As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to improve operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel API Documentation.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. That would not desire a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to change to this popular new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating errors and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and nurturing customer relationships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for companies seeking to combine their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will revolutionize your service … The turf often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few even more irritations led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology infrastructure from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– in addition to taking care of lost efficiency during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a huge mistake. The issues began accumulating rapidly, up until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the problem persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any sense, considering that the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally undesirable and just didn’t help my service. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low cost tag included pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel API Documentation
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the economical cost for access to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. Instantly my bank card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plummet almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every fixing trick, I can barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel API Documentation.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and awful user interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big error. The cons drastically surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is perfect, however the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of important features properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software application commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life easier, not more complex and messy.
- Transparency constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust fund.
- Seek honest evaluations. Delighted assistance assesses mean much less if extreme problems indicate inadequate general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly satisfy every distinct company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step renovations typically exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be more unconvinced of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily need to earn depend on via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.