Hmmm...OK
so some have had bad experiences with ACI. Me too, occasionally. The difference for me? When I would call about it, they fix it. If its a show stopper-something that actually affects work-they fix it right away. Now, while I would love to just buy software that just works for every machine and every task I want-this is real life, and the pc platform is so diverse that there will almost always be problems. The differences in support are generally in attitude and responsiveness.
I'm not going to bash any other softwares out there-their respective forums have already done that, better than I ever could-cause they actually use the software on a regular basis. And yes, each software package out there has its supporters as well as detractors. Lets just say that for us, ACI gets the job done.
ACI has the ability to import data available from MLS (though that's the newest, and least comprehensive as of yet in terms of the boards it supports), win2data, ndc, blue lime, data master, Landsafe Appraiserlink, and RealQuest. For mapping software, you can subscribe or you can use one of the stand alone mapping softwares. Apex integration of course, along with winsketch, and dc sketch.
It will work with both palm and pocket pc's. It has a very decent comps database available, one that can be populated as you close out of each appraisal, complete with photos. Even if you don't use track (ACI's database management program) for order entry, you can have report automagically fill out most of the same data every time you close a report.
Their people are great to work with most of the time (we all have our bad days, after all), and are very good at running down issues. If its a new one on them, they will work with you to reproduce the error if they can. I recently had a bad experience with a web update-they fixed it within a couple of days, and had a workaround for me in the meantime within two hours. It was an issue that probably 99.9 % of the users wouldn't have, ever-but they figured it out anyway, could reproduce it once I sent them an example, and had me working within a couple of hours of first seeing the error. That's really not bad-better than the days and weeks and sometimes months of non-responsiveness from other vendors I use-not appraisal related, generally speaking-where the first thought is generally to ignore you.
Personally, I think its nice that they don't automatically charge you for apex if you already have a licensed version. And the number of options available for use as a mapping program is pretty good-though delorme has made using their program pretty much unuseable now, that's not ACI's fault-the delorme program interface has become increasingly arcane.
Don't get me started on the signature generation-unlike some software out there, where you just insert a scanned signature, the sig function in ACI is password protected, and you can get a sig card filled out and back on extremely short notice. FWIW-I've had one from them since 1997, with no issues on the sigs.
Lastly-I think all of us would like to not be computer techs. And sometimes, being an appraiser, no matter what program you use, makes us feel like one, whether we want to or not. From the problems I've read about responsiveness, flakieness, or out and out bad releases, none of the vendors is immune from criticism. The rest is up to you and your working style. I like the integration options available with ACI, for sketches, mapping, and data integration. You may just want to have a form filler, with nothing extra. ACI allows you to do just that. So do some of the others, while some seem to want to get you onto the web, whether you want to go or not, just to manage your database. The final choice is yours.
JK!!!!!. 
