As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Vs Competitors.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a desire become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use site and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting client connections through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for companies looking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will certainly revolutionize your service … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I would certainly found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a few even more stress led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole technology framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of simply several of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with shed performance during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a far better lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a large blunder. The issues started piling up rapidly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, managing subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be functioning fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent to customers who need to NOT have gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any feeling, because the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my service. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Competitors
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to so many features. Yet I swiftly learned this affordable base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates drop virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Competitors.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, broken features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial error. The cons drastically surpassed any advantages.
No software is best, however the large volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle crucial features competently or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. But in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software often covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your work life much easier, not much more complex and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys count on.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Pleased support examines mean less if extreme concerns indicate bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can perfectly satisfy every special business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I found out to be much more cynical of “as well excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The tools you make use of daily need to gain count on via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.