As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Vs Climbo.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my service, it appeared like a dream come true theoretically. That would not want a single service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, ideally you can learn from my painful mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to use and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for businesses aiming to consolidate their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your company … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a couple of even more disappointments led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood changing platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology framework from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a review of simply some of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– and also managing lost performance during the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term service for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a huge error. The concerns began accumulating promptly, up until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, taking care of membership expiries and much more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and restoring the automation from square one. But the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any feeling, given that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my business. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Climbo
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the economical price for access to a lot of features. But I quickly learned this economical base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core capability. All of a sudden my charge card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send an email through their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every repairing method, I could barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Vs Climbo.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only point I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge mistake. The cons dramatically outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is perfect, yet the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important functions effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life less complicated, not a lot more challenging and messy.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust.
- Seek objective reviews. Happy assistance reviews mean much less if extreme concerns suggest inadequate general functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can completely satisfy every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental renovations generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be a lot more doubtful of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny new things. The devices you make use of daily should make count on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.