As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Membership Site.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a dream come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, ideally you can gain from my excruciating blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it managed everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social media kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer connections via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for organizations looking to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly 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 confess I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new device that will revolutionize your business … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few even more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew changing systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire tech facilities from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– in addition to handling lost productivity during the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a huge mistake. The issues began accumulating rapidly, until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and much more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to users who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any sense, since the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Membership Site
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the economical cost for accessibility to many features. However I quickly learned this cheap base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plummet practically over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I might barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Membership Site.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible interaction. The only point I might think that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, damaged features, and dreadful user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge blunder. The cons substantially surpassed any benefits.
No software application is best, yet the large volume of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features competently or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life simpler, not much more difficult and messy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys depend on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Satisfied support assesses imply less if extreme problems imply inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly satisfy every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations generally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I learned to be a lot more unconvinced of “also great to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily need to earn count on via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.