As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs Vendasta.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a dream happened theoretically. That would not want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this preferred new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the right messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly attractive for organizations looking to consolidate their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your business … The grass commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of just a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of shed efficiency throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large mistake. The problems began piling up promptly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion tips, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be operating penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to users that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the problem persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows included digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of general, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the affordable price tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Vendasta
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the cost effective cost for access to many features. However I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send an email with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open rates plunge almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending methods or tried every fixing method, I could barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Vs Vendasta.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had awful engagement. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant mistake. The cons substantially outweighed any benefits.
No software is ideal, however the large volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial functions capably or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application often obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life much easier, not extra complicated and messy.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages depend on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Pleased assistance reviews suggest less if extreme issues indicate bad overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can completely satisfy every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental renovations generally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I learned to be more hesitant of “as well good to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily ought to earn trust through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.