As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to enhance operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Vs SharpSpring.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a desire come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, with any luck you can gain from my unpleasant errors and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the right messages at the right time. Usage site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and nurturing client relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially appealing for organizations seeking to consolidate their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with minimal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly transform your business … The yard typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more stress led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew switching over systems was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of just some of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with lost performance throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big error. The issues started piling up promptly, till it reached a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, handling subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to customers who need to NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were responsible. But this description really did not make any kind of feeling, because the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my business. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and difficult.
Simple jobs like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs SharpSpring
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the economical cost for accessibility to many features. But I promptly learned this economical base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send an email via their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting method, I can barely push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs SharpSpring.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible interaction. The only point I could think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant error. The disadvantages substantially exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is ideal, but the sheer volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to deal with essential features capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices must make your job life much easier, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust fund.
- Look for impartial reviews. Pleased assistance examines imply much less if too much concerns indicate poor general usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can flawlessly meet every distinct organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental renovations generally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I found out to be much more doubtful of “too great to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you utilize daily need to make count on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.