As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to streamline operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Custom Values.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this preferred new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and boost profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting client connections through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly appealing for services looking to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with very little difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new tool that will change your service … The grass commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, but a couple of even more irritations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of simply some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with shed performance during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big mistake. The issues started piling up promptly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … till unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 completely unimportant emails had been sent to users who should NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were at fault. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my company. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low price tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Custom Values
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the budget friendly price for accessibility to many features. However I quickly learned this economical base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plummet almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting method, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Custom Values.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only point I can think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive error. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software is perfect, however the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to deal with important functions competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software application typically covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life much easier, not extra difficult and messy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust.
- Seek honest evaluations. Happy assistance assesses mean much less if extreme problems suggest poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can flawlessly satisfy every special business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step renovations normally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be more skeptical of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The devices you make use of daily must earn depend on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.