As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Mobile App.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my service, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. Who would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, hopefully you can pick up from my painful blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing client partnerships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly appealing for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked accurately with marginal fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will change your service … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a few more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire technology facilities from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a summary of simply a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to managing lost productivity during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge mistake. The problems started piling up swiftly, until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be functioning fine … until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent out to users that ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any type of sense, because the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally inappropriate and simply really did not help my business. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Mobile App
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I rapidly learned this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices plummet virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every fixing technique, I can barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Mobile App.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had awful interaction. The only point I can think that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big error. The disadvantages considerably exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is best, but the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of important features effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application commonly obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life less complicated, not extra challenging and messy.
- Openness builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles destroys trust.
- Seek objective evaluations. Pleased assistance examines imply less if too much problems imply poor general use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every distinct company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be more doubtful of “also excellent to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The tools you use daily ought to gain depend on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.