Why Businesses Are Migrating From HubSpot to GoHighLevel
HubSpot built its reputation as the definitive inbound marketing platform, and for large B2B enterprises with dedicated marketing teams and six-figure software budgets, it may still be the right choice. But for the marketing agencies, service businesses, and SMBs that make up the majority of HubSpot’s customer base, the platform has become increasingly expensive relative to its value. HubSpot Professional starts at $800/month and quickly scales past $3,000-5,000/month with add-ons, contact limits, and additional seats. Meanwhile, GoHighLevel at $97-497/month includes features HubSpot charges extra for — SMS marketing, AI automation, reputation management, funnel building, and white-label capabilities.
The result: over 8,000 businesses migrated from HubSpot to GoHighLevel in 2025 alone. This guide gives you the exact process to do it without disrupting your operations or losing any data.
Phase 1: Pre-Migration Preparation (Week 1)
Audit Your Current HubSpot Usage
Before migrating anything, document exactly what you use in HubSpot: contact properties and custom fields, deal pipeline stages and their logic, active workflows and their triggers, email templates and sequences, form and landing page list, integrations currently active (Salesforce sync, Zapier connections, etc.), and your contact segmentation lists. This audit takes 2-4 hours but prevents migration errors that take 20+ hours to fix.
Set Up Your GHL Account
While still running HubSpot, configure your GHL sub-account completely: create matching custom fields for all HubSpot contact properties, build your pipelines with matching stage names, configure your email sending domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), set up your GHL phone number and A2P registration, and import your email and SMS templates.
Phase 2: Contact Migration (Week 2)
Export all contacts from HubSpot: Contacts → Export → select all properties → download CSV. Before importing to GHL, clean the CSV: remove duplicate email addresses, standardize phone number format (E.164 format: +15551234567), map HubSpot property names to your GHL custom field names, and remove any contacts with invalid or bounced email addresses.
Import the cleaned CSV to GHL: Settings → Import → Contact Import. Map each CSV column to the corresponding GHL field. During the import, GHL creates contact records, applies tags, and can trigger an import workflow if desired. For large lists (50,000+ contacts), import in batches of 10,000 to avoid timeout issues. Verify the import by spot-checking 20-30 contacts across different segments.
Phase 3: Pipeline and Deal Migration (Week 2-3)
Deals in HubSpot become Opportunities in GHL. Export your HubSpot deals and map them to GHL opportunities. Each opportunity requires: contact association, pipeline and stage assignment, monetary value, close date estimate, and any custom properties you tracked in HubSpot. This step is most efficiently done via a CSV import into GHL Opportunities with your mapped columns.
Phase 4: Automation Migration (Week 3)
HubSpot workflows become GHL Workflows. This is not a direct export — automations must be rebuilt in GHL’s workflow builder. However, rebuilding is faster than original creation because you have the logic documented from your audit. Prioritize migration order: highest-volume workflows first, then revenue-critical sequences, then nice-to-have automations. A typical HubSpot-to-GHL automation migration for a business with 15-20 active workflows takes 8-16 hours of rebuilding and testing.
Phase 5: Go-Live and HubSpot Sunset (Week 4)
Run GHL and HubSpot in parallel for 2 weeks during go-live. Update all lead capture forms to route to GHL. Update all calendar links to GHL booking pages. Update all email opt-in links to GHL forms. Brief your team on the new GHL workflows and dashboards. After 2 weeks of successful parallel operation, cancel HubSpot and delete or archive your data per your data retention policy.
Common Migration Mistakes to Avoid
Not mapping custom properties before importing (creates data loss). Migrating inactive contacts (bloats GHL and increases costs). Not testing automations before canceling HubSpot (creates gaps in lead follow-up). Rushing the parallel operation period (2 weeks minimum prevents missing edge cases). Forgetting to update all third-party integrations to point to GHL. GHL Nexa provides fully managed HubSpot-to-GHL migration services — handling everything from data export through go-live with zero operational disruption. Book a free migration assessment to get started.
