Invision Community ClassicReviews of invisioncommunity.com

Best software. Best Team and Support. IPS - Name you can trust!

I've been using Invision software since 2001. It's flexible and has quite a few features. The support staff is first class. I gave this a 4-star rating due to the fact of some changes made from v4 to v5. Some features that my users and I liked were changed and/or removed, however; I still prefer Invision over any other forums software that I tried and used over the years. It would have received 5 stars were it not for the recent changes.

Quite surprised to see such negative reviews for Invision Community. As a Cloud client for almost 2 years now, self hosted (now Classic) for maybe 10 years prior. I could not be happier with the software, pricing and support. Matt and his team (special mention for Marc) respond quickly and professionally to any rare issues and I would not hesitate to recommend their Cloud offerings to any new or existing community owner. With the latest release of 5, it could not be easier to create your community with drag and drop page builders, a new theme creator by the Wizard that is Ehren. The awful and negative reviews below are quite frankly absurd.

Heed the reviews on this page. The switching costs for this type of software are high. Don't get stuck with this company. The software itself is outdated and confusing. I still have no idea how to navigate the backend. (When I complained about this to Invision, they said I needed to give it time.) They don't care about their customers. If you raise a concern or issue, they tell you why they're right and you're wrong. Excellent customer service. There are so many options out there. Find one that values your business and cares about making a decent product.

Mediocre software at best, atrocious customer service, and absurd pricing for something that costed far, far less years ago, yet it does the same exact concept. They seem to think their bogus features and ugly designs are worth thousands. Yeah, sure. Don't recommend and stay as far away from these bums as possible because they'll rob you in a heartbeat then just ban you once you disagree.

Do not get involved with this company. They are money-grubbers and goal post shifters. I have had 2 licenses for the full suite for over 10 years. They used to be great, but now you just can't trust them at all. Support is rude and as others have said they no no longer even allow those whose support licenses have lapsed to even post on their forum. Such a pity that their greed has overtaken their souls. EDIT after IPS reply: I started my online community in 2006 with free open source software. As the community grew I had to find better software to manage it. That software turned out to be IPS (now Invision Community). As Matt mentions in his response below, I have been using this software since 2011. When I was using version 3 I spent an inordinate number of hours building customised templates for camera lens reviews that were always available for free to all members. When version 4 came out I discovered that ALL my work had pretty much been destroyed and that I would have to start again. Lesson learned. Don't trust software "developers". They are not in it for your benefit, they only want to benefit themselves. Since being on version 4 I have seen IPS destroy the 3rd party developer marketplace, which contained templates, themes and plugins that I had paid for but which can no longer be updated. This essentially scorches my community user experience because small things we have come to love will no longer be possible to use. People who complained about this were shut down and censored on the Invision Community forum. That is a fact and I challenge IPS to deny this. For me the last straw now is that because I have elected to not pay for the support on my self-hosted licenses (2 of them) I am not allowed to even post on the community support forums. And this is just absurd. The reason why I have decided to not renew is that they have also changed the licensing of the self hosted products to an annual fee of $200 - you have no option but to accept their new T&C's if you don't want to pay that fee. This is a ridiculous amount of money and cannot be justified in any way, because the software is STILL THE SAME thing it was 10 years ago. It doesn't do anything different. Sure, they may have added some features and glitzed it up a bit but it doesn't do anything different to what it did when v4 first came out. It is a forum, gallery and blog with a very limited content management system attached. It can also act as a paywall with extremely limited payment gateway options (because who in their right mind would develop a gateway for a company with such fickle attitudes to 3rd party devs?). This product does not justify a $200 annual fee. Not in the slightest. What has truly broken the camel's back for me is that I cannot believe the amount of bot sign-ups I am receiving since allowing the support to lapse. Try as you will your registration net cannot filter these out, or even delete their un-verified accounts from the queue automatically (a supposed feature of the software I paid for) unless you pay the $200 to IPS. How do they do that? I strongly suspect that as soon as your support license lapses they sell your details to some nefarious organisation and give them the instructions on how to bypass the reCaptcha option for signups. No, sorry. IPS are the equivalent of the mafia when it comes to community software. I cannot believe how far they have rolled from the tree of usefulness. 2ND REPLY "As part of the license cost/renewal, you get our cloud based spambot registration filtering. Once your purchase period ends, then you will no longer have access to this paid service. " Thank you for confirming that. Funny how none of the dozens of WordPress websites I have designed and manage for customers has this same issue of spambot registrations bypassing reCaptcha. 3rd Reply: Since writing this review I have private messaged Jeff to give more reasons why I have written this review (which has nothing to do with their v5 product at all). My message was not well received and I was given a warning on their system for daring to give them a piece of my mind via private message. Well, it's pretty obvious that IPS are not the company they used to be and it reinforces my statement above that you should not get involved with them if you are planning to start an online community. Do I have any good things to say about the current IPS? Unfortunately no. They do not understand their purpose in the world of internet communications and seem to be under the delusion that they decide what's important and what isn't to the people who have actually created the online communities that they provide software for, i.e. their customers. When you start to dictate to your customers you should know that we won't be by your side forever. I would rather spend the $200 on a Xenforo license right now than pad the already fat IPS wallets

Ich hatte in der Vergangenheit IPS (Cloud-Lösung) für ein geplantes Projekt herangezogen. Allerdings wurde das Projekt bezüglich dem vorhandenen Budget (<2'500 USD) mit einer Lösung aus dem Mitbewerb umgesetzt. Grundsätzlich hatte ich mit IPS nur positive Erfahrungen gemacht (Geschwindigkeit // Usabillity & Optik. Der Support hatte immer zeitnah reagiert und für den DACH-Sprachraum gibt es - noch heute - eine grosse Community (Übersetzungsarbeiten // zahlreichen Add-on's usw.). Besonders gefallen hatte mir die Funktion "Pages", eine eigentliche CMS Funktion, was IPS zum umfassenden Framework macht. Einziger "Wermutstropfen" war der Preis (Cloud-Version). Viele ergänzende und tolle/spannende Funktionen sind ausschliesslich in höheren Ausprägungen (Versionen) enthalten, was für ein kleines Forum am Start fast unbezahlbar bleibt. Grundsätzlich kann ich IPS für grössere Projekte und einem soliden Budget gerne weiterempfehlen (weiterhin auch als Self-Hosting Anwendung erhältlich).

This company is a complete disaster, prices have skyrocketed several times recently! In a time when forums are collapsing! On top of that, their cloud service keeps experiencing outages! If you don't know how to do something, don't get into it! Not to mention, all negative and critical opinions about IPS on their forum are being deleted... At least here you can see from other people's reviews how pathetic this company is. I have a feeling that in a few years this company will be gone with such practices and astronomical prices. There are plenty of cheaper and less unreliable cloud solutions.