As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel HTTP Requests.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a desire come true theoretically. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, hopefully you can learn from my painful mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage site and social media kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing client partnerships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for organizations looking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply worked accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a new device that will revolutionize your service … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I ‘d learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a couple of more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology infrastructure from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of just some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– and also handling shed efficiency throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a large error. The concerns began piling up quickly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I encountered.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally irrelevant emails had actually been sent to customers who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, since the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t help my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel HTTP Requests
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the budget-friendly rate for access to a lot of features. Yet I quickly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices drop almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every fixing trick, I could barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel HTTP Requests.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I can believe that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the large quantity of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software often obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life simpler, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages depend on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Satisfied assistance evaluates mean less if too much concerns imply bad total functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single service can flawlessly meet every special business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental enhancements typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be a lot more cynical of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the appeal of glossy new things. The tools you make use of daily must earn trust fund through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.