As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to improve operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Better Business Bureau.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a desire come true on paper. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can gain from my unpleasant errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers get the best messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and boost profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially appealing for businesses seeking to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with marginal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your business … The lawn often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction points that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a few even more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology infrastructure from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– not to mention taking care of lost performance throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge blunder. The issues began piling up quickly, until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be working penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to users that ought to NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly declared “server concerns” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, since the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my service. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Better Business Bureau
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to a lot of features. But I swiftly learned this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices plunge virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every fixing trick, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Better Business Bureau.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had terrible interaction. The only point I could believe that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant error. The cons substantially outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, however the sheer quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to deal with important functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program usually obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life simpler, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages trust.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates indicate less if extreme issues indicate bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can completely meet every one-of-a-kind company demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Basically, I learned to be much more skeptical of “too excellent to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of shiny new objects. The tools you use daily need to make count on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.