GrooveFunnels Review Summary;
GrooveFunnels is a new 'all-in-one' platform that has been created and marketed by the same guy behind Kartra (another all-in-one platform) and a few others. It promises
Pricing
There is a free tier, but it's hard to tell if the lifetime access is actually worth it.
Ease of USe
It is fairly easy to navigate around the platform. Though some of the UI is not easy to understand (tabs changing from affiliate to vendor without much of a reason)
Functionality
Potentially this could end up having a lot of functionaility.
Maybe.
Support
Not needing to reach out to support, I can't comment first hand. But a few users have complained of long wait times, others have said it's fairly quick. They can have the benefit of the doubt here.
GrooveFunnels 'base' is free, but limited. You can upgrade to 'partner' for a limited time for $1397 one time fee (or take 3 of the different payments plans provided)
GrooveFunnels, a word I have seen on social media recently, more than I have seen the phrase 'education is a scam'..and that's saying something. With marketing campaigns done by new affiliate markters, promising high ticket sales and easy access to a hot new funnel builder than will of course 'kill ClickFunnels', this all-in-one has been everywhere.
I have owned a copy of GrooveFunnels since it first launched, had a snoop around and then forget about it, mainly because I was too busy writing the Systeme.io review and the DropFunnels review, but as they seem to be getting closer to being out of the 'BETA' program, possibly, I decided it was finally time to do a GrooveFunnels review.
What Is GrooveFunnels?
I think the easiest way to describe platforms like this, is an 'all-in-one' style, where by a marketer can simply own one platform, and it will contain everything you need to run your business (maybe), be it a marketing business, eCommerce business or something else within that particular realm.
For example platforms such as BuilderAll contain funnel builders, eCommerce cart plugis, website and blog builders and even email responders, and GrooveFunnels looks to be very much the same.
They are usually marketed and sold as the platform that means you can throw every other tool, platform or product you own away, or at least stop paying for them, with varying degrees of 'cost saved' attached too that claim.
GrooveFunnels is no exception, and the timeline for full launch looks to include everything you may normally see such as funnel builders, blog or website creators, video hosting, email & autoresponder capabilities and of course the ability to sell your own products (including running your own affiliate program for those products).
The timeline and the rate that all these different products, tools and 'features' that are meant to be appearing looks to finish in the second half of 2020 (potentially around 2 months after this review was written) so there will be a few unknowns within this GrooveFunnels review until I can get my hands on those aspects that are not finished.
What Does GrooveFunnels Include?
Due to the way GrooveFunnels is launching itself, and of course how the 4 different level of membership or access works, I will first run through the features that everyone gets access too, ending with ones that exist, but only 'lifetime' members can get, and then also checkout what might be coming in late 2020, in it's own seperate section.
As you will see from the next few sectios, GrooveFunnels does include a lot of things, but does the phrase 'jack of all trades, master of none' come into play with GrooveFunnels, or have they actually taken the time to polish out each tool before releasing.
I guess we will find out.
GroovePages
The first on our list is GroovePages, named because it's within GrooveFunnels and it focused on websites? I have no real clue to be honest, I feel they should have called the whole platform something else, but hey, what do I know about creating complex and huge all-in-ones.
So GroovePages is actually the funnel builder/landing page designer, and honestly, I hate it.
The designer, or the editor, depending on what you call it, is ok. Like, nothing ground breaking, you drag a few elements onto a page and it appears, or you click on an element on the page and you can change the text, or the image.
But everything feels so janky..and slow. Clicking on elements to edit them after placing them on there will close the left hand element bar, and open a right hand 'configuration' panel, it stutters doing it.
The other thing that GrooveFunnels is big on, are 'Blocks', these are prebuilt, or shall I say pre designed elements such as call to actions, headers, alerts etc. These are designed to allow you to simply find a block and throw it on a page, and oddly enough, they do work, you can kind of build a page using those blocks and make something that looks half decent, fairly quickly.
My biggest problem with them, they are just uninspiring, a huge majority of them (aside from the covers) are just different colours, and if you are new to Funnels or landing pages, you are probably going to struggle to throw enough blocks together to really give you that edge.
Another feature that GrooveFunnels provides within GroovePages, are page templates. Designed to allow you to get a ready built page, that you can install onto your page and tweak a few images or colours and happy days you have a sexy page to make you millions.
If you are a free, or 'lite' use, then you get access to 3 home pages and 1 upsell. No thank you pages, download pages or pages used to funnel someone off to the membership site or something. Just some super generic home page layouts, and an upsell.
That's cool, I appreciate that the cool stuff should be there for paying customers, but even the premium ones are simply a bunch of home pages, with a seemingly random selection of thank you pages, and a sprinkling of eCommerce pages.
There is zero grouping with these pages. One random home screen is thrown next to a different optin page or a completely different upsell page and then of course another different style thank you page.
Usually the point of using templates is to get pretty much a full funnel (or as much as possible) with your optin page/home page, upsell, thank you /download pages all looking the same, feeling the same and ultimately giving a customer the feeling they haven't gone off to a different website because the fonts have all changed or the layout and icons are completelty different.
I like it, but, I feel it's clunky, if this was my funnel builder, I wouldn't want to pay $99 per month for it. Especially if I was new to funnel builder and relied on templates or set features quite a bit.
GrooveSell
This would probably be called 'products' or something similar in other tools, but this does go a bit beyond your normal 'product' creation. So on platforms such as ClickFunnels or DropFunnels, the standard costing is put in place, if you then sell another product within the funnel then this would simply be added as a seperate product and the pricing etc is held there.
GrooveSell does that a little different, and for me this is where the confusing between GroovePages and GrooveSell come into play. As you can link to a GrooveSell funnel from GroovePages, by linking in thank you pages etc.
There are 11 steps in total, taking you from the basic information of the product, to payment gateways, all the way to how you will deliver the product and of course adding the affiliates section in.
For me, this seems like a really long way to add your products onto a funnel that you have on a different page. If GrooveSell and GroovePages merged together, then that would make a lot more sense.
I would also add that a lot of the sections also have 'coming soon' sections, such as the Checkouts, Oayment Gateways, order bumps and fufillment sections all have 'coming soon' on all or some of the options.
If you are selling products, you are going to have to run your cart or provide access a different way, which personally renders GrooveSell useless, it's not an all in one product if it doesn't actually allow you to host the products or eBooks in the 'all-in-one'.
I appreciate it's still in BETA, though on July 1st GrooveSell should have come out of BETA, which means you would expect these types of thigs to be finished.
GrooveAffiliate
Quite a few platforms now have their own affiliate marketplace, Kartra (the platfrom that Mike Filsaime created before GrooveFunnels) also had their own marketplace that allows you to find products or services that are sold via Kartra.
GrooveAffiliate is no different (except the marketplace doesn't exist), it's an area to promote both GrooveFunnels and other products (when they arrive).
You can also run your own campaigns through here, checking how the different product funnels are going (it hooks you into GrooveSell, well it's actually GrooveSell, but hey.)
At least you can promote GrooveFunnels this way.
GrooveKart
I'm not even sure GrooveKart belongs in this review, as it was a stand alone product before the rest of the GrooveFunnels family existed (or least possibly existed...coming late July). The reason I am adding it in, is because they do say you get this but only if you sign up for the 'life-time' member account.
I would say that GrooveKart is your Shopify equivalent, it was created to allow people to easily run DropShipping stores, or even Print-On-Demand websites, without having to own or run Shopify.
It's marketed as a 'cheaper' alternative to Shopify, mainly because they don't charge transaction fees ontop of your hosting fee. Which is fair enough, they charge just a single upfront monthly cost ($99), that just happens to be 4x more expensive than Shopify's cheapest plan. Unless you pay for a whole year of fees up front, which most DropShipping or PoD owners won't because the market and success rate is so volotile.
I will admit if you are a store that is selling say 500 - 1000+ products a month then you will actually be paying more to Shopify, especially if we say you did 1000 products, each at $10, you will actually spend $200 a month on fees that Shopify charge if you don't use Shopify's own payment provider.
GrooveKart don't do that, so after a certain point, you will break even. Though if you use GroovePay you will need to pay $40 per month to use them and then pay 2.85% transaction fee.
GrooveKart really is just a bit of a bonus, so if you are running a DropShipping store (which you might be) and you want an affiliate side, or the ability to payout affiliates for sending people your way, then GrooveKart + GrooveFunnels lifetime membership really does make sense from a financial point of view. As long as you really can integrate the newer GrooveAffiliate stuff with it.
One problem you may face is that it's all inhouse, with themes or layouts being deterined by the prebuilt ones shown, or what you can create yourself using their platform.
You of course do get access to apps that Shopify developers will charge you for, one of the arguements I make in favour of AliDropShip.
Well, that's the end of stuff that is currently avaiable from what I can tell, the next section is all about future 'hopefuls'.
What Will GrooveFunnels Include After BETA Or Full Release?
I will point out, I had orginally had GrooveVideo, GrooveMember & GrooveMail inside of the 'current release' section above, because GrooveFunnels themselves have a section in the back office that says 'Future GrooveFunnels' and they where not in it.
But after actually looking at the different tabs, they all just had 'coming July' with a notification to upgrade,without really explaining if they where ready (I am writing this in what I would call the second half of July) or if they where delayed.
GrooveVideo
I really couldn't find much information about this section, with the 'sneak peek' video being a 12 second long clip of some settings.
Inspiring
Insightful
Take my cash.
FML.. seriously guys.
From the information I can get from the splash page, and having a dig around on the web, it seems to be a content locker style video player, essentially allowing you to lock videos behind social sharing or optin forms, as well as embedding it into a 'video player' that fits in with your website.
Cracking.
Next.
GrooveMember
If you hadn't guessed it by the name that this is GrooveFunnels membership site creator. It will use the same site builder as GroovePages, but incorperate the membership element into it.
With the ability to run both free and paid access levels, drip feed content over time, give content based on timelines and tags or simply throw it at someone all at once.
Again, without much to go on, other than a 30 second video that simply shows the same step by step system you get with GrooveSell, it's difficult to say how it will fully look and feel.
But using GrooveSell as the example, the feeling is that certain URLS or sections or you link it to product sales that then unlock other URLS.
GrooveMail
A feature that I thought was actually complete, but seems I was wrong, GrooveMail is GrooveFunnels inhouse autoresponder and email list handler.
Designed to let you run your email campaigns for products, abandoned carts, and of course follow up on potential leads for free lead magnets. GrooveMail also looks to include text and voice broadcasting, which could be an interesting way, especially as text and voice can be quite a cheap and effective way to do marketing.
I will say that everything sounds quite good, once I get a view of the builder or the list creator I will look at updating this, especially as having looked at other platforms and their effort, I was massively let down, but this sounds promising.
GrooveBlog
This is the first of the proper 'coming later this year' features. GrooveBlog is yet another Wix wannabe. Designed to replace WordPress, the daddy of all blogging websites.
With promises of an SEO focused page builder and the ability to plug into GrooveCRM and the GroovePages funnels. This may be something can could work IF you run blogs, as well as use proper funnels to sell products.
The problem is, and something I have said a few times, I rarely know people who require both a blog builder & a proper funnel, most bloggers rarely sell their own products, courses or run their own affiliate promos.
Even affiliate marketers will usually pick one traffic method, either paid ads (using funnels) or SEO (usig blogs) and they rarely mix and match. Now bloggers will want to create landing pages, or potential lead pages, with a thank you page on the side, but you don't need a full funnel builder to do that.
A one off purchase of something like Thrive Architect will work perfectly well, plus WordPress can be loaded onto any host, with hundreds of apps available to use (usually for free) to cover pretty much any possible problem you may face.
GrooveDesk
Next up on the list is another feature, or tool shall I say if you are running a proper business. Something that requires you to run live agents, or support teams.
It has been designed to provide your customers a place to ask for help, chat with agents, read articles and of course for you to understand how they are doing.
Probably quite useful if you are a larger organisation or business that requires support staff and agents.
GrooveCalender
Possibly one that could be useful for most markets, though it looks to be focused on the consulting and coaching niches,. GrooveCalender will allow you to run meetings, have recurring meetings set up and potentially sell slots.
Might be interesting to see what happens with this.
GrooveSurvey
Technically this will appear in 2021, so let's not hold our breath.
GrooveSurvey is, oh damn you guessed it a survey and quizz creator. Great for lead generation and even viral campaigns, quizzes can boost engagement and help you understand a lot about your customers.
As with GrooveCalender, lets see what happens when it drops, next year.
GrooveWebinar
The final one on this list, as with some of the others simply has a 'coming later this year' tag on it, is GrooveWebinar. A mix between GoToMeeting, Zoom and basically any 'Webinar' program that people like to use to sell your courses and platforms.
This doesn't look to be any different, create yourself a sexy looking webinar page, schedule yourself a webinar (with GrooveCalender I guess), add a password and send a link.
Who Is GrooveFunnels For?
Honestly, I don't know. It's such a mix of tools and features, that it could be for vendors who want to sell their courses or training. It could be marketers who want to build nifty landing pages or run ad campaigns to capture pages and do some cool follow up later.
Or it could just be someone who wants to replace their invidual tools with a single platform that may do everything you need in one place.
At the moment it feels like its for Affiliate Marketers to sell to Affiliate Marketers, so that they can get 40% commission on a $1397 product, with the ability to then sell that same product to others.
And a lot of the marketing (at least from affiliates) have centred around that fact, you have the ability to make $500 or so by marketing this 'free' BETA platform.
What Does GrooveFunnels Cost?
This is the confusing part, because technically there are 5 seperate tiers or ways to chop the payment amount up.
Currently, you have;
- Base - Free
- Silver - $99 Per Month
- Gold - $199 Per Month
- Lifetime Access - $1397 (or a variety of other payment plans that turn that cost to around $1500 - $2000)
- Just GrooveKart - $99 Per Month
And they all come with strange little *s dotted everywhere to try and explain what you get and what you don't get.
Base Free
So, with the Free version of GrooveFunnels, you get access to
- GrooveSell
- GrooveAffiliate
- GroovePages (Lite)
- 20% Commission Affiliate Program
You can also hook in your own email responder to let you replace GrooveMail. If you are wondering what GroovePages lite is, you essentially get 3 funnels and that's it.
Silver
So you get access to the same stuff as the base, but then they also give you;
- GroovePages Pro (Unlimited I believe)
- GrooveMail
- GrooveVideo
- The Ability to use GrooveMail to email people (Great...?)
But, you can't actually buy this option. Instead you get taken to the lifetime deal that I will talk about in a second. This section is mearly there to tell you 'what the pricing may be in the future'..
Gold
Again, you get access to the same as Silver level, but with the added benefits of;
- GrooveBlog
- GrooveDesk
- GrooveCalendar
- GrooveSurvey
- GrooveQuiz
Interestingly you don't get access to the GooveWebinar Live or Automated.. whatever that means in practise, who knows.
Again, there is no option to start paying this amount, you simply get told that once BETA closes this WILL be the amount you pay per month for this tier.
Lifetime Access
So this was meant to have 'stopped' on July 1st, from what I can see on the page, it's currently the 18th July, this offer is still there.
Lifetime Access is the ability to buy into the BETA program, locking in a 1 time price, with a few perks thrown in to sweeten the deal, which seems a bit silly..as this is literally the only deal you can buy.
So, what does Groove Lifetime Access give you. It of course gives you everything you found in Gold, but then they throw in the following;
- GrooveMember
- GrooveKart (Instant Access - Which remember is $99p/m or $497 per year)
- GrooveWebinars (Live & Automated)
- GroovePages For Shopify (The thing they are trying to stop you from using because you get GrooveKart)
- A bump from 20% to 40% commission for sales
- The ability to earn 10% on 2nd tier sales (if someone you bought into GrooveFunnels purchases you get 10% of that sale)
- The ability to add your affiliate link as a badge onto your own pages with the ability to earn 20% if they sign up, by through that page, not through your link? I dunno that just confused me. Why offer 40% and then reduce it to 20% if they simply click a badge not a direct link.
To get access too all of this, is $1397 if you decide to pay it straight off, giving you a saving of 35% and of course lifetime access.
Or you can choose the $0 today, get 14 days access (like a trial?) and then $497 for 3 months. You can also do $288 for 6 months... or $188 for 12 months.
More payment plans than a car sales rep.
At the time of writing, this is actually the only option you have, so if you didn't need half the stuff, then tough, you can only get it by either paying x4 more per month than you wanted, or at least 2x more than you wanted and for at least 12 months.
Considering the lifetime value of most ClickFunnels users is around $200 - $400 (can be much higher in certain niches or for certain customers) and most stikc around for only a few months, I don't see someone wanting to spend 12 months on this platform, when it's still only half built.
Is GrooveFunnels Really Free?
Yes, as long as you only want to sell your own products using their 'funnel' system or want to create simple optin pages, landing pages or possibly thank you pages.
Beyond that, currently you have to pay $1397 minimum to get access too the rest.
Is GrooveFunnels The Right Platform For You?
This takes me back to the 'Who Is GrooveFunnels For' question, and one that I'm not even sure they know who this platform is for.
If you are someone that does use a vareity of different tools, you do pay $97 per month for ClickFunnels, you pay another $40 for an Autoresponder and you potentially sell products, then sure, you could probably save some money on this, but you potentially would be taking a risk that GrooveFunnels actually finish the stuff off on their list or that you will like what they do, or it works.
What I Liked About GrooveFunnels
I found that navigating around the platform seemed easy enough, the GrooveSell section is confusing, as the 'affiliate/vendor' button is the same button, or tab depending on how you look at it, but it's just not that obvious.
Even though GrooveSell took 11 steps to just create even the most simplest of products, you at least know it's robust and they have thought about every step, which I guess is a plus.
The editor was ok, though it felt a little clunky at times and had some serious lag issues when it came to clicking between objects or frames. I wouldn't ring my parents up and tell them it's the best page editor I had ever used..but yeah, it's ok.
The premium pages did look quite well built, from what I could see.
I was impressed with the number of tools and features that they had, or possibly aiming for, considering 90% of them are either in BETA or have a schedule date between 'July' and 'sometime next year'.
The free/base tier does give you access to a simple funnel builder, and if people don't have the money to pay for DropFunnels, ClickFunnels or something like Thrive Architect then that's a nice bonus.
What I Didn’t Like About GrooveFunnels
Honestly, quite a lot.
Nothing on GrooveFunnels felt finished or polished. They are meant to be out of the first round of BETA, with things like GroovePages and GrooveSell being released, but there are so many 'coming soon' buttons or tabs and even more places that simply say 'releasing July' with a big button to go pay some money to maybe? see it.
There where no real indications what the features would be, aside from 10 - 30 second clips that if you blinked you missed whatever screenshot they where showing you. And yeah, they weren't videos, they where screenshots. 15 screenshots showing you what something might look like.
With so many place holders, or calls to action pushing you to sign up to BETA, without really telling you why, or giving you a real indication about what you are purchasing, I was getting pretty pissed off by the 6th tab.
GrooveMail had the longest video at 1minute long, again all screenshots.
That page, which is meant to be a sales page designed to encourage you to sign up..show's nothing. If you want me to part with $1400, I want to actually see something working. I don't just want to see screenshots of some filtering, or tagging.
BuilderAll claim that MailBoss is amazing and easy to use.. understanding the base code of Runescape and RuneScript is easier than trying to send an email with that awful responder. Proove to me that GrooveMail is easier and nicer to send emails and maybe I will considering turning off whatever email provider I picked up this month for $15.
I get the feeling that the 'Free' base tier was created in a way to get people to simply get the 'coming soon' pages on as many eyes as possible and to build up some hype around a product and platform that isn't finished.
There are still a fair number of bugs and feature requests for the team to go through, and that's only on the tools they have released. Fair play to them though, they have fixeds over 800 bugs on GroovePages alone, which is impressive.
The GrooveFunnels Review Conclusion
I'm torn, I on one hand want to believe that this could be the all-in-one platform that someone somewhere is crying out for, with the ability to ditch their email responder and funnel builder, possibly their blog and be able to move it all on to one single place, saving $$$'s per month.
But on the other hand, I'm not sure it's polished or even remotely near finished enough to warrant someone to throw cash at you, when they have no clue what the finished product may or may not look like. Opening up lower tiers so say $20 per month with access to X features or $40 per month to increase that to XY features feels like a better way of doing this.
Doing what BuilderAll did when they first launched, super low pricing each month, which would lock in place until you cancelled, and then would rise to the new pricing tier say 6 months later, or would rise the real price on launch.
Asking people to pay $1397 straight away, or lock them in at $188 per month while you finish building your platform, without giving much of an indication what is going on, or the progression (at least from what I could see) feels a bit, off.
At some point, I will probably come back to this review once more features drop, when more time has been had playing around with the other tools, for now.
I would say grabbing the free version is worth it, it's free, you get access to a simple funnel builder and you can also market some of your own products. Which could be super useful for a first time vendor looking to get into the market.
GrooveFunnels
The Base Tier Is Free (Or Pay $1397 for lifetime access)Pros
- You Do Get Access To Some Cool Stuff For Free
- There Is A Free Tier
- You Can Hookup Other Emails Providers (Which Are Better)
- If You Are New, And On A Tight Budget, This Could Help
Cons
- It's Buggy As Hell
- Some Aspects Get Turned Off/Updated Randomly
- You Have To Pay For Lifetime Membership For A Product That May Never Fully Launch
- You Can Lose Access To Features If You Don't Get Lifetime (I.e Fake Scarcity)
I started this blog around 2017, after realising that I wanted to let people know about all the different ways someone could make money online. From DropShipping, Affiliate Marketing, Network Marketing and more.
This blog has now grown to review and explain a variety of different tools and platforms, in the bid to help you.
This blog contains affiliate links, and I will get a commission for purchases made through these links. It doesn’t change anything for you and will on occasion save you money! Enjoy, James.
Not too sure about it