I really, really want to love Pensil but there are a lot of small, messy issues that need to be resolved before I could think about switching my community over—I’m hopeful that it’ll get there.

Functionally it works okay—a little slow and a test livestream didn’t record—but nothing that’s a dealbreaker.

I never expect perfection from a new product on AS—especially so close to launch—but I do need to be relatively confident that I could start using it within 3-4 months, based on current functionality, developer responsiveness, and product potential/roadmap. I’ll take the refund period to make that decision but given the issues are small I’m quietly confident this will be a deal I keep.

A few things stopping me from switching my existing community to Pensil right now:

• Not everything is mobile responsive. Even with an app available it needs to work in a mobile browser. Links inside of Events are an example.

• Logo dimensions are not honored so it appears stretched or squished in various places. If there’s a specific ratio required it’d be helpful to share the info as users choose their logo file.

• The UX micro copy is strangely inconsistent—with some of it written all lowercase. There are grammatical errors too. This appears in the community itself and email notifications. It’s very obvious the English was written by someone with ESL which would be a big problem for my brand. You can’t edit any of this text—if I could edit it myself it would be a non-issue.

• You can’t edit the text in any of the notification emails that are sent—I couldn’t even find a resource that showed examples of them all. It’s really important to know 100% of the messaging that my members/customers may see.

• I appear to have been given a generic username that I can’t change: @ my name with a string of numbers. No idea why that’s shown when hovering over my picture but not something I can edit.

• You can create an Event or schedule a Live but they’re not integrated. So you can’t schedule a Live and include it in the Events section—making it more difficult for members to track. Vice versa your Events are assumed to be meetings where everyone is an active contributor. This set up doesn’t work great for larger communities where content/teaching is live-streamed.

• Both Live and Events post a notification post immediately to the community, I couldn’t see a way to create them privately and then announce the Event when you’re ready.

Most of these issues are small but they quickly stack into a messy experience—in a community the UX is as important as function.

If you don’t need finesse then Pensil works fine—if your brand is a concern and you plan to use it for a paid membership, then they need some time to clean up the experience but hopefully it won’t take long.

Keeping this one in my back pocket for now and if they can resolve some of the issues I’ll likely upgrade.