As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Vs Groove.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, with any luck you can learn from my agonizing mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing client relationships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for organizations seeking to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with minimal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will certainly change your organization … The yard frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few more stress led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of shed performance throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The problems started accumulating promptly, up until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to customers that need to NOT have actually received them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “server problems” were responsible. However this description really did not make any feeling, given that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely undesirable and just really did not work for my business. I have countless calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and challenging.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage overall, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Groove
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly learned this affordable base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core capability. Instantly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every repairing trick, I can hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Groove.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had horrible interaction. The only point I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages dramatically surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, however the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with critical functions effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done 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 an expensive ill fortune. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software program commonly covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life less complicated, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Openness builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages count on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Pleased assistance assesses mean much less if too much issues suggest poor general usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more skeptical of “too great to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily ought to earn count on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.