As a firm owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Alternatives.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire become a reality theoretically. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, ideally you can gain from my unpleasant mistakes and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage site and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer partnerships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for companies seeking to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will transform your business … The turf often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction points that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a few more aggravations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire technology facilities from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of simply some of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– and also taking care of shed productivity during the button.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The issues began piling up rapidly, up until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, taking care of subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had been sent out to individuals who must NOT have received them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, given that the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was completely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my service. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Simple tasks like editing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Alternatives
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget friendly cost for access to a lot of features. However I promptly learned this low-cost base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however 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 thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plummet nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every repairing trick, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Alternatives.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge mistake. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software program is perfect, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage crucial features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. But in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins count on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Delighted assistance examines imply much less if extreme issues indicate inadequate total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every special company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more cynical of “too good to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the allure of glossy new things. The devices you use daily need to make depend on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.