Okay, that headline is a little bit of a trap, and I’ll admit it right up front. I actually like GoHighLevel. I recommend it to clients regularly, I use it myself, and if you’ve talked to me about CRMs in the last couple of years there’s a good chance I steered you toward it. But “Why I Like GoHighLevel and Also It’s Basically Fine” isn’t a headline anyone clicks on, and honestly, no tool is perfect. So let’s talk about the stuff that actually bugs me about it, and then let’s talk about why I still think it’s the right call for most small and mid-size businesses.
The Big Picture First
Before I get into my complaints, I want to explain why GoHighLevel is still my go-to recommendation, because it colors everything else I’m about to say.
If you’ve shopped around for CRM and marketing automation tools, you already know the pricing in this space is brutal. The “enterprise” platforms — the ones with the polished demos and the sales reps who call you back within five minutes — are built for companies with real budgets. You’re looking at hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars a month once you add the automation, the funnel builder, the calendar tool, the reputation management, the phone system, and everything else a modern business actually needs to run its marketing and sales in one place. And that’s before they nickel-and-dime you for extra users, extra contacts, or extra “premium” features that used to be standard.
GoHighLevel looked at that landscape and basically said: what if we just gave small businesses all of it, for one price, without making them feel like they need a Series B round to afford basic marketing software? That’s the pitch that got my attention, and it’s held up. I’ve moved clients off of stacks where they were paying for five or six different tools — a CRM, an email platform, a landing page builder, a scheduling app, a review management tool — and consolidated all of it into one GoHighLevel account for a fraction of what they were spending before.
That matters a lot to me. I’ve spent 15+ years working with small businesses and solo operators who don’t have marketing departments or IT budgets. The enterprise CRM world basically ignores those businesses, or worse, pretends to serve them with watered-down “starter” plans that pretty much ends up being a fancy database to hold their contacts for them. GoHighLevel opened a door that a lot of companies were locked out of. That’s the real reason I recommend it, and no amount of nitpicking below changes that.
With that said, here’s what actually annoys me about using it day to day.
1. The Support Is Not Good
This is my biggest gripe, hands down. GoHighLevel has a decent knowledge base and there’s no shortage of YouTube tutorials and community groups where people are constantly troubleshooting things. That’s genuinely helpful. But when something breaks, or when you hit a weird edge case that isn’t covered in a tutorial, actually getting a human to help you is a frustrating experience.
Standard support tends to lean heavily on AI chat modules and canned responses that point you right back to the same knowledge base articles you already read before you opened a ticket. If you want real, responsive support, you’re paying extra for a premium support tier, and even then, most of the support team is based outside the United States, which isn’t a knock on the individual people helping you, but it does mean there’s often a language gap that slows things down when you need an answer fast.
When you’re in the middle of setting up a client’s automation and something isn’t triggering the way it should, “here’s a help article, please review our documentation” is not what you want to hear. I’ve learned to rely on the community forums and my own trial-and-error more than official support, which is a workaround, not a solution.
2. The UI Isn’t Pretty, and It Can Be Confusing
I want to be fair here — this isn’t a dealbreaker, and it’s not like the platform is unusable. But GoHighLevel does not win any design awards. The interface feels like it was built by developers focused on function over form, which, fine, I get it, but it shows.
The bigger issue for me isn’t just aesthetics, it’s findability. Certain tools and settings are tucked into places that don’t feel intuitive. You’ll go looking for a setting you swear you configured before, and it’s buried under a menu that doesn’t obviously relate to what you’re trying to do. New clients I onboard onto the platform almost always need a walkthrough, not because the concepts are hard, but because the navigation doesn’t guide you the way a well-designed SaaS product usually does.
It’s a small thing in the grand scheme, but when you’re in the platform every day like I am, those little friction points add up.
3. It’s Built Around the Resell Model
This one is more about how I personally use the platform than an objective flaw, but it’s worth mentioning. GoHighLevel was designed from the ground up with marketing agencies in mind — specifically, agencies that want to run a main account and then stack their clients underneath it as sub-accounts, reselling the platform as part of their own branded service.
That model works great for a lot of agencies, and I know plenty of people who have built entire businesses around white-labeling GoHighLevel and reselling it to their client base. Nothing wrong with that approach at all.
I just don’t use it that way. Most of my clients run their own individual GoHighLevel accounts rather than sitting under one big agency umbrella that I control. Because the platform’s structure, pricing tiers, and a lot of its internal logic are optimized around the resell/agency model, using it the way I do sometimes feels like I’m working against the grain a little. It’s not a problem, exactly, it’s just a reminder that I’m not really the target user GoHighLevel had in mind when they built it.
So Why Do I Still Recommend It?
Because none of these three things are dealbreakers, and all of them are manageable once you know they’re coming. Bad support is annoying, but it’s survivable if you lean on the community and documentation. A clunky UI is a minor speed bump you get used to within a few weeks. And the resell-first design doesn’t stop individual accounts from working just fine — it’s just not the platform’s primary use case.
What GoHighLevel gives you in exchange for those annoyances is real: one platform, one price, that replaces a stack of tools most small businesses couldn’t otherwise afford to run at the same time. For companies that have been priced out of proper marketing automation by the big enterprise players, that trade-off is worth it every time.
I don’t love everything about GoHighLevel. But I like what it makes possible for the businesses I work with, and that’s the part that matters most.