Monday, November 9, 2026 · Customer reviews of US businesses
The Fair Hearing score
Poor
58 reviews
Invision Community ClassicSelect a line to read only those reviews.
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Invision Community Classic is our legacy on-premises solution.
Invision Community Classic (invisioncommunity.com) has 58 customer reviews on The Fair Hearing, with an average rating of 2.8 out of 5.
Showing 25 reviews with 1 star · Clear filters
Mediocre software at best, atrocious customer service, and absurd pricing for something that costed far, far less years ago, yet it does the same exact concept. They seem to think their bogus features and ugly designs are worth thousands. Yeah, sure. Don't recommend and stay as far away from these bums as possible because they'll rob you in a heartbeat then just ban you once you disagree.
By John B.
Do not get involved with this company. They are money-grubbers and goal post shifters. I have had 2 licenses for the full suite for over 10 years. They used to be great, but now you just can't trust them at all. Support is rude and as others have said they no no longer even allow those whose support licenses have lapsed to even post on their forum. Such a pity that their greed has overtaken their souls. EDIT after IPS reply: I started my online community in 2006 with free open source software. As the community grew I had to find better software to manage it. That software turned out to be IPS (now Invision Community). As Matt mentions in his response below, I have been using this software since 2011. When I was using version 3 I spent an inordinate number of hours building customised templates for camera lens reviews that were always available for free to all members. When version 4 came out I discovered that ALL my work had pretty much been destroyed and that I would have to start again. Lesson learned. Don't trust software "developers". They are not in it for your benefit, they only want to benefit themselves. Since being on version 4 I have seen IPS destroy the 3rd party developer marketplace, which contained templates, themes and plugins that I had paid for but which can no longer be updated. This essentially scorches my community user experience because small things we have come to love will no longer be possible to use. People who complained about this were shut down and censored on the Invision Community forum. That is a fact and I challenge IPS to deny this. For me the last straw now is that because I have elected to not pay for the support on my self-hosted licenses (2 of them) I am not allowed to even post on the community support forums. And this is just absurd. The reason why I have decided to not renew is that they have also changed the licensing of the self hosted products to an annual fee of $200 - you have no option but to accept their new T&C's if you don't want to pay that fee. This is a ridiculous amount of money and cannot be justified in any way, because the software is STILL THE SAME thing it was 10 years ago. It doesn't do anything different. Sure, they may have added some features and glitzed it up a bit but it doesn't do anything different to what it did when v4 first came out. It is a forum, gallery and blog with a very limited content management system attached. It can also act as a paywall with extremely limited payment gateway options (because who in their right mind would develop a gateway for a company with such fickle attitudes to 3rd party devs?). This product does not justify a $200 annual fee. Not in the slightest. What has truly broken the camel's back for me is that I cannot believe the amount of bot sign-ups I am receiving since allowing the support to lapse. Try as you will your registration net cannot filter these out, or even delete their un-verified accounts from the queue automatically (a supposed feature of the software I paid for) unless you pay the $200 to IPS. How do they do that? I strongly suspect that as soon as your support license lapses they sell your details to some nefarious organisation and give them the instructions on how to bypass the reCaptcha option for signups. No, sorry. IPS are the equivalent of the mafia when it comes to community software. I cannot believe how far they have rolled from the tree of usefulness. 2ND REPLY "As part of the license cost/renewal, you get our cloud based spambot registration filtering. Once your purchase period ends, then you will no longer have access to this paid service. " Thank you for confirming that. Funny how none of the dozens of WordPress websites I have designed and manage for customers has this same issue of spambot registrations bypassing reCaptcha. 3rd Reply: Since writing this review I have private messaged Jeff to give more reasons why I have written this review (which has nothing to do with their v5 product at all). My message was not well received and I was given a warning on their system for daring to give them a piece of my mind via private message. Well, it's pretty obvious that IPS are not the company they used to be and it reinforces my statement above that you should not get involved with them if you are planning to start an online community. Do I have any good things to say about the current IPS? Unfortunately no. They do not understand their purpose in the world of internet communications and seem to be under the delusion that they decide what's important and what isn't to the people who have actually created the online communities that they provide software for, i.e. their customers. When you start to dictate to your customers you should know that we won't be by your side forever. I would rather spend the $200 on a Xenforo license right now than pad the already fat IPS wallets
By Dallas D.
Response from Invision Community Classic· Oct 21, 2024
Hi Dallas, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. I am always curious when I see a review full of emotion but little substance, making passionate claims without any examples or evidence, so I did look up your account to see if we've let you down or at least find some reason for this grievance. I can see that you've been a customer since 2011 and have built up a very active community with around half a million posts with our community software, which you monetise through subscriptions, which is a great way to help support the cost of an independent community. I am a little confused as I can see that you haven't been active in our community in over a year, and I can't see any other activity that would cause you to leave a negative review after thirteen years, but I'd like to address some key points in your thoughtful review. "They are money-grubbers and goal post shifters." We sell a product and, over our 22 years in business, have indeed shifted goalposts. If we kept the goalposts in 2002, they'd be rusted scrap betwixt the grass. The product you can get today is different from what it was in 2002. Money "grubbers" is an emotive statement, but I think we sell a fantastic product at a reasonable price. "They used to be great, but now you just can't trust them at all." Again, I need help with context. But I'll take an educated guess at what caused this review. We are currently in beta testing for Invision Community v5. This is a massive groundbreaking update to our platform that adds numerous new features and many technological changes. This new v5 product comes with a new license type that reduces the cost of the entire suite from $850 to $499. This license type changes the format of the renewals, which is very clearly explained to you, and you can then either switch your license and get v5 or keep your existing license and keep using v4. We think this is very fair and reasonable and not at all untrustworthy. "Support is rude, and as others have said, they no longer even allow those whose support licenses have lapsed to even post on their forum." I disagree that support is rude, but if you have not renewed your license to get paid support, you will not get paid support. We can only offer you a service you have paid for. It's a shame that you feel this way after thirteen years, and on a little more reflection, you may consider this review to be harsh and not reflective of the hard work our team puts in. Thanks, Matt, Invision Community. To address the edited review: "What has truly broken the camel's back for me is that I cannot believe the amount of bot sign-ups I am receiving since allowing the support to lapse." As part of the license cost/renewal, you get our cloud based spambot registration filtering. Once your purchase period ends, then you will no longer have access to this paid service. (See: https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/security-and-rules/spam-prevention-r9/) We did remove the marketplace as it was costing too much to maintain, and arbitrate in all disputes, eat the cost of multiple chargebacks a day, time spent helping customers that had grievances with developers and so on. We removed our marketplace but invested more in tools and frameworks to help third party developers. There are now independent marketplaces, and third party developers are still building applications for both v4 and v5. Finally there seems to be some confusion over the $199 purchase. You currently own v4. This is, for you, $135 every 6 months. You've been paying this for years. You can keep paying this if you wish for v4. Now, you can get the new v5 license, that enables you to use v4 or v5, and it is $199/year. That's $71 less than you're paying now. Either way, it's a choice, not a requirement.
This company is a complete disaster, prices have skyrocketed several times recently! In a time when forums are collapsing! On top of that, their cloud service keeps experiencing outages! If you don't know how to do something, don't get into it! Not to mention, all negative and critical opinions about IPS on their forum are being deleted... At least here you can see from other people's reviews how pathetic this company is. I have a feeling that in a few years this company will be gone with such practices and astronomical prices. There are plenty of cheaper and less unreliable cloud solutions.
By eveneme E.
Response from Invision Community Classic· May 21, 2024
Thank you for taking the time to leave this review. We pride ourselves on excellent customer service, offering timely replies both on our community support forum and via email for our cloud customers. We have thousands of happy customers, many of whom have been with us for a decade or longer. Our cloud platform is a testament to our evolution and commitment to providing excellent service. It's more than just resold hosting space, a practice we phased out a decade ago. We have continuously improved and upgraded our platform to meet the evolving needs of our customers. We have recently been performing essential maintenance and upgrades across our platform, which you can monitor and see historical data via https://status.invisioncommunity.com. We have had some 90-second outages as systems move over, but we try to keep these to a minimum. To date, our uptime is 99.97% this year. I also know that you are not a cloud customer, so you are writing this here to attempt to portray our company in a negative light. We moderate our community forum to ensure a positive and welcoming community. We allow constructive criticism and respond to it. We do not allow overly emotive postings or direct criticisms of specific members of our team. We also do not allow individuals to continually ruin other people's topics with extraordinarily negative and one-sided views. Unfortunately, review sites like Trustpilot tend to be used for people with extreme opinions. Unlike other companies, we do not encourage people to leave reviews here to mask the odd negative review. The fact that only two reviews were left here in 2024 indicates that almost all our customers are content with our service.
I had an account on there from years ago which was mysteriously banned. Now they claim they cannot find my account, even though I am getting an email back allowing me to reset the password. They will claim they cannot find an account with your email if it is banned. Very poor experience.
By Adam
Response from Invision Community Classic· May 17, 2024
Hello, I can see that you have been emailing a customer support email address that you won't have access to as you do not have a current license. Your last purchase on record was in 2004. If you want to discuss account queries, including recovery, please use the 'Accounts and Billing' option on our contact form: https://invisioncommunity.com/contact-us/
I've been a longtime Invision subscriber, both the software and their cloud hosting. Their off the shelf product remains best in class, but man am I disappointed with their cloud hosting. They're expensive, bureaucratic at every step, they don't provide ftp access, you have to go through them to perform backups and restores, they consistently lay blame on their customers, and they nickel and dime you every step of the way. The final insult happened today, when I'd finally had enough and decided to self-host my forums. They told me I'd have to pay $500 to change my plan (plus an additional $200/year for the service itself). I agreed -- what choice do I have? -- only to get an error when I tried to download the software. So what do they say when this happens, after I've spent $500 for the privilege of switching plans? No apology, no circumventing the system to just get me the software I just paid for. Instead, I receive this note: "After reviewing your request, we have determined that it is going to require further investigation by our advanced support/development team. I have escalated your request to that department and they will provide further assistance as quickly as possible. Due to the advanced nature of your request, please note that it may take longer than usual to fully address your concern. Please also note that advanced support is only available Monday through Friday. I apologize in advance for this delay." They sent this on a Thursday afternoon, btw. I am so angry. EDITED TO ADD: I just read Invision's response below and I want to point out that I'm not complaining about paying the $200/year for the new plan. I'm complaining about paying an *additional* $500 for switching to that plan... only to encounter an error when trying to download the software and then be curtly informed that it could be days before they address the issue.
By Jed R.
Response from Invision Community Classic· Dec 22, 2023
Hi Jed, thank you for your review. I’m sorry that our community platform didn’t meet your expectations. However, it would have been made very clear upon purchase that things like “FTP” access are not possible as we are a hosted cloud platform. As you are now choosing to use our classic self hosted version, payment for that product would be required as it is not the same as the cloud plan you’ve been using. There is currently an issue with downloads which has been flagged to our US infrastructure team. You reported it to us late on Thursday night, and at the time of this review, it’s outside US office hours the next morning. We always aim to respond to support issues within 24-48 hours.
Inquired about a cancellation and refund via their support e-mail, given they've recently closed their marketplace and was told "We offer free trials on our software to test out any functionality to prevent cases like this" without any further assistance in resolving the matter. Their customer service is absolute garbage. I've since initiated a dispute for the $99.00 charge.
By Gabriel
Discussing any form of criticism on their forums for their recent terrible decisions will get your account permanently suspended for "spreading fud" Look for another software. They're going downhill fast and trying to push their self-hosted customers away to force everyone into their cloud services so you can pay x4 the price for the same thing. EDIT In response to the IPS response, they note "temporary" restrictions. I've been permanently restricted from posting for over a year. Never received any previous warnings or citations. As with their "cloud" services, while this has been around for a very long time, it's only recently they started pulling features from self-hosted and releasing cloud-only features to try and box you out of being able to self-host.
By The D.
Response from Invision Community Classic· Mar 16, 2023
I note that your comments relate to our support community. Then you have some thoughts on the general business direction and nothing specific about your experience with our product, but I'm happy to address your points. A community has thousands of voices that come together. To keep a community healthy, we do have to resort to one of the many tools Invision Community has, from gentle reminders, unskippable alert messages, temporary posting restrictions and eventually the complete ban. We rarely use those tools, but to ensure that a single voice does not destroy parts of a community, we do use those tools. We have a very open community and encourage feedback, good and bad. We listen to it all. All we ask is that it is done in the pertinent part of the community and delivered maturely. We launched our "software as a service" option ('cloud') around a decade ago. Those who do not have the technical ability to manage a server and install complex software find our cloud services the best option for them. Released from the stress of pouring hours into managing security, DoS attacks, software upgrades that go wrong, etc. and can finally focus on managing their community. To be clear, we offer both our cloud plans and the self-hosted option for those with the technical skills required and have publicly committed to keeping both options for the foreseeable future. Our customers have a choice and are not being pushed towards any decision.
I just got scammed Watch out for this company.. They will scam you and they say they cant refund your money if you already have paid. I asked for at refund 6 days after I bought the script and it was not used at all and still they cant refund my money. Scammers! There are also a lot of bugs in their system and also if any errors are pointed out they will blame you for making those errors! Before I paid the support was nice and fast. After I paid the support was not responding for 3-4 days. Keep your money in the bank, because these scammers will rip you for nothing. Update: Thats why you are scamming people! You dont answer e-mails until the trial is run out, so you Can keep the money. Very smart move!
By Rune
Response from Invision Community Classic· Feb 3, 2023
I'm sorry that your experience with Invision Community did not meet your expectations. As our T&C state (which are linked to on the purchase page and you are reminded to read before purchasing) that digital downloadable products are not refundable. We offer a full trial to ensure the product is a good fit before purchasing.
