As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to enhance procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel 5-Day Reviews Challenge.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a desire happened theoretically. That would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, ideally you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small companies maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting client partnerships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially eye-catching for companies looking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with very little fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a new device that will certainly reinvent your business … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, yet a few more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of just a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– and also dealing with lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big mistake. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent to customers that need to NOT have gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the trouble continued.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “server concerns” were responsible. However this description didn’t make any sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally inappropriate and just didn’t work for my company. I have countless get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and challenging.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel 5-Day Reviews Challenge
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the economical cost for accessibility to so many features. Yet I rapidly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core performance. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices drop almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every repairing trick, I might hardly nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel 5-Day Reviews Challenge.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only point I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, broken features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big mistake. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software is perfect, yet the large volume of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage crucial features competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. But in hindsight, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software typically covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life easier, not more complex and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages depend on.
- Seek unbiased evaluations. Pleased assistance evaluates mean less if excessive issues imply bad general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can perfectly fulfill every special organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental improvements usually outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be a lot more doubtful of “too excellent to be real” marketing claims and less tempted by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily ought to make trust via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.