As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software program and automation to improve operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Vs Kajabi.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire come to life theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small companies maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients get the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing client connections with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly attractive for services aiming to settle their technology pile.
Essentially, it just functioned dependably with minimal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly change your company … The grass usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a couple of even more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire tech framework from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an overview of just some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– and also taking care of shed efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big blunder. The problems started accumulating quickly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion tips, taking care of subscription expiries and much more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless emails had actually been sent out to individuals that should NOT have gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any feeling, since the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally unacceptable and just really did not work for my organization. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag came with pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Kajabi
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the budget friendly price for accessibility to so many features. Yet I rapidly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic charges for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates drop nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing technique, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Vs Kajabi.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only point I might believe that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden fees, busted features, and awful interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any benefits.
No software application is perfect, yet the sheer volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. 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 leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life simpler, not much more complex and messy.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins depend on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Satisfied assistance reviews indicate less if too much issues imply poor general usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary remedy can perfectly fulfill every unique business demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I learned to be a lot more skeptical of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily need to make trust through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.