Pick SamCart if your sales happen on a checkout page and GoHighLevel if they happen in texts and calls. SamCart is a checkout and sales page tool from $79 a month, or about $59 billed yearly. GoHighLevel bundles a CRM, funnels, email, texting and calendars from $97 a month, with sends billed on top.
On checkout extras the SamCart vs GoHighLevel ranking flips. SamCart’s pricing page puts order bumps and 1-click upsells on Pro, $199 a month or $149 billed yearly, and HighLevel’s help docs show both on its $97 Starter. CartMango, which I run, has bumps from about $0.83 a month and upsells from $1.67, billed yearly once paid plans start in November, and is free right now.
On both tools, the features that decide this sit on different plans or cost extra. SamCart keeps order bumps and upsells for its upper plan, GoHighLevel caps client workspaces on Starter, and every GoHighLevel email and text is billed per send.
So the entry price is a weak guide. A seller who wants upsells and a coach who closes on the phone would pick different tools, and pay very different monthly bills, from the same 2 pricing pages.
Below are both price lists, the plan each feature lives on, what a month of email adds to GoHighLevel, and 4 seller situations with a pick for each.
Key Takeaways
- SamCart’s $79 Core plan has no order bumps. Bumps and 1-click upsells start on SamCart Pro, at $199 a month or $149 billed yearly.
- GoHighLevel’s $97 Starter plan includes both. Its funnel builder runs order bumps and one-click upsells, so for checkout extras it costs less than SamCart Pro.
- GoHighLevel bills sends on top of the $97. Emails cost $0.675 per 1,000 and texts are metered too, paid from a prepaid wallet.
- GoHighLevel suits sales closed in texts, calls and follow-ups. SamCart suits digital sellers who keep their own email tool and want a flat bill.
- CartMango puts bumps on its $10 a year plan and upsells on its $20 one, about $0.83 and $1.67 a month. CartMango is free right now, with no CRM or texting.
What SamCart and GoHighLevel each do
SamCart is a checkout and sales page builder for digital products, courses and subscriptions, while GoHighLevel is a CRM that also builds funnels, sends email and texts, books calls and runs client accounts. They overlap in a single place: both can take a payment on a page you built.
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SamCart’s own pricing page lists the pieces. Core gives you unlimited pages, products and checkouts, a courses app, cart abandonment emails and 1 team seat, but it does not send newsletters or texts. Asked on its GoHighLevel comparison page whether it has email marketing and SMS, SamCart answers “No” and says it connects to ActiveCampaign, Kit, HubSpot and Mailchimp instead. The same page lists Calendar Bookings, so a buyer can pay for a call and book it in a single checkout.
GoHighLevel goes the other way. Every plan, Starter included, carries CRM pipelines, 2-way email and SMS, booking calendars, a website and funnel builder, courses, communities, payments and invoicing, plus unlimited contacts and unlimited users. Starter covers 3 sub-accounts, GoHighLevel’s word for separate client workspaces, so the real decision is how much of that list you would switch on.
SamCart vs GoHighLevel pricing, plan by plan
SamCart charges $79 or $199 a month on monthly billing, and about $59 or $149 a month billed yearly, while GoHighLevel’s public pricing page prints only monthly prices: $97, $297 and $497. GoHighLevel’s billing help says you can pick yearly billing when you upgrade inside your account, but no yearly figure appears on the page.
Order bumps and 1-click upsells are on SamCart Pro only, GoHighLevel has both on its $97 Starter plan, and CartMango has bumps from $10 a year and upsells from $20 a year.
| Plan | Month to month | Yearly, per month | Order bumps | 1-click upsells | Email and texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SamCart Core | $79 | About $59 ($711 a year) | No | No | No, connects to your email tool |
| SamCart Pro | $199 | About $149 ($1,791 a year) | Yes | Yes | No, connects to your email tool |
| GoHighLevel Starter | $97 | Not printed | Yes | Yes | Yes, billed per send |
| GoHighLevel Unlimited | $297 | Not printed | Yes | Yes | Yes, billed per send |
| CartMango Silver | Yearly only | About $0.83 ($10 a year) | Yes | No | No, sends buyers to your email tool |
| CartMango Gold | Yearly only | About $1.67 ($20 a year) | Yes | Yes | No, sends buyers to your email tool |
CartMango is the checkout I run, so read its rows as a disclosed interest. CartMango is free right now, and the prices above apply once paid plans start in November.
A few things the table can’t hold. SamCart Pro also adds A/B testing, Subscription Saver (which chases failed renewals), the Affiliate Center, 10 team seats and outside payment processors. SamCart charges no added fee on SamPay, its own processor, which runs at 2.9% + 30 cents a sale, the same headline rate as Stripe’s pricing, and its plan table lists a “Tax Collection” rate of 0.5% on Core and 0.35% on Pro.
On the GoHighLevel side, the $297 Unlimited plan is for agencies and removes the 3 sub-account cap. The $497 plan, now called Founder on the pricing page, adds SaaS mode for reselling GoHighLevel as your own software. GoHighLevel’s pricing page lists no per-sale platform fee, so your card processor’s fee is the cost of each payment.
Trials: 7 days on SamCart, 14 on GoHighLevel.
Our SamCart pricing breakdown runs the yearly math in more detail.
Where page 1 gets the checkout extras wrong
The AI Overview Google shows for this search puts “bumps, 1-click upsells” in SamCart’s column beside “From $79/month”, against GoHighLevel’s “From $97/month”. Read quickly, that says SamCart is $18 a month cheaper for the checkout tools it is known for.
The AI Overview Google shows for “samcart vs gohighlevel”. Read the Checkout & Upsells row, then the Starting Price row.
The $79 plan has neither feature. The cheapest SamCart plan with order bumps is Pro at $199 a month, which makes it $102 a month dearer than GoHighLevel Starter on month-to-month billing, or $52 dearer if you pay SamCart yearly at $149.
Counting the AI Overview, 5 text results on page 1 put a price on SamCart, and only 2 of them tie order bumps to the Pro plan.
| Source on page 1 | SamCart price it quotes | Says bumps need Pro? |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overview | From $79 a month | No, lists bumps beside $79 |
| Top GHL Snapshots | Launch $59, Grow $119, Scale $299 | No, and those plans are retired |
| HL Growth Partner | From $79, about $59 yearly | No, lists bumps as core toolkit |
| differ.blog | Core $79, Pro $199 | Yes |
| SamCart’s own comparison page | Core $79, Pro $199 | Yes, on the plan card and in its FAQ |
Our SamCart review found retired plans quoted across the review pages too: SamCart has changed its plan structure twice, and the old Launch, Grow and Scale names still circulate.
The error runs the other direction on SamCart’s own blog. A January 2025 SamCart post on adding its Slide Checkout to HighLevel says HighLevel’s checkout is missing “order bumps, one-click upsells, and stored credit card options”.
HighLevel’s help center now documents both bumps and upsells. Its order bump guide says “you can include multiple bump products in the same form”, and its upsell guide describes an offer customers accept “with a single click”, charged to the card from the first purchase. 2 limits apply: only 1 product per form can be recurring, either the main product or a single bump, and the one-click upsell works in GoHighLevel’s newer V2 funnels, not the older V1 funnels or its website builder.
What GoHighLevel’s usage charges add to the $97
GoHighLevel’s plan fee covers the software, and every email and text you send is billed on top from a prepaid wallet that refills from your card. Its pricing page marks email, SMS, calling and some AI features with an asterisk: “Usage based charges apply.”
Email is the easy one to price. HighLevel’s pricing guide states “Email usage is $0.675 per 1,000 emails across all plans.” Send 8 emails a month to a 5,000-person list and that’s 40,000 sends, or $27, so Starter costs $124 that month before a single text goes out. Texts are metered per segment, a long message splits into several segments, and a text-heavy month costs more than an email-heavy one. Our GoHighLevel pricing guide walks through the wallet and the phone rates.
SamCart has no usage meter. You pay the plan, the card fee and the tax collection rate. CartMango bills the same flat way, a yearly plan plus your card processor’s fee, with no usage charges and 0% per sale. The email tool is a separate bill on the SamCart side, so the fair comparison is SamCart plus your email tool against GoHighLevel plus its sends.
If texts, calls and bookings close your sales
GoHighLevel Starter is the pick when a sale happens in a conversation rather than on a checkout page: a text thread, a discovery call, a lead you chase through a pipeline. GoHighLevel was built for that kind of sale. SamCart’s pricing page lists customer records with tags and notes, but no texting and no sales pipeline, and its booking feature is pitched as “Sell the call and book it in the same checkout”, which fits a paid call.
Take a coach who sells a $1,500 program. The lead fills in a form, gets a text, books a free discovery call, and pays after it. GoHighLevel runs the form, the text, the booking and the payment from 1 account, while with SamCart the texts and the pipeline still need other tools. The same goes for anyone selling to clients rather than to fans: Starter’s 3 sub-accounts cover a handful of client workspaces, and the $297 Unlimited plan removes the cap once you take on more.
- Pick: GoHighLevel Starter, $97 a month.
- Cost on top: emails at $0.675 per 1,000, texts per segment, phone numbers.
- The catch: setup can take a while. A poster who onboarded a small cleaning company onto GoHighLevel wrote that it “took me a full week just to get their pipeline, calendar, and a couple of automations behaving”. The same r/gohighlevel post, which defends the platform overall, adds that for a solo owner “that week would’ve felt like a scam.”
If your funnel pages already run on GoHighLevel
If your landing pages and follow-ups already live in GoHighLevel, try its own order bumps and one-click upsells before adding SamCart. They’re already in the plan you pay for.
Some sellers bolt SamCart on anyway, and SamCart publishes a guide for it. An advertiser laid out their funnel in an r/FacebookAds post as “Landing Page (GHL) > Check Out Page (SamCart) > Thank you Page (GHL)”, and listed 5 tools in total: Kajabi, SamCart, GHL, Demio and Zapier. That r/FacebookAds thread was asking how to track sales across all of them.
That guide covers placing SamCart’s Slide Checkout inside HighLevel pages. Running both means paying both: $97 a month for GoHighLevel plus $199 a month for SamCart Pro, or $149 if you pay SamCart yearly.
- Pick: GoHighLevel’s own checkout first.
- Add SamCart when: you want something specific from it, like Pro’s Subscription Saver or SamCart’s checkout payment options (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, and buy now, pay later through Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm).
- The catch: 2 dashboards, 2 sets of customer records, and a tracking problem like the one in that thread.
If you would rather keep the email tool you already pay for
SamCart is the pick for a digital seller whose list already lives in an email tool they like and who wants a flat monthly bill with no meter. GoHighLevel would hand you a second email system to ignore or migrate into.
Say you sell a course and 2 ebooks to a list you built in Kit, ActiveCampaign or BirdSend (which I also run). SamCart connects to that tool and stays a checkout, and your newsletters keep going out from where they go out today. Pick the SamCart plan by whether you want order bumps or upsells. If not, Core at about $59 a month billed yearly does the job, with cart abandonment emails included. If yes, you’re on Pro at about $149 a month billed yearly, and that $90 gap has to pay for itself: on a $9 order bump, that’s 10 bump sales a month to break even, before card fees.
If the bump is the only reason you’d move up to Pro, CartMango also leaves your email tool in charge and puts bumps on its $10 a year plan, which the next section covers.
- Pick: SamCart Core, or Pro if bumps and upsells are the plan.
- Cost on top: your email tool, the card fee, the 0.5% or 0.35% tax collection rate.
- The catch: the $79 headline plan has no checkout extras.
If an order bump is the only extra you need
A seller with a few digital products who wants a checkout with an order bump, and nothing more, doesn’t need either platform’s monthly bill. Our SamCart alternatives guide covers per-sale options like Gumroad.
CartMango puts order bumps on its $10 a year Silver plan and upsells, downsells and cart abandonment on the $20 a year Gold plan, with 0% taken from each sale. CartMango is free right now and paid plans start in November. CartMango hosts a simple sales page through Mini Pages, so you don’t need a website either.
CartMango is a checkout that sends each buyer to your email tool. CartMango does not text, book calls or keep a sales pipeline, and its courses and community features are not live yet. If any of those is the reason you were looking at GoHighLevel, CartMango is not the swap.
- Pick: CartMango Silver for bumps, Gold for upsells.
- Cost on top: your card processor’s fee and your email tool.
- The catch: no CRM, no texting, no booking, no hosted courses yet.
SamCart, GoHighLevel or neither: the pick for each situation
GoHighLevel wins when sales close in conversations or you serve clients, SamCart wins when you sell digital products to a list you keep elsewhere, and CartMango covers a bump-only checkout for about $0.83 a month billed yearly, or $1.67 with upsells.
| Your situation | Pick | Cost per month | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales close in texts, calls and follow-ups | GoHighLevel Starter | $97, plus sends | A Reddit poster’s setup took a week |
| Funnels already on GoHighLevel | GoHighLevel’s own checkout | $97, plus sends | Add SamCart and you pay twice |
| Keeping your email tool, want bumps | SamCart Pro | About $149 billed yearly | Email tool is a separate bill |
| Keeping your email tool, no bumps | SamCart Core | About $59 billed yearly | No bumps or upsells |
| Only want an order bump | CartMango Silver | About $0.83 billed yearly | No upsells, CRM or texting |
| Want bumps and upsells, no CRM | CartMango Gold | About $1.67 billed yearly | No CRM, texting or booking |
GoHighLevel prints no yearly price on its pricing page, so its rows show the monthly figure.
The problem GoHighLevel solves that you may not have
GoHighLevel’s own FAQ says most users replace “their CRM, funnel builder, email marketing software, appointment scheduler, SMS marketing tools, and review management software”. That’s a great deal if you were paying for all 6. If you sell a digital product, you were probably paying for 2 of them, a page builder and an email tool.
Back in 2022 I ran a done-for-you service that fixed emails landing in Gmail’s Promotions tab. On a sales call, the prospect turned out not to have the problem at all: his emails already landed in the main inbox, and he didn’t know it. I told him so, though, as I wrote that week, I was “VERY tempted to take his money”.
Run the same check on yourself before paying for texting, pipelines and booking calendars. If you can’t name the client, the call or the text thread that would use them this month, you’re probably buying a checkout with a CRM attached.
FAQ
What is better than GoHighLevel?
For the whole bundle, Kartra is a close match, with pages, email and SMS, calendars, courses and a checkout on 1 bill, and our GoHighLevel alternatives roundup prices 7 options against the wallet charges. For the checkout alone, GoHighLevel’s $97 already includes bumps and upsells, so a dedicated checkout only saves money if it costs less than that. Gumroad’s 10% + $0.50 a sale stays under $97 a month up to about 38 sales of $20, and CartMango costs from about $0.83 a month billed yearly once paid plans start.
What are some good alternatives to SamCart?
Gumroad takes 10% + $0.50 a sale with no monthly fee. SendOwl and Sellfy charge a monthly plan, and ThriveCart charges a plan fee plus small add-on fees on some features. CartMango, which I run, is free right now and costs $10 to $30 a year once paid plans start in November, with 0% a sale plus your card processor’s fee. Our SamCart alternatives guide compares 8 options, these 5 included.
Is GoHighLevel actually good?
For agencies and service businesses that use most of it, yes, because it replaces several subscriptions with 1. For a solo seller who mainly needs a checkout, it’s a lot of tool to set up and pay for. The r/gohighlevel poster quoted earlier, who defends the platform overall, still calls the support complaints “legit and consistent”.
How much does SamCart cost per month?
SamCart Core costs $79 a month, or about $59 a month billed yearly ($711 a year). SamCart Pro costs $199 a month, or about $149 billed yearly ($1,791 a year), and only Pro has order bumps and 1-click upsells. Card processing on SamPay is 2.9% + 30 cents a sale.
Can you use SamCart with GoHighLevel?
Yes. SamCart publishes a setup guide for placing its Slide Checkout inside HighLevel pages, and an advertiser on Reddit describes running GoHighLevel landing pages into a SamCart checkout. Check first whether GoHighLevel’s own order bumps and upsells already cover what you need.
How do I cancel GoHighLevel or SamCart?
GoHighLevel deletes your data 90 days after you cancel, so export first. Our guide on how to cancel GoHighLevel covers the steps, and the SamCart cancellation guide covers the billing page and refunds.
A checkout without the CRM attached
If your sales happen on a page and not in a phone call, the tool you need is the checkout, and SamCart vs GoHighLevel becomes a question of how much extra you carry around it.
A dedicated checkout does that job without the CRM. CartMango puts order bumps on every plan and upsells on the $20 a year Gold plan, sends each buyer to your email tool, and takes 0% of each sale on top of your card processor’s fee. CartMango is free right now, so you can build a first checkout and see whether that was all you needed.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
Related Reading
- GoHighLevel vs ClickFunnels: GoHighLevel against the other big funnel builder, and the email allowance only one of them includes
- GoHighLevel vs Kajabi: when the choice is client accounts against hosted courses
- SamCart vs Shopify: SamCart against a store builder, with the same Pro-only order bump