As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to streamline procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Vs Salesforce.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, hopefully you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the right messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly appealing for services wanting to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned dependably with marginal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new device that will change your business … The lawn commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a couple of more frustrations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire technology infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to taking care of lost efficiency during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large error. The issues began piling up rapidly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. However the issue persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, because the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my service. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Salesforce
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to many features. Yet I quickly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices drop virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending methods or tried every fixing technique, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Vs Salesforce.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big error. The cons drastically exceeded any benefits.
No software is ideal, yet the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle critical features capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it showed me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software often covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not more challenging and messy.
- Openness builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys trust.
- Seek impartial reviews. Satisfied support evaluates mean less if excessive problems imply inadequate overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly satisfy every unique business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements usually surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I learned to be a lot more doubtful of “also good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily should gain depend on through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.