As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to improve procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs Monday.com.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a desire happened theoretically. That would not want a single service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to change to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, with any luck you can learn from my agonizing mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use website and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing customer connections through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for organizations wanting to consolidate their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new device that will certainly change your organization … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction points that I ‘d discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few more irritations led me to believe perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– as well as handling lost productivity throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering 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 use to understand I had actually made a huge blunder. The concerns began accumulating promptly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to customers that must NOT have obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. But the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were at fault. But this description really did not make any type of sense, because the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally inappropriate and simply really did not help my business. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of general, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Monday.com
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the inexpensive cost for access to a lot of features. However I quickly learned this affordable base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plummet virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out techniques or tried every repairing trick, I could barely push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Monday.com.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had awful involvement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, broken features, and terrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a massive mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any benefits.
No software application is best, but the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage important functions capably or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software application frequently obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your work life much easier, not more challenging and untidy.
- Openness builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Pleased support reviews mean much less if too much problems imply poor total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can completely meet every unique business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental renovations normally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be extra hesitant of “too great to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you use daily must earn count on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.