As an agency proprietor for over a years, I count on software program and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus Is GoHighLevel Safe.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and failing) to change to this popular new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, ideally you can learn from my agonizing mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive consumer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting client partnerships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for organizations seeking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned dependably with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a new device that will reinvent your company … The turf often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a few more disappointments led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of just some of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– in addition to taking care of shed efficiency throughout the button.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge mistake. The issues began accumulating swiftly, until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event tips, taking care of subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had been sent to users that must NOT have received them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried repairing and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, since the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t help my company. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Is GoHighLevel Safe
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the economical rate for accessibility to many features. Yet I rapidly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plummet practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a useless 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every fixing trick, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria Is GoHighLevel Safe.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had dreadful engagement. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any advantages.
No software application is excellent, but the large quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage essential features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life much easier, not much more complicated and messy.
- Openness develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys trust fund.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Happy assistance assesses mean much less if too much issues indicate poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can completely satisfy every unique company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental enhancements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I learned to be much more hesitant of “too great to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you use daily must earn trust fund with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.