As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention Does GoHighLevel Have Free Trials.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a dream come to life theoretically. That would not want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service needs, with any luck you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer relationships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for organizations wanting to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply worked reliably with marginal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing points that I ‘d found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology infrastructure from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with lost performance throughout the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big blunder. The concerns began piling up swiftly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally unacceptable and just really did not help my business. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag included expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing Does GoHighLevel Have Free Trials
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the budget-friendly price for access to many features. But I quickly learned this affordable base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plummet nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every repairing method, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks Does GoHighLevel Have Free Trials.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only point I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, busted features, and horrible interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive mistake. The disadvantages dramatically surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, but the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage vital features effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it taught me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life much easier, not much more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins depend on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Happy support evaluates indicate much less if too much problems indicate inadequate total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can perfectly meet every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements typically surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more doubtful of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you use daily ought to earn count on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.