If you are new to this platform it is cheaper to buy Animate Pro 3 and then upgrade to Harmony Premium. Harmony Advanced is a waste of time - it is missing too many features; the user guides for Advanced are actually the same as the guides for Premium so you can waste a lot of time trying to find menu items or buttons for features which the manual says you should have but which are actually not included in Harmony Advanced. It would seem likely that Harmony Advanced was created merely to provide justification for the 80% price increase from Animate Pro 3 to Premium Advanced.
There is no information that I can find on the website which explains the huge price increase from Animate Pro to Harmony Premium. Does anyone know what extra features are provided in Harmony Premium that are not in Animate Pro?
At US$1975 Harmony Premium is now a very expensive option. However, the muddled tutorials, inaccurate documentation and missing functionality make Harmony Advanced at US$975 a frustrating experience.
Animate Pro 3 is US$1199. If the upgrade is US$499 then buy Animate Pro and then upgrade it. Presumably, the reason that the upgrade prices are unavailable without a serial number is to discourage people from doing exactly this.
Alternatively, you can subscribe on a monthly basis. If you are careful, you can subscribe to the basic Harmony software while you do all your drawings and basic animations then change to Premium when you are ready to animate using the more advanced features. When you are not using the product you can cancel the subscription. If you are project-based this is possibly a viable, and cheaper, option.
However, I should point out that there is, currently, no obvious way to upgrade a monthly licence - presumably you have to cancel it and sign up for a different level.
As someone who is new to this platform, it seems to me that the restructuring of Harmony forces all Animate Pro users to move to the much more expensive Harmony Premium. If the upgrade is US$499 for existing users this might not be a big deal - assuming there is extra (and useful) functionality involved.
But for new users to the platform who would previously have purchased Animate Pro, the price increase is nearly 80%. Toon Boom must be confident about the advantages of their software compare to the competition, but I suspect that, for many, the huge price increase will turn users away.
Harmony Advanced appears to have been an afterthought and Toon Boom are still struggling to provide accurate documentation and tutorials for this level of the software. I suspect this version will be dropped - its hard to see who would use it, and its going to create lots of angry users who can’t find the functionality described in the user guides.
It is hard to imagine that Toon Boom could always have been so disorganised. But when your objective is to increase revenue rather than provide a better user experience this sort of outcome can be expected.
Toon Boom are being too tricky here. Upsetting the user base is never a good idea, even if most of your revenue comes from Disney.
In my first 2 weeks I have used 4 of my 24 annual support tickets in relation to questions about removed tutorials, out of sequence tutorials, missing pages in the user guides, wrong information in the Harmony Advanced User Guides, questions about upgrade path for subscriptions and other issues which relate to the muddled introduction of Harmony Advanced.
