As a company owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to improve procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Vs DashClicks.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it looked like a dream happened on paper. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this popular brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, ideally you can learn from my painful blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the right messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically eye-catching for companies aiming to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply worked reliably with minimal fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will change your organization … The lawn often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a couple of more stress led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew switching systems was going to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with lost productivity throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large error. The problems began accumulating promptly, up until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely irrelevant emails had actually been sent out to users who need to NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were responsible. Yet this description really did not make any sense, because the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely undesirable and just really did not benefit my business. I have hundreds of calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs DashClicks
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I quickly learned this economical base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send out an email via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices drop almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I might hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs DashClicks.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had awful engagement. The only point I could think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any advantages.
No software application is best, yet the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial features properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life much easier, not more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Satisfied support reviews imply much less if too much issues suggest poor overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single remedy can flawlessly meet every distinct service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step renovations generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I found out to be much more cynical of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny new things. The devices you use daily ought to gain trust through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.