With the latest version of Pro Tools 2018 released recently, we wanted to see which version of Pro Tools the community are using.

We have some anecdotal evidence that suggested a lot of post users are still using Pro Tools 10 as they struggle with AVE and video support. 

We split the poll into music production and post-production Pro Tools users, to see if there were any differences between the 2 main groups of Pro Tools users.

Lets take a look at how the usage of the different versions of Pro Tools breaks down acrross the 2 sectors...

What is very interesting from these results is that the order of which version of Pro Tools we use is the same for both groups and that Pro Tools 11 is the least popular version of Pro Tools since Pro Tools 9. 

Moving onto the usage of Pro Tools 10, the anecdotal evidence suggested that a lot of post users are still using Pro Tools 10 doesn't stack up anywhere as much as we expected, with only 16.21% of post users and 13.99% of music users still using Pro Tools 10.

Combining the figures for Pro Tools 12 and Pro Tools 2018 shows that 69.83% of music users and 71.56% of post users are on a relatively modern version of Pro Tools, which is a stronger take-up of the later versions of Pro Tools than we were expecting based on the anecdotal evidence from comments in posts and on Facebook.

What is really interesting is how many users are still on Pro Tools 12 rather than Pro Tools 2018. This got me wondering as to why this might be.  

I can only speculate because we didn't ask this question, but the only valid reason I could come up with as to why Pro Tools 12 users have not upgraded to Pro Tools 2018 is that they don't have a current active upgrade plan.

This could mean that only 43.99% of music users and 40.98% of post users are on active upgrade plans or current rental subscription plans. If this is true, then Avid has still some work to do to convince more Pro Tools users to sign up for upgrade plans.

Especially as to get Pro Tools 12, you had to have been on an upgrade plan at some point, which also means that up to 26.44% of music users and 30.58% of post users have chosen to let their upgrade plans lapse and will need to buy a Reinstatement plan to get the latest versions of Pro Tools.

Why might this be?

We are aware of the anecdotal evidence that people believe that the current upgrade plans are more expensive than the old paid-for upgrades and in our story "How Much Have Pro Tools Upgrades Increased Since Pro Tools 6?" we showed that for a like-for-like comparison, the current upgrade plan pricing is no more expensive than the old paid-for upgrades.

There also seems to be a reticence regarding renting rather than buying Pro Tools. In our article "Buying Pro Tools? Which Is Better, Perpetual License Or Rental Subscription" we showed that the break-even point for renting Pro Tools HD software is about 4 years and for renting Pro Tools Standard the break-even point is about 5 years.

Or could it be that users don't consider that the upgrade plans are good value for money because the features Avid has concentrated on are not the features users are wanting? If Avid had included more of the top 20 feature requests on the Pro Tools Ideascale like Folders in the Clip List, would the upgrade plan take-up and retention be much higher?

There we have it, thank you to all of you that took the time to complete the poll, it certainly seems to have put a dent in some of the anecdotal evidence about Pro Tools usage but has raised several more questions.

Can you think of any other reasons why over a quarter of Pro Tools users have not upgraded from Pro Tools 12 to Pro Tools 2018?