Pricey and frustrating unless you have the patience of Job.

[Note: at the end of a frustrating attempt to make this plugin work, even after purchasing the product, I gave up and removed it. They asked for an honest review, which I provided by their direct support page. I’m posting it here as well, as it may help other potential users.]

This plugin shows great promise, but it is beset by nagging issues, which the company doesn’t seem able to address.

The first issue is that the plugin sometimes fails to stay in sync with the Facebook site it is drawing from. I was told (and forums confirm) that this appears to be limited to the free version. Oddly, after about two weeks of testing, the free version suddenly started syncing as it should. So that was a lot of anxiety and support time spent for nothing.

The second issue is the bigger one: the free version is extremely limited and the “pro” versions (yes, there are multiple levels of the “pro” version) are mind-bogglingly complex. All I wanted to accomplish was to display our Facebook feed’s livestream videos on a page on our site. (We currently manually edit the page to insert the latest video — tedious but not difficult.)

The free version doesn’t allow filtering by type, so it displays all posts, and it only displays the text — no photos, videos, etc. for the posts. That’s fine, and I don’t mind paying for the additional capabilities, so I purchase the “pro basic” version, which is billed as being “for 1 website” and promises “Photos & Videos in Feeds” among other things that might be useful. (The next level is called “pro plus” and is billed as being “for 5 websites” and offers a few more features, and… there are TWO levels of “pro” beyond that!)

Since I’m just administering a single site, I go with that plan. Foolish me. After going through a convoluted process to install the “pro” version (which is actually the “pro basic” version) I go through all of the additional settings and find that virtually all of them present me with an [advertisement] to purchase the “pro plus” version. On top of that, the few additional settings I can access don’t appear to make any changes to my page at all. [Yes, I cleared caches, etc.] The promised “photos & videos in feeds” — which was the one thing I thought I might salvage from this purchase — do not appear.

To make that sad experience worse, Wordfence is now warning me that its update check is now encountering errors with the plugin. I then disable and delete the plugin and go to the WordPress forum to reinstall the free version (until I can decide what to do for an alternative) and discover that it can’t be found! [Probably because I can’t navigate their complex naming scheme.]

My next complaint is that their website seems to be overly complicated. Consider this process: 1) go to the smashballoon.com home page. 2) see a large “Get Started Now” and click it. 3) See “Facebook Feed Pro” with “Buy Now” and “Learn More” buttons. 4) Click “Learn More” 5) See a page with a large “Get Started” button. Wha….? 6) Click “Get Started” and… the “Buy Now” page loads! Why not just take the user there in the first place, if that’s where you are driving us? I’m sure the reply would be that there is additional information on those intermediate pages, but the potential customer who is just trying to figure it out, is now confused and overwhelmed. (As I wrote in one email: “I kindly suggest that you invest some time in UI testing utilizing people who have no familiarity with your plugin: as the developer of the plugin, you have blind spots where you can not see the difficulties in your UI.)” That goes for the website, too.

After all of that, a 3-star rating might sound high, but this plugin does what it does quite well, and I suppose if you purchase the higher (or the higher-higher or even higher…) end package you might get what you are looking for. But for a small single use site, the “pro basic” license feels more like an “enhanced free version” than an actual value. And although they are plagued with administrative errors (after going back and forth for a couple of weeks, they apologized for not realizing that all of my support questions were coming from one person — even though I was directly replying to the emails I was receiving — and suggesting that they could have done better) it seems that they wanted to try but by then I was so frustrated and had realized that the $99/year “pro” plugin wouldn’t do what I needed, that I just gave up. Again, they were professional and honored their money back guarantee, but really, I would have rather had a plugin that did what it promised and offered a reasonable value for the price.

Last thought: I almost dropped this to a 2-star review after thinking about the fact that although support was a bit slow and beset with issues (see above) they are not shy about filling my inbox with marketing tips. But then I realized that this is most likely because they are all about selling to people who are marketing products, and that a site like ours, that is only interested in providing information, is not their target audience. That’s not their fault, so I can’t ding the rating for that. But it might be good for Smash Balloon if they could broaden their vision a bit.