Unfortunately bugs can be extremely difficult to find and track, especially in a piece of software as diverse as WHMCS. It's an all in one solution, or as I prefer to call it, a jack of all trades and master of none (more on that in an upcoming post).
It has its problems, but the truth of the matter is that it's the only mature piece of software that has enough community support.
Community support is
crucial when it comes to adding new modules and features. If I asked you to point me to similar software that has the same number of provisioning modules and gateway modules (produced both by the community and by WHMCS directly) as WHMCS, I'd switch away from it immediately. Community support extends past that, too. There's a distinct familiarity that those in the hosting segment have with WHMCS. I remember trying ClientExec when helping a friend and it was a terrible experience.
I think WHMCS has become considerably better in terms of testing its software since being sold to cPanel. I don't remember the last serious security problem that WHMCS had.
Regarding Blesta (tagging @
Licensecart so he can weigh in for a friendly discussion), there are a lot of features that I love, like:
- Admins can opening a support ticket using a predefined response (this is awesome for abuse stuff)
- Great admin area design
- The 'view client' page is awesome
- Beautiful order forms
- Amazing reseller program. Bulk licenses are unimaginably cheap and significantly cheaper than WHMCS
Blesta View client page
Now here's why Blesta isn't quite ready for my use:
- It's a well thought-out product, but it's light on real-life needed features. I want to see more reporting -- and not just billing reporting. It should have all the reports provided by WHMCS, and then some (e.g. ability to view all replies by a single staff member, another thing WHMCS is missing)
- I don't see the ability to log in as the client. This is something that is needed from time-to-time when invoicing gets hairy (although, one would hope it wouldn't if blesta did its job properly)
- Ticketing system would be amazing if it had ticket timers (timers to re-open a ticket) and auto-escalations, some of the more advanced features provided by Kayako. WHMCS vanilla, built-in support is seriously lacking for any growing company that takes its support seriously.
- I would like to see at-a-glance (customizable) stuff in the header like Support Tickets and Pending Orders... it would be great if these could be customized to provide other statistics like average response time and average orders per day
- There is a small community of Blesta users which makes me uncertain about it. Of course, this is one of those "critical mass" things, but the features provided so far are not enough to make me take the plunge.
In my book, it just needs some more time in development. It's a contender, but it needs to have something new to it. That's my two cents.
Naja7host made a private encrypted notes widget.
