As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely on software and automation to streamline procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Live Chat.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner always looking to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a dream become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and failing) to change to this popular new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, ideally you can gain from my painful mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small companies maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients get the ideal messages at the correct time. Use web site and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing customer relationships via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically appealing for organizations wanting to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will transform your organization … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a few even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology facilities from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– and also dealing with lost productivity throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big error. The issues began accumulating promptly, until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion reminders, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally irrelevant emails had actually been sent out to users who must NOT have actually obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the problem persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they vaguely declared “server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally undesirable and just really did not work for my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these problems …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows entailed excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the small cost tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Live Chat
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the inexpensive price for access to numerous features. Yet I swiftly learned this inexpensive base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core functionality. Suddenly my credit card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Live Chat.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only thing I could assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial mistake. The cons considerably outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, but the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage important features effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program often covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life easier, not a lot more complicated and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys trust fund.
- Look for honest testimonials. Delighted support assesses imply less if too much issues suggest inadequate overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I found out to be a lot more unconvinced of “too good to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The tools you make use of daily ought to earn trust through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.