Niche product requiring lots of time and/or money to make it work
First and foremost, this product clearly reflects the years of dedication and hard work put in by its founder, and I'm confident it provides exceptional results for many advanced users who have full time developers dedicated to their CMS.
I successfully launched my own instance on AWS Lightsail ($10 per month). I've installed all essential premium modules and implemented customizations tailored to my brand and community structure.
My experience was really disappointing, as I am used to smoothly working products on Appsumo:
- The step-by-step installation tutorial deserves to be more detailed. 95% of users are probably stopping at that step, but maybe that's done on purpose to filter out their ideal customer.
- This is NOT a user-friendly, ready-to-use product; this is just a skeleton that will require 15 hours to set up a basic configuration, but which cannot be further customized without coding ; They offer paid services, but their pricing page mentions more than $100,000 a year for a half-time coder dedicated to your project (100 hours/mo).
- The product can be downloaded and installed for free; this LTD just offers a few premium modules. The most interesting modules must be purchased from the marketplace. However, the selection is limited, with most modules created by only a few developers.
- There are no UI tips, you keep wondering what each setting is supposed to be about.
- There is no detailed documentation, and you must use a trial-and-error approach, eventually killing your CMS because you cannot set up a 'sandbox' environment or handle versions. You cannot export/import settings, so creating a clone is also not an option.
- I was really surprised by how little customization there is. It’s missing some basic settings you’d expect to set up a simple community platform. Even the premium modules have just a short list of things you can tweak. So, you’ll have to dig in the code, but then there’s the worry that it might not work after updates.
- Finding settings is not straightforward, as there are no convenient search bars available. You will need to navigate through the pages one by one until you locate the option you need to edit. Content, format, menus etc are not regrouped per page. Editing could be made more straightforward, merging everything in the visual page editor.
- At some point, my CMS stopped working: Posts on feeds or discussions posted in public were not visible, even after reinstalling the related modules. There was no way to fix this by myself.
- There are bugs with no ways to fix it, e.g. posting in anonymous mode doesn't work, or setting up an AI agent resulted in all questions and answers being posted on the public feed of the user!! I would expect basic features to be bug-proof and work smoothly, at least.
- This product has undergone numerous updates over the years, with significant revisions occurring every 1 to 2 years. In my opinion, this situation has turned into quite a mess, and I believe the developers ought to adopt a completely new strategy.
- I don't anticipate any significant AI integration in the near future, and we know how much future CMS will require to be reinvented with AI-powered features. At some point google studio, Manus.ai or OpenAI will allow us to code, publish, updade, and maintain, or own products. Or we will see new actors using this AI-optimized coding approach to boost their product update. I therefore don't see myself investing time in a product that might soon become outdated.
- My fundamental question is: What customer segment are they targeting, and why did they release on AppSumo?
Yasko
May 23, 2025Thank you for the detailed feedback, Sebastien!
First, to your main question - who’s is this for? UNA is a product for community-led business founders. In most cases it’s someone tech savvy but not necessarily a developer. There’s also an assumption that a community should be independent and capable to run a high-scale network.
These assumptions drive many design decisions - the platform is a full stack solution, but it’s not entirely opinionated - you can build a network like Facebook or like X or like Quora. Our ideal customer is someone with a unique idea in mind, so a lot of modules are effectively starters that provide the fundamentals required for social networking, which can then be extended to build something unique.
So, you’re right - as it is, UNA is not a “launch in one hour” kind of platform. You’d normally need a few weeks to implement a custom network. On the other hand, once it’s done you’d have the base server logic and API for your socials apps.
Your observations on installation, documentation and UI guidance is also very valid. We’ve been working on a solution for these issues for a while now and expect to release a preview of the new UI in July this year along with AI-driven configuration assistant. We also have an automated deployment tool which will be augmented with integrated services later this year.
Thank you again for your detailed feedback - it’s really helpful and on point.