As a company owner for over a decade, I rely upon software program and automation to improve operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel GoKollab For Communities.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and failing) to change to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can pick up from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and boost revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and supporting client connections via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for services aiming to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply worked reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will reinvent your company … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of just some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with lost productivity throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-term remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge error. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, managing membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning fine … up until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to users that should NOT have actually received them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the issue persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any sense, given that the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely inappropriate and just really did not work for my organization. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various areas. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of general, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel GoKollab For Communities
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the inexpensive price for accessibility to numerous features. However I quickly discovered this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open rates plunge almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing trick, I might barely push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel GoKollab For Communities.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial mistake. The cons substantially surpassed any benefits.
No software is perfect, but the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of vital functions capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. However in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices need to make your job life simpler, not extra complicated and messy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust fund.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Pleased assistance evaluates indicate less if too much concerns indicate poor overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can perfectly meet every one-of-a-kind business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental enhancements generally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I discovered to be more skeptical of “also great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny new things. The devices you utilize daily should make trust through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.