We haven’t actually built the underlying Growably system ourselves (we wish 
).
Instead, we’ve built Growably on top of a platform called High Level (you can find out more about High Level here).
Here are some of the limitations we’ve noticed on the High Level platform to help you decide whether you want to use Growably or not:
- LIMITED 2FA SUPPORT – whilst High Level enforces 2FA on all users (awesome), they currently only supports SMS & Email as 2FA methods (not as awesome). If this concerns you, then please don’t use Growably. We would love if you would vote on this Feature Request to encourage High-Level to add more 2FA Options.
- EMAIL SENDING – Growably/High Level is an amazing Marketing Automation / Sales tool, however it doesn’t include an SMTP Service. They instead integrate with professionals in this space (SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES etc). We have setup a Growably Mailgun account and allow you to send up to 2,000 emails per month through that account (using your email).
If you need to send more than 2,000 – you’ll simply need to plug in your own SMTP Service (e.g. Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES etc). The process is luckily VERY easy & super cheap.
As we get used to the average sending amounts per Tech Tribe Member, we will hopefully be able to increase the included 2,000 email per month included limit (remember, we are trying to keep Growably completely free for Tech Tribe members so we need to be very careful on our hard costs). - NO BLOG FEATURE – whilst Growably includes a full WYSIWIG Funnel & Website builder and hosting, there is currently no dedicated BLOG feature like in WordPress. However, High Level say it is coming on the roadmap, so stay tuned. Some users use a 3rd party tool called Drop In Blog.
- LIMITED OFFICE365 CALENDAR SUPPORT – Growably includes a replacement for Calendly / Schedule Once / Acuity however High Level have focused on Google Calendar as their primary integration method (which works great). Office365 Calendar integration does exist however is a bit clunky and requires a bit of messing around. Some people use Calendar Bridge to sync their Office365 Calendar to a Google Calendar to make it work better.
- COMPANY <-> CONTACT RELATIONSHIP WEIRDNESS – High Level initially didn’t build a 1:Many relationship between a Company and Contacts so it’s a little weird for how you manage multiple contacts at the same company. It’s likely not a deal-breaker – but if you do work with lots of businesses where there are LOTS of contacts at each business – you might get a little frustrated managing it.
- NO DIRECT PSA INTEGRATIONS – since we are 1 of only 2-3 clients of High Level (out of 50,000+) that operate in the MSP Industry, there is no chance of us asking them to build a direct integration into a PSA and have them actually do it. Luckily, there is a very healthy API plus Zapier and Integromat/MAKE integration so you can build out your own integrations if you have the need. At this stage, we aren’t going to be building any direct integrations ourselves, however MSP specific vendors are welcome to use the High Level API to integrate with us.
- NO FEATURE REQUESTS – because we didn’t build and don’t control the underlying platform, we have very limited (to no) input on the Product Roadmap as we are only 1 out of over 15,000 businesses that use High Level. If you are looking for a platform where you can ask for feature requests with a reasonable chance of them being built for you, this is likely not that. If we think a feature request will be helpful for the majority of Growably users, we’ll of course ask High Level to create it, however as they have 15,000+ clients, we won’t hold high expectations.
- ACCESS TO DATA – Obviously, being your CRM vendor means that both us and High Level will have access to data you store in there. That adds a layer of risk you need to take into account. However, if you’ve been around the Tech Tribe world for any period of time, you’ll know that we have a ridiculously good reputation in the Industry that we protect fiercely. Using your (our clients) data for our own purposes would be the fast road to completely ruining our reputation and business. We operate in a least privilege security model so that the ONLY people on our side that have access to client data are people that absolutely need it to be able to help deliver the product and provide Technical Support & Assistance. We don’t currently believe there’s a single Marketing & Sales Automation vendor in the world that operates any differently (yet), including the major players like InfusionSoft/Keap, Hubspot & ActiveCampaign. We’ve had the conversation directly with the CTO of High Level directly about the direction they should take with better granular security controls and will continue to push this agenda where we can.
Hopefully that covers all the major limitations / frustrations (that we know of).
If you’re happy with all of them – then get your account setup ASAP and get started!
If you ever notice a limitation that you think will frustrate Growably users and think we should list it on this page, shoot us an email to help@thetechtribe.com and we’ll get it added 