As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to simplify operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus GoHighLevel Course Completion Certificates.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a desire happened theoretically. That would not want a single option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about 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 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 task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and clients obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer relationships via powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically attractive for companies seeking to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked reliably with very little fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will certainly transform your service … The lawn often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew switching platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech framework from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– in addition to handling shed performance throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a big error. The issues began piling up swiftly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Numerous Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working fine … until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to users who need to NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the problem lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any type of sense, given that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally undesirable and simply really did not work for my business. I have hundreds of calls relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the small cost tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Course Completion Certificates
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the cost effective price for accessibility to numerous features. But I promptly discovered this inexpensive base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core functionality. Instantly my bank card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open prices plummet practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Course Completion Certificates.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I might think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software application is excellent, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of important features capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. However in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software frequently obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life much easier, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems ruins trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Delighted support reviews suggest less if extreme problems indicate poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single service can completely fulfill every special business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental renovations usually outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The devices you use daily must earn trust through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.