As a firm proprietor for over a years, I count on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus GoHighLevel GitHub.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching 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 happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for organizations looking to consolidate their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply worked accurately with minimal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will certainly transform your organization … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing points that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a few more disappointments led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of just some of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– and also handling shed productivity during the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a large error. The concerns began accumulating promptly, till it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, managing subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I hysterically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. However the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, because the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t work for my company. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Simple tasks like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel GitHub
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the economical price for access to many features. But I swiftly learned this affordable base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices plummet practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every repairing method, I might barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel GitHub.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had horrible involvement. The only point I could believe that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons dramatically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is best, however the large volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around new software frequently covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your job life simpler, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys count on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Delighted support examines suggest much less if extreme issues indicate inadequate total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can completely meet every unique business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I learned to be more skeptical of “also good to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny new objects. The tools you utilize daily ought to earn trust fund via openness and performance, not slick advertising.