As a company owner for over a years, I count on software and automation to enhance operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Canny.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a dream happened on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this preferred new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, with any luck you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small companies maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing client partnerships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for companies looking to consolidate their technology pile.
Generally, it just worked reliably with minimal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will certainly reinvent your company … The lawn commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire tech facilities from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of just some of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of shed performance throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big error. The issues began accumulating rapidly, up until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, handling subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … up until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to users who need to NOT have received them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the problem lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they slightly declared “server concerns” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally undesirable and just really did not help my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Canny
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to so many features. But I promptly discovered this inexpensive base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core performance. Instantly my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send out an email with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open prices drop nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Canny.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had horrible engagement. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive blunder. The cons considerably outweighed any type of benefits.
No software is perfect, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in hindsight, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software program usually covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices need to make your work life easier, not extra complex and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys depend on.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Satisfied support reviews indicate much less if too much issues suggest bad total usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every distinct company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental improvements commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In other words, I found out to be more hesitant of “as well excellent to be real” marketing claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily should gain trust via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.