As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my focus GoHighLevel Solar Snapshot.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a dream come to life on paper. Who would not want a single service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, hopefully you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require 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 management choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the right messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with minimal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational 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 item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will revolutionize your organization … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction points that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of even more irritations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology facilities from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– and also managing lost performance throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big error. The issues started accumulating swiftly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event tips, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … until instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to users that ought to NOT have received them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the problem lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were to blame. However this description really did not make any kind of feeling, given that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely inappropriate and just didn’t help my organization. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally various sections. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag featured pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Solar Snapshot
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the budget-friendly price for access to numerous features. Yet I swiftly learned this affordable base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plunge virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Solar Snapshot.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had terrible interaction. The only point I might assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, but the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle critical functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program frequently covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices need to make your work life much easier, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages trust.
- Seek objective testimonials. Delighted assistance evaluates mean much less if too much problems indicate inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can completely fulfill every unique company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be extra doubtful of “as well great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily should earn trust through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.