As an agency owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Mastery.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet 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 find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social media types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing client relationships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly appealing for services wanting to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will transform your service … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology infrastructure from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to dealing with shed productivity during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The problems started piling up promptly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event tips, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who should NOT have actually received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. But the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were to blame. Yet this description didn’t make any feeling, because the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally undesirable and simply didn’t help my organization. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and challenging.
Easy jobs like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low price tag came with expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Mastery
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the budget-friendly cost for accessibility to many features. Yet I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core performance. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Mastery.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge blunder. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any benefits.
No software program is best, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of vital functions properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us 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 debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. However in knowledge, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life easier, not extra challenging and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins count on.
- Look for honest testimonials. Happy assistance examines imply much less if excessive issues imply inadequate general use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely satisfy every special business requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental enhancements usually exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I found out to be extra cynical of “too great to be true” marketing cases and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily must gain depend on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.