import your contacts separately and connect your integrations afresh.

3. Connect your phone, email and payments

Set up your phone numbers, connect your sending domain, link your calendars and connect your payment processor. If you use WhatsApp, this is when you'd connect it.

4. Run both for a short overlap

Don't flip a switch overnight. Run Keap and HighLevel side by side for a short period. Let any long-running Keap sequences finish while new leads go into HighLevel. Check every form, every booking and every message. Then turn Keap off.

Walk before you run. Even when you're ready to run, keep walking a little bit longer.

What you get when you start with us

If you get HighLevel through NexGenHighLevel, you're not just getting a login. Here's what comes with it:

• Over 200 HighLevel training courses.
• Access to all our Apps for HighLevel, the live ones and the future releases.
• 24/7 support and personalised, one-to-one onboarding.
• A full HighLevel sub-account under our agency, plus a free Snapshot from NexGenHighLevel.

That last one matters if you're switching from Keap. You don't start with a blank account. You start with a system. You can read a bit more about who we are and why we do it this way.

Frequently asked questions

Is HighLevel better than Keap?

For most small businesses and agencies, I think so. Keap covers CRM, email, US texting, payments and booking well. HighLevel covers all of that plus websites, WhatsApp and social messaging, calls, reputation management, courses, communities and deeper AI. It also has a 1,500+ app marketplace, whole-account Snapshots and full white-label for agencies. If you want one system to grow on, HighLevel is the stronger choice.

Can I migrate from Keap to HighLevel?

Yes. Export your contacts and tags from Keap and import them into HighLevel. Then either rebuild your automations or load a Snapshot to stand up funnels, forms, workflows, pipelines and calendars in one go. Connect your phone, email and payments, and run both platforms for a short overlap so nothing falls through the cracks while you check everything works.

Is GoHighLevel cheaper than Keap?

It depends on your set-up, so compare the live pricing pages. The models are different. Keap sells one all-in plan with two users included, charges for extra users and raises the price as your contact list grows, with required implementation services. GoHighLevel charges a flat agency price with unlimited users, so adding team members or clients doesn't push your bill up per seat.

Does Keap have white-label?

I couldn't find white-label on Keap's partner pages. Keap's Certified Partner programme describes recurring commissions and billing clients directly as an authorised reseller, rather than rebranding Keap as your own software. HighLevel lets agencies remove HighLevel branding, use their own domain, run unlimited client sub-accounts on higher plans and, with SaaS mode, sell the platform under their own brand.

What is a HighLevel Snapshot?

A Snapshot is a reusable template that captures a HighLevel sub-account's setup, such as workflows, funnels, forms, pipelines, calendars, email and text templates and AI agents, so it can be loaded into another account. Our Snapshots are complete business systems for a niche, connected around the whole customer journey, so a business or agency can start with a working system on day one.

How do I get a HighLevel account through NexGenHighLevel?

You can start your HighLevel account with us. You get a full HighLevel sub-account under our agency, a free Snapshot, over 200 HighLevel training courses, access to all our apps, 24/7 support and one-to-one onboarding. It's a simple way to move from Keap without starting from a blank screen.

The bottom line on HighLevel vs Keap

Keap helped a lot of small businesses get their first taste of automation. That deserves respect.

But the question isn't who got there first. It's who you want to build with from here.

GoHighLevel gives you the whole journey in one system, a marketplace of apps that install natively, Snapshots that load a working business on day one, and an agency model that lets you put your own name on all of it. As a Keap alternative, that's a lot more than a like-for-like swap.

And remember: the platform won't fix a weak offer. Technology is leverage, not strategy. Leverage multiplies whatever is underneath it. So get the offer right, then pick the platform that multiplies it furthest.

When you're ready, get HighLevel through NexGenHighLevel and start with a system, not a blank screen.

Don't pick the tool you know. Pick the one you can grow into.