As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my attention Who Owns GoHighLevel.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this popular new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, with any luck you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly appealing for services aiming to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will reinvent your organization … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a few even more frustrations led me to assume maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling shed productivity throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term solution for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large error. The problems began piling up quickly, until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event tips, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be working penalty … till suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent to individuals that should NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “server issues” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any feeling, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my company. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag included pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing Who Owns GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the budget friendly price for access to a lot of features. However I rapidly learned this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every single time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices drop almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every repairing trick, I might hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria Who Owns GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only point I might think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge error. The cons drastically exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is best, but the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage vital features capably or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. However in knowledge, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software usually covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your work life simpler, not more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys trust.
- Look for objective reviews. Happy assistance reviews imply less if excessive issues indicate poor overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can completely meet every one-of-a-kind organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental improvements commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I found out to be extra unconvinced of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily must make count on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.