As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to enhance procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel POS For iPad.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. Who would not desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my excruciating errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the right messages at the correct time. Use web site and social media sites types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer connections through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly attractive for companies seeking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will revolutionize your organization … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a couple of even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of just a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling shed productivity during the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge blunder. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally pointless emails had actually been sent to individuals who should NOT have received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they slightly claimed “server problems” were to blame. However this description really did not make any kind of feeling, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally unacceptable and simply really did not help my service. I have countless calls relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and challenging.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage general, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel POS For iPad
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the inexpensive rate for access to so many features. Yet I quickly learned this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core performance. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates drop almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I can barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel POS For iPad.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had dreadful engagement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed fees, busted features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant blunder. The cons dramatically surpassed any type of advantages.
No software program is best, yet the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle critical features effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around new software program typically covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life much easier, not more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Happy assistance assesses suggest less if extreme concerns imply poor total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can completely meet every special service requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I found out to be much more skeptical of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the attraction of glossy new things. The devices you use daily should gain count on via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.