Feedback Upmind - Enhance: Page 2 - Enhance Control Panel

Feedback Upmind - Enhance

Seb

Hey guys, Seb here from Upmind. Just giving this a reply here to say we acknowledge the feedback. Our stage at Upmind is that we're building out functionality and lots of it behind the scenes which is super foundational, but frustratingly (for us and for our users) sometimes doesn't translate into how things work on the frontend.

The biggest win we could have in terms of what seems like bugs (like immutability/deleting invoices/changing things, and also the way things look and feel confusing) is for us to basically spend a couple of months simplifying things from a usability perspective. We'd love to do that so much, but at the same time if we do that we shoot ourselves in the foot long-term.

We're probably another six months of 'beta' before some of these foundational things start rapidly translating into real-life functionality and we can then really start focusing on making things straightforward.

Adrien

Seb this is getting political...You ignore people's question on your own community but come here to defend your piece of the cake. That's not fair for the end users.

Anyways I know you're very close to Enhance and in my opinion this limits the possibility for Enhance to innovate in this field. We are in 2023 and third party provisionning solutions like WHMC etc...don't make sense anymore.

You will see soon what RunCloud is coming up with. They will integrate all the billing.

We should have direct Stripe integration with Enhance. I keep saying this since day 1.

Adrien

Seb @Harry While re-reading my previous post, I realize that my comments regarding Upmind may have come off as harsh and unfair. I wish to rectify this and provide a more comprehensive review:

In my opinion, Upmind can be a good choice if you're seeking a fully loaded 360° solution that covers everything from hosting and billing/accounting to support and domain reselling and much more. Upmind comes loaded with so many features.

However, for those seeking a more lightweight solution focusing on selling (online shop), provisioning, and client management only while delegating complete support, billing, and accounting to third-party integrations like Stripe or PayPal, Upmind feels bloated. Personally, my focus is primarily on WordPress hosting. I don't provide domain sales, nor do I utilize the support features that Upmind offers, preferring to handle all support-related matters through my own live chat system.

Therefore my own feedback may not reflect how most companies use Upmind.

Pros:

Aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly UI
An abundance of features, with the PIN code generator being really useful.
Managed hosting included
Friendly and helpful support.

Cons:

The system is complicated due to a plethora of options/settings.
Feels rigid at times.
No self-hosted option
Development seems slow
The roadmap and release notes could be clearer for better user understanding
I find Upmind expensive when you have a team
The online store with these big products images isn't user-friendly and optimized for conversion
Hard to customize anything on the front end
Can feel bloated as much as WHMCS

Zoinkies

Adrien Sidenote to this, GridPane is now integrating billing 🙂

Adrien

Zoinkies Hungry Patrick... his eyes are bigger than his pocket.

kyzoeadmin

Adrien So true !

Zoinkies

Adrien Accurate.

Seb

I think that's pretty accurate feedback, thanks @Adrien

We're looking to improve as many of the cons as possible 🙂

Machiel92

If upmind just releases its stripe payment gateway, I might move over my clients to upmind.
I want to provide more than just credit card payment options..

Besides the upmind store isn't really optimized for hosting.. the domain searcher is fine. The images for packages are just off. would be nice if that could just be changes :/
Hope upmind does anything with it.

mendozal

Machiel92 Upmind recently updated their stripe integration to support rendering the credit card fields using Stripe JS, so you can enable Link, and other payment methods.

PradeepC

Zoinkies Any update on the integration from Upmind to WHMCS?

JohnB

Adrien

You could setup a stripe store and then its pretty simple code that checks the subscriptions every x amount of time (or use a webhook to avoid pooling) and takes appropiate action via the enhance API.

For example:

New subscription bought via stripe = provision in enhance via API
Overdue x days stripe subscription = suspend via enhance API
New payment to a suspended stripe subscription in ehance = unsuspend
Cancel subscription = delete via enhance API
etc

Would something like this work? Enhance won't integrate Stripe within the next year just like they won't build an end to end disaster recovery solution that doesn't require their help to restore. You gotta build your own billing solution and diaster recovery it seems.

Mason

JohnB

I'd much rather see the Enhance team's resources go towards the hosting aspects as they've been doing well there. Once you throw billing into the mix - even just a basic integration - that becomes a whole thing on its own with bugs, support tickets, feature requests, etc. It would slow development for things that matter.

I really do wish a good billing software existed though. I'm having to build an entire billing system from scratch to accomplish what I need. But that frees me from the headaches WHMCS has given me over the years.

Adrien

JohnB Thanks for your message. I eventually went the WHMCS route and so far so good.
I gave up on Stripe integration for the time being.

Adrien

Mason Would you mind sharing briefly what were your let's say 3 biggest headaches using WHMCS? This will help me anticipate 🙂 Thank you.

JohnB

Mason That's a very good point about the support and everything. I'm curious about your from scratch billing system. Can you share more details?

I have hated Upmind and WHMCS for a long time. In my opinion all the billing systems are WAY too complicated and I have played with the idea of building a SIMPLE billing system for SMALL hosts but ultimately the quirky integrations with all the panels stops me. Integration with the payment processors and UI design is the easy part.

manu

It would be great if Enhance focusses on the hosting features first being a good hosting panel should I believe be the first goal. A lot of things like NodeJS support, WAF, Git etc are missing.

MediaServe

Adrien You didn't ask me but I'll give you three!

New ownership raised prices 1100% (from lifetime purchased license, yeah right!, with $99/yr upgrade protection to $99/mo.
Years ago WHMCS added multiple payment methods, promised to develop it more so that clients could pay one service automatically from one card and another service from a different card automatically, but it never materialized. All you have is the ability to add secondary payment methods that are only available for manual invoice payments.
WHMCS provides OpenID support, but they provide NO support for it. I tried to connect the MiniOrange Joomla component with WHMCS and they refused any assistance, to the point they wouldn't even provide me the proper oAuth scope that should work. They're a bunch of shifty bastards IMO.

We still use it but at the first good opportunity I'll ditch that pile of shit and replace it with something better.

Mason

Adrien

It's a black box with a horrible API
It does not innovate or advance in almost any way [since Webpros bought it]
Adding functionality or making it look good involves purchasing a lot of expensive modules with yearly renewals

JohnB

The new direction we're taking would be very hard to accomplish with WHMCS - it would involve extensive modifications or a bunch of modules mashed together (which significantly reduce the stability & UX). We're building a unified system to handle billing, hosting, and other offerings. It just makes much more sense for us to build it from the ground up than try to make these neglected legacy tools work with modern features.

I really wanted Upmind to be good - they had a chance to start from scratch and seem to be fumbling a bit from what I'm reading here. But they're young and not owned by Webpros so my outlook for them is much more positive than WHMCS. But that doesn't help us right now - so custom it is.

Adrien

Thanks a lot @MediaServe @Mason for your interesting feedback.

From my side the biggest issue I am facing with WHMCS/Upmind and Enhance is handling server location provisioning.
I think Enhance team should add into their roadmap the ability to choose, in a simple way, a server location when clients purchase a package. If you still want to handle mutiple locations it's a total nightmare and you need to create so many packages in Enhance. It's not feasible as it is and leads to so much complexity.

I don't know how you guys go about server locations in your automated provisioning. This is holding back now.

PS: overall I def prefer WHMCS over Upmind because it is:

self hosted
Like WordPress super easy to customize
Upmind has recently become slow in page loading time (8s when you login - I've just tested on Enhance - i'm based in Switzerland)

So in this testing phase, I'd be curious to try Clientexec but they do not integrate yet with Enhance and they keep delaying V7.

I feel all these companies took a big hit post COVID. Things are super delayed.

Mason

Adrien

I have no idea if this would be compatible/feasible with Enhance (I don't have it connected to WHMCS) but I previously used this to manage multiple locations for Plesk servers: https://www.modulesgarden.com/products/whmcs/server-allocator

Modules Garden has 7 day trials on everything, though I'd recommend trialing things on a dev environment as to not muddy up your prod database.

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