Personify Review

We have been on the Personify platform since the very beginning with upgrades every other year for the past several years. It is a very large system, that can be complex if you make decisions that way. The more complex the rules, the more that there are cracks you find in the base system. Even after all these years, there are still a ton of bugs on things you couldn't imagine passing out of their QA environment and into the hands of customers. Not well tested at all at this point in time. However, if you need a system that does it all for an association and does at least 80% of what your needs are, Personify is a good choice. It can save you money compared to cobbling together other niche systems. You will likely be disappointed that the system doesn't do xyz in a particular area like meeting registration, ecommerce, etc. But you can't expect a system like this to compete with specialists when its competing in a generalist field. You can customize a lot and fill those gaps if you need to, but you will pay for it in time and money later during upgrades. Implementations and upgrades are extremely painful. We have to port over customizations and there isn't a really good way to do it efficiently. Its not quite a 1:1 from implementation hours to upgrade hours, but pretty darn close. The technical teams assigned are not well practiced in software development and so expect there to be bad estimates, off schedule, and off-budget. So the fewer the customizations, the smoother your upgrade will go. Since there are bugs in the system, Personify is very slow to react and truly resolve the issues at the core. They do attempt to follow best practices in this area. However, they have failed to solve the vast majority of reported bugs and therefore the best practices only work to inflame its customer base that a fix isn't coming. Often we have experienced that a bug is classified 'By Design' - meaning, they didn't finish off a design or had a flaw in the design and aren't simply willing to claim it as a bug and fix it. We're not talking a new feature, but just making sure that pricing is accurately shown online... Every association is different and needs are different. There are some associations that I've recommended Personify for based on their needs; and other associations where I've not recommended it (too large for what they need). So its a mixed bag. Just know going in that you will need to spend a lot of time managing the vendor, more than you can imagine and set those expectations with your stakeholders appropriately on the 80/20 rule.