As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I count on software and automation to simplify procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel AI Agent.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who would not want a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, hopefully you can pick up from my uncomfortable errors and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it managed whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small businesses maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients get the right messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically appealing for businesses wanting to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with minimal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, but a few even more stress led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire tech framework from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of simply some of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with shed efficiency during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big error. The problems started accumulating promptly, up until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Many Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, taking care of subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent to users who need to NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the problem continued.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “server issues” were at fault. However this description really did not make any feeling, because the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Basic tasks like editing workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
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 general, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low price tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel AI Agent
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the inexpensive price for accessibility to numerous features. However I quickly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every fixing method, I can hardly nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel AI Agent.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had awful interaction. The only thing I might believe that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden charges, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a massive mistake. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software program is excellent, yet the sheer volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial functions capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life less complicated, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages count on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Delighted assistance reviews indicate much less if excessive problems suggest bad total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can perfectly satisfy every special company need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step improvements normally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I found out to be much more cynical of “as well great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the allure of glossy new objects. The devices you use daily should gain trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.