As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Vs Bitrix24.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this preferred new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage site and social media forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting client relationships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly attractive for businesses wanting to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly change your service … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction points that I would certainly found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of even more irritations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of just a few of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also taking care of shed efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large error. The problems began accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent to customers who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the problem continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various areas. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag included expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Bitrix24
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget-friendly price for access to so many features. Yet I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every repairing technique, I can barely push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Bitrix24.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only thing I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, damaged features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive error. The disadvantages considerably exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is best, yet the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software application often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your work life less complicated, not much more challenging and messy.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates suggest much less if excessive problems indicate inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every unique organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step improvements commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I learned to be more unconvinced of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily ought to earn count on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.