As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to simplify operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Vs PipelinePRO.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and supporting consumer connections via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for services looking to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with very little difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a few even more stress led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole technology facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of just a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– and also dealing with shed efficiency during the button.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion tips, handling membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating penalty … until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who need to NOT have received them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly claimed “server issues” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, because the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my service. I have countless get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complex.
Basic jobs like editing workflows included digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage general, individual, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag came with costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs PipelinePRO
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the inexpensive rate for access to many features. However I promptly discovered this affordable base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send an email through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates plummet virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I could barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs PipelinePRO.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had terrible engagement. The only point I could believe that would certainly be triggering 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 concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge error. The cons substantially exceeded any advantages.
No software application is best, however the large volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features properly or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. But in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing hype around new software program usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life simpler, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys trust fund.
- Look for impartial reviews. Delighted assistance examines mean much less if excessive concerns indicate inadequate general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary remedy can perfectly fulfill every distinct company need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements typically outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more unconvinced of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and less lured by the appeal of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily should earn trust fund through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.