As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Vs FlowTrack.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a dream come true on paper. Who would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, hopefully you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer relationships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically appealing for services seeking to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will transform your company … The yard commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a couple of even more stress led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an overview of just a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling lost performance during the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a huge error. The issues began accumulating swiftly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, managing subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent to users that ought to NOT have received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I desperately tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the issue persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were to blame. Yet this description really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing workflows included excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs FlowTrack
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the inexpensive cost for access to so many features. However I rapidly learned this economical base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every time you send out an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending practices or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Vs FlowTrack.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only thing I might assume that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is ideal, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with important features effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software typically covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your work life much easier, not much more difficult and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins trust fund.
- Look for objective testimonials. Satisfied assistance assesses indicate much less if extreme issues suggest poor general usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can completely fulfill every distinct company demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental enhancements commonly outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more skeptical of “also great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the allure of glossy new items. The tools you utilize daily need to earn depend on via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.