HeroLab is one of the best products which you can purchase or find for character creation. It is capable of creating characters quickly for any number of RPGs. With its sister product Army Builder (for those of us who like wargames), it's been a staple for making and designing games. You could almost copy and paste my comments here into a review of Army Builder, so if you also play table wargames, give it a look. What I say about PF applies to pretty much all of the game systems contained in Hero Lab.

The Good: The interface is very intuitive regardless of which game system you are running. The product almost never has any clash between its rulesets. From Call of Cthulhu to Pathfinder to (new) World of Darkness, it almost never has a hang-up because of the game system.

The product is able to output its data sets into a variety of formats, including PDFs.

The variability which you can use when making characters is almost mind-blowing. Pretty much every Pathfinder product is loaded into the PF section, for example. If your character concept will need you to pull from Ultimate Combat, Cheliax, and Bestiary 3 along with the Core Rulebook, HeroLab will do it seamlessly. If as a player or GM you wish to impose certain house rules, you can. If you wish to restrict which source books are available, it takes a few clicks of the mouse.

Hero Lab will automatically check the Rules As Written validity of a character, which can be very helpful. You are not forced to have a valid character, however, which can be a godsend when the GM just wants to craft an NPC who bends the rules. The product will highlight areas of the game where you have yet to develop an NPC or character and will highlight invalid options.

There is a "use HeroLab to modify your character in play" option, but see below.

The Bad: The output formats are not only a bit limited, but they tend to have some weird issues where the spacing of text leads to text falling on top of text into an unreadable smudge. This tends to occur in more "numbery" games like PF and tends to make high level characters' sheets a bit ugly. The character sheets are highly standardized with almost no options to format them. It's certainly not a deal-breaker. Naturally, the sheets are printed off, so they're tough to edit, but they do have tracks for tracked resources. One option is to put the sheet in a page protector and make changes with dry/wet erase markers, but you'll still need to reprint everything when you level up or just acquire a new, traceable resource.

Characters with a lot of spells have the option of preparing their spell list (spell book or spells memorized) in a separate file which can be printed off as well. This sounds nice, but the time to generate that PDF can be absurdly long. The PC I'm running this program on is a high-end gaming laptop, and even it can sit there, using almost none of its resources but taking several minutes just to slap together a PDF list of spells.

This is my personal opinion here, but I despise products which put a screen up between the players and the GM where the players track their characters. (GMs having a laptop at the table off to the side, to consult, is not as bad.) HeroLab does something very bad (tracking your character in a program) very well. Really, invest ten minutes or a few dollars in condition cards.

The Ugly: Development. You'd think the ability to drop in your own custom creations would be nothing but a boon, but you'd be wrong. Clunky doesn't begin to describe it. The documentation is of little help. Good luck.

Lastly, remember all that content mentioned above? You have to purchase it. For example, let's say you just want "Core" Pathfinder: The Core Rulebook, APG, UC, UM, and the Bestiaries. The three Bestiaries together will in a discounted bundle cost you $30, while each of the non-Core Rulebook books will be another $10. "Core Pathfinder" alone has a -real- price of the listed price here + $60 USD. While I believe that price is worth it to me, that's my opinion and I can't help but feel that consumers are NOT being shown an "honest" price up front. That's not ugly. That's just mean.

These guys are a small development outfit; they seem really dedicated to the product and at this time Pathfinder; you are going to pay money for add ons (you can buy bundles of books and with the exchange rate - I am in Australia - it's not heaps of cash but not free).

You get a pretty clean product and updates do come out regularly. Their forums answer most posts but you get much a much quicker response by putting your questions on the Paizo boards (sorry fellas it's true).

I have had issues with licencing (after a system died - it took days to sort with the difference of times in the US to Australia) and creating custom magical items can be a trial - yes there are work-arounds, and you can go into the editor but this should be as simple as creating a PC, NPC etc.. and it isn't yet).

That said, it's worth the money I pay for it. I can and have generated full characters for conventions/games in minutes. You might have to wait for the occasional release [e.g. Inner Sea Guide] to be available.

It a product I recommend to friends and gamers at the table; GM's are used to seeing the sheets at tables and I can see myself using it years from now.

It's easy to use (except for the editor, which probably lovely if you know what a bootstrap is?)

The last niggles (and they are only niggles); there is no level progression view/report.

Gestalt isn't supported and the last which they are addressing is customised character sheets.

There are some new print views (although still no print view that shows calculations, like heroforge can). The new Spell view is very nice; providing a complete spell wording; meaning no more lugging extra books around, and the book reference makes it easier on the GM.

Another nice to have is a play card (the have an "In-play" function but who has a laptop open at the table). The inplay function allows you to turn on and off in game effects. stunned, blind, buffed etc.. it's of limited use unless your screen is in front of you. A print view with conditions in a table form would be more useful.

I recommend printing landscape (print 2-up landscape to get most sheets one page, simple).

Have a look at the demo and make up your own mind. It's free.

(This review changes with releases).

I never give 5 stars for anything because nothing is perfect.

Although if there was a half star option I would give HeroLab four and a half because HeroLab is close to perfect.

The only problems I have found so far are, there needs to be more output styles for the PDFs (I have picky players) and the racial trait extra spells known per level for the sorcerer is very fiddly and not explained very well.

I do recommend that people purchase this product and a few of my players have all ready.

I was the world's biggest skeptic regarding HeroLab until I just went ahead and bought it about a week ago. Let me tell you, this software is pretty amazing.
Pros: Character generation time has been cut by at least 75%. With high-level casters, this might be more like 90%. The character is going to be accurate, and you're not going to miss anything. You can output the character in several different ways, all useful. I'm going to try running combats out of the tactical console this week for the first time, but I expect it to work well.
Cons: The UI is clunky. Granted, this is like a million times better than an Excel-based sheet or a fillable pdf, but let's face it, it could be drastically improved. Looking at this program for more than an hour or so starts to make my brain hurt. Still, way better than the alternatives.
Overall, a really, really good buy. Highly recommended.

I started out merely liking this software, now it is quite literally an indispensible part of my game. I can create NPCs and monsters with blinding speed and ease. I even recreate whole encounters from modules and with a few clicks I'm in combat, initiative rolled. I even save them with the same room number and title as the modules so I can quickly move from room to room. Managing large numbers of combatants is made MUCH easier by the built-in tactical console. Most of my players have the software now and they love it as much as their GM. There's even a community of people out there making free custom files with the editor program. Now that Lone Wolf made things official with Paizo, you can buy add-ons like the APG and other titles. Love it, love it, love it.

Quite simply it is the best character software program on the market today. Don't bother looking else where, pay the money and never have to buy a different program again. Supports Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, World of Darkness, Savage Worlds D&D 4e and more.

I love this software plain and simple.

This program has helped lower the time for character generation by at least 50%. It has a large amount of Pathfinder support as well as several other gaming systems. I LOVE THIS PROGRAM!

I run two tables of Pathfinder Society a week with new folks showing up all the time. HeroLab has cut the new character generation time from an hour or more to 15 minutes tops. It's ability to limit character creation to Society Organized play traits and feats, the ability to track scenarios as well as the in-game character effects tracking (staggered, dazed) make this a life saver at my tables. Ever think a player made a mistake in adding STR bonus, BAB, Weapon feats? Plug it in HeroLab and poof there it is all added up nicely. Ever have a regular player leave his character at home? Easy to fix, you just print it up.

Several people in my group tried different things from free offering to paid. We all ended up liking this one the best. Is it perfect? No. But they are actively making it better all the time. Bugs that I found and submitted were fixed fairly quickly and their communication has been great. Most of us have Mac's and it's unfortunate that is doesn't run natively on mac but running it in VMware or Parallels is a small price to pay for the connivence.