As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention Is GoHighLevel The Best CRM For Agencies.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small companies maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage website and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer connections through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for services looking to consolidate their tech stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will transform your company … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction points that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a couple of even more frustrations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized changing systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire tech infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of just several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term option for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a huge error. The concerns began accumulating quickly, until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed 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 brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion tips, taking care of subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have received them. This happened three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted fixing and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “server issues” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely unacceptable and just really did not help my service. I have thousands of calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing Is GoHighLevel The Best CRM For Agencies
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the economical rate for accessibility to so many features. However I rapidly learned this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates drop practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards Is GoHighLevel The Best CRM For Agencies.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had awful interaction. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge error. The disadvantages dramatically surpassed any benefits.
No software is ideal, but the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle crucial features competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in hindsight, it showed me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life easier, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for honest evaluations. Delighted support examines suggest much less if excessive concerns imply bad total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can perfectly meet every one-of-a-kind service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step improvements generally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be more skeptical of “as well great to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The devices you make use of daily must gain trust fund via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.