As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Vs ClickFunnels 2.0.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it felt like a dream become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary option that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, hopefully you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for companies looking to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned dependably with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your service … The yard typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching over systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire technology framework from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of just a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost efficiency throughout the button.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term service for my company, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big error. The issues started piling up promptly, up until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
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 series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely irrelevant emails had been sent out to users that should NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the issue lingered.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “server problems” were at fault. Yet this description didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my business. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle overall, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs ClickFunnels 2.0
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the cost effective cost for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I rapidly learned this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices drop practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting method, I might hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs ClickFunnels 2.0.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only point I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, busted features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant mistake. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any benefits.
No software is excellent, however the sheer quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial features properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. But in hindsight, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software frequently obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life less complicated, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys count on.
- Seek honest evaluations. Delighted support evaluates mean much less if too much issues indicate poor overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can completely meet every unique company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements typically outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more skeptical of “also good to be true” marketing cases and less lured by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily need to earn trust via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.