As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to simplify operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel SaaS Mode.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, with any luck you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing customer connections with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially attractive for organizations seeking to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with very little hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a few even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech infrastructure from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– and also dealing with lost performance throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge mistake. The issues started accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … till unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant emails had been sent to individuals who need to NOT have received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they vaguely declared “server issues” were to blame. However this description really did not make any kind of feeling, because the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally inappropriate and just really did not benefit my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel SaaS Mode
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to numerous features. But I swiftly learned this inexpensive base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel SaaS Mode.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, broken features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any advantages.
No software is perfect, however the large quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to manage critical functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. But in knowledge, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life easier, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins trust fund.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Satisfied assistance examines mean less if too much issues suggest bad total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind service requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental enhancements usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be extra hesitant of “also great to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily need to make count on via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.