As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Free Trial.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a desire happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for companies aiming to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just functioned accurately with minimal hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will certainly reinvent your business … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a couple of more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an overview of just some of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with shed productivity during the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a huge blunder. The concerns began piling up promptly, until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unimportant emails had been sent to individuals who must NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my service. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Free Trial
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the affordable cost for accessibility to many features. However I rapidly learned this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send an email via their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates plummet virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every fixing method, I might barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Free Trial.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful engagement. The only thing I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any type of advantages.
No software is best, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important functions properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application typically obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life simpler, not more challenging and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins trust.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Happy assistance assesses imply less if too much concerns suggest bad overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can completely fulfill every special organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements normally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I learned to be much more hesitant of “as well good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The devices you make use of daily ought to make count on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.