As a firm proprietor for over a years, I count on software program and automation to improve operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Advanced API.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a desire happened on paper. That would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist local business maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially appealing for companies wanting to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with very little fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new device that will reinvent your service … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of just several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to handling shed productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a large error. The concerns started accumulating quickly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every 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 out event pointers, managing membership expiries and much more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have received them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. However the issue continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “server problems” were responsible. But this description really did not make any feeling, because the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally undesirable and just really did not help my company. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Advanced API
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I rapidly discovered this affordable base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an email through their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every fixing method, I might barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Advanced API.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only point I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and awful interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant error. The cons substantially outweighed any type of advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage important functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your job life less complicated, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems ruins trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Happy assistance reviews imply less if excessive problems suggest inadequate general use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can perfectly fulfill every unique organization demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I learned to be much more cynical of “also good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the allure of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily should gain count on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.