As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel UpViral.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly aiming to simplify and scale my service, it looked like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers get the right messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media sites kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting client connections with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations aiming to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it just worked accurately with minimal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new device that will reinvent your business … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching platforms was going to require moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology framework from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– and also managing shed performance throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large error. The issues started piling up rapidly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, taking care of membership expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent to individuals who should NOT have obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue continued.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely declared “server issues” were at fault. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, since the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my company. I have hundreds of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel UpViral
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the economical rate for accessibility to many features. But I quickly learned this affordable base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an email through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices drop nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every fixing technique, I might barely push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel UpViral.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful involvement. The only point I might believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive error. The cons dramatically outweighed any type of advantages.
No software application is ideal, yet the sheer volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle important features capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. But in hindsight, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software commonly obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices need to make your job life much easier, not more challenging and messy.
- Openness builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys count on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Pleased assistance reviews indicate much less if excessive issues suggest inadequate total functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly fulfill every special company demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more cynical of “also great to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the allure of shiny new things. The tools you use daily should make count on via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.