As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Vs Thryv.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. That would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, with any luck you can pick up from my agonizing errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use website and social media sites types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for businesses looking to consolidate their tech stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with very little hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will change your business … The grass commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of even more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– in addition to handling shed performance during the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-term solution 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 huge mistake. The problems began accumulating promptly, till it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate 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 a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers that need to NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “server issues” were at fault. But this description really did not make any type of sense, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle total, private, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Thryv
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the affordable cost for access to numerous features. But I quickly learned this cheap base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices drop nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or tried every fixing trick, I might barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Thryv.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I can think that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant mistake. The cons dramatically outweighed any type of advantages.
No software application is perfect, yet the sheer volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of essential features competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software frequently covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life simpler, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages depend on.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Satisfied assistance assesses mean much less if extreme problems indicate bad general use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can completely satisfy every distinct organization need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements normally surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “as well good to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily should make count on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.