As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Do Not Disturb (DND).
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, ideally you can gain from my agonizing blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small companies keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the right messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for businesses aiming to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with very little hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new device that will change your company … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I ‘d learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire tech facilities from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an overview of just some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– and also managing shed performance throughout the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large blunder. The issues began accumulating promptly, up until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I ran into.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and much more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have actually received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have hundreds of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low price tag included pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Do Not Disturb (DND)
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to so many features. However I rapidly learned this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I could barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Do Not Disturb (DND).
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had terrible engagement. The only thing I might think that would be creating this was whatever was occurring 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 charges, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant error. The cons dramatically surpassed any advantages.
No software application is perfect, yet the sheer quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial features properly or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough call to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your work life less complicated, not much more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys count on.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Happy assistance reviews suggest much less if extreme problems suggest inadequate total use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can completely fulfill every distinct business demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be much more unconvinced of “too great to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the allure of shiny new items. The devices you make use of daily should gain trust fund via openness and performance, not slick advertising.