As an agency owner for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Vs Housecall Pro.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, with any luck you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media sites kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for companies looking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with very little fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new device that will certainly change your business … The lawn commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower friction points that I would certainly found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few even more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized changing systems was going to need migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of just some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling lost efficiency throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large mistake. The problems began piling up rapidly, up until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning penalty … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally pointless emails had been sent to users who should NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the trouble persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were responsible. However this description didn’t make any feeling, because the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally inappropriate and just didn’t work for my service. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low price tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Housecall Pro
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the cost effective price for access to so many features. Yet I swiftly learned this economical base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. Instantly my bank card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every time you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open rates drop virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I maximized my sending out techniques or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Housecall Pro.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge error. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any type of advantages.
No software program is ideal, however the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage essential functions properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. But in hindsight, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software commonly covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life much easier, not more complicated and messy.
- Transparency constructs count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust.
- Look for impartial reviews. Happy assistance evaluates imply much less if extreme issues indicate bad general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can completely meet every distinct company need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental renovations commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “too good to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily must make trust via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.