As a company owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs ClickUp.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, ideally you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the right messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically attractive for services looking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply worked dependably with minimal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, however a few even more frustrations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology framework from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of simply a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed productivity during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big blunder. The issues began accumulating rapidly, till it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent to users that should NOT have actually received them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the issue lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any type of feeling, because the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally unacceptable and simply really did not work for my business. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of total, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs ClickUp
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget-friendly cost for access to so many features. However I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send out an email with their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every repairing method, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs ClickUp.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only point I might believe that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any benefits.
No software is excellent, but the sheer volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial features competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life easier, not more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy assistance examines indicate less if extreme concerns suggest bad total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can completely fulfill every special service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations normally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be extra skeptical of “too excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The tools you use daily must make depend on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.