As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention SaaSPRENEUR Powered by HighLevel.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As a business owner constantly aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it looked like a desire become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating errors and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media sites types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and increase profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing customer partnerships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for companies seeking to consolidate their technology stack.
Generally, it simply worked dependably with minimal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your service … The lawn often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a few even more disappointments led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the 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 style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to managing lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge mistake. The problems started accumulating quickly, till it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent to users that should NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the issue persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, given that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my service. I have thousands of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows entailed excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Moving in 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 setups panels to manage total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag included expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing SaaSPRENEUR Powered by HighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the affordable price for access to a lot of features. But I rapidly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core capability. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices drop almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing method, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards SaaSPRENEUR Powered by HighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only thing I could think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden charges, broken features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial error. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, but the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital features properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life less complicated, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys trust fund.
- Look for honest testimonials. Delighted assistance reviews imply much less if too much concerns imply poor overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can flawlessly meet every special service need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be more skeptical of “as well great to be real” marketing claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily need to earn trust through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.