As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely upon software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Webhooks.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage web site and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing client partnerships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially appealing for organizations looking to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your service … The grass often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a few even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole tech framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– as well as taking care of shed efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems began piling up rapidly, up until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event reminders, managing subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I frantically tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were at fault. But this description really did not make any kind of sense, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my company. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Webhooks
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to so many features. However I promptly discovered this economical base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core functionality. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every fixing trick, I can barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Webhooks.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had awful interaction. The only point I could assume that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is perfect, however the sheer quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential functions properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software program often obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life simpler, not extra challenging and untidy.
- Transparency constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages depend on.
- Seek honest reviews. Pleased support examines suggest less if too much issues suggest inadequate general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary service can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental improvements normally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be extra hesitant of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the allure of glossy new items. The tools you use daily ought to earn depend on through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.