As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to simplify procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Interface.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, hopefully you can gain from my uncomfortable mistakes and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the best messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly appealing for services wanting to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked reliably with minimal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will reinvent your business … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a couple of even more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was going to require moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech facilities from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of shed performance throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a large mistake. The concerns began accumulating rapidly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, handling membership expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely pointless e-mails had been sent out to customers that need to NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I hysterically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely undesirable and simply really did not benefit my organization. I have hundreds of calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Interface
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the affordable cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I quickly learned this inexpensive base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core functionality. Instantly my bank card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates drop practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every repairing trick, I can barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Interface.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible engagement. The only thing I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any advantages.
No software is perfect, but the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital functions capably or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around new software commonly obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life less complicated, not more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins trust fund.
- Look for impartial reviews. Pleased support evaluates indicate less if extreme problems indicate poor total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly fulfill every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step enhancements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be much more cynical of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The devices you utilize daily ought to make trust via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.