As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel JavaScript.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to simplify and scale my business, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. Who would not want a single service that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it managed everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing consumer connections through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for organizations looking to settle their technology stack.
Essentially, it just functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly change your organization … The yard typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire tech framework from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a summary of simply some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with lost efficiency during the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term option for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The problems started piling up rapidly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent out to users that ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the problem persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were at fault. But this description really did not make any type of sense, since the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely undesirable and just didn’t work for my organization. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and challenging.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle total, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel JavaScript
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the budget friendly price for accessibility to many features. However I promptly learned this affordable base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged whenever you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open rates plunge nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing technique, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel JavaScript.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had horrible involvement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and awful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant error. The cons considerably surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of important functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys trust fund.
- Look for honest reviews. Pleased support evaluates suggest less if excessive problems indicate poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly fulfill every unique company need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more unconvinced of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you use daily must gain depend on through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.