As an agency owner for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Vs Skool.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come true on paper. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, with any luck you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies maintain their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers obtain the right messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically eye-catching for businesses wanting to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will transform your business … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a few even more irritations led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology facilities from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– not to mention taking care of shed performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large error. The problems began piling up swiftly, up until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, handling membership expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … till instantly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to users that ought to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were at fault. But this description didn’t make any type of sense, given that the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally unacceptable and simply really did not work for my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle overall, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Skool
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the inexpensive price for access to so many features. But I rapidly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every repairing method, I might hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Skool.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had horrible involvement. The only thing I might believe that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and awful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge error. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential features competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained 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 key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program often covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life simpler, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins depend on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Satisfied support evaluates imply less if excessive problems indicate inadequate overall use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can perfectly satisfy every distinct business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra doubtful of “also good to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily should earn count on via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.