As a firm owner for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Agency Sub-Account.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, hopefully you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the right messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for services seeking to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with minimal fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s discussing a new device that will change your service … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a few more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole technology facilities from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of just some of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– and also handling shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-term service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big mistake. The issues began piling up rapidly, until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be operating fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to customers that should NOT have obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the issue continued.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were to blame. However this description really did not make any kind of feeling, since the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely undesirable and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, private, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Agency Sub-Account
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I swiftly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. Instantly my bank card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices plummet almost overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can hardly nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Agency Sub-Account.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive error. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any benefits.
No software is perfect, but the large volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage essential features capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. But in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software application usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life easier, not extra complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins trust fund.
- Seek honest testimonials. Satisfied assistance reviews indicate less if extreme issues suggest inadequate total use.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly meet every special service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be much more cynical of “as well great to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily need to gain trust via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.