Flexi vs Signlab

[SightLine]

Been using Flexi for nearly 20 years but am tiring of the issues. We have always had perpetual licenses. Still on 12 because of all the horror stories on here when 19 first came out and many even being told to go back to 12 by SAi support!

One issue I really see now is that we are now past the one version upgrade cost. On top of that to add insult to injury our perpetual designer licenses are apparently now garbage and cannot be upgraded, ever, period. Perpetual licenses for Designer seats are no more. Designer only licenses are only subscription now. So if we go to subscription on everything now I will have to pay out $1800 (that is with the annual fully prepaid 1 year pricing, monthly or annual commitment pricing is even higher) a year or I can pay $2959.20 to upgrade the Sign & Print perpetual license and then $360 per year, per design license (x3).

Here is their new pricing sheet.... https://www.thinksai.com/.../resources/flexi_price_list.pdf
Not the first time I've been kicked in the teeth with them either. Back on I think V10 I paid for the banner grommets add on, then they soon after started just including that for free. Did a get a refund? Of course not.

After nearly 20 years of being loyal to Flexi (I still even have a Casmate parallel dongle somewhere), I'm debating on looking at other options.

Another issue I am now having.... we have one Sign & Print license (dongle). We have always had a dedicated workstation just for Production Manager that sits in the print room and has the printers and cutters connected to it (2 Mimaki JV150, 2 Summa cutters). We have that computer setup so that it is basically on 24x7 with PM open. We can then install the same full Sign & Print on one of the users workstations and they can run Flexi Design and it sees the dongle over the network. Works great. Until we moved a few weeks ago. Everything is setup the same. Same Brocade network switch, same computers, etc. The one computer can no longer find the dongle or Production Manager over the network. Even swapped its install from the shared Sign & Print to a standalone Designer only license. When you try to print it just says cannot find any servers on the network. You can ping the PM machine by name, IP address, it shows in the network neighborhood, can click it there and browse the shared folders on it, copy files to/from it. Everything communicates with it except Flexi. Bizarre....

Aside from that. We really do not do much design in Flexi itself - mostly in Illustrator or PS. The workflow in Flexi is very easy. Open the artwork in Designer, arrange, add contour cuts, click Rip & Print (or cut only), poll the printer you want for the media size (or choose a size if it is not loaded yet), check options and send. Then go to the print room, make sure the right media is loaded, and click send from the Production Manager computer in there (cut job is sitting the the queue on hold to run later).

We use our own custom color profiles created in PM using an i1 Pro as well and it is fairly easy to use the same preset settings on all workstations. It really has served us well.

I'm very adverse to SaaS (renting software forever) but I realize that is what everything is going to. We have stayed with Adobe CS6 since that is the final perpetual licensed version and still use Estimate 2.0 since that is the final perpetual licensed version. If I go to subscription everything with 4 seats it will cost me close well north of 5 grand a year!!! Anyone want to buy a well established sign company - includes 10,000SF building and the real estate.... Seriously.

Anyways what do ya'll think? Look at Signlab? Some other option like Onyx? I'm not sure anything else has the dead simple seamless print/cut workflow that Flexi has. Stay with Flexi and try to just stick it our forever on v12 (I'm sure I can resolve the communications issue (I need to upgrade the RIP computer anyways). Bite the bullet and do full subscription for Sign & Print plus 3 designer seats for $1800 a year (if fully prepaid - more if not)? Upgrade the Sign & Print perpetual license and then subscribe to 3 designer seats? I'm pretty irritated that my designer perpetual licenses are pretty much garbage according to SAi now and cannot be upgraded to new perpetual licenses anymore.

 

[buggyjr12]

I feel ya. I paid $1,000 to upgrade from 11 Cloud to 19 last summer. Now, 21 is out and they want $2,200 to upgrade from 19 to 21. If you still have 12 however, you can upgrade from 12 to 19 for $895 and get 21 for FREE. How's that for a kick in the nuts? They're penalizing everyone who upgraded last year. It's infuriating.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

You missed the third option... 7 day free trial. You just have to sneak in the shop every Sunday and reinstall all your software.

Seriously though...I'm still using 8 and my production PC can't be upgraded past Windows 7....

 

[WildWestDesigns]

If you are going to try to stay with v12, VM and run a program in a VM with an OS that it was designed for. At some point on a newer OS, an update could very well make a legacy program not work right and you'll be up that well known creek. I'm pretty sure you like your Xeon/ECC hardware, and that really helps with VMing.

Even if you get a perpetual license software now, no promises that it will remain so for the next upgrade. We are really on the way to "own nothing and be happy" (although to be fair, we never owned commercial software, we just had more power back then compared to now). The EULA on the software is really pretty aggressive against end users, so this really shouldn't be much of a surprise.

For me, I would either stick with what I have and start setting aside for a subscription if I think I may have to upgrade a machine or two and it would require drivers included with a later version of the software or get a newer version of a still perpetual license software and try to hold onto that for as long as I can (of course that means a learning curve as well, I always have to wonder if some of the negatives that people say about programs aren't really that the alternative program can't do the work, but it's just a different workflow to it). Depending on how long you think you'll be in the game, the decision may fluctuate as well.

Between SaaS and lack of ability to repair our own machinery, it's no bueno.

You missed the third option... 7 day free trial. You just have to sneak in the shop every Sunday and reinstall all your software.

Back in the old days used to be able to roll the system clock back.

 

[Graphic Extremes]

What did you end up doing I am in the same situation now.

 

[DPD]

Well, I'm confused. I'm using Flexi 19 which I've upgraded to through the years. It's a subscription version and yup, it's pricey. About $70 / month and perpetual support. When I purchased my Win 7 system years ago the version of Flexi I was using crashed upon my first Windows update. I rolled the update back, turned off Windows update and haven't had a windows update in years. Flexi also has no problems. I think that the problems are a result of Flexi not being updated as updates of Windows comes out but Windows updates so often who can blame them. If I left my updates on I'd get them every day.

When I purchased my W10 system I learned how to turn those updates off even though Windows was trying to force them through. Moral of the story? Turn off windows updates after you get Flexi settled down again. Aside from that, I work through Corel and Adobe software and can't find a substitute for Flexi - especially its RIP engine which I revise through I1 profiling. These are things you can't do (as far as I know) in Corel or Adobe.

Anyway, I get the feeling that any sign software will have problems with Windows because there's no way to keep up with the incessant updates that windows installs on their systems. It's not like you're using Word or Excel or any other standard program. I'd move to Linux if these darned programs would go with me because there are substitutes for the Corel and Adobe but you can't get Flexi or the others on Linux.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Well, I'm confused. I'm using Flexi 19 which I've upgraded to through the years. It's a subscription version and yup, it's pricey. About $70 / month and perpetual support. When I purchased my Win 7 system years ago the version of Flexi I was using crashed upon my first Windows update. I rolled the update back, turned off Windows update and haven't had a windows update in years. Flexi also has no problems. I think that the problems are a result of Flexi not being updated as updates of Windows comes out but Windows updates so often who can blame them. If I left my updates on I'd get them every day.

And yet another reason why I am not an advocated of a rolling release OS approach for production purposes, if going this route, programs may as well be web based at that point. With WASM, getting better RAM usage, it is also doesn't matter what OS the user has. I would say, rather one likes it or not, this would be the way software vendors go in the long term. Might as well if they are going the subscription route totally.

When I purchased my W10 system I learned how to turn those updates off even though Windows was trying to force them through. Moral of the story? Turn off windows updates after you get Flexi settled down again. Aside from that, I work through Corel and Adobe software and can't find a substitute for Flexi - especially its RIP engine which I revise through I1 profiling. These are things you can't do (as far as I know) in Corel or Adobe.

If you had an old enough version of Win 10, you could do this. The newer versions, you would be unable to do this. Even the most common trick of using the host file to block IPs is no longer valid (and this was the common method of stopping the Win10 nag and the updates early on).

Bare in mind, twice a year, there are big version updates to Win 10 that are only supported for 18 months (just about as bad as Fedora's 13 months(on average)), there are programs that won't work even on certain versions of Win 10, or if nothing else, only officially supported on certain versions, so keep that in mind.

I personally wouldn't mind if they did this with just security updates (as far as Windows goes), but feature updates and forcing even Enterprise users (yes MS did change that for even Enterprise users, just have a longer delay time is all) that's where things can get hinky.

I'd move to Linux if these darned programs would go with me because there are substitutes for the Corel and Adobe but you can't get Flexi or the others on Linux.

There are good replacements for cutters/lasers, shoot can even setup raw HPGL very easily (as in a GUI method, I know some on here are all about the GUI) to "print" to a cutter without the need of drivers, OEM or 3rd party, as long as your cutter can parse what it needs. As far as RIPs go, Caldera is about your only bet with Linux. What I use. For a time, you actually had DRAW on Linux (that was about the time that they originally had a Mac version as well, before recent years).

The biggest problem for software vendors and supporting of different platforms is the GUI. Most compiled languages are fairly portable (at least the ones that most people would think of, C++, C, Go, HAXE etc. However, once you slap a GUI on it, especially the old school way of targeting the native OS API, that's it. Have to do a code base for each OS. From the late 90s on, had Qt (my favorite, big Plasma fan) which is the best library for C++ and is cross platform (if use QML can even run off iOS and Android), but their licensing is horrid. Autodesk Maya (which does support Linux as well due to no small part to this), Teamviewer, parts of Adobe programs, VLC, Krita use Qt. A lot of people hate Electron, but that too is an option (it's not really all that bad, just makes it really easy for just any program to be made and that presents the biggest problem).

The downside going forward for a lot of people is that most cross platform libraries don't use the native libraries (Qt QWidgets does (not QML though), GTK, and WX do as well) and that is off putting for a lot of people, although it does make a program consistent across all platforms, just maybe not consistent for the individual platform unless a lot of styling is used.

But I think with a lot of people used to the Material Design GUI look/feel and there are even desktop GUIs that use this (Fyne for Go comes to mind, interesting thing about Go is that Go can build cross platform even when the target and host machines are different as long as everything is totally written in Go, only reason why I mess with that language), so I think most software vendors are going to have to come to terms with cross platform, especially if they are just coming out now. If they are old, but adding say Mac when they were mainly Windows only (I think I read on here that Flexi was going to be releasing a new Mac version, but that is rumor as far as I can tell, but I haven't looked into it), this would be the time to do something that is more cross platform, even if they never do Linux, it would atleast merge the two to one. Only downside is that it is a dependency that they don't have much control over. Always something.