Here’s why I switched from BuddyBoss to Youzify

I just spent the past six months trying to create a new website using BuddyBoss, and have given up. I had high hopes for BuddyBoss, but the product doesn’t live up to the hype. The one claim they make that they live up to is support, which is good.

If you want to build a site that’s a straighforward clone of Facebook, with no unique functions or features, BuddyBoss might work well for you.

But if your members need functions beyond ordinary social media, you’re probably better off with a plugin like Youzify that allows you to add these social media features to a regular WordPress site that allows you to do anything.

Here are just a few of the major problems we encountered:
1) They have a “BuddyBoss Integrations” webpage with a long list of plugins that supposedly are compatible with BuddyBoss, but I think they just mean your computer won’t blow up if you combine them. For instance, Elementor is on that list, which was a major plus since we use it heavily. But it turns out that none of the core BuddyBoss pages (like Groups, Forums, Members, etc.) are editable in Elementor: you can only create new pages in Elementor using their Sample page.

2) Don’t believe the BuddyBoss claim of requiring fewer plugins: you’ll need tons of them. It’s true that you don’t need BuddyPress, but that’s about it for cutting down on plugins.

3) Many of our support requests got the reply that we would need to hire a professional developer to get what we want. Sometimes it seemed like sending business to developers was the reason they created BuddyBoss.

4) The turning point came when we realized that we were spending half our development time trying to work around BuddyBoss limitations. We bought it to make our lives easier, not harder.

We were far beyond the 14-day money back guarantee. But, since we never used BuddyBoss for even one minute on a live site, I was hoping for at least a partial refund, since it turned out to be useless to us. (There’s no way you can really discover that in just 14 days.) No such luck: $228 and six months of work wasted.

I worry about the future of BuddyBoss. They regularly have lifetime license offers that they push really hard. They are sacrificing future revenues for a cash infusion now, which makes me wonder whether they have staffed-up too fast and created too much overhead. But they might actually have a good reason: if there are lots of folks like me who don’t renew, it makes sense to get as much money from them as you can before they leave.

Note: This review is more about BuddyBoss than Youzify (which is what we’re now using). Part of the reason for that is that BuddyBoss removed their product from the WordPress system, probably so that people couldn’t rate them and leave reviews like this one.

Youzify is listed here on WordPress, so they aren’t afraid of what folks will say about them. I can see why. I’ve only been using Youzify for a couple of weeks, and can already report that it’s a great plugin and the support is absolutely phenomenal: the best I’ve seen. They always reply within 24 hours, and they bend over backwards to solve problems or address unique needs.

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