As an agency owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to simplify operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my focus How Long Has GoHighLevel Been Around.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. That would not want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, with any luck you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting client relationships through effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for services wanting to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with minimal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will reinvent your business … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few more stress led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of just a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as dealing with shed efficiency throughout the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term option for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large error. The problems started accumulating quickly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to users that should NOT have received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the issue continued.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they slightly claimed “server issues” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any feeling, since the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my company. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of total, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing How Long Has GoHighLevel Been Around
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the economical price for access to so many features. Yet I rapidly discovered this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates drop almost overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every repairing technique, I could barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards How Long Has GoHighLevel Been Around.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only point I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big blunder. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any advantages.
No software is perfect, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with important features effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software application usually obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life easier, not a lot more complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins count on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Happy assistance reviews mean less if too much problems imply poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can completely meet every distinct company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be extra unconvinced of “as well excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the allure of shiny new items. The tools you use daily need to make trust via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.