As an agency owner for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus List of GoHighLevel Features.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a desire happened theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can gain from my agonizing errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job administration option 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 regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer connections with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for companies wanting to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new device that will certainly transform your service … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I ‘d found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a couple of more disappointments led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole tech facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of simply some of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of shed productivity during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a large blunder. The issues started piling up promptly, until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … till all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely irrelevant emails had been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. But this description really did not make any type of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not work for my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like editing workflows included excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing List of GoHighLevel Features
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the cost effective rate for access to numerous features. Yet I promptly learned this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my charge card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plummet almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, 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 instantly to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every repairing method, I might hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria List of GoHighLevel Features.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had terrible engagement. The only thing I could think that would certainly be creating 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 debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big blunder. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any benefits.
No software is excellent, but the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of critical features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. But in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software commonly obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life less complicated, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins depend on.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates imply less if too much issues imply inadequate total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can flawlessly fulfill every special company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step renovations commonly surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be much more skeptical of “as well good to be real” marketing claims and less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily should gain trust via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.