Is it just me or is the v5 (hosted) upgrade really a downgrade from v4?
We had a few issues in v4 that we learned to live with, but since being upgraded to v5 in October we’ve had nothing but problems. Data import that didn’t import all client data, payment gateway issues, invoice sending issues, recurring invoice problems, upgrades that won’t upgrade the system … the list is so long that I don’t even know where to begin. And the UI is such a huge change and so strangely organized that it takes us twice as long to do anything, even after using it for a month.
I work in software development and this REALLY looks like we are paying to be beta testers for software that was never tested by real users in a production environment.
Am I the only one that feels this way? Is everyone else just loving v5?
Let me know if I’m just experiencing anomolies or if this is the new state of Invoice Ninja.
We’ve already started looking for alternatives but that would mean a huge migration headache after using IN for almost 5 years.
v4 is a very old app which has gotten stable over time. v5 is much newer, we’ve been working extremely hard to correct any issues as they are reported.
If you’re still seeing any specific problems we’ll of course work to address them.
Also, if you can provide specific examples of tasks which take longer in v5 it would be helpful.
I certainly agree with you.
We just upgraded and many things did NOT work as intended. I had so many correspondence with the support team about many different things.
First of all I think it is SLOWER not faster. I asked my member of staff to use the V5 and they told me it has a terrible UI.
I also do not agree with the notation of V4 was an old software and V5 is new. Following this logic when a software provider launches a new version it would be OK to have a bad experience at the beginning.
Hopefully you’ve found we’re responsive to your feedback. v5 is still very early in its lifecycle, we’re confident with time (and constructive feedback) we can make it into an amazing app.
Have you tried the new desktop app, the performance is significantly better than the web app.
Thanks for being active in this forum.
Yes I got quick replies to my questions and they helped me to solve my problems. (in most cases)
I’m happy to provide constructive feedback but you should also accept your responsibility when providing a software in a money related vertical.
It is not 2 days after the launch of V5 I remember seeing about it in the Slack channel for many months. (maybe even back in 2020)
For instance now I have to add all the users we had in V4 back in V5 since the users are not visible in V5 but they are counted against the user allowance etc.
There will always be bugs in v5, for that matter there are still bugs in v4. We aren’t able to create bug free software, the best we can do is try to fix bugs as quickly as possible when they are reported.
We’ve made the user allowance is v5 much better for our users. In v4 if you added a user to 2 companies it would count as 2 users, in v5 we’ve corrected this so it only counts as 1 user. If you’re seeing a problem with your user limit on the hosted platform please send an email to contact@invoiceninja.com and we’ll correct it.
Personally I don’t like Flutter in this project. Seems like it is not adjusted and optimized to work with browsers and desktop too much. It is slow, clunky and really heavy. In fact, you are downloading whole client app to your browser, that’s why caching is so important for Flutter. But even with cached whole app, everything seems slow. UI/UX is really weird for me, but I think I just adjusted to it already. But maybe I just looked too much on Angular admin site templates?
But I’m gonna admit that for me V5 is mostly stable experience. Bugs happens but they are fixed usually in a few days.
@kaan Agreed. We’re doing everything we can to reduce bugs. v4 has very little automated testing whereas we’ve made it a top priority with v5. Thank you for your patience and understanding, if you’re able to stick with us we’re confident v5 will eventually be insanely great.
@hahyes Thanks! I agree but think this will improve with time. Flutter has been on mobile for many years but is new to web and desktop. The creator of Flutter discusses it here and actually highlights our app.
Also… with v5 we strongly recommend users download the desktop app, assuming you don’t mind not being in the browser. It runs directly on the CPU/GPU, it’s much faster than the web app.
I’m sorry. I’m running a business. And invoicing is key to my business. I’ve run into problem after problem. I don’t have time to submit bug reports to fix obvious functionality issues. You really should have done internal testing to resolve this before you released it to the public.
If you were creating an entertainment software bugs wouldn’t be an issue, but in financial software you need to have a rock solid system or it’s useless.
Also, if this were a free package that I was hosting on my server, that would be one thing, but I’m paying you for this service, precisely because I don’t have the time to host it myself.
I think you’ve tried to add too many ‘bells and whistles’ and lost the focus of having a good, reliable invoicing system.
I’m definitely going to be moving my invoicing to a different solution after several years using Invoice Ninja (self-hosted and hosted). You have a good product, sorry you messed it up with this upgrade.
I would use the desktop app but I can’t zoom-in the PDF?, when I edit an Invoice I can’t save it? No save button, only continue editing or discard changes?? (update: the save button reappeared after changing colors back and forth but after restart it is the same, no visible buttons for cancel or save an invoice!)), It always opens collapsed and I need to manually open it to full screen… I can’t copy text almost nowhere, pdf is unreadable…
Regards
Paying customer here. This is very worrying for me - we received an email urging us to migrate to V5 and as a professional party, this meant the product was ready for production use. Your message here implies that it may not? Please clarify.
@cpaschen Sorry to hear it! We’ve been testing v5 in beta for over a year now.
@ma7ija If you’d like help resolving any existing bugs please create a new post.
@bartv The email was to let you know that the v4 MOBILE app will be removed from the app store, if you download it now you’ll be able to keep it after it’s removed. “Early in its lifecycle” does not mean “not ready for use”. It just means it’s a new app and we’re open to feedback from our community to help improve it.
Hi all, I wanted to just chime in on this. As someone who self-hosted v5 from very early in the beta (and, let me tell you self-hosting this was no fun at times), v5 has improved greatly over time. I have never used the cloud-hosted offering, but I’m hoping at least the codebase is similar.
It can be easy to pile on because we depend on the software so much and how sometimes this seems like an exercise in frustration - but, and this is a big one - the developers such as @hillel and others have shown a clear investment in positive outcomes with this software. They’ve surely endured enough of my frustration to show me they’re ready to take the hits to make this stuff better. Heck, they’ve heard me out when others might have walked away. I respect that and appreciate what they’ve done. I don’t regret sticking with v5.
The rest is the hard work and the effort to make things better. They’re doing that, and the evolution of the software has - I think - proven it.
I hear you. And I can’t speak to paying customers or those who need to be able to move along their workflow daily rather than deal with bumps in the software road. I understand those kinds of users have more at stake than a user like me.
As a self-hosted user who uses primarily open source type software, I can deal with rewrites that have some issues, which occasionally put me on hold a bit or lead me to do some troubleshooting. And the devs here have been more responsive and more polite than probably any other project I’ve used. I’m sure things haven’t gone as smoothly as they expected or would have liked. But they also had their reasons for the big switch, and hopefully it will all work out in the long run. In the meantime, v5 still seems to have more going for it right now than anything else I’ve tried at the “free” level, especially since I can also self-host. For me, that means a lot, in combination with active, interested devs.
I am an InvoiceNinja paying customer, and “upgraded” to v5 three months ago. I now realize I have made a terrible mistake. I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, but I am done.
The UI is not user-friendly at all.
The UI in a web browser on a desktop PC is unreasonably slow and not user-friendly. e.g. Perhaps the most important aspect of creating a Task is the description, yet the input field is small. Having to scroll to see just a few sentences is absurd.
The default black-and-white theme is impractical. I believe it was made for color-blind individuals, even though the majority of the population is not. See ProtonMail for what a nice, modern theme should look like.
Even the icons are ugly. Who designed this theme? And yes, I know I can change the colors.
The worst offense has to be the slowness of the web app. Making a change to a draft invoice takes several seconds to save.
It is as if they tried to reinvent the wheel, but made a triangle instead. Did InvoiceNinja do any market/user testing with real customers. These are the types of decisions that ruin a company.
What do I do now? I’ve had been using InvoiceNinja now for numerous years and feel that switching to another web app with all of my data intact is impossible. I am extremely disappointed, and will hesitantly look for another option.
Sorry you’ve had a bad experience and thank you for the detailed feedback.
If you’d like to stay with the app and work with us to improve these suggestions please let us know. If you decide to, please create a new post and we’ll work through these issues.
I don’t want to pile on the hate. While v5 has been a mixed bag, in truth, the team, @hillel and @david in particular, have both been very responsive to any and all issues I’ve seen and/or experienced. Given that I’ve paid exactly zero dollars so far, I think that is worth mentioning that they have been committed to improving the free, self-hosted offering.
Having said that, my advice to folks and what I’m following is to wait before upgrading and check on the forums to see what others’ issues have been. This has been helpful to know if I need to wait a release or two or not. Do I like not having the confidence that upgrades will “just work”? Of course not, but it is what it is.
Moreover, despite the frustrations, I also applaud the Invoice Ninja staff for always remaining pleasant and respectful. That goes a long way, and how you guys handle the community’s frustrations and your quick response is commendable.
I’m afraid I agree that v5 isn’t good compared to v4. I upgraded a hosted setup last week on the assumption that it would go smoothly and be an improvement. Neither appear to apply so far.
The migration annoyed me because it did not bring forward some of my settings, including no having a logo on the invoices. Instead it gave me the Ninja logo until I uploaded a blank image file to replace it. Only later did I track down where a flip-switch was to disable the logo (I think). By then I’d spent quite some time trying to see where to adjust the html - which was far from obvious as there seemed to multiple layers of named fields and parameters that weren’t clearly explained. And that’s in the hosted version!
I also “lost” the public notes I apply as standard to my invoices. These weren’t brought forward by the “clone to invoice” function. And I noticed that my old invoices from v4 had acquired the new v5 formatting and not retained their v4 character. So I’m not sure where that leaves me in strict legal terms. maybe I should have included downloading a pdf copy as part of my past process?
In terms of improvement or not, I had the impression it is slower. But more importantly, the UI makes no sense whatever to me. It took me an hour to realise that the “X” icons were meant to be what you click on to turn things OFF and didn’t represent things that weren’t selected in the setup. I do not like it. Nor do I like the look and feel.
I reckon it took me about 2 hours to do 10 invoices (cloned so not eventricky to create) by the time I’d fought my way round the new UI etc.
I’d really, really like to downgrade back to v4 if it’s possible. I was happy there and only migrated as I assumed IN had built a new version of similar quality and ease of use.
I am seriously thinking of moving elsewhere I’m afraid. In some ways it’s a relief to find I’m not the only one who’s disgruntled.
