WHMCS vs. ModernBill (Plesk Billing)

[rockhost]

09-07-09: sethcole.wordpress.com

 

I am going to be as dramatic (ha ha, initially I meant democratic) about this comparison as possible and do my best to share experiences with both of these software products. My company, www.RockandRollHosting.com, finally stepped away from expensive unintuitive third party billing services in 2006. At that time ModernBill was all the rage. I paid a fair price for the perpetual license and a whopping $1600 for installation. At that point I thought it was paradigm to look professional and offer our customer base a client area and instant on-site order activation (automation).

 

Originally support ticket response time was fairly slow with ModernBill, however I felt like Sarah and Sean would take care of me when it really mattered. In fact, even though the installation fee was outlandish, I did receive a two hour phone consultation and was walked through the software with my hand held. Then, big brother came along, the Parallels acquisition of ModernBill. The support has since disappeared and attempting to do something as simple as retrieve a lost password is terribly difficult as well as completely frustrating. The last shoe finally dropped this summer when my license expired (I own a perpetual lifetime license) and I couldn’t make contact with Plesk Billing support without paying $59.95 for Parallels precious time. :{ No thanks! There are other fish in the sea.

 

Enter WHMCS (Web Host Manager Complete Solution)…Wow, a company like my own, a business and people who care about their clients! I had looooooooong forgotten what this was like. Support tickets are generally answered the same day, the prices are cheaper, the products more robust and user friendly, and my business is now easier to manage.

 

Let me go into a more technically detailed review.

 

1. Customization

 

WHMCS – Easy money, upload a template(s), go to General Settings, activate…Also the directory tree structure is built for common sense. Oh, and if you don’t got the time? WHMCS offers a top notch Integration Service – $34.95!!! WHAT?! YES!

 

ModernBill – Ouch, dig dig dig, customization is possible because I’ve done it. Wait, I’ve done it three times. Why? Because when you upgrade your software version your customization is wiped out, overwritten. It was so ugly I finally created a lenghty list of files that I had to modify with each software upgrade. Painful!

 

2. Automation

 

WHMCS – Honestly the module list here is very impressive. What’s mind numbing? WHMCS has a better Plesk module than ModernBill (Plesk Billing).

 

ModernBill – Clients had a tough time in the shopping cart figuring out how to “associate” a domain name with their hosting package and in turn in most cases I had to manually create cPanel or Plesk accounts. Look, I’m a busy guy, I’ve got other things to deal with. I think I bought this software to resolve issues…not make them. UGH!

 

3. Backup

 

WHMCS – Sends me an email of the MySQL database back up every morning, not to mention a cron report.

 

ModernBill – Can anyone even figure out those weird Plesk back up files? What format is that? .trouble?

 

4. Client Area

 

WHMCS – Let’s put it this way, once I switched from ModernBill to WHMCS. Our clients actually started using the client area. It is layed out in a much more sensible manner.

 

ModernBill – You tell me, try the demo. ModernBill uses its software for its clients. It just barely functions properly or understandably. So if I can’t login and use it well how can my less tech savvy clients feel about it? Answer – not good.

 

5. To-Do List

 

WHMCS – This is a simple basic to-do list which is helpful as a reminder tool. For instance right now in my WHMCS To-Do List I have a pending domain name transfer.

 

ModernBill – What a joke! I noticed that my ModernBill admin To-Do List was made public in the client area. HUH!? When I inquired about this issue I was told that ModernBill wasn’t sure what they were going to do with this feature yet. UH, you might want to get on that! I had to cut the code out of the template, yes during every software upgrade.

 

5. Affiliates

 

WHMCS – There is a very slick, easy to use interface which essentially runs itself. You can offer bonuses for joining, flat fees or recurring commission, minimum payouts, monthly newsletters/reports, etc.

 

ModernBill – They got nothin’.

 

L@@k, I was going to lay down a list of ten points, but let’s face it, this going to nowhere fast besides a rant and rave session. Luckily though I made the move forward to WHMCS, so I don’t have be hostile or angry.

[ffmpeg]

Good one may be we had same story a shift from MB to WHMCS and I think we will stick to WHMCS in future..

[Scolpy]

Proud to be WHMCS user

[dnerty]

I hope Matt won't sell WHMCS to Plesk

[MrSaints]

For the price I'm paying, WHMCS is really worth it and I hope it continues to stay alive!

[pdpd]

Nice write up - just one inaccuracy with your review of ModernBill - the support didnt go downhill once they were acquired, it was always an absolute joke.

 

I had one ticket unanswered for 13 months with ModernBill (pre the buy-out) - they were simply taking the pi**

Double payments in MB used to trigger once as a payment, and then as a debit meaning people who paid twice got suspended. How long did it take them to fix this? About 2 years.

With WHMCS, we asked Matt to do a customisation for our legacy payment customers - all done and dusted in a matter of days, and cost hardly anything.

 

To anybody reading this, even contemplating going with Parallels/ModernBill over WHMCS - you would be making the biggest mistake of your life. WHMCS is at least 1,000,000 times better and is run by people who truly care about their product, and not just making money at any expense.

[MediaPlayStudios]

I agree with all statements. And Matt I hope you never sell WHMCS to Parallels I will buy it first.

 

But I must say I use both WHMCS and PleskBilling and my company resells both applications but by far WHMCS is the top requested product

[railto]

I have used (in this exact order) HostDirector, ModernBill, WHMCS, ClientExec, AWBS, WHMCS. I quit using WHMCS after having some major issues and after someone i know got hacked and the code appeared to come through an exploit. This was all resolved though and recently i decided to come back to WHMCS as it truely is the best system, so easy to work with and to skin.

[WHMCS John]

I've used Perlbill, WHMAutoPilot v2 and Modernbill v4 in the past. I heart WHMCS though...obviously

[Kanistic]

I totally agree with this article, I'm a strong Plesk control panel user, but when Parallels acquired MB, worst decision ever. Like the OP said, support died. I received a free account with MB (Plesk Billing) so that I could test their software, things seemed to be fine once I played around with the software, but when I ran into a problem, and contacted support it took weeks before I got a simple response to my ticket being opened, keep in mind that I was a potential customer. I opened a post on their forums to see if at least a user would respond, no reply for weeks, maybe to this date there is no reply to my post. A friend advised me to check out WHMCS, after the trial period, i was fascinated by ease of use, the official support, and the community who stands by the software, so I ended up purchasing the software and to this day I am still in love with it.

[RPS]

ModernBill is a worthless piece of **** that should never be used in a real functioning business. When I was a user, some upgrades completely broke my system.

 

It is clear nobody ditches WHMCS for ModernBill, they don't even have a working WHMCS import script, to be able to import WHMCS into ModernBill!

 

Anyone who does their own research, and still uses ModernBill, is a complete idiot. Your business will fail, and it will be well deserved.

[jnet]

I have not used any other software so do not want to judge and make bad image for those companies , sure they are doing their best to survive but I am happy with whmcs

[Derek]

ModernBill is a worthless piece of **** that should never be used in a real functioning business. When I was a user, some upgrades completely broke my system.

 

It is clear nobody ditches WHMCS for ModernBill, they don't even have a working WHMCS import script, to be able to import WHMCS into ModernBill!

 

Anyone who does their own research, and still uses ModernBill, is a complete idiot. Your business will fail, and it will be well deserved.

 

lol, sorry that was funny to read.

[chrcol]

Agree with all of the above.

 

1 - I was overpaying for at least a few months, multiple payments taken of my card.

2 - I eventually got my license suspended even tho I had 'overpaid', seems what someone said above they count 2nd payments as debits.

3 - When I wanted to contact them regarding the billing problems the form appeared to expect me to pay them money to ask them to fix their billing problem, this was the moment I decided to stop using modernbill.

4 - To this day even tho I have removed my credit card from the modernbill member area as well as cancelled my license parallels are attempting to bill it 3 times a month, I have had to ask the credit card company to put a block on the payments.

 

Regarding support, yes it was not great before the buyout however some important things, before the buyout the member area was ok, access to download modules etc. and a support area where you could contact them without paying anything. They would charge if they needed to do proper tech support but at least for things like billing they were contactable, however it seems now post buy out to even send them a ticket for 'any' reason a support payment has to be made.

 

WHMCS I have not needed to contact anyone yet, but I already see a clear improvement, much more sensible pricing and a good members area as well as the developer been very active here on these forums answering customer concerns. Oh and WHMCS actually works properly.

[sensei]

After switching from modernbill to WHMCS.... Due to modernbill's inability to function properly... I found 3 or 4 accounts in my system that were active for over 6 months without being billed. (Monthly accounts). After importing these accounts into whmcs they were sent invoices for this period. (Meaning, whmcs fixed the problem and invoiced them properly (automatically))

 

^^ This is just the icing ontop of the cake of the numerous other problems I had with their product which above posters have already highlighted.

 

Stay far away from modernbill.

 

P.S.

Derek, I find you everywhere!! stop following me!!

[Salman75]

Yes, we have used MB v4 and WHMAP as well but nothing compares to Matt and WHMCS.

[mikelegg]

We had been using a very crude in-house system that I wrote, then I received a WHMCS licence as part of a VPS plan that I ordered. Over the last year or so we've gradually been using more and more of the WHMCS features and less of the in-house application.

 

Just this week we put the last of the in-house stuff out to pasture and it's WHMCS all the way now.

 

Although I've had some trouble working out how to use some of the functionality, I love WHMCS and wouldn't even consider using another system.

 

WHMCS Rocks!

 

(The documentation could use a little more detail though)

[WHMCS John]

(The documentation could use a little more detail though)

PM me with what's lacking and we'll look into it!

[poppyq]

So I'm one of those unfortunate people who has been running Modernbill since v4 and I am actually still running PleskBilling v6.0.3, until today (almost). I have run into an issue (big surprise) where it seems to think my clients haven't paid their invoices and so it isn't running domain renewals. Those customers have a $0.00 balance. Trying to even find a way to get support from Plesk was a joke. They bought Modernbill, and now, unless you have the Plesk and Pleskbilling bundle, you're screwed. The standalone code is sitting on a shelf gathering dust somewhere and I'd be surprised if they even staff someone to support it.

 

With all that said, and finding this post confirming my desire to move away from PleskBilling, I'm wondering if there's an import script for v6.0.3. The main site here says it has import scripts for v4 and v5, but I didn't see a mention of PleskBilling v6. This is the only thing stopping me from ordering a license for WHMCS right now, so if someone can confirm that I'll be able to import everything without having to do it by hand, please let me know!

 

Oh, I forgot to mention that every time I login to PPB it tells me my license key has expired and I have to reactivate it. I have an owned license... why would it expire?

Edited August 15, 2011 by poppyq

[poppyq]

You know what? I couldn't wait and went forward with a trial and it turns out the ModernBill v5 import script works GREAT for PleskBilling v6 (they're essentially the same product anyway, just re-branded). I've already got all my clients migrated and while I did have to do some manual updating (none of the domains were set to my registrar module) it's working like a charm.

 

I just wanted to say that I'm already way beyond impressed with WHMCS after having used ModernBill for the past eight years (yes, I bought it in July 2003).

[Matt]

Great to hear that you've been able to get switched over so quickly! And I can confirm for others that our MB5 importer will also work for Plesk Billing 6 as like you say, that update was pretty much a rebranding only exercise on their side so the DB didn't change much. If you get any problems or questions, just let us know.

 

Matt

[mojahed]

To be honest these days the best Hosting Billing Software in the market are WHMCS & ClientExec.

[Gitex]

i was used mb5 / mb4 / whmap / clientexec in past.

 

i switched to whmcs 3.5 first time.

 

it was excellent for my needs. great & fast developing.

[VicToMeyeZR]

Wait, you bought a lifetime license of modernbill? With how much money you paid, I hope you are suing them for breach of contract. (Even if they were bought out, they HAVE to honor previous contracts)

[rlshosting]

Modern Bill 4 was alright. 5 was downright horrible. I am glad that I have switched to WHMCS since then. I highly recommend WHMCS to anybody!