I've used Tessitura for 20 years, in multiple organizations and found it to be user friendly. Reporting and analytics options have improved greatly over the last 5 years. Without knowing SQL I'm able to create custom visualizations for end users.

I like that Tessitura is a non-profit helping other non-profit organizations. They truly take feedback from end users and improve the software every year. The technical support and world-wide community support is amazing. Everyone is willing to share and help find best solution. Every department is able to work in the same system and get the full picture of each patron. It forces collaboration where silos existed in the past. Ticketing and Develoment folks will use it the most, Marketing some, Finance the least. Security features are robust and easy to manage as an administrator.

My current organization is in the middle of implementation. Because the system is so flexible there are times when there are no hard and fast rules of how to set up a process. Everyone uses it differently so that's good and bad. I wish it had facility management capabilities since so many non-profits rely on that for operations.

Tessitura has been flexible and the solution we needed at the time we implemented to handle our complex admissions, membership and fundraising needs. Support is always helpful and typically quick to respond. I love having all data in a single location.

Product is very complex and many users are deterred by that. Tessitura is on the right track but a little slow in updating technologies to match other competitors. I feel like I spend a lot of time defending the software and it's functionality to our less technical end users. The cost is not insignificant, but has been worth it at this point for us.

Shop around. There has to be a more efficient and effective product.

The integration of ticketing with prospects/donors is alluring, esp. for performance art organizations.

This is a ticketing software with a CRM work-around built in. It's confusing, user abusive and extraordinarily expensive. In our town, NPO's had to group together, in one building, where they created a new company that specializes in Tessitura software management. It's a clever use of the software and a business structure. This company then went out and sold it's software services to other performance art organizations as far away as Los Angeles. However, all organizations can see who has who in their database. You can't go into the account, but it becomes readily apparent our prospects and donors are being hit on all the time by all the same organizations. It's tricky. But the fact remains. Tessitura is enormously complex, just to get acknowledgements out is a lot of busy work. When I came on board, the previous development person really used Tessitura as a storage unit and did all the fund raising in Excel and Word. And from a NPO business perspective, once you commit to this software, extraction is basically a blackmail. It costs a fortune to leave it and organizations still have this challenge of ticketing tied to fund raising.

Tessitura is at the heart of everything we do as an organisation. It holds our customer data, we use it to manage our ticketing and website offerings, to manage Direct Debits and donations, marketing, and much more. We could not function without it.

It is so customisable, and does so much. There are facets for all areas of our organisation.

It is so customisable. This is an amazing feature, but comes with a lot of pitfalls and makes life challenging at upgrade time.

Aside from an antiquated"look and feel" (of reports, UI, etc.) functionality is KEY. Tess seems to be as functional as necessary for my organization.

As an integral part of the team working to settle financials for events I can get almost any data collected through Tessitura sliced and diced in a report with tremendous customization. I have been pleased with the content of reports in particular. Without this tool, it would be impossible to provide the backup documentation necessary for settlement and reporting throughout the sales cycle. I also love the scheduled reports feature. I can develop custom reporting and set it once to send to multiple parties throughout the sales cycle and never worry about it again. Newly implemented dashboard are extremely versatile and powerful, but sometimes a touch cumbersome if you need a look at data. Great tool to develop and maintain KPIs. Though the learning curve, assuming ticketing software is in your background the learning curve is not terribly steep and I know I have just scratched the surface.

The near-infinite report customization can be a double edged sword because any tick-box accidentally checked (or unchecked) may dramatically change the content of a report. Special care must be taken and there are many ways to produce reports with inaccurate or undesired content.