Useful features but expensive and lacking full customization

The plugin model that Sumome has setup is very interesting – sort of like an App store for wordpress. I evaluated this plugin for its social sharing features and ultimately decided not to use it after some testing.

The base free versions of the plugins offer a fair amount of functionality, but fairly quickly you realize there are good features that require payment. And the payment model is fairly expensive and was the big deal breaker for me.

For many people who don’t mind the lack of customization this plugin is quick to setup and may be useful. However if you prefer more control over your plugins, this may not be the plugin for you.

The plugin loads a 144kb javascript file on every page of your site. In addition, the customization options are a bit to generic (it feels like the plugin was built to run on any platform and misses true wordpress integration).

Case in point is the user interface which I personally found to be distracting with the floating blue button loaded on every page of the admin panel. Rather then follow the normal convention of integrating the plugin into wordpress, Sumo attempts to create their own interface separate from wordpress.

I also tried the share image feature and while that was also easy to setup, I was disappointed it required the user to accept the SUMO app during the share process for facebook and twitter. While there may be a technical reason for this, that’s a barrier I would prefer to avoid.