Action1 vs. N-able N-central

If you need a solution to help you remotely manage your endpoints this is a no-brainer. I highly recommend signing up for the trial and pushing the agent out to a few endpoints to test

In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).

• Customer service and support team are easy to reach and response time is really fast
• Interface is really user friendly and easy to use

• Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
• Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
• Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.

• I wish the remote connection has a file transfer feature.
• I hope Action1 will implement DLP and Secure Web Gateway features in the future.

• Expensive software
• The support team are terrible
• Sales team will promise the world to get you over the line
• Subscription management is tedious
• Old software with very little development and the support team will not provide any further information on this - no roadmap
• Integrations galore - but none of them are effective

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

Incentivized

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

Incentivized

Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.

Incentivized

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

Incentivized

Action1 Cloud Remote Monitoring and Management Solution may not be as feature rich as SCCM and Intune, but it does its job without having to set up and support additional infrastructure on your network. It's more user friendly than ManageEngine's Desktop Central but does most of the same tasks you would be getting from ManageEngine's cloud version of their desktop management system.

Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.

• ROI = Time saved for us.
• The Action1 agent has allowed us to maintain the security of our endpoints by allowing us to update all software on our fleet of devices.

• Reduced time to manage and support servers and endpoints.
• Provides support dept with more accurate information to assess and resolve issues quicker and more efficiently.
• The subscription cost associated with N-central, to our clients has a good profit margin for us.

Incentivized