As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Vs Airtable.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this preferred new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, ideally you can gain from my excruciating blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize 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 designed to help small companies keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and clients get the best messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly eye-catching for businesses aiming to settle their technology pile.
Essentially, it just functioned accurately with very little hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will transform your business … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, however a few more frustrations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– as well as dealing with lost productivity during the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big blunder. The problems started accumulating promptly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered 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 included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … till all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to customers that should NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted fixing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “web server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation really did not make any type of sense, because the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not help my organization. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the affordable price tag included expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Airtable
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the inexpensive price for accessibility to so many features. But I promptly discovered this economical base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core capability. Suddenly my charge card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices plunge almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every fixing trick, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Airtable.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I could assume that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big error. The cons substantially exceeded any benefits.
No software is perfect, yet the sheer volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with important features competently or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. But in knowledge, it taught me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life simpler, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys depend on.
- Look for objective evaluations. Satisfied support assesses imply less if too much issues imply bad total functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can flawlessly satisfy every special company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be much more hesitant of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of glossy new items. The tools you make use of daily need to make depend on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.