ConnectWise Control alternatives and competitors 2023 (2023)

The primary support or the remote access support is really what we use ConnectWise Control for, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Even people outside of the organization would benefit from this. We do push out the agents, but if somebody, for whatever reason, like our board of trustees, don't have the agent on their computer, we can create a support session so they can just join via a web browser and we can support them in the same manner. It's very handy. It's very beneficial.

This solution isvery feature rich. It hasa Wake-on-LAN ability.

You can block them from having control, so you're not fighting over control, e.g.mouse control. Another example isif you have the need to enter a password with additional access, e.g.an admin password, you can blank out their monitor so they can't see what you're typing. That's very, very handy because you don't want the end user to be able to get that password, and if you mistakenly type it in the username field, it will be in plain text. It'll be there until you do your password change.

I did mention the toolbox which is really good.

The granular groups is also good because fora managed service provider, to be able to just really get that down, e.g. you don't want to give full access to everybody,it's just fantastic with that.

This solution is absolutely easy to scale.

We had almost 6,000 endpoints in one of the MSPs that I worked for, and I didn't find any issues with that at all.

Right now, we're hovering around 1,000 endpoints, with no issues.

In the larger MSP that I worked for, my remote team consisted of 20+ individuals, and this product went through the paces, but I've never heard anybody say, "Hey, you know what? This is just too slow. I'm going to wait until somebody's off to continue because it's unusable."

The only time I've ever had to contact tech support is to purchase additional licenses, andthey wouldjust send me over to the sales department.

Now I don't even have to do that because they have a self-serve portal. If you do have to contact support, you can do thatright on the main screen.

If I remember correctly, they have a chat feature too, soit's not like you have to wait in queue for an agent. There's somebody there to at least chat with. With a company the size of ConnectWise, I would expect them to have very strong support.

There was a time when we were using Google Remote Desktop. There werea lot of the things that I didn't like about it, particularly the security it provides.

ConnectWise is a lot more secure than TeamViewer, Zoom, and Google Remote Desktop, especially in schools which hasbeen a known area where malicious activity has occurred. I just don't hear the same thing, nor have I experienced the same security risks from ConnectWise Control.

Talking about VNCs, they werenot as usable at times. The VNCwas such a poor technology. We tried different products, so it's not just one product that was an issue.

TeamViewer was a solution I found really, really heavy. It needed a lot of resources. The juice just wasn't worth the squeeze. It was a lot of work and we really didn't benefit from it.

When I was introduced toScreenConnect or ConnectWise Control, it wasalmost too good to be true. We did a proof of concept for six to eight weeks on it, then we started switching over to it as our primary tool. Nothing was preventing us from doing that, not even the price, because it was totally reasonable,totally doable, and the rest was history. We never looked back.

We also used LogMeIn in the past. Itwas a scaled down version, or it could have beenanother acquisition called join.me.There was some acquisition there, but I can't keep track of all these acquisitions. They were okay, but not feature-rich. LogMeIn and join.me suddenly had significant price increases,so they were almost pricing themselves off the market.

The initial setupis easy. With no exaggeration, from the time you sign up for your free trial to when your instance is created, it takes less than 10 minutes per person.

It's just really a matter of how granular you want it to be, how many groupsyou have, and your group structure. I have fairly bad OCD, so I have subgroups on top of groups.

We saw a return on investment from using this solution.

It's just really difficult to put a price tag on ROI because often times we deal with non-technical individuals who just get very frustrated and they can't exactly express themselves very well with what's happening. We get this feedback from them whichis not uncommon: "It just doesn't work. I don't know what's going on. There's this message here."

We help them with their concern and say:"Hey, can we just connect to your machine and take a look at what's going on, because it's a lot easier to visualize?" Just by not having to drive out to rural Alberta where there is a lot of snow, andwe're up to about three feet of snow this year. It's not exactly easy to drive anywhere, so the ROI on this is easily less than a day, and that's really not an exaggeration. It's totally worth themoney.

ConnectWise Control is not an overly expensive tool.

When I first bought it 10 years ago, I paid about $4,000 for a one-time license for unlimited connections. The price has gone up over the years, but the current pricing only costs us$35 a year for each license.We're a small team, so we're on a very, very basic plan and we've only got four licenses. Pricing for this solution is reasonable.

Because of our size, there's a free version that I use for my home, which is great. When you sign up, you get the free trial and all the bells and whistles. In a larger organization, whetherin thepublic or private sector with multiple departments and a number of buildings, they may benefit from that. For the most part, I don't know if there's anything additional that you would really need. It's just bells and whistles.

This solution used to be called ScreenConnect, then ConnectWise bought them out four or five years ago. A little bit of background on the organization: We're a rural school division in Northern Alberta, so we have to cover a lot of geography. It's been apparent in the last couple years with COVID that going out and seeing machines just isn't the way to go like it was 10, 20 years ago.

We're using this solution as SaaS (Software as a Service).I don't know if they're stilloffering it on-prem.I think that they went away from that. For some reason, that rings a bell.

I'm trying to think of anything else that might be a room for improvement for this product. Something I really haven't played around with a whole lot is the PowerShell through this, but it might also just work through the commands section of it. I can't see that as something that's missing in the product. In all fairness, I haven't really done a lot with that as of late.

Currently, we have six people using this product.

The beauty of ConnectWise Control is we really don't have to do anything for maintenance.We only need todo a little bit of housekeeping, e.g. if we decommission a machine, we just remove the agent from there and it's gone.

Any app-specific maintenance is done by ConnectWise, so we have zero responsibility for that. ConnectWise is always great about sending a planned maintenance message out, e.g.: "Between the hours of 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM, the service will be unavailable.", which is the perfect time. I'venever had an issue where I've gone in and said: "Oh, they're still doing maintenance. Something must have gone wrong." This is a solid solution.

Increasing usage of this product isn'tout of the question, but not at this point in time. There are some features that are in there that we don't use today, but as far as the number of individuals, it's going to depend on whethermy team grows or not. We don't have plans of increasing usage in the near future, butit'snot a definite no.

I would say to anybody who's even thinking about using this solution, is to definitely sign up for the free trial, even if you don't decide to go with it. The setup is so easy. You get 15 days to try it out and that's more than enough time to see exactly what you can do with itand if it's a good fit. I'd be surprised if somebody says: "No, I really don't like this." It's so intuitive. I've got non-technical individuals who just do app support, so theyknow that one application, andthey don't know a lot about servers or computers, but they just absolutely love ConnectWise Control because it's so simple. They search for the machine, double click it, and they're in. That's not oversimplifying it at all. That's literally what they do.

Definitely do the free trial and let it speak for itself.

I'm rating this solution a10 out of 10.It's easily a 10 out of 10, because eventhough there were some glitches and bugs, it's very rare. I can't even remember anything off the top of my head that was so significant that made me say: "I'm not liking this at all." I'm typically pretty hard on these products because there's so many of them out there, but we definitely have a choice.

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