As an agency owner for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to streamline operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Media Library UI.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a dream happened on paper. That would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, with any luck you can learn from my agonizing errors and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically attractive for services aiming to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with very little hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will reinvent your organization … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction points that I ‘d found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a couple of even more frustrations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire tech facilities from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of just some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to managing shed productivity throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns began piling up swiftly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 completely pointless e-mails had actually been sent to customers who need to NOT have received them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the trouble continued.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally inappropriate and just really did not work for my service. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Media Library UI
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the affordable cost for access to a lot of features. Yet I promptly learned this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core capability. Suddenly my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plummet nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every repairing trick, I might barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Media Library UI.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden fees, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages dramatically surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software application is excellent, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to manage critical functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life easier, not extra complex and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Satisfied support examines indicate less if too much issues indicate inadequate overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can completely satisfy every unique organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “also good to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you utilize daily must make trust through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.