As a company owner for over a years, I count on software and automation to simplify procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Chat Widget.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it looked like a dream happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, with any luck you can pick up from my painful mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it handled whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses keep their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer partnerships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically attractive for services wanting to combine their technology stack.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with very little difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a summary of just several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– and also taking care of shed efficiency throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The issues started accumulating swiftly, until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating penalty … till all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent to users who ought to NOT have gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Chat Widget
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the cost effective cost for access to many features. But I rapidly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every repairing trick, I could barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Chat Widget.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed fees, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big mistake. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any benefits.
No software is best, yet the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software application typically obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys trust fund.
- Seek objective evaluations. Pleased assistance assesses imply much less if extreme problems imply bad total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental renovations usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more cynical of “also good to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of glossy new items. The devices you make use of daily must make depend on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.