As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to improve operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Pro Plan.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, with any luck you can gain from my uncomfortable errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly eye-catching for companies wanting to settle their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new device that will transform your service … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a couple of even more disappointments led me to assume perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with shed productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big blunder. The concerns began accumulating rapidly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent to individuals that need to NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the problem persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, because the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t help my business. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the small cost tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Pro Plan
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the economical price for access to a lot of features. However I quickly learned this affordable base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core performance. Suddenly my bank card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however 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 very carefully nurtured email open prices drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I might hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Pro Plan.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had awful interaction. The only point I could believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, busted features, and terrible interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any benefits.
No software program is excellent, but the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial features capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices need to make your job life easier, not extra complex and untidy.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust.
- Look for honest reviews. Pleased support evaluates mean less if excessive concerns suggest poor general use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can flawlessly meet every unique organization need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental enhancements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra doubtful of “as well good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the appeal of shiny new items. The tools you utilize daily need to gain trust through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.