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How is blesta over Whmcs
DiggDigital
Member, Host Rep
in General
Blesta user how easy and user-friendly is blesta?
Comments
Really?
I mean fucking REALLY!?
It's okay. WHMCS is easier and more flexible, but Blesta is still pretty solid. We have and use both, and I have developed modules/extensions for both.
From an admin perspective, WHMCS is easier to use.
From a developer perspective, WHMCS is easier to develop for.
From a design perspective, WHMCS is easier to skin.
But Blesta is not bad, and I've had no complaints from end users..
both have their own pros and cons, and upfront price wise, blesta is much more in the range for starters
more ove, since whmcs is pretty old, you get tonnes of modules/plugins, but blesta is no less
Mediocre in practice, but the dev is cool and gives a shit.
We use it and it does the job.
WHMCS is the most complete integration software for cPanel servers.
However, Blesta is also doing a good job recently but it's not a replacement of WHMCS and will not be soon.
This is my assessment too. I still use it. I hate it.
The best way to compare WHMCS and Blesta:
WHMCS, like it's name suggests, is a complete solution for a web hosting company and is great for managing your whole company from client management, to billing, to automation, to help desk, to reporting, to auditing, to accounting, and everything in between. You can literally run your whole company with WHMCS and a few documents/spreadsheets. And of course developing reports, modules, addons, widgets, and anything else you need is a piece of cake (it's insane how simple it was to write a full fledged SolusVM replacement with significantly more features in WHMCS with very little coding knowledge).
Blesta is a billing system, it excels at client management, billing, and help desk for the most part. I personally really like Blesta but in order to run my company I would need to not only invest in more software, I would need to have multiple different logins and do A LOT of manual data entry and processing to get the kind of reports I need to make it possible to run my company. We attempted to switch to Blesta in the past but the weekly tasks we perform to get a "health report" of our company takes roughly 30 minutes in WHMCS all said and done and would take hours in Blesta to run database queries, enter data into other software or spreadsheets, compare with other data from elsewhere, and in the end would be prone to human error. There is a huge benefit to having everything in one spot when it comes to handling the administration, financial, and logistical side of a business. I love the company and the values in terms of open source and community support, it would just be too expensive and time consuming for me to get Blesta to a point where WHMCS is out of the box.
EDIT: Full disclosure, Secure Dragon has both an owned license for WHMCS and an owned license for Blesta.
I run a shared hosting company and it's perfect to sell shared cpanel hosting
If you just want to sell shared cpanel hosting. Boxbilling do the job just fine for free.
Blesta is totally fine for selling shared hosting (vesta, ispconfig, cpanel)
You shouldn't suggest BoxBilling to anyone since it is not even updated anymore. Moreover there are many security issues.
I am also using Blesta and it is doing the great job. People might complain about less modules, but now i see that Blesta has made so many modules and more are planned. There are also updates almost every month for Blesta. It doesn't mean that Blesta is for starters, there are many large companies using it.
Care to mention what's the security issues ?
One could be lack of regular maintenance and security checks. I'm sure both whmcs and blesta do atleast that.
I am actually trying to find the security issue with boxbilling. And have made a few post asking specifically for that. Yet nobody can give a definite answer. They just say it's old. It must have security issue. But they doesn't really know what the security issue is. Sure it's old. But if it works, what's wrong in using it ? People are still using Windows XP and Office 2007. And yes, they using it without the update. Because well, it works.
Sure, here's one security issue that i found out when using it for sometime:
Adding funds can sometime add double funds which you never know about it. This happened to me many times and i found out that this problem occurred due to the payment gateway not being updated regularly.
You cannot compare Windows with a billing software, you shouldn't play with your customer's data when you have opened a hosting company business and using very outdated software. What if in case your customer's data gets leaked? Want to know more security issues? Just visit their community forums and you will see a lot of people complaining about it. Whatever why would someone use an outdated billing software with less features when there are better software available? Offering premium services and using a free billing software doesn't sound good.
Blesta is amazing, but mainly focussed on Billing, invoicing and simplicity. It has a long way to come compared to whmcs, but Im a big fan. Im also gonna use it for my company and Im already busy building 2 templates (which i will share here btw)
I visited the forum sometimes. What I see is not security issue. Most of them just complain the lack of features, updates and asking how to do X. If Boxbilling security is compromised to the point that client data get leaked, we surely will hear the news. The news will be all over the internet.
Sure, there are a lot of better alternative out there. But none of them is free.
Sure, it lacks of features. But for just selling shared cpanel account, it works just fine.
And I don't think selling $1 / month shared hosting count as "offering premium services"