As an agency proprietor for over a years, I depend on software and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Documentation.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a desire happened on paper. Who would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, with any luck you can pick up from my agonizing errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and supporting customer connections through effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically attractive for services wanting to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly change your business … The turf often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech facilities from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of just several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with lost productivity throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a huge blunder. The issues started piling up swiftly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent to individuals that need to NOT have gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. However the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, considering that the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my company. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like editing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag featured costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Documentation
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the cost effective price for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I swiftly discovered this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core functionality. Instantly my charge card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices plunge almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I can barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Documentation.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only point I could believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive blunder. The cons substantially surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software application is best, yet the large volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of important features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life simpler, not much more complex and messy.
- Openness constructs trust. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys count on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Satisfied assistance evaluates imply less if excessive problems suggest poor general usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary solution can perfectly meet every unique organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step improvements usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be more unconvinced of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you use daily need to earn trust fund with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.