Use Whmcs, its better than any other billing system.

Please don't take this personally, because it's directed at many others as well..

There's no such thing as "the best, or better that X".. Only "best for me" or "better than X in my opinion". I'm getting really frustrated as I read so many people making absolute statements about things that are clearly relative to their application.

Usually I'd just sigh and let it go. But there's a lot of people browsing these forums looking for advise. If you tell them X is the best they may just take your word for it. I'd much rather someone think "I don't know what's the best for me", research the hell out of it, and determine what's best for them based on their needs. Otherwise they could think "111host said WHMCS is the best, so here's my $324.95 Matt"...

I'm not saying WHMCS wouldn't be the best solution for many people, I absolutely love it, always have. But take VPS Guy for example.. When I started developing the site I actually had an unused WHMCS license, but it wasn't what was best.

There are so many things to consider. I suggest to make a list of needs & wants in a billing&/support system, then go though all available options with that list.

By the way mods, WHT has a nice little wiki directory that lists many common software(you know what I'm talking about). We should get something like that here.. Just make sure you back it up(lol).

We don't use WHMCS, but it certainly is an industry standard and very popular. Of course, you should match your requirements to the system you're considering integrating.

I've been seriously considering it. I'll demo it later this week and see how it compares to WHMCS

I think it depends on the services you offer. For example, if you are offering shared and reseller hosting you can use WHMCS if more advance i would use modern bill.

Out of curiosity, what does Modernbill offer that you can't do in WHMCS?

From my understanding there's better/support for Parallels software. Other than that I'm not quite sure. I used MB back in v4-5 and was disgusted with the support. I'm assuming Parallels has done much better with it, but I won't be using it unless I find I'm required to with a future project.

this is an intresting thread - it started back in 2006 -- read how it went from ModernBill to WHMCS --

Modernbill owned the market, then version 5 came out - and it feel apart --

we use WHMCS -- we did order modernBILL, couldnt get it running and 60 days later switched to whmcs - we should note we are a reseller as well

We use WHMCS, but it would be nice to see some other billing systems out there besides WHMCS and CE. If only a couple of PHP programmers would get together

Hey Domenic,

You beat me to it! I wanted to be sure that anyone reading this thread saw that the original suggestion of ModernBill was from in 2006 (when the software was one of the best on the market). The thread was rehashed again in 2008 and now here again in 2009.

I've used many various types over the years, even purchased ModernBill when it was $49!!! Now who else can remember that far back with the budding software? I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Fountain a few times over the years and we even did a bitch session about just what was wrong in version 4 and how awful the version 5 prototype was looking. I'm happy that they finally saw when to get out of the market and let someone else take over.

I've used Ubersmith, but due to the number of servers and the monitoring needed, we needed the DE version which was very expensive for what it did.

In late 2007 we moved to WHMCS and really haven't looked back. We've developed a few different tools for integration to get the software to do more things than it was designed to do, and for an "Out of the Box" solution it's a tough one to beat! Support is also good, and the community is fairly quick to post help when they can.

The downside to using an inhouse product is the certification and requirements that will be needed to pass PCI Compliance. The up side is that you know EVERYTHING that's in the software and it does exactly what you want to do. If you have the money, custom is usually a good solution.

As for DHD-Nick, what would you like to see different in WHMCS or CE? Personally I think the billing market is pretty covered at this time, but a server monitoring program, server inventory control and software version tracking information is software that is actively being seeked by various places. Would love to head up that project, but I'm not in a position to invest the money needed currently

HSP Complete / PEM did that at one point as well as billing... Not sure if parallels do it anymore, they have changed the name so many times


Were using WHMCS and are more than happy with it - they are becoming the market leader (if not already). ClientExec has however improved massively and I just love the new front end!

Yeah, we had setup Ubersmith as they had a nice monitoring and inventory control setup, but by the time you add in 300 sever hardware configurations, and then monitor 7 ports on each one, you're paying a FORTUNE for each individual "node" that you monitor. Top it off that they have limitations on the number of customers in the program, we'd need to be buying the 5,000+ customer license, so there's another chunk of change out the door.

Parellels have changed so much it's hard to keep up I still think they're playing catchup to WHMCS though!

Mind you im sure doing the same to WHMCS would slow it down!!!

Were creating a plugin which integrates into the rack software we have for automatic provisioning / management of servers - it *should* lighten the load on WHMCS when its done...

Presumably your running billing on its own separate server?

Oh yes, definitly on different machines Our website is actually on 6 different dedicated servers. I did look at the monitoring inside WHMCS but like you said, not really a practical solution. Even their status/uptime script can be intense when doing a force request on the home page.

We run NOCWizard, OPenNMS and Nagios on different servers currently for monitoring. Works out just fine. Just wish I could do more on the Nagios software so we can track hardware inventory, server passwords and software versions automatically populated etc. Some of this can be done with SNMP I'm sure, but just never have enough time to play with it.

I looked at WebMonkey years ago for automatic provisioning etc - really nice the way it was setup, but we no longer need to do this portion of setups any more.

Were currently implementing Nagios onto our new network along with some custom stuff (lets face it... nothing beats in-house software)

Did you mean NocMonkey You can setup automatic provisioning via PXE etc as well...