As a firm proprietor for over a years, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Trust Center.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this popular new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, with any luck you can gain from my agonizing errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses keep their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Use site and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer connections through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for companies seeking to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your business … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction points that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a review of simply several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– and also taking care of shed productivity throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The problems began accumulating promptly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be operating penalty … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “server problems” were at fault. However this description really did not make any feeling, given that the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t help my company. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Trust Center
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to so many features. But I rapidly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my charge card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an email with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices plummet nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every repairing method, I might hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Trust Center.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had terrible interaction. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and awful user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge error. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, however the sheer volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle crucial features capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software frequently covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not much more complex and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins count on.
- Seek objective testimonials. Pleased assistance evaluates indicate much less if excessive issues suggest bad total functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental renovations generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more unconvinced of “also good to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the attraction of glossy new items. The tools you use daily must make depend on with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.