Invision Community software is $500. After that, it's $200 a year for support and updates.
That's a lot of money.
Sure, you get features like user blogs, downloads, commerce, and events but not every community owner is going to need those features. In all honesty, they'd be better as official plugins.
Do you think Invision Community is worth its price? If so, why is that? If not, why not?
My personal experience from using it, I believe that it is worth the investment for a community that is looking to offer more than just forums. The Pages and Blog options are worth it alone, along with the overall software suite.
You could compare it with Woltlab with the feature set; the only issue is that most of the support for them is in German.
For forums, I think it's way overpriced. The UI is beautiful and modern, but I would rather stick to XenForo (even though their price has increased as well over the years) for forums since they have all the same capabilities that are needed to run a successful forum. I also love the consistent XenForo updates and available themes/plugins which I am more familiar with.
I personally think IPS is worth it if you actually use the ecosystem properly. Yeah, $500 upfront and then $200 a year for renewals is expensive, especially for smaller communities, but you are getting a very polished platform with a lot built in already. At the same time though, I do agree not everyone needs things like Commerce, Blogs, Downloads, or Events. For a lot of forums, those probably would make more sense as optional official plugins instead of part of the main package.
I’ve had IPS on baysidegamers.com since 2014, and honestly the pricing back then to get everything was actually more expensive than what it is now. Back then renewals were every 6 months too, whereas now it’s yearly, which makes it feel a bit easier to manage financially.
For me, the biggest reason IPS is worth it is stability, support, security updates, and the overall quality of the software. A lot of cheaper forum software can end up costing you more in time, plugins, fixes, and headaches in the long run.
