As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my interest Does GoHighLevel Integrate with QuickBooks.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
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 messages, making certain leads and clients obtain the best messages at the correct time. Use website and social media sites kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations wanting to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with minimal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will change your organization … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower friction points that I ‘d learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a couple of more stress led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of just a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– and also managing shed efficiency throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge error. The issues began accumulating quickly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned 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 clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event tips, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, since the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely inappropriate and just didn’t help my organization. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, private, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing Does GoHighLevel Integrate with QuickBooks
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to a lot of features. But I swiftly learned this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core functionality. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plunge practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every repairing method, I might barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria Does GoHighLevel Integrate with QuickBooks.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages substantially exceeded any benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the sheer quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical features properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life easier, not more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins count on.
- Look for objective reviews. Satisfied assistance reviews suggest much less if extreme problems imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step improvements commonly outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I found out to be more cynical of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The tools you use daily must earn count on via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.