As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to simplify operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Audit Logs.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, ideally you can pick up from my uncomfortable errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing client partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially eye-catching for organizations seeking to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just functioned accurately with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your service … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology framework from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning everything over– and also taking care of lost productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems started accumulating rapidly, until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event tips, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent to users who need to NOT have received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I frantically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the problem continued.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were to blame. But this description really did not make any type of feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Simple tasks like editing workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Audit Logs
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the budget friendly price for access to many features. But I quickly discovered this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every fixing technique, I might barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Audit Logs.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had awful interaction. The only thing I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, busted features, and terrible interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial error. The disadvantages considerably exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software application is perfect, but the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to handle essential functions effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life less complicated, not more complex and messy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust.
- Seek honest testimonials. Pleased support examines indicate much less if too much problems imply bad general use.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly meet every special company demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements normally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more hesitant of “as well good to be real” marketing claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny new things. The devices you make use of daily must make depend on through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.