As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to improve procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Vs HubSpot.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single remedy that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, hopefully you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing 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 gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients obtain the best messages at the right time. Use website and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting client relationships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for organizations aiming to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with minimal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will revolutionize your service … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a few even more disappointments led me to assume perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole technology facilities from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of lost productivity throughout the button.
However eventually, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The problems began piling up swiftly, till it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely irrelevant emails had been sent out to users who must NOT have obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I frantically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, because the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally unacceptable and just really did not help my business. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs HubSpot
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the economical price for access to many features. However I promptly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every fixing technique, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs HubSpot.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only thing I might assume that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive error. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, however the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of critical functions competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. But in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life simpler, not more challenging and untidy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins count on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates mean much less if excessive problems indicate poor general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can perfectly fulfill every special company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental improvements typically exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I discovered to be much more unconvinced of “as well excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new things. The devices you make use of daily should make trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.