As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to streamline procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel GPT-4 Turbo.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist local business maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the right messages at the correct time. Use web site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer partnerships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly eye-catching for services aiming to combine their technology stack.
Essentially, it just functioned accurately with marginal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will change your service … The grass often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a couple of even more frustrations led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood changing platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire tech infrastructure from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of simply some of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– and also handling lost performance during the button.
But eventually, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large error. The concerns started piling up rapidly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and restoring the automation from square one. But the trouble persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were to blame. But this description really did not make any type of feeling, because the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally unacceptable and simply really did not help my company. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the affordable price tag included expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel GPT-4 Turbo
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I quickly learned this cheap base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core capability. Instantly my credit card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates plummet nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every fixing method, I might hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel GPT-4 Turbo.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had horrible involvement. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed fees, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive error. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software application is best, however the sheer volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle critical features effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life simpler, not more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust fund.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Delighted assistance reviews suggest less if excessive issues imply poor total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can completely satisfy every special organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental renovations normally surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I found out to be more skeptical of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less tempted by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily must gain trust fund with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.