As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to simplify procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Kollab App.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, hopefully you can learn from my excruciating blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the right messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting client partnerships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly eye-catching for organizations looking to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked reliably with very little hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren call of “shiny object syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly change your business … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more frustrations led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire technology infrastructure from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of just some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to managing shed productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a large mistake. The issues began piling up quickly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered 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 included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of membership expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent out to customers who must NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were at fault. But this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, since the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally inappropriate and just really did not work for my service. I have countless get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the small cost tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Kollab App
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the affordable cost for accessibility to so many features. However I swiftly learned this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic charges for core performance. Suddenly my credit card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send out an email via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices plummet nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I might barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Kollab App.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible involvement. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big blunder. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is ideal, but the large quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with important functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program usually obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life less complicated, not more complex and messy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems damages depend on.
- Look for honest reviews. Happy assistance assesses suggest much less if excessive problems indicate inadequate total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be a lot more unconvinced of “as well great to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the allure of shiny new things. The tools you make use of daily should gain count on via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.