As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Vs Simvoly.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a desire become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, ideally you can gain from my unpleasant errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it took care of everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and supporting customer connections through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically appealing for organizations looking to consolidate their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with very little hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a couple of more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire technology framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of simply some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– not to mention managing shed performance during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns began piling up promptly, until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to individuals who should NOT have received them. This happened three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any sense, because the mistakes continued occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complex.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Simvoly
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the affordable rate for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I promptly learned this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core performance. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices drop virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Simvoly.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible engagement. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big error. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any advantages.
No software application is ideal, but the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application frequently obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life simpler, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys depend on.
- Seek objective reviews. Delighted assistance assesses suggest much less if excessive problems suggest bad general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can completely meet every distinct service requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step improvements generally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be more cynical of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily should gain trust with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.