As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to simplify procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel AI Employee.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and boost revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and supporting customer relationships with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for services looking to consolidate their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with minimal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your business … The grass commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a few more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire technology framework from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of simply a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– not to mention managing shed productivity during the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, up until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, managing membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that must NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the issue persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any sense, because the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally inappropriate and just really did not work for my organization. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel AI Employee
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the cost effective cost for access to a lot of features. However I quickly learned this inexpensive base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting method, I might hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel AI Employee.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible interaction. The only thing I could assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening 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 charges, damaged features, and dreadful interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big mistake. The cons substantially outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is perfect, however the sheer volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of critical features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life much easier, not more complicated and messy.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins trust.
- Seek honest reviews. Delighted support examines suggest less if excessive problems suggest bad total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind service need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements typically surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In short, I learned to be more skeptical of “also great to be real” marketing claims and less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The tools you use daily need to gain trust fund with openness and performance, not slick advertising.