As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to improve operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs ThriveCart.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, hopefully you can gain from my agonizing blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need 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 monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist local business maintain their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use web site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly attractive for services seeking to consolidate their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with very little difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will transform your organization … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a few even more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire technology facilities from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of simply several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating 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 once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– as well as managing lost performance during the button.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The issues started piling up rapidly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent out to users that need to NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately attempted repairing and restoring the automation from square one. However the problem lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, given that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and simply really did not work for my service. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low price tag featured costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs ThriveCart
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the cost effective rate for access to numerous features. But I quickly discovered this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an email through their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs ThriveCart.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful interaction. The only point I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big error. The cons drastically surpassed any type of advantages.
No software program is excellent, but the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital functions competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application commonly obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life easier, not extra challenging and messy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins depend on.
- Seek honest reviews. Pleased assistance assesses indicate less if extreme issues suggest inadequate general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can completely satisfy every unique organization need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be extra unconvinced of “too good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily should earn count on via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.