Action1 vs. Cisco Webex Support (discontinued) vs. SolarWinds Dameware Remote Everywhere (DRE)

If your organization is like mine (nonprofit and tight budget) this product is for you. The first 200 endpoints are free and being we are a small organization, this product is perfect for us. I was able to use Action1 to upgrade all my endpoints from Windows 10 to 11 pretty much effortlessly. If you are not a nonprofit and have more endpoints over 200, this is still a great product to use as I don't find it very expensive to incorporate into your infrastructure.

Incentivized

We use WebEx Support Center in the IT department to support users as well as work with vendors remotely. This applies to physical desktops, laptops, and Virtual Desktops. We have around 200 employees. Most employees work in one of our offices, but we do have at least 5-10 users who are more frequently remote than they are in the office. It helps us remotely access machines we wouldn't otherwise have access to, due to lack of physical access. It's excellent for troubleshooting access problems from users' personal machines, as well.

Incentivized

I think for ANY environment it's worth taking it out for a test drive. It's very powerful, especially when using the agent to connect to sessions where the end user doesn't need admin rights but when not in a VDI environment it likely would perform better with its built in functionality to ask for elevation. It is really powerful, even with the ability to run command line scripts without the user seeing (kind of a built in psexec) and it does work with Mac and Linux to some degree too so it really is worth trying out regardless of your environment. It may be just what you're looking for and the sales folks at DRE are not pushy at all, at least in my experience, and give great advice even at the expense of selling less licenses!

Incentivized

• Easy remote access to devices. That simple. We have some very unskilled users in the field where asking them to access their PC via conventional remote tools like TeamViewer, Anydesk, etc. was always a pain. Now, all they have to do is ensure their PC is online, and we can connect to them.
• Remote software deploy. Before Action1, we did have some GPOs and scripts, but again - being able to deploy to PCs outside of our office/LAN, is just beautiful. On top of the standard repository, being able to create new packages is very useful for our scenario.
• Inventory Reporting. Recently we had to identify PCs running old versions of Windows. Can't highlight enough how easy it is.

Incentivized

• Simple Remote Access - WebEx Support Center works with either a permanent install or temporary executable, so you don't have to worry about users being particularly comfortable or knowledgeable about software installation. It also doesn't matter if the user is on an account without admin rights, you can still connect and see what's going on using the temporary executable.
• Robust Access Options - You can take see the user's screen, take control of their screen, send files, and retrieve files. It's a great tool for troubleshooting issues that users might be experiencing and doesn't depend on them being able to find the files that you need to properly troubleshoot their issues.
• Great performance - Even when users don't have a particularly great internet connection, you can still typically get good results and help them quickly. You're not going to do it over dial-up (if that even still exists for anyone), but it works acceptably well even over very modest DSL or satellite internet connections.

Incentivized

• Remote control is solid, rarely loses connection
• Allows for control of the desktop prior to login
• Allows for scripts to be executed in the background without disturbing users
• Allows for batch rollout of scripts across multiple machines
• Allows us to see the end users' desktop - as opposed to RDP

Incentivized

• Remote Access could use added functionality
• The deployment screens for update deferrals can be hard to understand at first and easy to skip since it carries some default info when you create a new automation rather than a more conspicuous prompt to update.

Incentivized

• During initial setups it can be a little confusing.
• The look and feel is a little rigid. It feels like it is in need of a smoother UI update.
• When a new user is introduced to webex and they are asked to share their desktop, it maybe a little difficult for the user to navigate to the correct buttons.

• Connectivity to a helpdesk/knowledgebase would be nice feature so users can do self-help
• Offering a branded version of the client/agent would be a nice touch for businesses
• A web-only version of the technician console for remote support would be a nice feature

Price, functionality, and continuous improvement of the product.

Incentivized

The Enterprise package we purchased (Event Center, Remote Support, Meeting Center, and Training Center) for 100 users is the same annual price as GoToMeeting for 25 users. We will renew as it is a package deal. If it were just WebEx Remote Support, we would not renew at all.

Action1 has taken many of the tasks that are time consuming and made them simple automated tasks that can be run on a schedule. I can schedule tasks to run off-hours and know that they will be done and I no longer have worry about it. As someone who does IT support for a living, it just makes my job so much simpler with less stress.

Honestly, there are people available. But none of them will help you with your issues. They just keep assigning new service engineers who are often clueless.

It's a good tool overall, but could be better.

Incentivized

I never contacted support services

Incentivized

As a user of Cisco Webex Support, I have never had to contact Cisco for technical support as it is a very easy to use tool.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Dameware Remote Everywhere is an easy to use software package. The manuals are easy to understand, and the installation is simple and straightforward. The Maintenance and support costs are relatively reasonable, and we maintain support and maintenance strictly for the upgrades rather than support. Over the years, SolarWinds has released numerous feature enhancements to the software package, making SolarWinds Dameware Remote Everywhere indispensable on our network.

Incentivized

very easy to start using it.

Incentivized

After looking at different solutions, Action1 [Cloud Remote Monitoring and Management Solution] was the perfect fit for us that delivered all of the features we wanted without being as costly as some of the others alternatives we've looked at. There was no minimum endpoint count and they even offer up to 50 endpoints for free, which is really great for a small organization like us to help us lower our starting costs and still allows us to grow at our pace without having to commit to a defined amount of endpoints to start.

I would say that Cisco Webex Support stacks up pretty evenly in capability, but in some regards (video clarity, toll-free access, etc.) they were even better. Where they did provide a better solution for toll-free access on audio bridges, their audio quality was worse for those that wanted to use VoIP for the audio conference bridge.

We basically selected this for our one of the SolarWinds Project. In that we needed to take remote session and screensharing and do the analysis and troubleshooting. In our initial analysis itself we got the excellent result, and it was too quick. We were very much inspired from this. Later on, we started using SolarWinds Dameware Remote Everywhere (DRE) for almost all the projects of SolarWinds. Highly appreciated, thanks team.

Incentivized

• Saved hours per week on patching and able to ensure a 100% patching success rate.
• Able to create custom alerting on potential problems as well as able to create some automation to automatically address problems.
• Improved support to our remote locations and users.
• Custom deployments allow us to have a mechanism to deploy custom applications we build as well as other third party applications we need to distribute.

Incentivized

• WebEx Support Center works pretty excellently for us as we are a small shop. We are experienced and have pretty good skill sets. WebEx Support Center is an excellent product for our use cases with our users and client to troubleshoot issues.
• WebEx Support Center is more expensive than our previous product MXIE or Logmein. It has a more user-friendly UI, and overall performance is better and reliable.

Incentivized

• seamless installation of MSI or EXE
• No Codes to enter when installing agent
• Agent automatically connects to cloud dashboard
• our deployment tool has messed up a couple of times, so agents get uninstalled or not installed when this occurs, and we can't see a computer in the dashboard

Incentivized