As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to simplify procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Summit 2025.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a dream come true on paper. Who would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant errors and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the right messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing client relationships via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for organizations seeking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it just functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new device that will reinvent your company … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of just a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling shed performance during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a huge error. The problems began piling up swiftly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I frantically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. But the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, given that the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally inappropriate and simply really did not work for my organization. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Summit 2025
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the affordable cost for access to numerous features. However I quickly learned this economical base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. Suddenly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an email via their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open rates plunge virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing technique, I might barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Summit 2025.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge error. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle critical features capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. However in knowledge, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your work life less complicated, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins depend on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Happy assistance reviews mean less if too much issues imply inadequate general use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary remedy can flawlessly satisfy every special business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step improvements commonly outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be more hesitant of “too good to be real” marketing claims and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily ought to gain trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.