As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to simplify operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Vs SuiteDash.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a desire become a reality theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this preferred new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, hopefully you can gain from my unpleasant errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it managed everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business keep their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the best messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, 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 credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing customer connections via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly appealing for companies wanting to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply worked accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will change your business … The turf frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction factors that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of just some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– not to mention managing shed efficiency throughout the button.
However eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge error. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, managing membership expirations and much more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely irrelevant emails had been sent to individuals that should NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the issue persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, given that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely undesirable and just really did not help my service. I have countless get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs SuiteDash
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the cost effective price for accessibility to many features. But I rapidly discovered this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed each time you send out an email via their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending methods or attempted every fixing method, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs SuiteDash.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only point I might believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden charges, damaged features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the large quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial functions effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program often obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life much easier, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Openness develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys trust fund.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Pleased support evaluates imply less if excessive issues suggest poor total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every distinct business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I learned to be more doubtful of “as well excellent to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new things. The devices you use daily need to make trust with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.