As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to simplify procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel General Atlantic.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it looked like a dream come true theoretically. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, hopefully you can pick up from my painful errors and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small companies keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting client partnerships with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for organizations looking to settle their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with very little fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new device that will certainly transform your business … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, yet a couple of more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology facilities from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– and also managing lost performance during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big error. The issues began piling up quickly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event suggestions, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who should NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I anxiously tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the problem persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, given that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my company. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag included expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel General Atlantic
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the inexpensive cost for access to so many features. However I rapidly learned this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open rates drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every repairing technique, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel General Atlantic.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had horrible engagement. The only thing I can think that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the sheer quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital functions capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program often obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life simpler, not more difficult and untidy.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages depend on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Happy support assesses suggest much less if extreme issues imply inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can flawlessly meet every unique business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be much more cynical of “too great to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The devices you use daily should make trust through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.