BetterCloud vs. OpenLM for Engineering Licensing

BetterCloud is well suited for small to medium sized companies where a small technology support team can exponentially improve their capacity thru the available automation. When a company's data set starts to grow larger than 50-60 million objects and ~30k+ users there is still a good return on the investment but the population that BetterCloud has catered to for so long does not seem to be plentiful and shared experiences and community are just not there. Where a company that size might have a handful of technically capable team members that push for functionality that doesn't seem niche, there isn't much of a crowd to bounce those large scale ideas off of.

Incentivized

OpenLM can simplify the reporting of complex licenses with multiple toolboxes or products on one server. It covers most of our license server types, but not all. The academic version is reasonably priced (e.g. for educational institutions) giving 90% of the features, however setting it up on-premise was more complex than our original pilot would suggest. We couldn't do without it now.

• Allows us to quickly audit and assign delegates to email account, something that's completely missing in Google as an administrative function
• Allows us to automate offboarding of a Google account
• Allows us to perform bulk actions, like assigning email signatures and forwarding to hundreds of accounts at a time
• Allows us to audit Google Drive files. Orphaned files are very common in Google Workspace, and BetterCloud allows us to find them and take ownership of them.

Incentivized

• Peak concurrent license use for any period of time, often less than expected, saves unnecessary over purchase.
• Denials of license, can quickly see where a license is not working, say, after an upgrade.
• Comparison of license utilisation (% when near the limit).
• Quick check of expiring licenses.

• Integration with Google in the App version to allow pushing of email signatures, this feature is available in the legacy version.
• More canned reports, although custom reports are available for you to build yourself.
• More onsite visits with customers if available, to be onsite and see what challenges are available first hand.

Incentivized

• You can share a link to a dynamic report (e.g. the last 365 days). The URL is very long but it can be used with a 3rd party short URL utility and shared with users.
• Upgrading to the latest version took a long time to troubleshoot, which left a short gap in the saved data.

Support for BetterCloud is excellent. They have fantastic email support who are very responsive and knowledgeable, but more importantly they have chat support that are absolutely top-notch. They have not only the knowledge to answer and help, but the capability to solve without escalations or runarounds. These support folks are the real deal.

Incentivized

BetterCloud has a much more friendly UI when it comes to building workflows as I've mentioned before. Our team has visited Okta workflows a number of times but it was incredibly difficult to replicate our current BetterCloud workflows into Okta because the Okta UI for workflow building is hard to follow and create

Incentivized

X-Formation, OpenIT, JTB, Sassafras either more expensive for the particular task of managing and monitoring concurrent licenses, or they had a different set of features (such as Sassafras K2/Keyserver also for remote access)

• Data monitoring: previously unavailable insight into our organization’s file-sharing habits and documents.
• Granular roles: ability to set least-access permissions. And really, truly granular unlike some other applications.
• Automation: we’ve already saved dozens of man hours using workflows. Gives us time to focus on things that matter without compromising common tasks.

Incentivized

• The academic version has paid for itself handsomely, including our setup costs. The ongoing strategic information saves costs.