June 17, 2025
Which CRM should you use for your coaching business? It’s one of the questions we get most often, from clients and from random people in our DMs. And we have strong opinions, at least about the features your CRM should include.
In this episode of the Bringing Simplicity Podcast, Judy and Greta compare five platforms that come up constantly in the online coaching space (HighLevel, Kajabi, ClickFunnels, Kartra, and ThriveCart), share the non-negotiable features they look for, and explain what to do if you’ve already built your business on a platform you’ve outgrown. Fair warning: we’re biased, but we’ve used all of them.
CRM stands for client (or customer) relationship management. Judy thinks of it as a system or software, even though the “S” usually gets left off.
In Judy’s words, a CRM is how you serve your clients at the highest capacity and serve more of them. It moves people through a pipeline and helps guide them toward the decision that’s best for them. Sometimes that’s working with you now. Sometimes it’s hanging out on your newsletter for a year. It’s also your communication software.
Greta loves that a good CRM gives you a visual representation of where people are in your buyer’s journey. The key is being able to personalize as much as possible in a scalable, repeatable way, using things like tags and funnel stages so your messages don’t feel generic.
Nobody wants a generic “Hey girl” text. People want to know you saw and heard them. You can’t send a fully personalized message to 500 people a day, but you can make people feel special, especially early in your funnel. And please don’t keep trying to sell someone something they already bought.
These are the platforms we see talked about most in the online coaching space, typically for people around five-figure months up to about $1 million and possibly a bit beyond:
When Judy hears someone is on ThriveCart, Kartra, or Kajabi, she often assumes they’re newer and were drawn in by “create your course here” ads. Those platforms are great marketers and appear to be a great value, but in our experience you get more value for less with another system, and they aren’t as scalable. People running programs, mentorships, and live events tend to choose ClickFunnels or HighLevel.
Most of these platforms need something else to complement them. When someone asks which software to choose, Greta wants to know how tech savvy they are and how much of a Frankenstein tech stack they’re willing to manage.
ThriveCart has some great qualities, and we used to recommend it. It works well for someone who started on an email platform like Flodesk or ConvertKit and later needed course software without merging everything. But then you always have two places to look and need Zaps connecting them. As of April 2025, ThriveCart was the only one of the five without built-in email, which tells you why the others all added it.
We like email platforms. But they won’t grow with you long-term. If you start with one, be very intentional about your tagging and list grouping so everything can be exported easily. It’s not if you’ll have to move. It’s when.
For both of us, texting is a showstopper. Judy doesn’t check email all the time or read every full email, but she’ll read a two- or three-sentence text and react to it. Use texts sparingly so people want to read them.
Here’s the real-life proof: one client ran a live virtual masterclass without text reminders, and show-up was in the single digits. With text messages, more than 30% showed up. People aren’t checking email five minutes before an event.
If you sell high-ticket, you need a calendar inside your CRM. With an outside scheduler like Calendly, you can’t easily trigger a text that says, “Did you get the invite? Just making sure we’re on for this time,” unless you pay for more, and by then it costs about the same as the CRM we recommend. HighLevel and Kartra have built-in calendars and booking. The others require a third-party integration, and third-party integrations break.
Greta wants to see a trigger, like “person books appointment,” and then easily modify and personalize every step after it: the tag, the email, the text message. You’d think every system makes that easy. They don’t. Making automations easy saves your team time and frustration, so you can serve more people.
Some of you love Skool for your community. HighLevel has a community built in that’s virtually the same, so you don’t have to manually remove someone from a separate platform when they miss a payment. And you can track engagement and trigger messages like “Haven’t seen you in a while” or “You got through module two fast, you might be a perfect fit for this upcoming event.” You can’t do that when your community lives in a different system.
Greta’s honest take: all of these platforms are weak at analytics and reporting. Even HighLevel gives you a high-level view, but for things like comparing show-up rates against confirmation calls or building pivot-table style analysis, we pull data into Notion and our own dashboards, including ads data alongside funnel data.
Judy adds: always have a backup. You never know what will happen to a platform, and if you ever switch, you’ll want all your data in one place. Make it a monthly checklist item. And actually look at your data. How else will you know what moves to make?
HighLevel is a SaaS company that sells to other companies. When you buy direct, you get an empty shell with no pre-built automations or templates. Some people love building from the ground up. For others, it’s overwhelming.
We’ve worked with four different HighLevel white labels and used some of them for more than six months each before deciding. We chose to partner with Automator AI because:
You can check out Automator AI here.
Judy’s answer is a question: how much do you want to help people? If you’re okay with where you are and your current capacity, that’s okay. But if you want to impact more lives, what happens to the people who can’t find you? If that bothers you, make the move.
People are often surprised by the affordability. If you went with something like ThriveCart’s one-time payment, you’re probably still paying for tools like Kit, Flodesk, or Calendly. Look at your total software expenses, not just the course platform.
Greta’s tech lens: yes, make the switch, and make a plan for it. You might spend three months cleaning up tags and lists and building a checklist of everything that needs to move. Judy compares it to moving a store to a better location. You take inventory first, and you don’t move overnight. You’ll either pay someone or spend your own time. If it were easy, everybody would do it.
We recommend HighLevel, ideally through a white label like Automator AI, because it combines email, texting, calendars, courses, community, and automations in one place. The best CRM for you depends on how tech savvy you are and how many separate tools you want to manage.
At minimum: text messaging, a built-in calendar for booking calls, easy-to-edit visual automations, and ideally a built-in community, so you aren’t relying on fragile third-party integrations.
In our experience, yes. One client’s masterclass show-up went from single digits without texts to more than 30% with text reminders.
If your current platform limits how many people you can serve, it’s usually worth it. Plan for the transition to take time, often months, to clean up tags and lists and move everything over.
We’re just a message away. If you want to know which other white labels we tried or which CRM fits your business, reach out to us.
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