As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest Is GoHighLevel Worth Buying.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it managed whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Use internet site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed client connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and supporting consumer relationships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for services wanting to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with very little hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an overview of simply some of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of shed efficiency throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big error. The concerns began accumulating promptly, up until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given 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 subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, taking care of membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent to individuals that must NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the trouble continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any kind of sense, since the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely unacceptable and simply really did not benefit my organization. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing Is GoHighLevel Worth Buying
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the inexpensive price for access to so many features. However I rapidly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core capability. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to numerous dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I could hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria Is GoHighLevel Worth Buying.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I might think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant error. The cons considerably outweighed any benefits.
No software is perfect, but the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital features properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. But in knowledge, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life less complicated, not more challenging and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys depend on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Happy support reviews imply much less if excessive problems indicate poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every special business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step renovations usually outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be extra cynical of “also good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The devices you make use of daily need to earn trust fund with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.