In November/December 2023 we switched our CMS from Little Green Light to Neon CMS. We finally gave up and switched back to Little Green Light in January 2025. Our experience with Neon CMS has nearly scuttled our 14 year-old nonprofit. This page will serve to share our experience. If you are considering Neon CMS, I highly recommend checking independent reviews of Noen CRM on reddit.
Mark Hicks
Founder and Developer
TruthUnity Ministries
Neon charges and refuses to provide import services and live support
2023-08. The first thing we noticed when moving to Neon was that none of our emails in the old system were imported. We had years of essential customer conversations in our emails. Neon imported the data but intentionally refused to import mailing data, citing "concerns about security."
The second thing we found out was that the three hours of service billing shown here would only be available three or four months later. The reason Neon gave was that they were "short staffed in support." So we found ourselves with no telephone or live support for the first 3 months.
Campaign audience subscription info not visible on the profile page for an account
2023-12. Neon CRM will allow your constituents to subscribe and unsubscribe from Campaign Audiences, much like Constant Contact and MailChimp. It also has a profile page of each constituent, known in Neon as an "Account." But when you look at the account, you don't see anything about what audiences the constituent has subscribed to. I reported this by writing: "I have discovered that the most important marketing information in the CRM - the audience that the constituent has chosen to subscribe to in the Portal - is not available on the Account page within the CRM. Nor is it available in setting up a report. Without that visibility, I really know nothing about the interests of anyone who subscribes."
The "solution" is to abandon the built in subscribe/unsubscribe functionality and replace it with a custom field with one checkbox for each audience. If you have 10 audiences, you have to create 10 custom fields, each a binary. It's a hack, and it's not pretty. We switched to Neon because we were never able to integrate Mailchimp subscriber info with our Little Green Light info. With Neon, we're back to custom hacking to achieve integration. It's better than what we had, but it's also not elegant. This is a big let down for us.
PCI Compliance
2024-12-04. In November 2024 we were notified that we were not in PCI compliance. We had our web provider look into the allegations of noncompliance Neon's vendor made about our website and got this reply:
"They are wrong. That's the IP of our load balancer; we host a fair number of sites and they all go through it. If you hit the load balancer directly without any hostname in the request header (or in this case the reverse DNS lookup address) it just gives you a 404 with a default fake certificate so that's what is happening here. It seems a bit weird to expect a single IP to only serve one website these days so I don't think they've updated their scanner in a while or else something isn't configured quite correctly on the scanner. Nothing to worry about as far as your site, you get a valid certificate when visiting with the truthunity.net hostname in the header. Happy to answer any other questions about it if you have any."
By threatening to cut our donations unless we comply with their vendor, Neon One has cause us tremendous loss of time and money. The PCI vendor's web site is almost impossible for anyone who is not a System Admin to understand. After several emails and a telephone call, the vendor explained to me how to answer the questions so that we would be given a pass through a "false positive" report. After obtaining a pass, we were cleared. Then, 2 weeks later, we received another letter says we were not in compliance. This was the final straw and led us to find an alternative to Neon as our CMS provider.
Neon says 'monthly billing' but means annual lock-in
2025-01-30. We notified Neon of our cancellation on January 30th. But Neon will continue to bill us for another six months. Their Client Account Service Manager sent us the following:
you will see that you also agreed to our Terms of Service, which state in Section 10.1 that we require a 30 day cancelation notice prior to the contract end date. Your contract renews on an annual term and ends every year on July 30th. All contracts will auto-renew at the same term. Because of this, we are unable to let you out of your contract. You are set to be shutdown on July 30th, 2025.How would you interpret "billed monthly"? Does it say "paid over twelve months" or "paid monthly"? Is it not possible that this is deceptive? Would you do business with a company that dishonors their contract to import data, does not provide promised, live support services for the first three months, threatens to cut off donation receipt services because of mistaken security allegations and other issues documented here?
