As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Daily Group Demo.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not desire a single option that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small businesses maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use website and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and boost profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically attractive for services aiming to combine their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will reinvent your organization … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a couple of more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an overview of simply a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– in addition to managing lost performance throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large mistake. The problems began piling up rapidly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, managing subscription expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely unimportant emails had been sent out to users that must NOT have received them. This took place three days straight, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and restoring the automation from square one. However the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly declared “server concerns” were to blame. Yet this description didn’t make any sense, because the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely inappropriate and just really did not help my service. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally various sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Daily Group Demo
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the cost effective cost for access to numerous features. However I rapidly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plunge almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I might hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Daily Group Demo.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had awful interaction. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive error. The cons substantially exceeded any benefits.
No software program is excellent, however the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life easier, not more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins count on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Delighted support assesses suggest less if extreme problems indicate bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can completely fulfill every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements normally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I learned to be much more doubtful of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily should make trust fund via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.