As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to simplify operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Avis.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, hopefully you can learn from my agonizing mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Use website and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. 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 rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting customer connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for services aiming to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more irritations led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– in addition to handling lost performance throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge error. The issues began accumulating quickly, till it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, managing subscription expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be working fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally irrelevant emails had actually been sent out to individuals that must NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the issue lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. But this description really did not make any kind of sense, since the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally unacceptable and simply really did not help my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally various areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle total, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Avis
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the budget friendly rate for access to numerous features. Yet I rapidly learned this affordable base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core performance. Suddenly my credit card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices drop virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every fixing technique, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Avis.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only point I might believe that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial blunder. The cons considerably surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is best, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial features competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. But in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around new software usually covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life less complicated, not more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins count on.
- Look for objective evaluations. Satisfied assistance evaluates mean less if too much concerns indicate inadequate total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can completely meet every distinct organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements normally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be extra unconvinced of “also good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy new things. The tools you use daily need to gain trust with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.