As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention How Many Websites Can You Host on GoHighLevel.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a desire come true theoretically. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients get the right messages at the right time. Usage website and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting client relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for services wanting to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with minimal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new device that will change your business … The turf often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of even more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole technology framework from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a summary of just some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– as well as handling shed productivity during the switch.
However eventually, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge blunder. The problems began accumulating rapidly, up until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I ran into.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be operating fine … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 completely unimportant e-mails had been sent out to users who should NOT have received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “web server problems” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was completely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have countless calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely undependable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Easy tasks like editing workflows involved digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing How Many Websites Can You Host on GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the budget-friendly cost for accessibility to numerous features. But I swiftly discovered this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every single time you send an email with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous bucks in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every repairing technique, I might barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria How Many Websites Can You Host on GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible involvement. The only point I can assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software application is ideal, yet the large quantity of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with important features capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not extra challenging and untidy.
- Openness develops trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Delighted assistance evaluates imply less if excessive problems indicate poor overall use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly satisfy every special company demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements normally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I learned to be extra skeptical of “too great to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the allure of glossy new items. The tools you use daily need to earn depend on via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.