As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Voice AI.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a desire come to life on paper. Who would not desire a single option that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, hopefully you can gain from my excruciating errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching 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 gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly attractive for businesses seeking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction points that I would certainly found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a couple of more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew changing systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of shed productivity during the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term solution for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge error. The concerns began piling up promptly, until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … up until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have actually received them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any type of feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was totally inappropriate and just really did not work for my business. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of general, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag included expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Voice AI
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the cost effective rate for access to a lot of features. Yet I quickly discovered this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core capability. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plunge almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every repairing method, I can hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Voice AI.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had awful engagement. 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 dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any advantages.
No software is best, however the large volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of critical features properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application frequently covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life much easier, not more complex and messy.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins depend on.
- Seek objective testimonials. Satisfied assistance evaluates imply much less if too much problems indicate bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind service demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In short, I learned to be much more skeptical of “as well excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of shiny new things. The devices you make use of daily ought to earn count on with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.