As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus What Services Does GoHighLevel Offer.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a dream become a reality on paper. Who would not desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, with any luck you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About 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 actually been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the best messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and supporting client connections through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically appealing for companies seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with very little fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your company … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a few even more irritations led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology facilities from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of just some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– and also handling shed efficiency throughout the button.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, up until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event tips, managing membership expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the issue lingered.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing What Services Does GoHighLevel Offer
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the budget friendly price for accessibility to numerous features. But I promptly discovered this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates plunge nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing trick, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria What Services Does GoHighLevel Offer.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had dreadful involvement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial blunder. The cons considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software program is ideal, however the sheer quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage important features properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program typically obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life less complicated, not much more challenging and messy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust.
- Seek unbiased testimonials. Pleased assistance assesses indicate much less if extreme problems indicate inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can flawlessly satisfy every unique business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step improvements normally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be more hesitant of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you utilize daily ought to gain depend on through openness and performance, not slick advertising.