As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I count on software and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Vs Leadpages.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream come true on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing errors and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use site and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and nurturing client connections through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically attractive for organizations seeking to consolidate their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will transform your service … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of even more frustrations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire technology facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a review of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– in addition to managing lost efficiency throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term service for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large error. The issues started piling up promptly, up until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had been sent to customers that must NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the problem persisted.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were responsible. However this description didn’t make any feeling, since the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my organization. I have countless calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely various areas. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low price tag came with pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Leadpages
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the inexpensive price for accessibility to so many features. But I quickly learned this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core performance. Suddenly my charge card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open rates plunge almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Leadpages.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible engagement. The only thing I could think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant blunder. The cons significantly surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is best, but the large volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial functions properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around new software usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life easier, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust fund.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Happy assistance evaluates suggest much less if excessive concerns suggest poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements normally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “too great to be real” marketing claims and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The devices you use daily ought to gain count on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.