AVX Sorter: the feature list is real, the track record is six weeks old

The promotional banner for AVX Sorter shows the app's own dashboard, and if you look at the file paths in the screenshot they read C:\dev\demo-sims\MSFS\Packages\Community. Twenty-five add-ons. Eighteen point nine gigabytes. It is a developer's synthetic test rig, dressed up as a hangar.

That is not a scandal. Every software company screenshots a clean machine. But it is a small, accurate emblem of the problem with reviewing this product: almost everything you can learn about AVX Sorter, you learn from AVX Simulations. There are no forum threads. There is no independent video. There is one news site that asked a hard question about it, one day after the developer's biggest announcement, and got no answer because nobody has published one.

What there is — and this matters — is a genuinely large, genuinely specific feature list, a changelog that runs from v0.4.0 to v0.9.10 with named community contributors credited in five consecutive releases, and a documented architecture that is more careful about your files than most freeware in this category. AVX Sorter is not vapourware. It is a real, actively developed Electron desktop app that does a real job.

The job costs €12.99, and the job has been done free since 2020.

We read 17 sources for this review: both simMarket listings, seven pages of the developer's own site including the full changelog and terms, three independent news articles, the developer's YouTube channel and Discord server, and the flightsim.to and AVSIM records of the free tools it is competing against. Reddit, which is where sentiment on a new utility would normally surface first, is unreachable from here, so treat the absence of grumbling as an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence. So is the absence of praise.

What you are actually buying

One SKU. One licence. Four simulators. We checked the AVXSimulations vendor page on simMarket and there is exactly one product on it — no MSFS edition and X-Plane edition sold separately, no upgrade path to buy twice. That is worth stating plainly because three-simulator badges usually mean two SKUs wearing a trenchcoat, and this one does not.

Price	€12.99 one-time, both stores
Stores	simMarket (listed 1 July 2026, PID 21306) and the developer's own Stripe checkout
Simulators	MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024 (Store and Steam), X-Plane 11, X-Plane 12 (Laminar and Steam)
Version	v0.9.9 per simMarket, v0.9.8 on the download page, "0.9.10" in the download page's What's New list
Requirements	Windows 10/11 64-bit, 4 GB RAM, ~500 MB disk, internet for activation
Licence	One active machine, bound to hardware on first activation
Refund	14-day money-back guarantee, developer's site
Trial	None. The installer is licence-gated

On price, the two stores are level at €12.99 and neither is cheaper — but the figures are not built the same way. simMarket's clause 1.5 reads that all prices stated "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a session with no resolved country means 0%, so an EU buyer's total can land differently. The developer's checkout shows a flat "Total due today €12.99" with no tax line at all. Same headline, different plumbing. Buy wherever you prefer the receipt.

The pricing page shows €39.99 struck through above the €12.99. We could find no evidence AVX Sorter has ever been sold at €39.99: simMarket has listed it at €12.99 since the day it appeared, and the developer's own terms of service state flatly that it "is sold as a one-time purchase of €12.99".

What it actually does, because "add-on manager" covers five different jobs

This is the part that decides what it competes against. AVX Sorter does most of them.

Enable and disable. In MSFS it physically moves the package folder out of Community into a managed holding area on the same drive — an instant same-volume move, not a copy — so the sim genuinely stops loading it. In X-Plane it writes SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED lines into scenery_packs.ini and never touches the folders.

Load order and conflicts. This is where the X-Plane half earns its keep. Scenery Intelligence classifies every pack by reading its contents — apt.dat, library.txt, DSF and terrain files — rather than trusting the folder name, then finds airports buried below Global Airports, ortho stacked above overlays, duplicate ICAOs and missing folders, and rewrites the load order after taking a timestamped backup. It understands XP12's *GLOBAL_AIRPORTS* entry and absolute paths on other drives, and it sorts Ortho4XP and AutoOrtho tiles into the right tier automatically. Nothing free on the MSFS side does anything comparable, because MSFS does not have a load-order problem of that shape.

Getting content off the system drive. The Community Relocator moves your Community folder to another drive and links it back. That is a junction, and junctions are where these tools historically break installs.

Updating installed add-ons. It does not. The marketing says "sort, enable, and update every aircraft, livery, airport and scenery" and the documentation describes in-app updates of AVX Sorter itself. There is no add-on updater here; that word is doing work it has not earned.

Diagnosis. Crash Hunt, the headline feature, automates the bisect every simmer eventually does by hand: halve the library, launch, report crash or no crash, halve again, until the culprit is named. Pins keep must-have packages enabled, the hunt survives an app restart, and Abort restores everything. CTD Doctor scans for broken layout.json files, corrupt manifests and sceneries fighting over one airport. Sim Guardian handles duplicate library names, overlapping files and broken manifests, auto-fixing the ones it judges safe.

On top: Livery Closet, an Airport Map on a 3D globe, add-on profiles, Flight Prep that reads a SimBrief OFP or a .pln and parks everything the route does not need, One-Click Flight to launch the sim with companion apps, a disk treemap, a deduplicator, a rolling-cache cleaner and 14 languages.

What the community consistently praises

We have to be honest about the size of the room. The "community" here is seven verified reviews on a page the developer hosts and moderates, all five stars, several of them a single sentence. simMarket has carried the product since 1 July 2026 and shows no customer rating at all — the star row on the listing is an empty "Review it now" prompt, not a score. AVSIM returns zero results for "AVX Sorter". So does the official MSFS forum's search. The developer's YouTube channel has 4 subscribers and one video, the official trailer, at 236 views. The Discord has 118 members.

Within that room, three things repeat.

It finds add-ons you had forgotten you owned. The most detailed review on the developer's page, from a customer posting as Flightsim_Marshall, describes a Community folder "now exceeds 1TB" and credits the app with making it navigable, singling out the world map for visualising what is installed where. A second reviewer reports discovering 300 GB of mods they did not know were there. The disk treemap added in v0.9.7 is the feature doing that work, and it is the sort of thing that is hard to fake in a screenshot.

Parking what you are not flying reclaims VRAM. One reviewer, running an RTX 4060, credits Flight Prep with letting them run high-fidelity aircraft at 4K by disabling everything the route does not need. This is a real mechanism — a smaller Community folder does load faster and use less memory — and it is the same mechanism the free tools offer. AVX's contribution is automating the selection from a flight plan.

Support answers. Both the reviews page and the download page say the same thing: replies usually within a day. The one review that mentions a problem — an activation failure on first use — resolved, and the reviewer says so.

Beyond the room, the independent coverage is thin and mostly restated. simFlight ran the product on 14 July and the X-Plane expansion on 18 August 2026; both read as press-release rewrites, both carry zero comments, and simFlight's own footer declares it sponsored by simMarket. MSFS Addons, on 19 August, is the only outlet that engaged with the buying question, and its framing is the correct one: "a newcomer that asks €12.99 up front has a question to answer before anything else".

What keeps coming up as a problem

Since there is no complaint record, the honest place to look for problems is the developer's own changelog — which, to its credit, is unusually candid about what was broken. Every item below is the developer's own account.

Activation and first-run failures. Status: fixed, but they happened. v0.6.1 was a hotfix for "a blank screen on launch affecting some packaged installs". v0.6.2 fixed activation failing outright on newer Windows 11 builds with the error "HWID must be 20 or more characters". v0.9.2 fixed another blank screen when leaving the Liveries page. That is three separate ways the app failed to start, in a product that requires activation before you can use anything.

MSFS 2024 diagnostics fired false alarms. Status: fixed in v0.9.1. The changelog entry is blunt: CTD Doctor produced "hundreds of fake 'missing layout.json / Aurora' alerts on streamed store planes". This is the MSFS 2024 package-structure problem in one line. 2024 streams much of its content from the cloud with no folders on disk, so a Community-folder tool that assumes every package has a layout.json finds a library full of imaginary corruption. AVX's answer, in v0.9.0, was to read the streamed package list so Marketplace aircraft at least appear in the Hangar and liveries can be linked to them.

But — and the developer does not say this anywhere — if a package has no folder, it cannot be moved out of Community, so it cannot be disabled. Read the documentation carefully and enable/disable is explicitly a folder move. The unavoidable inference is that on MSFS 2024 the tool manages a smaller share of your library than it does on MSFS 2020, and one reviewer's line that it is "especially good for MSFS 2020 users" reads differently in that light. We could not verify this directly and we are flagging it as an inference, but it is the question we would want answered before buying for a 2024-only install.

Large libraries were slow. Status: fixed across v0.9.3 and v0.9.6. A full-library rematch of roughly 30 seconds every time you changed a package type, freezes on livery reassignment, and a Livery Closet that stopped scrolling smoothly past 1,000 liveries. All addressed, all recent.

Version signposting is a mess. Status: still open, as of 20 August 2026. simMarket says 0.9.9. The download page badge says v0.9.8. The What's New list on that same download page describes 0.9.10 features. The changelog's newest entry is v0.9.8, and it does not mention Sim Guardian, One-Click Flight or the X-Plane Doctor — three features the store listing sells. Nothing in the changelog carries a date. For a product whose entire pitch is that it brings order to chaos, this is an unfortunate look.

The support link on the store is dead. Status: still open. The AVXSimulations vendor page on simMarket lists avxsimulations.com/forum under Customer Support. It returns a 404. The real support channels are a Discord and a Gmail address.

It is still pre-1.0 and there is no trial. You cannot download the installer without a licence key. The only way to evaluate AVX Sorter is to pay €12.99 and use the 14-day refund if it disappoints. That is a defensible model. It is also the reason there is no public record.

Performance and stability

Nobody outside the customer base has stress-tested this, so treat what follows as an assessment of design rather than of behaviour.

The design is careful. AI Sort — the bulk reorganiser, and the single most dangerous thing in the app — shows a full preview of what moves where before it touches anything, runs preflight validation, applies changes as staged two-phase moves with automatic rollback, recovers interrupted runs on the next scan, keeps history, and supports one-click undo. Add-ons installed by Orbx Central, Aerosoft One, iniBuilds or Contrail are detected and skipped by default, along with junction links. Every X-Plane scenery_packs.ini rewrite is preceded by a timestamped backup. The Backup Center journals changes app-wide. v0.6.0 added filesystem path confinement, a strict Content-Security-Policy, production DevTools lockdown and Electron fuses; v0.7.2 got the installer digitally signed, under the name FuseBoss Technologies LLC — an entity that appears nowhere else on the site, whose terms of service are signed "AVX Simulations" and whose contact address is a Gmail account.

Set against that: this tool writes a great deal. It moves package folders on disk, creates junctions for the Community Relocator, rewrites scenery_packs.ini, clears GPU shader caches, rebuilds scenery indexes and empties the rolling cache. The free comparison, MSFS Addons Linker, takes the opposite approach — your add-ons never move, and only symbolic links are created inside Community. Both models work. The link model has fewer ways to end badly, and it has had five years and 565,000 downloads to prove it.

Two practical warnings. Running two managers over one Community folder is a known way to break your activations, and AVX's own v0.9.1 changelog quietly acknowledges the overlap by adding a "pause auto-rescan" toggle for "huge libraries / Linker setups". And we could find no published account of what happens on uninstall — specifically, whether add-ons parked in AVX's holding folder are returned to Community before the app removes itself. Ask support before you uninstall with half your library disabled.

Who should buy it

The X-Plane 12 flyer with a large scenery library. Buy it. This is the strongest case in the product and the only place where nothing free does the same job as well. If you have wrestled scenery_packs.ini by hand, or you run Ortho4XP tiles and have watched your overlays vanish under them, €12.99 for a tool that classifies packs by contents, explains why each ordering problem matters, and backs up before every rewrite is a straightforward yes.

The simmer running MSFS 2020 and X-Plane 12 side by side. Buy it. One licence, one interface, two hangars, no per-sim upsell. Managing both from one window is worth the money on its own and there is no free equivalent that spans them.

The MSFS user with a Community folder that has become a liability. Try it, on the refund. Crash Hunt, the disk treemap and Flight Prep are the three things worth the money and they are worth it in that order. Give yourself the fortnight and actually run a crash hunt.

The simmer who already runs MSFS Addons Linker happily. Do not buy it. You already have grouping, presets, one-click activation, ICAO scanning, duplicate detection, a livery browser and a map, free, from a tool with 565,000 downloads and 4.9 out of 5 across 942 ratings. Running both over one Community folder is a good way to break what already works. The only reason to switch is X-Plane, and if you do not fly X-Plane there is no reason at all.

The MSFS 2024-only simmer with a mostly-Marketplace library. Wait. Most of what you own is streamed, and a folder manager cannot park what has no folder. Ask the developer on Discord what proportion of a 2024 install AVX can actually toggle before you spend anything.

Anyone who buys on track record. Wait six months. This is a v0.9.x product from a studio with one release, no forum footprint, a 118-member Discord and a changelog without dates. Nothing about that is disqualifying, and everything about it is unproven.

Where it stands today

At the end of August 2026, AVX Sorter is eight weeks old on sale and roughly fifteen months old as a project — the Discord server dates to 13 May 2025. In those eight weeks the developer has shipped what the numbering suggests is a dozen releases, added X-Plane 11 and 12 wholesale in v0.9.8, and credited a single beta tester by name in five consecutive changelogs. That is a serious pace, and it is the strongest argument for the product: somebody is clearly working on this every week.

It is also the reason to be careful. The feature list has outrun the evidence. Sim Guardian, One-Click Flight and X-Plane Doctor are sold on the simMarket listing and appear in no changelog entry we can read. The store, the download page and the release notes cannot agree on the current version number. The only independent article that asked what €12.99 buys over the free tools was published on 19 August, made no mention of X-Plane — the one honest answer to that question — and has not been followed up.

So the buying question resolves cleanly, and it resolves on one axis. If you fly X-Plane, AVX Sorter does something the free MSFS tools structurally cannot, and €12.99 is a fair price for it. If you only fly MSFS, you are paying €12.99 for a nicer interface, an automated bisect and a disk treemap on top of a job that Addons Linker has done free, well, and publicly, since 2020 — and you are paying it to a developer whose entire public record is seven reviews they collected themselves. That is not an accusation. It is just what the record says, and the record is six weeks old.