As a company owner for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to streamline operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Custom JavaScript.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. That would not desire a single service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid local business maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the best messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships through effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations aiming to settle their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply worked dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I enrolled in 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 switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of just several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh 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 started piling up promptly, till it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible problems I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, managing membership expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be functioning fine … until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that must NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Custom JavaScript
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the affordable cost for accessibility to so many features. However I promptly learned this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core capability. Suddenly my credit card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices drop virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out techniques or attempted every fixing trick, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Custom JavaScript.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible interaction. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big blunder. The cons substantially exceeded any benefits.
No software application is excellent, yet the sheer quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing hype around new software program typically obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life less complicated, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins count on.
- Look for honest evaluations. Satisfied assistance reviews mean less if extreme issues indicate bad total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can perfectly satisfy every special business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Basically, I discovered to be extra doubtful of “too good to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the appeal of glossy new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to earn depend on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.