I received a one-month review copy for Festinger’s Vault, and here’s my review of the experience.
First, the ordering and deployment itself was seamless — you order the product as you would any other service, you receive a key and authorize it, etc. The added benefit of Festinger’s solution is that you have a WP plugin and a dedicated interface to manage all the plugins and themes. You can search, update and discover new plugins directly from your dashboard, which is a great turnkey solution. In my time using the vault, I had 10 tokens/downloads per day, which was more than enough to update any plugins and/or test out a few new ones. Updating and installing plugins works pretty much just as it does in the WP store, and I had no issues.
As far as content goes, there are thousands of available plugins and themes to choose from. The one "criticism" I would have is that there are few "unique" plugins to the Vault — generally speaking, if the plugin or theme can’t be found anywhere for free, chances are that it won’t be in the Vault ether. But, I think this is truly a unique solution for people who don’t have the time to track down individual plugin updates and have more pressing things to deal with. For those cases, Festinger offers a great deal of value and reliability that are necessary in production environments.
