PCgen or Herolab?

[taks]

We have nearly all of the Hero Lab packages as well as the Hell's Rebels and Giantslayer APs. I picked up the community content as well, mainly for the Mummy's Mask AP. With the AP additions, we're just over $400 by my estimate (of which about $100 was from me).

This is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money I spend on subscriptions and other content over the course of a year. Not to mention all the ink and paper from printing out monster sheets! I really need to get a laptop and their free reader to make that easier...

EDIT: I forgot to add my opinion regarding HL. I love it. I have PCGen on my computer but I don't use it, not for any reason other than once I had access to HL, my group and I were all in a common format (well, except for one guy, there's always that one guy, hehe). It is particularly useful for the APs, which is where most of our playing occurs. I can adjust everything almost on the fly as the party changes.

[Gravedancer2014]

Ive used both fairly extensively, and have messed around with creating/altering source material on both (though moreso on pcgen).

If you can afford the $100 to $400 for Hero Lab, then that is the way to go as it is the superior product. The interface is smoother and more responsive (due to not being Java based), they are quicker to incorporate new source material, and the program handles odd classes/archetypes (Synthesist, Arcanist, etc) better than PCGen does.

However...

Of course the reason they are more responsive is that its a paid product, as opposed to something that people update in their free time out of the goodness of their hearts. For that reason, the guys like Andrew who maintain PCGen should probably be nominated for sainthood for providing something as robust as PCGen free of charge. Yes, its buggy at times. Yes, they are slow to fix bugs (there are bugs that I personally reported a year or more ago that were acknowledged as bugs but nobody has time to fix), but its a free product, so you kind of have to take what you get.

Basically what im saying is, its not really fair to even compare the 2 directly, as one is free and the other is priced almost as much as a microsoft product. If you can afford it, the paid option is clearly better. If you cant, then the free one will be better.