As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to enhance operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel SaaS Pro Plan.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a desire happened on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, with any luck you can gain from my excruciating blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting client relationships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly appealing for companies looking to combine their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy things disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your company … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a couple of even more disappointments led me to assume perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of simply a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– and also handling lost efficiency during the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting option for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems started piling up swiftly, up until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, handling subscription expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically attempted fixing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they slightly declared “server concerns” were at fault. However this explanation didn’t make any feeling, since the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my company. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of general, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low price tag featured costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel SaaS Pro Plan
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the cost effective rate for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I rapidly learned this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every time you send an email with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates plunge almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every repairing method, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel SaaS Pro Plan.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had horrible interaction. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial blunder. The cons considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is best, however the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of essential features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. But in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software commonly covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life easier, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness develops trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys count on.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Pleased support reviews imply much less if extreme problems suggest poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can perfectly fulfill every unique service need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental renovations commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I learned to be more hesitant of “also good to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily ought to gain trust fund through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.