As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to streamline procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my attention Is GoHighLevel Worth It.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always looking to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. That would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this preferred new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, ideally you can learn from my excruciating blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to use and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and customers get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and boost revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer relationships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for organizations wanting to consolidate their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply worked dependably with minimal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly transform your organization … The turf usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, but a few even more irritations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a summary of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– and also taking care of shed efficiency throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a huge error. The concerns started accumulating promptly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, handling membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unimportant emails had been sent out to users that must NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I frantically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the trouble persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “server problems” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my company. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag featured costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing Is GoHighLevel Worth It
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the economical cost for access to many features. Yet I promptly discovered this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an email through their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I can barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks Is GoHighLevel Worth It.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only point I could believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is excellent, but the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle important functions competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software application often covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life simpler, not extra complex and untidy.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages depend on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Satisfied assistance evaluates suggest much less if too much problems suggest inadequate total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary service can flawlessly satisfy every distinct company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step renovations generally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In short, I discovered to be much more cynical of “also great to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the allure of shiny new things. The tools you utilize daily ought to gain trust fund through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.