As a company owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to enhance operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my interest GoHighLevel Plai.io.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come true theoretically. That would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, hopefully you can gain from my painful mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the ideal messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships through effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly appealing for services aiming to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new device that will transform your company … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a few more disappointments led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood changing platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of just some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning everything over– as well as dealing with lost performance during the button.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big mistake. The concerns started accumulating quickly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any sense, given that the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely unacceptable and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag included pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Plai.io
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the inexpensive rate for access to many features. However I rapidly discovered this affordable base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. Instantly my bank card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I might hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Plai.io.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I might think that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge mistake. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the sheer quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with important functions properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. But in hindsight, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software application frequently obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools must make your job life less complicated, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins trust.
- Look for objective testimonials. Delighted assistance reviews suggest less if excessive issues suggest bad total use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step improvements usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I found out to be much more doubtful of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of glossy new items. The devices you use daily should make trust through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.