As an agency owner for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus What Is The Best Browser For GoHighLevel.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, hopefully you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small businesses keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media sites kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for services looking to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new device that will certainly reinvent your service … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, yet a couple of more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire technology infrastructure from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply several of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with shed performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a big error. The problems began piling up rapidly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to individuals who must NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the issue continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any sense, since the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not work for my company. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing What Is The Best Browser For GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the economical rate for accessibility to so many features. Yet I promptly learned this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open rates drop nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting method, I could hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria What Is The Best Browser For GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had horrible interaction. The only point I might believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, broken features, and horrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge error. The cons dramatically outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle critical features capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life less complicated, not a lot more challenging and messy.
- Openness builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages count on.
- Seek objective reviews. Happy assistance examines suggest much less if extreme problems imply bad general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can perfectly meet every unique organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental enhancements commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be much more skeptical of “too great to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the allure of shiny new objects. The tools you utilize daily must gain depend on through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.