Andrew Sobczak

Review of Bentley Systems

Great software and support overshadowed by shady b...

Great software and support overshadowed by shady business practices.

We use the RAM products extensively at our firm and well the software and support have been great, their licensing on the other hand not so much. There licensing is extremely confusing but basically after you purchase your set number of licenses they still allow for users to bypass this license limit because they want to "ensure that access to our software is available at any consumption rate, 24/7/365". Well, I understand this approach and think that for some organizations this would be great, for my organization and probably many others this is a huge problem because this causes us unpredictable quarterly overage charges, why not give organizations the option to choose which strategy works best for them? The most baffling thing is that they already have a license alerting feature which sends alerts to the user that we have reached our license limit but still gives them the option to continue(which all users inevitably do anyways), It seems like such an easy fix for Bentley to allow admins to disable the "continue button" in the licensing alerting feature. After talking with multiple support people and reps, I walked away with the feeling that either nobody at Bentley is capable of figuring this problem out or that this shady business practice was deliberately put in place to get a little bit more money out of customers each month, either way it's not a good look.