As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Vs UpHex.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream come true on paper. That would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, ideally you can learn from my agonizing errors and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing customer connections via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially appealing for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with very little fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
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 admit I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will revolutionize your company … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of even more stress led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial 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, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech framework from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– as well as managing lost performance during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a huge mistake. The concerns started accumulating promptly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided 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 email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning fine … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to customers who need to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the problem continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have countless get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the small cost tag came with pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs UpHex
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the cost effective cost for access to so many features. But I promptly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core performance. Instantly my credit card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates drop virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs UpHex.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only point I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, damaged features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big mistake. The cons considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software program is perfect, however the sheer volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage crucial functions properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life less complicated, not much more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust.
- Seek unbiased evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates indicate much less if extreme issues suggest bad overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly fulfill every special service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step enhancements generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be extra hesitant of “as well good to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily must gain count on through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.