Originally Posted by
Michael Jasper
I just purchased the Silver Edition after evaluating with the free trial. I think it's good software - for me, as a hobbyist, minimizing my purchases of expensive wood justifies the cost. I like the materials database, though I think there are some odd quirks in the interface.
Compared to alternatives it's easier to use, more polished, more powerful. I like that you can keep track of your stock and decrease it for each project.
Some of the UI decisions are a bit awkward or unwieldy or unintuitive - but nothing that's a deal breaker.
I was put off by one decision they made in their pricing model. The Silver Edition is aimed at the hobbyist, while the Gold edition ($250) is aimed at professionals - more complex projects, copies with minor changes for customers, the ability to merge projects, creating customer proposals, a pricing tool, multi-user features, and CAD integration. For a business to pay an additional $160 to get all those capabilities seems quite reasonable.
The problem is they've chosen to put edge banding in the Gold Edition. As a hobbyist, no matter how helpful that feature might be, there is no way I could justify that price jump just to add on Edge Banding. It's kind of a bizarre pricing model. I wrote to them about this and their response was simply "we consider this an advanced feature" - but they would not discuss that they've bundled one material planning feature with a whole set of capabilities aimed at professional shops.
It's not unreasonable to charge a bit more for additional features - but the idea that a non-professional would jump to $250 from $90 to get one single capability defies logic. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for the feature. But an additional $160? That's just silly.
All that said, of all the alternatives I evaluated , the $90 silver edition feels like a reasonable expense for pretty high quality software. But don't expect help with Edge Banding unless you have money to burn.
Yes the lacking of edge banding support in the Silver version really is a downfall of the suite. Its not like hobbyists dont work with edge banding. I really think they left it out as an annoyance to tempt the hobbyist Silver owners to drop way more money to upgrade.
If at first you don't succeed, redefine success!