As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel JustCall.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially attractive for organizations looking to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny object syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly change your service … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few even more frustrations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a summary of just a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– and also dealing with shed productivity throughout the button.
However eventually, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a huge error. The problems began accumulating swiftly, until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … up until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unimportant emails had actually been sent to individuals that need to NOT have received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my business. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, specific, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel JustCall
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core functionality. Instantly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every single time you send an email via their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices plunge practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel JustCall.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had terrible involvement. The only thing I can believe that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, damaged features, and dreadful user interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant blunder. The cons dramatically exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is ideal, yet the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage important functions properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software program commonly obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life easier, not extra difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys depend on.
- Look for honest testimonials. Pleased assistance reviews imply much less if excessive concerns indicate poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can perfectly fulfill every distinct business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental renovations commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I learned to be extra doubtful of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less tempted by the allure of shiny new objects. The tools you use daily need to gain trust fund with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.