As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Estimates.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a dream become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single remedy that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and failing) to switch to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients obtain the right messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting client relationships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially appealing for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your service … The turf frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a few even more irritations led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was going to need moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole technology facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge blunder. The problems started piling up rapidly, till it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals who must NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the issue lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any feeling, since the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely unacceptable and simply didn’t help my service. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle total, specific, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Estimates
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the affordable rate for access to many features. However I quickly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices plunge virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every repairing technique, I might hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Estimates.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive error. The cons considerably outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, however the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of critical functions competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software usually covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complex and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys trust.
- Look for honest reviews. Satisfied assistance assesses mean much less if excessive problems indicate poor overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single remedy can flawlessly meet every special organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I discovered to be more doubtful of “as well excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily must earn count on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.