As a firm owner for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Competitors.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary option that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, ideally you can learn from my unpleasant errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive customer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing client relationships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for services wanting to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will change your company … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may lower friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few even more irritations led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire tech infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of just a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost performance throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The issues began piling up quickly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, managing membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unimportant emails had been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I desperately attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the trouble lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were at fault. But this description didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely undesirable and just didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the small cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Competitors
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the cost effective price for access to numerous features. However I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core performance. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates plummet almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every repairing trick, I can hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Competitors.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had dreadful engagement. The only point I can think that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and horrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages dramatically surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software application is best, however the sheer volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of critical functions effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life much easier, not a lot more difficult and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys count on.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Satisfied support reviews mean less if too much problems imply inadequate general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly fulfill every unique business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step improvements usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be much more cynical of “too great to be true” marketing cases and less lured by the allure of glossy new things. The devices you use daily must make trust fund through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.