Invision Community Classic Reviews 58

Many years ago i moved from a self hosted forum to an Invision hosted one on the promise that everything would be smooth and updates all managed by Invision. Over the years, the price continued to increase, support got worse, i had to do my own updates and features have been dropped or just dont work. Then today i found out that i have to move to v5 for continued support which means i need to move to a new package costing more than double what i pay now. Absolutely ridiculous.

I've started using InvisionCommunity 4 on their Cloud Host almost exactly 10 years ago. For better or worse, the amount of communication between me and their support staff has been topping any other contact I have with other companies. From mundane questions, not understanding certain features, to bugs in the software, to the site just going down for no reason and no fault of my own and that several times, to, one time, all our DNS entries of our domain just getting lost altogether (for a while they were our nameserver for our domain). It's been a wild ride.

There are aspects of their hosting service and future vision for IVC that I strongly disagree with, such as dropping the support tickets system from IVC5, but on the other hand I cannot deny that their Software helped me grow a one man business to a gamedev studio that employs 20+ people now, and in the process utterly outgrowing their hosting capacity.

In life you have to take the good with the bad, and the same rings true for InvisionCommunity.

Despite all these flaws, thank you for your 10 years of service and giving an effort to deliver a good product.

Back in 1999, Matt Mecham, who is an outstanding php developer, created a brilliant piece of online forum software called “Ikonboard”, which was available for free. The software became incredibly popular and was installed on thousands of websites all around the world. In April 2001 Matt decided to join the Jarvis Network in return for 50,000 shares, but apparently (and sadly) he was ripped off because he was never able to sell any of the shares.
Later Matt cofounded “invision community” with Charles Warner and Lindy Throgmartin. A large portion of Ikonboard users, myself included, followed Matt.
The software kept evolving, was no longer free, but it was very reasonably priced. In those days 99% of the clients were “self hosted”.
In recent years, the company has grown and the target audience is no longer small communities, and the pricing structure has changed dramatically.
At present, self hosted clients are only around 10% and shrinking, and they’re mainly focusing on “Software as a service on the cloud”. They no longer offer “lifetime” licenses (your know, you only pay if you upgrade to a newer version) to self-hosted clients, they want to charge us 200$ every year for a crippled version of the software, (for the time being, although that could increase at any time, and realistically, the most likely evolution is that they will no longer develop the self hosted version in the not too distant future). Many of the old “faithful Matt Mecham followers” believe that the cloud version is outrageously priced and that prospective clients would be much better off studying much cheaper alternatives or even free ones…
I have 3 invision licenses for the 4.x version, and I will not be renewing any of them.
I understand that things change and some products are no longer profitable, but Invision could've sold the self hosted version of the software before they closed the add-ons market and focus on the cloud-only version only, they're such different products now, but apparently they preferred to keep "milking the cow".
Kicking those who believed in Matt and were loyal to him deserved better. Now Invision community has become greedy and without a soul. I cannot possibly recommend Invisioncommunity to anyone other than wealthy individuals and corporations who don’t care about spending a fortune on something that they could get for much less.

About 19 years I think, I've hosted a wonderful "community" forum, self-hosted. I'm still chugging along on the V4. The early years were super. Then things started changing, dropping/removal of features, but that happens in any growing product trying to improve.

I saw the business model coming out years ago as the store with themes and mods was dropped. But to make this a review, I need to stick to the service.

I gave 3 stars
*Support was always great for me,
*Reduction of available customization.
*No longer a "community", more like a business. platform.
**Affordability. When support for V4 ends,
*Operational costs too high for just a forum.

That's an important distinction, unless you have a customer base that can afford it.

If you're looking for a business or organizational platform, that has plenty of funding it would be a nice platform. If you're a small town, individual with less than a over modest income, I'd look elsewhere. I haven't needed support in a good while, but if you don't pay the fee, you lose features that used to come with the forum. Recently announced that you will need to provide your on recatpcha. Unless you go to the cloud.
Best of luck to them

Removed core features of the website, breaking almost every article page we had when upgrading to v5. Users have asked to bring them back, and have been instantly shot down. Community members have tried to make plugins to fix these issues and had their links removed. I am going to find a different forum backend, and I suggest you do too. This site and their admins are not friendly to users requests.

Invision Community wants to be used solely as a “forum++”, basically, a forum with a few extra features like a gallery and downloads for forum communities. For years, they’ve been stripping features, removing functions and services, while continuously increasing the price as if they were following Venezuela’s inflation rate. Support has gone from decent to worthless.

Here are a few things that come to mind (though it’s far from a complete list):

For Version 5, they removed:
-Status updates
-Commerce support requests (yeah use alternatives, what a joke of a suggestion)
-Q&A mode

They even created a feedback forum, and then proceeded to ignore every single request or suggestion made by customers.

Additionally, the marketplace for applications, plugins, and themes has been removed.
It used to be an easy place to get plugins for a fair price instead of paying a developer full price for something small. Removing it completely killed the plugins, applications, and themes market. Just look at all the developers who used to be active and contributing, they’ve all been gone for a year or two now. I even talked to one developer who said he abandoned Invision Community for a competitor.

If you need support with any of their software, you’re in luck, there’s a public support section where you might get a reply that fits your question… or you might not. You also have to post everything publicly visible to everyone.

There are alternatives out there that are better supported, more customer-friendly, and easier on the wallet. Just do a quick search and you’ll find them.

The multiple changes in licensing/pricing model are concerning. With the price increases and the need to alway renew the license (even if we are not interested in the new features or support), the price becomes more than 5x of what we used to pay. It is also worth noting that originally we had access to security patches for free, but at some point they became only available with renewals. For small volunteer communities, this is not sustainable.

At the same time prices increased, the quality of support has been decreasing, and right now we only get access to "support" on the public forums. But even before, we had bad experiences with IPS "ignoring" the bugs.

On the positive side, on the recent years the software itself reached a reasonable quality level (good set of features, and not as buggy as before).

I’ve been using Invision Forums for a while, and honestly, I cannot recommend it to others. The software itself works fine, but the company’s pricing and renewal policies are very disappointing.

When I first purchased the product, it was a one-time cost with a small renewal fee for updates and support. That was reasonable. But now, they’ve changed their policy so that every new major version requires a completely new subscription plan. For example, moving from version 4 to version 5 suddenly costs $199/year, even if you already paid for the product.

This means that every future version (v6, v7, etc.) could also demand another big payment. That feels unfair and unnecessary, since most companies include upgrades as part of the product lifecycle.

My Recommendation:

If you’re considering Invision Forums, I would strongly suggest not buying it. The pricing model is designed to lock you into continuous expensive renewals, instead of respecting the fact that you already paid for the software. There are better alternatives out there with fairer upgrade policies.

1) Invision is continuously pushing for their cloud
services vs self hosted plan.
2) Licensing model has changed i.e. if you don't pay subscription cost, 500$ license becomes useless. Even Adobe, Microsoft, doesn't do this non-sense.
3) Features get removed and now it's data loss for many users.
4) Team also removed market place. So now for installing add-ons, you have to visit 10 different places. Imagine if Apple remove App store and ask you to visit 50 different places. It's annoying and not user friendly.

It's good platform for corporate platform where companies can pay for features. However, new model is not friendly for community admins.

Invision really wants you to move to their cloud service. God forbid you have the infrastructure to run their (basically 2012 web app) on a server.
They want you to scale with them and pay their cloud prices. Leaving users who self host with a less than product. Acting as if it is obsolete to encourage and gaslight their community into thinking it’s a thing of the past.

I wouldn't use this company for any self-hosted solutions.

EDIT (to make things clear)
I wouldn’t use this company for self hosted solutions based on their attitudes towards their clients in that tier.

EDIT 2
These guys are asking their community for reviews, lol. invisioncommunitycom/forums/topic/481851-do-you-have-a-few-minutes-to-help-us-with-trustpilot/
If I could go negative I would, truly feel I wasted $$$

After becoming a customer and dealing with community management I wouldn’t recommend any of their services.

I've used Invision Community software for years, and version 5 unfortunately continues the same trend: solid legacy functionality buried under outdated technology choices.

Don't get me wrong, the app works. The interface is very nice, and core features like forums and member management still hold up. But the underlying technology stack feels like it's from a different era. There’s no OpenAPI support, no OAuth device flow, and it lacks even basic modern deployment tools like Docker or a Helm chart. Want to scale or integrate in a modern infrastructure? Good luck.

Even basic tech choices are questionable in 2025, still no PDO support, which means no PostgreSQL compatibility. That alone is a dealbreaker for many modern environments.

In short, it's still the old-fashioned web: PHP, MySQL, manually managed, and monolithic. If you're looking for a modern, API-friendly, cloud-native community platform, you may want to look elsewhere.

I will continue to use it tho, because it works and it's quite complete. It have some very nice features. Downloads and Pages are very nice.

Answering Mat:

Thanks for taking the time to reply, but to be honest, it feels like you didn’t really read or address the core points of my review.

Yes, I’m aware that Invision has built-in OAuth integration, that’s not the issue. I was referring specifically to OAuth device flow support, which is important for integrating with modern APIs and headless environments.

Likewise, saying there's a "cloud-based platform" using React and Node doesn’t change the fact that the core software — the one self-hosted customers use — still lacks critical modern standards like:

OpenAPI support
Docker images
Helm charts
No Composer
PostgreSQL support (due to no PDO)
And overall, a more modular, API-first design.

The UI is fine, and yes, the functionality works. But in 2025, functionality alone isn't enough — developer experience, deployment flexibility, and integration capabilities matter just as much.

Please don’t deflect valid technical criticism with vague marketing terms. I’d love to see Invision modernize, but that starts with acknowledging the gap.

After careful consideration we have chosen invision community to take our existing community to a higher level. In addition to the functions and possibilities of the software, the thinking along and the solutions of support on how to transfer our existing forum were decisive. invision has carried out the conversion and has kept us well informed throughout the process. very satisfied with the software, the advice and the support.

I've had long time to decide to write that review, and it boged me for a long time.

What i can say, it really last standing good software to build website. I was work with IC for a long time back to 2012 where i started building my first sites, and what i can say, its really good piece of software, for honestly fair price.

I really want give big thank to the team for their work and still keeping work on it for a such long time.

To me its really best choice in the market to build full-fledged site with gallery, blogs, forums and etc.

I've been using Invision Community's platform for over 5 years now, and I can confidently say it's one of the best decisions I've ever made! Before that, I tried several alternatives, but none of them even come close to what Invision Community offers. The continuous evolution of the product, the constant innovation, and above all, the outstanding quality of support provided by the IPB team truly set it apart. To those who think they can find better elsewhere: true quality comes at a price — and with Invision Community, every cent is a worthwhile investment. It's not just another solution — it's the gold standard.

To be honest, I’m disappointed with V5.
V5 feels like a "V4 Lite" but with a higher price tag. Frequently requested customer feedback has either not been addressed or is still being ignored.

What is V5 to me?
To me, V5 is like a V4 Lite with a more modern UI but fewer features. A major point of criticism is the lack of an official marketplace. The current resources directory is poorly maintained, confusing, and frankly just a bad (very bad) joke.

As a user, it’s just frustrating to find new or unread content on a site based on Invision Community. The new text editor is a disaster — texts and images are poorly handled by the software, and there’s little emphasis on consistency. It’s just a mess. If a user creates a post with 10 photo attachments and doesn’t embed them in the text at an appropriate size, you end up scrolling forever, and it looks terrible.

The software heavily relies on external services and offers many embeds — unfortunately without proper opt-in solutions, making it hard to use legally in Europe. Back when we asked support, they said, “Our software can be used without concern, and the embeds are fine, but we’ll make some improvements.” What happened instead? They added a cookie consent tool no one wanted and hardly anyone uses. We even got hit with an expensive legal warning because of the embeds. So in terms of European data protection, it’s a no-go. The Invision team also made false promises in this regard.

Pricing:
The cheapest cloud package costs $1,068 per year.
The self-hosted package is $199.

You’re forced to renew the license annually; otherwise, the software’s spam protection stops working. Within two weeks of expiry, you’ll be flooded with over 100 spam accounts — all of which you must delete manually, as there’s no proper bulk deletion process. But hey, maybe there’s a plugin for that… wait, where do I even search for it? Right, there isn’t a proper plugin directory. If you don’t renew after a year, you’ll have to pay the full new price of over $500.

How does the competition do it?
The competition (e.g., XenForo) runs databases like StopForumSpam locally on their own servers, and the protection works even without an active license.

It’s great that Invision is on Trustpilot — though criticism of their own software tends to disappear mysteriously.

BUT
The Invision Suite was an amazing piece of technology — about four years ago. The software had a unique dynamic and community flow that no other platform could match. It was genuinely fun to work with.

But even V5 now feels outdated and uninspired.
Creating content is tedious and no longer enjoyable.

I don’t believe anything will improve with Invision, so we’re switching to XenForo.

Working with IPS for more than 15 years. Great community software, very active in new features and improvements.

Gone from bad to worse. I am in the process of moving my forum to Xenforo because my personal experience of Invision (both software and support) have just become so unpleasant that its not feasible to continue to support my business with their services. Firstly, despite constant protests from their customers, they've insisted on removing well loved and used features. Why? Because its costing them money to maintain. Ok, I guess that's fair? Lower the price then to reflect the reduction in services offered? Nah, they've increased it multiple times. Secondly, the support. I paid for lifetime support, which was scrapped without warning or refund. All support is handled via the forum now, and if you say anything they don't like they will just mute or ban you (like I am now). Matt, will undoubtedly reply here and tell me everything I am saying is wrong, but that's just his modus operandi. He is an absolute embarassment to the company he represents but nobody cares because Invision's only motivation is to make the most amount of money whilst keeping costs as low as possible; customers needs are not important to them. The software itself is outdated and honestly just bad. V5 is just embarassing. They staff are actually begging loyal fans to post positive reviews here. Could say far more but I think you get the message....just avoid IPS.

Excellent service!

I have used Invision for the last six years and have three motorcycle forums on their cloud plan. Their software is easy to use, and is possibly the most attractive looking forum software available. So many things are possible with Invision Community. Their support staff is fast and eager to help with support questions. They update their software alot , often trying to adjust it to fit requests of their users. And thats the best thing, they listen to us forum admins and do their best to give us a product that helps us succeed.
Very happy with my experience with Invision Community.