Abila starts strong but requires workaround after workaround
We've used Abila NetForum Pro for 3 years now, and it does a serviceable job for the price tag. We pay $3,000 a year for one user licenses, and use it to handle all of our online membership renewals and CRM tasks. We mostly have organizational memberships, and one or two individual memberships. We also needed a one-log-in system, so our members could access our Online Resource Library.
Abila NetForm Pro had the features we needed it and our conversion from Salesforce to Abila went well. We also unlocked the Query Builder Tool and that made our reporting much more functional.
A few things didn't quite work the way we wanted them to. Our business practice is to set up a membership to expire one year from the day it is purchased. Abila defaults to setting up a membership one year from the date that the dues order is created. Since we create dues orders on behalf of our members, the dates are often wrong. The only way to fix this is to cancel and repurchase the membership. This worked for us for a while, but as we started to rely more on the financial reports, we noticed duplicates in the membership numbers, due to the credited members. It's also difficult to tell how long members have been active due to the number of canceled memberships.
Abila integrates with other software like Mailchimp and more, but only through the xWeb API, which costs an additional $1000+ per year for EACH instance. We considered unifying all our systems, but the cost would have been prohibitive.
We recently tried to implement monthly donations using Abila, but the donation amount shows as $180 a month even though it only charges your card for $15 per month.
I really wanted to like Abila, but all of the simple solutions require multiple steps and multiple workarounds. It confuses my members, and now its confusing me. I would not recommend this to others, especially as support has declined in quality over the years.
