As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Reviews.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small companies keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and clients obtain the best messages at the correct time. Use web site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer relationships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for companies wanting to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new device that will certainly revolutionize your business … The yard usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire tech infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of just some of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– as well as managing shed performance throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big error. The problems began accumulating quickly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally pointless emails had actually been sent to customers that ought to NOT have received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the trouble continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly declared “server problems” were at fault. Yet this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and simply really did not help my company. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle general, individual, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low cost tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Reviews
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the inexpensive rate for access to many features. Yet I rapidly learned this low-cost base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plunge nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every repairing trick, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Reviews.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive error. The cons dramatically surpassed any type of advantages.
No software application is ideal, but the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle important functions competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing buzz around new software frequently covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not more complex and untidy.
- Openness builds trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust fund.
- Seek objective evaluations. Satisfied support reviews indicate much less if excessive problems suggest bad general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every unique company demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental enhancements commonly outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I found out to be more doubtful of “too good to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily must earn count on through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.