As a company owner for over a years, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Vs ManyChat.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a dream come true theoretically. That would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, ideally you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use site and social networks kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing customer connections via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it specifically appealing for services aiming to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with very little hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new device that will certainly revolutionize your organization … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction points that I ‘d learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a few even more irritations led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole technology framework from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of just a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– not to mention taking care of shed efficiency during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large mistake. The concerns started piling up promptly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, handling membership expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely pointless e-mails had actually been sent to users who must NOT have actually received them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately attempted fixing and restoring the automation from square one. But the problem lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any sense, since the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs ManyChat
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the cost effective rate for accessibility to many features. But I swiftly discovered this cheap base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plunge practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or tried every fixing method, I could hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Vs ManyChat.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had horrible engagement. The only point I could think that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, damaged features, and awful interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big blunder. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, however the sheer volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to deal with important functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around new software usually obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life easier, not a lot more complex and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins depend on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Pleased assistance evaluates indicate less if too much issues imply inadequate general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more unconvinced of “as well good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the allure of glossy new things. The tools you use daily must gain trust fund through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.