As an agency proprietor for over a years, I count on software application and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs Ontraport.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it felt like a dream come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this preferred new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, with any luck you can learn from my agonizing blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for organizations looking to combine their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with marginal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will reinvent your service … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower friction points that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a few even more aggravations led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– as well as handling shed performance throughout the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a huge error. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning penalty … until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers who should NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the problem lingered.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were at fault. Yet this description really did not make any kind of sense, because the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally undesirable and just really did not work for my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Ontraport
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to a lot of features. However I promptly learned this low-cost base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core functionality. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send out an email through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plummet nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every repairing technique, I might hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Ontraport.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I can think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a massive error. The cons dramatically outweighed any type of benefits.
No software is best, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage important features properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software frequently covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not a lot more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins depend on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Satisfied assistance reviews imply less if extreme problems indicate poor total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single remedy can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental renovations usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be much more doubtful of “also great to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily ought to make depend on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.