Tendenci Review

This review is for the self-hosted open source version of Tendenci. They also have hosted offerings, but we have no experience with those. Our experience with Tendenci would likely be very different if we used their hosting, relied on them for customer support, or asked them to do customization. As it is, we did everything internally. We were looking for a low-cost way to adopt an AMS system, and since most of the rest of our tech stack is free and open source, we decided to go with Tendenci. The short version is that it worked adequately for our entry-level needs at the beginning, but we quickly outgrew it and needed to move to a commercial offering with more features and support. The open source version is fairly easy to install, but requires in-house tech resources to deploy, configure, and maintain. Fortunately, we have a tech division with multiple sysadmins and that did not present a major issue for us. Tendenci would be a bad fit for any association without those kind of resources - deployment is more difficult than the average end-user would want to handle. Tendenci has a functional admin interface with many modules similar to what you would see in a commercial AMS - but most of them are clearly light-weight. Don't expect the ability to customize most of them in any meaningful way without substantial developer involvement. Some of the modules, like Forms, Testimonials, or simple Event Registration are adequate for very simple needs. Other ones, like the Invoicing system, are not robust enough to run a large association with. Tendenci would also be a decent choice if you wanted some simple integrated CMS features to get a public-facing web presence off the ground quickly. But if, like us, you have a pre-existing website you plan to use as your CMS, then most of those features are useless, and integration becomes more difficult. Most of our staff users also found the back-end UI a little hard to navigate. Many of the options are presented in long lists with overly-large font-sizes and minimal internal navigation, so it can take a lot of scrolling through lists to find the exact area you're looking for. Since it's open source, you CAN customize anything from the ground up - which is great for a team like ours that is comfortable with that. On the other hand, it leaves you entirely on your own, and we decided that we'd rather spend limited tech resources on other projects. The good news is that if/when you do outgrow Tendenci, it's very easy to get our data out - if you're doing all the hosting yourself, you're a SQL dump away from being able to provide your data to another vendor. Basically, if you're still using Excel spreadsheets or something to do many simple membership functions, Tendenci will be a major improvement. But if you need a robust, complex AMS, the open source version of Tendenci will likely fall short.