Avid Technology Reviews 200

Avid really DOES NOT care about supporting customers. It's almost as if you DON'T want us to contact you for support at all! They keep resorting you to 'articles' and 'FAQs' that don't help at all.
Because they don't care.
Amazing. Well, its going to lose you customers, I'm switching to Logic. After 10+ years of being a loyal Pro Tools user, you've lost me. The subscription is a money grab and is ridiculous.
I am trying to cancel my ProTools subscription entirely, while keeping Sibelius (for now), and I cant even log on to cancel it because their incompetent website keeps crashing everytime I try..

Let me be precise about what happened, because it deserves to be on the record: I paid for a perpetual license — not a subscription, not a rental, not a conditional arrangement that expires when a company decides it's no longer convenient. A perpetual license. The kind that, by definition, is supposed to work indefinitely.

Following a routine macOS update, Pro Tools stopped launching entirely. No warning, no grace period, no migration path communicated in advance. The software I paid a significant sum for simply ceased to function on a machine I own, running an operating system I am fully entitled to update. This is not a fringe scenario — it is an entirely foreseeable compatibility event that a professional software company has an obligation to manage.

I contacted customer support expecting, at minimum, a workaround or a clear timeline for a fix. What I received instead was a support ticket that was silently closed — no resolution, no explanation, no follow-up. Not declined. Not escalated. Simply closed. As though my issue, and by extension I as a customer, had ceased to matter.

This is not a technical review. Plenty of professionals will tell you that Pro Tools remains a capable DAW in a stable environment. This is a review of a company's values — and what this experience reveals is deeply troubling. Avid appears to have made a deliberate commercial calculation that perpetual license holders are a legacy inconvenience, and that eroding the value of those licenses over time is an acceptable strategy for nudging users toward subscription revenue.

If you are a professional whose livelihood depends on your tools being available when you need them, please factor this in: Avid's customer service infrastructure is not built to protect you. It is built to manage volume and close tickets. The moment your problem becomes complicated — or the moment solving it conflicts with their commercial interests — you are on your own.

I would strongly urge anyone evaluating a Pro Tools purchase to consider alternatives where the vendor relationship is more transparent and support is more than performative. There are excellent DAWs that treat their customers as long-term partners rather than revenue to be converted. Spend your money there.

Avid fully embrace all the reasons that exist for Trustpilot to have a 'minus' feature! They truly are an example of the worst possible customer service that I have ever come across. This Easter break will be spent familiarising myself with Dorico so that I never again have to use Sibelius and run the gauntlet of Avid's unbelievably useless website (or customer 'service') ever again.

Avid must have the worst customer support of any company on earth. I have an annual protools studio subscription, protools just stopped functioning on my user profile on my laptop, for a few months I've been logging into a different user in order to work. I tried to cancel the subscription by turning off the auto renewal, apparently it didn't work as I got charged another £310 for a year. Contacted them over email (Cos you cant phone them unless you give them money) and they just said the auto renewal was on so the charge is valid, immediately closed the case and I couldn't continue the conversation. I guess I'm locked in for another year with this blood sucking parasite of a company.

They dont know a good worker if it hit them in the face , no wonder their not popular oh well 😏

I've been with avid for years. I purchased sibelius back in 2014 for school and bought a perpetual license for uni. Despite having a perpetual license, they will charge you annually for "support" (very few improvements, some even extremely annoying. The ai chords that i have to switch off everytime i open a score,for example.)

Today I have been charged for the yearly subscription, despite turning off the auto renewal, and avid will not refund. One time I was charged for a product I don't even have, and was told I wouldn't be refunded. The only reason I ever got my money back was due to the fact that it had happened to so many other people that day.

Dorico will be the industry standard in the future, if you are wanting to engrave professionally, it was the one my lecturer recommended.

I am going to block avid technologies. I will never purchase another Avid product again.

Today is the latest in a long list of days when I am stuck not being able make any income, letting down my employer, because of Avid's unprofessionalism and lack of help.

I have just repurchased Sibelius Ultimate, and when I click 'Open Sibelius Ultimate' it opens Sibelius First. There is no instruction manual, you are left in the dark as to how to sort it out.

This is one of many, many examples of this sort of thing which I have experienced over the years. Avid is the worst online distributing company I have ever encountered.

Avid support know absolutely nothing about Sibelius. They are completely useless. What a waste of my time.

Avid is the worst for customer service and bugs. I have both Sibelius and ProTools, I'm a professional composer and tend not to have hours available to tinker with Avid bugs to get it to license the software I am and have continuously been paying for. I pay over $600 a year for these products, and need them to work when I'm in the midst of deadlines. Sometimes it'll randomly make me refresh things with my subscriptions for no reason. Today it gave me an error which for some reason wouldn't let me refresh the subscriptions. I tried everything for hours to resolve it. Did my payment not go through? That'd be unusual but let me check...nope when i look at my bank account it confirms that the good people at Avid did get their monthly payments from me on time as always. Let's call tech support...ah no that's not an option, you have to pay for tech support. Paying over $600 is not enough to get the support of Avid to resolve a bug on their end. Dorico and other software options are starting to look tempting.

I can not get this working for the life of me. I had a yearly membership which expires in 4 months. Says I dont have a license. So I bought another for $50. Still says I dont have a license. Then I thought I must have bought the wrong one so I bought 1 more monthly membership to try and it still doesnt work. I used all 3 system ids to call and try to get help but they say they dont give me help with these memberships but I can submit a request online or PAY MORE to get phone help. This is complete bull. Happy to take my money but cant get help when I need it.

Une licence soit-disant perpétuelle de Sibélius qui se transforme soudain en essai de 30 jours et impossible de joindre qui que ce soit. Je suis professeur de composition et je vais faire à Avid la publicité qu'il mérite auprès de la communauté et des étudiants. LAMENTABLE !
A supposedly perpetual license from Sibelius that suddenly turns into a 30-day trial, and it's impossible to contact anyone. I'm a composition professor, and I'm going to give Avid the publicity it deserves among the community and students. PATHETIC

They charge with no consent. I purchased a perpetual license and a year later they charged me for a support plan they had auto enrolled me without notifying me and then refused to refund the charge. This is a deceptive practice that it is clearly intentionally. I am not surprised they have one star and I am now joining the hundreds of clients cheated by avid.

The policy and attitude of this company is absolutely disgraceful and not worthy of a monopoly holding piece of industry software.

The absolute default of Avid is to take people's money regardless of whether they require the service or not. Twice I tried to cancel auto-renewal and twice the systems have failed to recognise it.

I received no reminder or warning emails that the money was about to be taken.

Auto Renewal should be the opt-in option, not something the user has to opt out of and it should be made clear upon purchase what the current setting is - not buried in small print / product settings.

There should be an option upon making your first payment, to only buy that month in isolation with no auto-renewal attached.

When you are asked for your reason for cancelling the auto-renew, the option to continue with auto-renew is deliberately designed in the dialogue box to be more prominent than the one to cancel the subscription. It then makes no attempt to confirm the option you've selected, so it makes you think you've successfully unsubscribed, whether you actually have or not.

There is no confirmation email to confirm if opt-out has gone through.

Avid clearly then has a blanket policy never to refund the money in any circumstances.

These practices are not in line with UK consumer protections.

It's shocking that Avid are taking advantage of its users in this way, at an already difficult time for creative freelancers.

Took 2 yearly payments from my bank and I’ve jumped through so many of their hoops trying to get a refund of money they took without authorisation. Disgraceful way to treat their customers.

AVIDLY unhappy Avid customer. If I could give Avid ZERO stars, I would have. I have used Sibelius for over 25 years -- back in the days they used to mail CDs to us to install on our computers. I have recently (and for the MONTH preceding) been a frequent-flier with Avid's customer service agents in the online chat platform (both purchasing support and technical support for installation. Today, after five hours spent with the IT person at my school, we sorted out all the accounts I have from past purchases, successfully deactivated the old ones, including a deep dive into my computer to delete weird things from app support in my library ... none of which I would have figured out without my IT person's help. I am not ashamed to say I cried. 
I have spent easily 40 hours over the course of almost a month, between purchasing and installing this software, and it has been beyond frustrating. Infuriating. I love Sibelius' software. I hate Avid's customer support. I have been hung up on (in the chat support), spent days waiting for someone to email me back to supply help. Honestly the most helpful thing that anyone Avid agent has said is that Avid had refunded the money from my initial purchase, which experienced some mysterious technical error, and that I should just start over and try again. Of course this was AFTER two weeks and several hours of my time spent in Avid chat trying to figure out what went wrong with the purchase (they billed me, but I didn't receive a purchase confirmation).  Honestly, my colleagues are all shaking their heads at me and telling me that I should have just spent the 40 hours that it took to get Sibelius up and running -- a MONTH in which I COULDN'T compose/arrange -- learning Finale instead. At least in that scenario I would have gotten ACTUAL work done. 
My IT person said that Reddit was more helpful than anything I got via Avid support. AVID has GOT to fix this garbage! Seriously, every other program on my computer automatically updates itself and bills me, and I am always working with whatever is fresh and new. THIS was ridiculous. I believe if one person had talked to me, walked me through what was going on with my account and then with my computer, this could have been resolved in a couple of hours. I feel disrespected, and unvalued as a loyal customer.

AVID Solutions are rotten to the core. Saw another review about their dodgy practices and it inspired me to add my own.
No client focus.
I am having difficulty using the subscription process but nobody helps.
Impossible to talk to anyone.
Stupid website only has specific options to contact about.
Oh but they take your money!
Oh yes!
They are happy to take your money.
I recommend stay away from this lot.

CRIMINALS!!’
DO NOT GIVE THEM PAYMENT DETAILS!
For the last two years they have charged me for someone else’s account.
When I disputed the charges, they told me I failed to log in to the account to turn off auto pay.
I have explained so many times that I do not have access to the account to turn it off because the account is NOT MINE.
I demanded they stop charging my credit card but they just continue doing it.
Been going on over a year.
Cannot turn it off.
Their crafty processes do not allow me to stop the payments.
Absolute criminals.
Stay away!
You will end up paying for someone else’s subscription just because your details have been added to their account.
Absolute filthy criminal enterprise.
100%

I bought a perpetual license in 2022. NEVER DO THAT EVER. I am not able to download, open or use Protools anymore since last year. So this "perpetual" license lasted two years

Following the installation of a new hard disk, I contacted Avid to reregister the previously functioning software they license and support. They proved to be slow to respond, slow to understand, and finally incompetent and obdurate. The software now sits on the computer unusable and useless. Avid appear ignorant of the software they license, and uninterested in supporting the customers who purchased their products.

I have been using Sibelius since 2012, when I bought the software. I then was forced to repurchase the perpetual subscription last year, even though I already owned the product. I tried out their Artist version, subscription based first, and then when I bought the actual product to own they kept charging me for the subscription! Their customer service is horrendous and it's impossible to speak to a person on the phone. I hope this company sees its downfall someday.