As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to streamline operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Karan Agarwal.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a dream come to life on paper. That would not want a single service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, with any luck you can learn from my agonizing errors and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Use website and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically attractive for services aiming to consolidate their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with very little hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new device that will reinvent your company … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few even more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew changing systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of just a few of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– in addition to taking care of lost efficiency throughout the button.
However eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge blunder. The issues started accumulating quickly, up until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I ran into.
Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
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 e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, handling membership expiries and far more.
Everything appeared to be functioning fine … till instantly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unimportant emails had been sent to users that ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. However the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were responsible. But this description really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t help my organization. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and challenging.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle overall, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Karan Agarwal
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the inexpensive price for accessibility to so many features. But I swiftly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core functionality. Instantly my bank card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices plummet virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a useless 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or attempted every fixing technique, I might hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Karan Agarwal.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge error. The cons dramatically outweighed any advantages.
No software is best, but the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage critical functions properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. However in knowledge, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program often obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life much easier, not more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust.
- Look for objective evaluations. Pleased assistance examines imply less if excessive problems suggest poor general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can completely meet every distinct organization need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements generally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be extra cynical of “also good to be true” marketing claims and less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The tools you make use of daily ought to earn count on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.