Software is buggy, support refuses to acknowledge issues.

AWFUL. I can’t even express how frustrating my experience with this company was. I literally wrote a 9-page review that included a month’s worth of back-and-forth support emails with Chronosly, but no one will read all that, so I’ll do my best to summarize in bullet points.

ISSUE #1 – DRAG AND DROP EDITOR
The editor is HORRIBLE. Fields don’t drop where it seems they should, then they default to full width, pushing other fields out of place – then those fields default to full width, pushing other fields out of place – and if anything gets pushed under another box, it becomes unclickable, so you can’t resize or move it. The sample text “lorem ipsum, etc” is too long and pushes fields under other boxes, making them – you guessed it – unclickable. Support suggested I use the “Default” button to resize fields back to their original size, but that doesn’t help if you can’t select the field.

There’s no ‘back’ or ‘undo’ button in the editor, so any time a field became unclickable, my only options were to either a) delete other fields until the one I wanted moved and could be clicked on again, or b) refresh and start over, losing whatever work I hadn’t saved. AND – on that same note, there’s no “Preview” option either, so the only way to preview your finished product is to save it, which means that – if it *didn’t* work right, you’re screwed because you’ve just saved that change into your template. (A couple times I couldn’t get things undone, and had to reset the entire template and start over after trying for an hour to make ONE SIMPLE CHANGE that should have taken 30 seconds. I wanted to throw my computer through a window.)

ISSUE #2 – INSTALLING ADD-ONS
Three of the five things I purchased from Chronosly (full calendar version, one template, and three add-ons) would not install. I tried on multiple browsers, multiple computers, on a PC and Mac, no luck. I had to go back and forth with support for a week on average, PER ADD-ON, to get them installed. Support told me repeatedly there was no problem, and everything was working fine. They suggested I was trying to install it through the WordPress plugin installer, as opposed to the Chronosly add-on installer, but I was not. The Chronosly add-on page would even say “Add-on successfully installed.” I sent them a screenshot of this – but not once, even after going through this problem three separate times – did they ever acknowledge that their software was possibly not working correctly for me.

ISSUE #3 – RECURRING EVENTS
I tried setting an event to run on the last Wednesday of every month, only to find that wasn’t possible without buying ANOTHER add-on. Great. First, it took a week to get the new add-on installed (see previous issue). Next – the new add-on didn’t just add functionality, but instead COMPLETELY changed the event editing page. The date entry section, which previously had been simple and user-friendly, now took up half the event editor page, and all my events were now called “seasons.” What does this even mean? I’m not a baseball team. In the options for this add-on, there’s a box that reads, “Name for Seasons.” I entered “Occurrences” here. Saved, went back to the editor page, and everything still read, “Seasons.” Sigh. To top it all off, the recurring events didn’t work. In the event editing page, the events showed in the right places, but online, it only displayed the first event. I went back and forth with support again. First they told me THREE SEPARATE TIMES that everything was working fine (I had to wait days between emails for them to tell me this, repeatedly, despite the fact that the recurring events were VERY CLEARLY not displaying on my website), then they finally said it was because I wasn’t displaying the event end time on the live site.

I didn’t WANT to display end times, because our shows may end early based on weather or crowd size. I had already added event end times to the backend, but why am I forced to communicate end times to customers that might not be accurate, in order to get this plugin to work? And if removing that field on the front end breaks the calendar, why is it an option to remove it in the drag and drop editor? And why did they tell me three times it was working perfectly? Did they ever even LOOK at the website I was showing them?

ISSUE #4 – FB IMPORT
I bought the import/export add-on to import events from my business FB page. I studied the instructions, which told me to go to a certain page on FB, which would have a certain “ical” URL, and use that page to get a downloadable list of events. Except… it didn’t work. None of my page’s event lists had “ical” anywhere in the URL, not on the main events page, the “share events” page, nowhere. The only way I could get a URL with “ical” in the URL to download anything was to go to a single FB event and select “export event.” That *did* work… which meant that, for each event I wanted to import, I would have to go to it individually, one at a time, and download it, then upload it into Chronosly. How on earth is this supposed to save time? It would be significantly faster just to create each event by hand. Of course, when I brought this up, support first helpfully informed me that there was no way to export events *to* Facebook – which isn’t what I was asking about at all – and then when I explained again, they told me that the plugin was working as intended, and that “FB doesn’t have a native exporter.” I’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean. How does this explain the fact that the instructions they give on their support page for this plugin don’t actually match what Facebook does?

ISSUE – SUPPORT
Several times, support told me things that didn’t make sense. For example, they suggested my issues with the drag and drop editor were because I was customizing my feature image — but there IS no ability to show a featured image in the drag and drop editor. It’s a placeholder image, provided by Chronosly. What could I have been customizing?

At least a dozen times, they told me everything was working fine, when it was NOT. They told me several times that I should try a certain thing, when I’d already told them I’d tried that same thing – so they weren’t reading my mails. Their time zone is different from mine, meaning that unless I emailed first thing in the morning, I had to wait at least a full day for a response. This obviously isn’t their fault, but for a month, my life consisted of me emailing them with, ”Hey, this isn’t working. I tried x, y, and z,” and them responding after two days with, “It’s working fine. You were probably doing it wrong. You just need to try x.” Again, my computer came close to going out the window multiple times.

When I finally just asked them for a refund, explaining that it wasn’t working for me, they told me they wouldn’t refund ANY of it – not a single penny – because a) it was all working just fine (!!!), and b) software is intangible, and I could use it on other sites, and they offered me a discount on future products. Seriously? Why on earth would I want to use it on other sites when I can’t get it to work on one? Who would want to continue working with software that won’t even INSTALL without having to spend a week going through a support ticket? I sent them my license key and asked them to disable it, delete it from their system, whatever it took to ensure I couldn’t continue to use their buggy software – but they insisted that a refund was not possible.

I’m aware, from the tone of their emails, that they think I’m an idiot who can’t read or work a computer, but I assure them – and whoever’s reading this review – that I’m not. I’m no sysadmin expert, but I’ve created a dozen small websites over the years, all using WordPress installations, and I know how to read a FAQ. This software has SERIOUS issues, and they refuse to acknowledge any of them. I gave them multiple opportunities to take the good customer service route and refund my money, but they refused.

After finally giving up and switching calendars, losing $194 and at least 60 hours of my time, it took me TWO DAYS to get a new calendar back to the place I was before. I didn’t have to buy any extra add-ons, and when I had a question for their support team, they solved it within one day. I won’t name the other calendar here since I don’t want to come across as an ad for another company – as that’s not what this is about.

I desperately wish I hadn’t wasted so much time and money with Chronosly, and that includes the time it took to write this review — but if it saves even one person the experience I had with this frustrating plugin, it’s worth it. Don’t start down this path!