HighLevel Review: The Swiss Army Knife for Marketing Agencies

Growing your online agency is hard. You have to manage a lot of different tasks, and it’s difficult to handle all of them on your own.

Plus, you will need to work with many different types of softwares to make your agency run smoothly.

This includes software for creating sales funnels, websites, handling email marketing, CRM, and much more.

That’s where HighLevel comes in.

The HighLevel platform is specifically designed to help you focus on growing your agency and giving you a solid platform to do this with.

With HighLevel, you’ll be able to get more done in less time so that you can focus on growing your agency business.

Here’s what I’m going to cover in this HighLevel review:

• What Is HighLevel?
• Who Is HighLevel For?
• What Are Some Of My Favorite Things About HighLevel?
• What Are The Annoying Things About HighLevel?
• A Look Inside HighLevel
• HighLevel Pricing
• Final Verdict
• HighLevel Pros and Cons

And if you are just here to get my bonuses you can skip to the bottom and click this link to grab my HighLevel Bonuses.

Take the HighLevel 14-Day Free Trial

What Is HighLevel?

HighLevel, founded in 2018, is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform.  Its designed to give agencies and marketers all the tools, resources, and support they need to start and scale a digital marketing agency.

Like any all-in-one platform, the idea is to provide a well-integrated suite of tools that work seamlessly together, without the need to tack on any third-party solutions.

With HighLevel, you’re getting:

• Lead capture tools such as a landing page builder, surveys and forms, calendars, and an inbound dialer.
• Lead nurture tools such as an email autoresponder, Facebook Messenger chatbots, SMS marketing, and automated voicemails.
• Sales tools such as a CRM, checkout and payment forms, appointment schedulers, and in-depth sales analytics.
• Product hosting such as free and paid courses, membership areas, and unlimited video hosting.

Of course, all of these individual tools can be used to build full-featured websites and entire sales funnels, complete with marketing automation to maximize conversions and sales.

Who Is HighLevel For?

HighLevel is an agency-driven platform, and so it’s designed for growing marketing agencies looking to consolidate their tech stack and reduce overheads.

Unlike other all-in-one marketing platforms, HighLevel can be used both for the agency to acquire and manage clients, as well as by the agency to fulfill the needs of their clients.

This messaging is quite different from alternative platforms, even going as far as offering a white-labeling solution which opens up another pathway to generate revenue for your business.

The only caveat is that some of the tools available inside HighLevel are built around local client acquisition, which could be problematic depending on your business model.

In summary, this is for agency owners looking to acquire more customers, retain more of those customers, and scale their business using an inclusive, white-labeled sales and marketing solution.

Take the HighLevel 14-Day Free Trial

What Are Some Of My Favorite Things About HighLevel?

Awesome thing #1: It can be white-labeled

It’s one thing selling your services as an agency, but if you play your cards right, you can also sell the technology that powers those services.

This is possible through the power of white-labeling.  HighLevel allow you to have a branded desktop application if you sign up for the Agency Unlimited plan.

With this account, all you need to do is set up a sub-account for each new client.

This provides three distinct benefits:

1. You can add another source of recurring revenue to your business
2. You can add credibility by providing an agency-branded solution
3. You can give clients the power to make certain changes by themselves

You can even have your own branded mobile app with a custom Zapier zap for an additional fee, should you decide to take white-labeling to the next level.

Awesome thing #2: It has cross-app automation

Intelligent automation is key to scaling an online business.

Fortunately, HighLevel takes full advantage of its wide range of applications by including another application for advanced triggers and automation actions — called Triggers.

The first step is to set your trigger, and this could be anything from submitting a form, clicking a link, or purchasing a particular product.

The list of triggers spans pretty much every application in the HighLevel suite and even extends to third-party platforms like Facebook.

On the “actions” side, you then choose what should happen once that trigger condition has been met. This could be anything from removing a tag, revoking product access, or sending an SMS.

Awesome thing #3: Competitive affiliate program

If repackaging and reselling this platform to clients wasn’t already attractive enough, the ability to make a generous commission on each agency referral is also available here.

Like ClickFunnels and Kartra, HighLevel offers 40% recurring commissions for any agency you send their way, and they also throw in an additional 5% tier-2 commission as well.

From your HighLevel dashboard, you’ll find the relevant affiliate links in your agency account dashboard, under Settings:

Considering the only viable plan for agencies (in my opinion) is the Unlimited plan at $297, you won’t need to get many of these on a recurring basis to make it worth your while.

Take the HighLevel 14-Day Free Trial

What Are The Annoying Things About HighLevel?

Annoying thing #1: It’s very integration-reliant

Most all-in-one platforms don’t require the use of outside tools in order to function, at least not fundamentally.

HighLevel is the exception, as many of its core features are reliant on having active integration with third-party services.

For example, if you want to send emails (of course you do) then you’ll need to connect to an SMTP service like Mailgun because HighLevel only provides the frontend interface.

And if you want to send SMS messages or utilize the calling features, you’ll need to connect a Twilio account because HighLevel only provides the frontend interface for those features too.

While free and low-cost plans are available for connected services, you will need to take the time to configure these services, ensure the integration is working correctly, and monitor your usage to keep everything running smoothly.

Kinda takes the “all” out of “all-in-one”, don’t you think?

Annoying thing #2: Lacks a viable e-commerce solution

High Level is full to the brim when it comes to its range of applications, but it is missing one feature worth pointing out; e-commerce stores.

If you’re looking to move your Shopify or WooCommerce store over, are looking to build a new store, or plan to offer e-commerce as a service, HighLevel doesn’t currently allow you to do it.

To be clear, this relates to physical products with multi-product checkouts (like Amazon or Walmart). You can still sell single items and digital products using a funnel-based system.

A Look Inside HighLevel

Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns are essentially automation sequences.

These sequences are made up of ‘Events’ with each Event containing a specific action that fires automatically after the last.

To start a new campaign, go to Marketing > Campaigns and begin adding your events:

An Event can be any type of communication supported by the platform, such as SMS messages, Facebook Messenger messages, emails, and even voicemails.

You can also use webhooks to trigger a third-party service if the preferred option isn’t listed here, but that’s for more advanced use-cases.

Choosing an Event will open the editor for that Event in a popup, allowing you to craft your message right away without having to leave the sequence — which is a UX touch I’ve come to appreciate.

This editor is relatively simple but has everything you could need.

For example, the SMS message editor has a subject field, message field, live preview, time settings, and test send features. You can also add personalization through the text editor.

Of course, you can (and probably should) mix-and-match the different Event types so you’re not stuck with just SMS messaging or just email.

The idea to keep adding as many of these Events as is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the sequence, whether it be to close a sale, onboard a new client, or fulfill orders.

You have full control over the pacing of the sequence using ‘Wait’ events, and you even get a snapshot of how the sequence will play out. I particularly like how you can drag to reorder events — another nice UX touch.

With your Marketing Campaign sequences built, how do you actually trigger them?

The first way is to use the advanced Trigger features discussed at the beginning of this review, and you can also create simple trigger links from the Marketing tab itself:

You can then embed these links into email and SMS campaigns to automatically trigger the relevant sequence when clicked (again, the rules for these triggers are handled in the Triggers menu).

Funnel & Website Builder

Funnels are your bread and butter when it comes to selling online.

When you go to set up your first HighLevel funnel, you will be able to select from various industry-related templates.

These are not just page templates but also funnel templates with several steps already laid out for you. If the template designs don’t appeal then you can always start from scratch.

Regardless of which way you go, the funnel building process is largely the same. The interface will give you a checklist of your funnel steps with the ability to add new steps and edit the relevant pages.

Editing a page opens the drag and drop editor, and if you’re anything like me then you’ve seen enough of these things to last a lifetime.

Thankfully, I found this to be one of the better page editors/builders. It’s fast, settings are where you expect them to be, and it actually has a very ClickFunnels feel to it overall.

Like any good page builder, you can add new sections, columns, or rows, add new elements, position elements, and configure the appearance of elements through the sidebar panel.

There’s also a ton of useful settings for global styling, SEO data, custom CSS, tracking codes, and responsive editing.

Going back to the funnel-building aspect, the editor allows you to switch between the different steps of your funnel, as well as applying button actions to jump to the next step in your funnel.

You can even apply other actions like click to call, click to SMS, open a popup, or send to an upsell/downsell page by selecting one of your existing products.

The Website Builder is almost identical in its setup process, even down to the template selection which spans various industries.

Strangely, each industry only featured a single template design which made the folder system unnecessary, but I can only assume they plan to scale this up in the near future.

What I found really helpful, however, was that these templates come with a series of pre-built pages using the same design aesthetic, including the home page, about page, and contact page.

Each of these pages is then linked using a navigation element (which is already set up) and can be edited using the familiar funnel editor.

The biggest drawback of using this platform for building websites is that it still lacks a blogging component, making it impossible to use with clients who absolutely need a blog on their website.

I did also find a few rough edges like the naming conventions of pre-built pages (shown below), but overall the funnel and website building aspect of HighLevel is very well executed.

Reporting & Analytics

On the reporting side, HighLevel works in much the same way as most platforms these days.

As usual, you’ve got your main dashboard area with an overview of all the different applications, including new opportunities, conversion rates, funnel statistics, tasks, and more.

Each of these boxes has controls for adjusting the time period, as well as the ability to change the individual campaigns.

Of course, many of the individual applications have their own analytics with more in-depth reporting, such as the website builder showing page views and opt-ins for each of the pages on your website.

A similar reporting dashboard is available for funnels, so you can see exactly which steps are working and which steps are causing leads to drop off.

Another example is the Marketing Campaign statistics, which give you a clear breakdown of how your automation sequences are performing overall, including how many prospects are active vs completed, and how many of those engaged.

And let’s not forget about third-party data such as Facebook advertising, though you will need to integrate your account in advance for this to work.

Here’s an example of how that looks using sample data:

I should also mention that all this is available for client sub-accounts as well, so your customers can get real-time reporting on their project without having to chase you up every week.

Overall, HighLevel doesn’t have the most advanced reporting but it provides good coverage of the individual applications and will be more than enough data for most agency requirements.

Other Apps

There’s a ton of other applications and features I haven’t covered in this review, but for the sake of my own sanity, I’ll just give a quick rundown of what else is on offer here:

Memberships allows you to create your own e-learning environment and sell it as a product within your funnels. It’s still relatively basic as far as membership platforms with limited design options. But it does work as advertised.

Forms & Surveys allows you to custom-build and embed your forms and surveys into the pages you design, including traditional website pages (like contact pages) as well as funnel pages for lead capture (like opt-in pages).

Calendars & Appointments allow you to manage your schedule on a web-based calendar, right inside your HighLevel account. You can also have prospects submit booking requests on the frontend and manage everything on the backend.

The Built-in CRM allows you to manage contacts and leads, store and view relevant data or activity, and use this data as part of automation sequences. You can also use the Conversations feature for real-time chat data.

Reputations allow you to manage your online reviews by integrating Google My Business and Facebook reviews, including monitoring new review requests and handling responses.

Take the HighLevel 14-Day Free Trial

HighLevel Pricing

High Level has two different pricing plans.  Agency Starter is $97 a month and includes all the features we’ve talked about in this review.  Then there’s the Agency Unlimited account for $297 a month.

For the extra cost, you also can create unlimited sub-accounts, and you’ll get access to the branded desktop app.  This lets you use your own domain and customize the look and feel of the platform.

When you sign up, you will automatically be enrolled in a 14 day free trial of the platform.

Final Verdict

If you are running an agency, you should seriously consider HighLevel. It really does give you everything you need to help your agency thrive.

It can replace tools like ClickFunnels (for landing pages/funnels) and HubSpot (for CRM).

This will help you reduce your costs, yet still gives you a viable tech stack to grow with.

It’s also simple to set up, and even a non-technical person can get up and running easily.

Give it a shot.  I think you will like it.

Take the HighLevel 14-Day Free Trial

HighLevel Pros

• Fast and intuitive funnel/website builder
• Supports 1-click upsells/downsells
• Basic course/membership area builder
• Built-in prospecting tool (Opportunities)
• Ability to build forms and surveys
• Ability to take bookings (with calendars)
• Full CRM and lead management
• Calling and SMS features (Twilio)
• Integrated Facebook Ads management
• Review management portal
• Account snapshots for quick account setup
• Automation/email sequences (Campaigns)
• Good coverage of reporting across apps
• White labeling for additional revenue
• Attractive affiliate program

HighLevel Cons

• Poor account setup/onboarding process
• A little too reliant on integrations
• No built-in e-commerce solution
• Only one website template per industry
• No PayPal integration