As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Form Builder.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it looked like a desire come to life theoretically. That would not want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can gain from my painful mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses keep their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it specifically attractive for businesses wanting to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with minimal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will transform your company … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a few more stress led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was going to need moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire tech framework from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of simply some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with lost performance throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big error. The concerns began piling up swiftly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally pointless emails had been sent to customers who should NOT have received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem continued.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally undesirable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Simple jobs like editing workflows included excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Form Builder
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to many features. However I rapidly learned this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to numerous dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices plunge nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every fixing technique, I might barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Form Builder.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had awful involvement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge mistake. The cons dramatically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software is perfect, however the sheer volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to handle essential features effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software program frequently obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life simpler, not extra challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys count on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Delighted support assesses mean less if extreme concerns imply bad total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly satisfy every special business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements usually surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more doubtful of “also great to be real” marketing claims and less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily should make count on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.