As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Vs Wix.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a desire happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to change to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it managed every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up 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 bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations wanting to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly reinvent your company … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a few more stress led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole technology infrastructure from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– and also handling lost productivity throughout the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large error. The issues began accumulating quickly, till it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, managing membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that should NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the trouble continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “server concerns” were responsible. Yet this description really did not make any feeling, since the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows entailed digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in completely various areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low price tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Wix
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the cost effective cost for access to many features. But I quickly discovered this affordable base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send an email through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plummet virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting method, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Vs Wix.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden charges, broken features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any type of benefits.
No software is perfect, but the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program often covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life less complicated, not a lot more challenging and messy.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins count on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Satisfied assistance reviews imply much less if extreme problems imply poor total functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can completely satisfy every distinct organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I learned to be more cynical of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to earn count on through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.