Is there anything better than WHMCS?

niceboy

Tried whmcs, blesta and clientexec. Whmcs is a clear winner and both the remaining are far behind.

mgcAna

Hostbill is good but they want to do everything for it themselves, all plugin or features. They have really lots of plugins and 99% times what you need already there but if its not there, forget about it.

thecreator_

@niceboy said:
Tried whmcs, blesta and clientexec. Whmcs is a clear winner and both the remaining are far behind.

I think so too. Thanks for your response.

@mgcAna said:
Hostbill is good but they want to do everything for it themselves, all plugin or features. They have really lots of plugins and 99% times what you need already there but if its not there, forget about it.

Hostbill is like a closed box. That makes it safer, but I don't know how I'm going to run into it. I think I'll start with WHMCS and maybe switch to hostbill if I have a chance to review it later.

chiccorosso

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PulsedMedia

@crunchbits said:

@thecreator_ said:
WHMCS is very expensive now, but I think it's still the best. Other alternative automations lack too many modules and I have concerns about reliability.

As far as I can see, hostbill is the only and biggest competitor of WHMCS, but hostbill is also expensive and support is paid.

Is there an automation you can recommend and experience?
(I never prefer to use warez software. Also, I never buy anything from companies that use warez software.)

Have used Blesta, WHMCS, and HostBill in live/production environments. They all sort of have their quirks and their roles.

Blesta is by far the least expensive, functions very well/stable, but the most limited in features/plugins and 'maturity' of said plugins. We very quickly ran into tons of headaches and needed manual intervention--most of which were somewhat niche case but still existed. All of the comparable plugins for different backend/management software we used either didn't exist or were comparably very immature.

WHMCS you probably are familiar with already. It works well, it has the most mature plugins and widest variety, and it isn't really that expensive for what you get (though it isn't "cheap", either). We were able to automate so much more of our backend tasks that I saved a lot of labor for myself & my team on menial tasks and made the end customer experience a lot smoother/faster. Most of the plugins/services you need start here and expand to other billing platforms after.

HostBill was excellent. It's a bigger up front one-time cost but I actually preferred that method. It ran well, it was smooth, looked good, very detailed and an interesting approach to how they do their modules or plugins. Because we are pretty dead-set on staying with VirtFusion for our virtualized stuff, HostBill was a no-go at the time and had an ETA of ~6+ months before rolling the plugin out so we had to go elsewhere. I think if HostBill also integrated our bare metal solution (or allowed us to write the plugin ourselves) we'd likely seriously consider switching back. Support was good and lenient with the tickets, and they honored everything they said they would.

There were a bunch of other solutions as well but most of them were too niche/targeted for what we wanted overall. Generally speaking, we have some excellent options in this space now.

I will say that I had originally started with Blesta because most of our business was not in VPS/small bare metal at the time (almost exclusively bigger GPU/HPC servers that were all unique builds) but we outgrew it so fast that it was likely a mistake to start there. Within a month we needed to migrate to something else and it was a huge headache and hassle and added some friction to our customer experience.

nice write up. HostBill is not too bad for serious businesses depending on what you need. We would need the DC license, and compared to WHMCS costs it would be quickly saved with the lower annual renewal cost of 99$

Something to consider!

What baremetal solution are you using? We use NOC-PS, but not being able to write our own code for reboots on it is a bit annoying and have to reverse engineer some other API and make a translator (in the works). DCIM we considered "too enterprisey, too much bells and whistles, too abstract". So we went with NOC-PS since all we needed was quick network OS installs, reboots and such.

Albeit setting up NOC-PS proper install images is a lot of work at times (Debian preseed ...).

I know some people are transitioning to Ubuntu MaaS tho even for virtualization.

Will testdrive hostbill now

@thecreator_ said: Yes you are right. For some countries and companies, WHMCS can be quite costly right now. I guess I think it's too expensive now as I compare it to its old price. A software that used to cost $50 per month for unlimited customers is now $1300 per month, I think. I'm a little angry that WHMCS was bought by a greedy company and indirectly partnered with web hosting companies.

At least less exploits now, i think that was a lot for the reason to sell out. Now we know price will increase ~annually too.

@Hxxx said: I like blesta. Provides source code, you can modify as you wish. There is no greater value than access to the code to improve on. My POV as a Developer and Provider.

Agree that it's very valuable, but when we tested Blesta out it was just way way too far behind in everything compared to WHMCS.

We prefer to concentrate on service development, not billing dev

pphillips

@PulsedMedia said: Agree that it's very valuable, but when we tested Blesta out it was just way way too far behind in everything compared to WHMCS.

When did you test Blesta and what did you find "way too far behind"? If it's more appropriate, I'd love to connect offline to discuss.

lonea

@PulsedMedia said: We prefer to concentrate on service development, not billing dev

^ This...

PulsedMedia

@pphillips said:

@PulsedMedia said: Agree that it's very valuable, but when we tested Blesta out it was just way way too far behind in everything compared to WHMCS.

When did you test Blesta and what did you find "way too far behind"? If it's more appropriate, I'd love to connect offline to discuss.

about a year ago. It's just .... raw

crunchbits

@PulsedMedia said:
nice write up. HostBill is not too bad for serious businesses depending on what you need. We would need the DC license, and compared to WHMCS costs it would be quickly saved with the lower annual renewal cost of 99$

Something to consider!

Yeah, I liked HostBill. I dread ever having to migrate again, but as soon as they have the last plugins we need I will very seriously give them another look.

What baremetal solution are you using? We use NOC-PS, but not being able to write our own code for reboots on it is a bit annoying and have to reverse engineer some other API and make a translator (in the works). DCIM we considered "too enterprisey, too much bells and whistles, too abstract". So we went with NOC-PS since all we needed was quick network OS installs, reboots and such.

Albeit setting up NOC-PS proper install images is a lot of work at times (Debian preseed ...).

We started with NOC-PS, and there is a small Austrian company called Deploymentcode that made excellent NOC-PS to WHMCS bridge/manager plugin. They were extremely responsive and doing the best they could with what they had. Well, recently they launched a competitor (more like an updated better version, NOC-PS is not really much competition) to NOC-PS. It had some growing pains (and still has some) but it's significantly better. It also helps that their support is insanely fast to respond with actual helpful/useful stuff. Very active development on it, and features we asked about were generally already being worked on or implemented within a week or two.

I know some people are transitioning to Ubuntu MaaS tho even for virtualization.

Ran this for awhile, actually liked it. It has some quirky bugs with disk layouts/partitioning but overall not bad at all and very smooth. Especially considering the price. The only downside is that it was (basically) Ubuntu-only. If you're just looking to manage the back-end of your virtualized infrastructure where customers don't interact with the bare-metal I would highly consider MaaS if Ubuntu is acceptable.

@Hxxx said: I like blesta. Provides source code, you can modify as you wish. There is no greater value than access to the code to improve on. My POV as a Developer and Provider.

Agree that it's very valuable, but when we tested Blesta out it was just way way too far behind in everything compared to WHMCS.

We prefer to concentrate on service development, not billing dev

Same story here. I do value that to a degree, but my personal skill set isn't in development. I do have an excellent dev on staff, but at a certain point I'd almost rather have him make something from scratch and completely custom than sink all those hours into Blesta. Just ran into too many places where it was lacking or missing some core functionality that existed elsewhere. It isn't putting Blesta down at all, but the cost difference (monthly) between WHMCS and Blesta really isn't that big but compatibility/feature sets outweighed the $8 or whatever. Our bare metal would not even work with Blesta, for example.

netswitch

Just checked TenantOS from Deploymentcode as a NOC-PS alternative, looks very interesting.

PulsedMedia

@crunchbits said: Ran this for awhile, actually liked it. It has some quirky bugs with disk layouts/partitioning but overall not bad at all and very smooth. Especially considering the price. The only downside is that it was (basically) Ubuntu-only. If you're just looking to manage the back-end of your virtualized infrastructure where customers don't interact with the bare-metal I would highly consider MaaS if Ubuntu is acceptable.

I heard it supports other distros now too. Have never tried it myself.

@crunchbits said: It isn't putting Blesta down at all, but the cost difference (monthly) between WHMCS and Blesta really isn't that big but compatibility/feature sets outweighed the $8 or whatever. Our bare metal would not even work with Blesta, for example.

That cost difference is meaningless for actual business tbh, $8 is spent on morning coffee very quickly if you operate from a country like Finland if you'd like toast to go with it. 8$ doesn't even buy you a cheap lunch in Finland.

Hell, i spent almost twice that much just to get to the DC.