As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software and automation to simplify procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Granular Permissions.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small companies keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting client partnerships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for organizations wanting to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with very little fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will certainly transform your business … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, however a few even more disappointments led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire tech facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– not to mention managing shed efficiency during the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a large blunder. The concerns began accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent out to individuals that must NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I frantically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the issue lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly declared “server problems” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my company. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Easy tasks like editing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of total, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the low price tag came with pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Granular Permissions
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the cost effective rate for access to so many features. Yet I swiftly discovered this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open rates drop almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting method, I could barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Granular Permissions.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had awful interaction. The only thing I could assume that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big error. The cons substantially outweighed any benefits.
No software is ideal, but the sheer volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial functions capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing buzz around new software typically obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages trust fund.
- Look for objective testimonials. Satisfied assistance assesses mean much less if excessive issues indicate inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can perfectly fulfill every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step renovations generally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I learned to be more unconvinced of “too great to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The tools you make use of daily ought to gain trust with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.