As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs Jobber.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner constantly aiming to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a desire come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social media sites kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting client partnerships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for companies aiming to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with very little fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will certainly transform your company … The yard usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, yet a few even more irritations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood changing systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire technology infrastructure from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to handling shed performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big blunder. The concerns began accumulating promptly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate 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 enrollments, sending event pointers, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to customers that must NOT have obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “web server issues” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, because the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely inappropriate and simply didn’t help my service. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of general, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Jobber
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to so many features. But I promptly learned this economical base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices drop practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I could hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Jobber.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden fees, broken features, and horrible interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big mistake. The cons substantially surpassed any advantages.
No software program is excellent, however the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle essential features effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complicated and messy.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems ruins trust.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Pleased support reviews mean much less if too much issues imply bad total usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly satisfy every distinct business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental improvements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I learned to be much more skeptical of “also excellent to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you make use of daily ought to earn depend on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.