As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Vs Builderall.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come true theoretically. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, with any luck you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation demands.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it handled whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Use internet site and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer relationships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for companies aiming to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your company … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of even more disappointments led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole technology facilities from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of lost productivity throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large blunder. The issues started piling up quickly, till it got to a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I came across.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning penalty … till all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent to individuals who should NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the issue continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were at fault. However this description really did not make any feeling, since the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely inappropriate and just really did not help my company. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag included pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Builderall
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the affordable rate for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I rapidly discovered this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed each time you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing method, I could barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Builderall.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had terrible engagement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial mistake. The cons drastically surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software is best, however the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle vital functions capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software application commonly covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life much easier, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins trust fund.
- Seek objective testimonials. Delighted assistance evaluates imply less if too much problems suggest inadequate total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can perfectly satisfy every distinct business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements normally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I discovered to be much more unconvinced of “also great to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The devices you make use of daily must gain trust through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.