As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs Nutshell CRM.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream come to life on paper. That would not want a solitary option that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, ideally you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it managed everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting client partnerships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for services looking to consolidate their technology pile.
Generally, it simply worked reliably with very little hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will transform your business … The lawn commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few even more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I recognized changing platforms was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of simply some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with shed productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-term remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The issues started piling up quickly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I encountered.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, managing membership expirations and much more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who must NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the issue persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were at fault. Yet this explanation really did not make any feeling, considering that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was totally inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my company. I have thousands of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and difficult.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the small cost tag included expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Nutshell CRM
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the economical price for accessibility to a lot of features. However I rapidly discovered this economical base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional charges for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send an email with their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plunge nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I might hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Nutshell CRM.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only point I could think that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken 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 massive blunder. The cons considerably exceeded any type of benefits.
No software program is ideal, but the sheer volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software commonly obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life easier, not more challenging and untidy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages count on.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Happy support reviews mean less if excessive problems suggest poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can completely meet every one-of-a-kind business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental renovations commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I found out to be a lot more unconvinced of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily must gain count on with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.