As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my interest What Type of Company Is GoHighLevel.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a dream become a reality on paper. Who would not want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, hopefully you can learn from my unpleasant errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting client partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for services seeking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will change your company … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing points that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood switching platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of just a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– in addition to managing lost performance throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-term remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a big error. The problems started piling up rapidly, up until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to customers who should NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the issue continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were at fault. However this description really did not make any feeling, considering that the mistakes continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely unacceptable and just didn’t help my business. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag featured pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing What Type of Company Is GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the budget-friendly rate for access to a lot of features. However I swiftly discovered this cheap base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every single time you send an email via their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending methods or attempted every repairing technique, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks What Type of Company Is GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly 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.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed fees, damaged features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big mistake. The cons considerably outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, yet the sheer quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage critical functions capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. But in hindsight, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software commonly covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life much easier, not extra complicated and messy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages trust.
- Seek objective evaluations. Happy support evaluates mean much less if excessive concerns indicate inadequate overall functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can flawlessly fulfill every distinct business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental enhancements commonly surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In other words, I found out to be more hesitant of “as well excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The devices you use daily ought to gain trust fund with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.