As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus GoHighLevel Conversation AI.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who would not want a solitary option that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, with any luck you can pick up from my unpleasant blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use website and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and supporting client partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly appealing for services wanting to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just worked dependably with minimal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will change your business … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a few even more aggravations led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire technology facilities from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply some of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also managing lost efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly 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 accumulating swiftly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unimportant emails had actually been sent out to customers who must NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the issue continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were to blame. But this description really did not make any feeling, because the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally unacceptable and just really did not work for my company. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing workflows entailed digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle total, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Conversation AI
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the cost effective price for access to numerous features. However I quickly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send an email via their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I might barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Conversation AI.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only thing I might think that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial blunder. The cons drastically outweighed any benefits.
No software program is ideal, but the large volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle essential features effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. But in hindsight, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application commonly obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life easier, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust.
- Look for honest reviews. Pleased support evaluates suggest less if excessive concerns suggest bad general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can completely satisfy every distinct service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental enhancements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I found out to be more unconvinced of “also great to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The devices you use daily should make depend on through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.