ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel Migration: The Best Complete Guide 2026

An ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration goes wrong in one predictable way. Somebody exports the contacts, imports them, cancels the old account, and then discovers that every automation they spent two years building is gone.

The contacts always move. The automations never do. Once you accept that split, the project stops being scary and becomes a checklist.

This guide walks the whole move using the documented behaviour of both platforms, including the exact export limits ActiveCampaign publishes, because those details change how you plan the week.

What moves in an ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration

Moves as data. Your contacts and the fields attached to them. According to the official ActiveCampaign export documentation, an export produces a CSV that can include email, first name, last name, phone number, date created, IP address, user agent, organization, account, account ID, your custom fields, lead scores, deal scores and tags in a single column.

Does not move. Automations, campaigns, email designs, forms, landing pages, deal pipelines as working logic, and site tracking. None of these come out in a format another platform can read.

There is one more detail worth knowing before you plan. The same documentation states plainly that contact notes cannot be exported. If your team keeps important history in notes, decide now how you will handle that, because no export will rescue it later.

Why teams start an ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration

Three reasons come up in almost every audit we run.

The stack. ActiveCampaign users usually pay separately for texting, booking, funnels, websites and review requests. GoHighLevel includes those in one login. The official HighLevel pricing page lists Starter at $97 a month, Unlimited at $297 a month and Agency Pro at $497 a month, with a 14 day free trial.

Cost that scales with contacts. ActiveCampaign pricing climbs as your list grows. GoHighLevel charges per account rather than per contact, which changes the maths for anyone with a large list.

Client work. Agencies want one system they can copy to every client under their own brand, which sub accounts and snapshots make simple.

Your reason decides your rebuild. If cost is the driver, rebuild only what still runs and leave the rest behind.

Prepare before any ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration

Four things, about an hour, and the rest of the ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration becomes easier.

1. Decide your cutoff. Most ActiveCampaign accounts carry years of dead records. Contacts who never opened, deals lost in 2021, duplicates from an old form. Moving rubbish costs nothing in fees and everything in clarity.

2. List your custom fields. Every custom field you actually use needs a matching field created in GoHighLevel before you import anything.

3. Screenshot every automation. Open each one you rely on and capture the trigger, the wait times, the conditions and the message wording. This becomes your rebuild plan and it is the most valuable hour of the project.

4. Deal with notes. Since notes cannot be exported, decide whether the important ones get copied by hand into a custom field, or whether you keep the old account open in read only mode for a while.

Step 1: Export your contacts for the ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration

Every ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration starts here, and the documented path is short.

Open Contacts from the left menu. Click the ellipsis at the top right of the Contacts Overview page. Choose Export. In the window that appears, give the export a name and avoid special characters, select the fields you want, then click Export.

The export runs in the background, so you can safely move to another page or close the browser. When it finishes you download it from the Exports page, or from the link in the confirmation message.

One deadline matters here. That download link is valid for seven days. Start the export when you can actually finish the job.

Step 2: Clean the file before the ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration

This step decides whether your ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration ends in a calm CRM or a messy one.

• Delete rows with no name, no email and no phone number, because GoHighLevel needs at least one of the three to create a contact
• Strip brackets, spaces and letters out of phone numbers
• Make country codes consistent across the whole file
• Remove duplicate rows inside the file itself
• Split the tags column into something your new system can use, since ActiveCampaign exports tags in one column
• Rename headers to plain words that match your GoHighLevel fields
• Split anything over 30 MB, which is the import size limit

Save it as a CSV with a single sheet, and make sure the first row is your header row and is not blank.

Step 3: Build your custom fields first

Create every custom field in GoHighLevel before you import a single row.

If a field does not exist, that column is ignored during import and the data is gone. Fixing it means a second import, and a second import creates duplicates. This is the single most common cause of a messy first week.

Step 4: Import into GoHighLevel

The official HighLevel import guide states that only an administrator can run an import, so check your access before you start.

Open Contacts, choose Import Contacts, then pick contacts only or contacts with opportunities. Upload your CSV, choose create or update, and map every column to the matching field.

Two settings matter. Duplicates are matched in a fixed order, which is Contact ID first, then email, then phone. And when updating existing records, switch on the option that stops empty values overwriting good data, or a blank cell can wipe a field that already held something useful.

Step 5: Rebuild what an ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration cannot carry

This is the half of an ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration that no export can do for you. Open your screenshots and rebuild in this order.

Pipelines first. Recreate your deal stages so imported opportunities have somewhere sensible to land.

Forms and calendars second. These are how new leads enter the system, so they must work before anything else.

Workflows third. Start with new lead follow up. That one automation carries most of the value in almost every migration we have run.

Templates last. Move your email wording across and rewrite anything that referenced an ActiveCampaign feature that does not exist here.

Be selective. Most teams find that a third of their old automations had been switched off for years. This is a good moment to leave them behind rather than carefully rebuilding something nobody uses.

Tags need a decision, not a copy

Long running ActiveCampaign accounts collect tags the way a garage collects boxes. Opened webinar email. Did not open webinar email. Clicked in March. Bought in 2019.

Dragging every one of them through an ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration is a mistake. Tags are cheap to create and expensive to maintain, and a tag nobody reads is noise inside your CRM.

Sort them into four groups before you import. Keep, because a workflow depends on it. Convert, because it really describes a stage and belongs in a pipeline. Merge, because three tags say the same thing. Retire, because nothing has used it in two years.

Most businesses come out of that exercise with under fifty tags and a system that is far easier to work in.

Step 6: Do not cancel ActiveCampaign yet

The safest ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration runs both systems side by side for at least two weeks.

Send a real lead through your new forms and follow it all the way to a booked appointment. Check that emails arrive in inboxes and not spam. Confirm your A2P 10DLC registration is approved before you rely on text messages, because carriers block unregistered traffic.

Compare contact counts on both sides. If GoHighLevel is short, find out why before you cancel anything. Then take one final export and store it somewhere safe, because once that subscription ends the data is not coming back.

How long an ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration takes

A small business with a few thousand contacts and five automations takes about one to two weeks.

A long running account with heavy automation, deal pipelines and site tracking takes four to six weeks.

The exporting and importing is rarely more than a day. Everything else is the rebuild and the testing, and the testing is what protects your revenue.

ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration mistakes that cause real damage

• Importing before the custom fields exist, so values silently disappear
• Letting blank cells overwrite good data during an update import
• Assuming contact notes will come across, when the documentation says they cannot
• Letting the seven day download link expire and having to run the export again
• Rebuilding every old automation instead of only the ones that still run
• Cancelling ActiveCampaign before a live lead has travelled through the new system

When to bring in help

Run the ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration yourself if your data is tidy and you rely on fewer than about ten automations. The steps above are enough.

Bring in help when you have complex conditional logic, deal pipelines your sales team lives in, tens of thousands of contacts, or a business that cannot afford a broken week. You can see how we scope that work on our GHL migration services page.

Your next step

Open ActiveCampaign and do the boring part first. List your custom fields, screenshot your live automations, and decide what happens to your notes. That single hour turns an ActiveCampaign to GoHighLevel migration into a checklist instead of a gamble.

Then export, clean, build your fields and import in that order. If you are comparing platforms, our HubSpot to GoHighLevel migration guide and our Keap to HighLevel guide follow the same process, and our GoHighLevel migration services guide explains what a done for you move should include.