Blissfully vs. OpenLM for Engineering Licensing

As mentioned before we find that Blissfully works amazing for our on-boarding and off-boarding workflows. Being able to track all systems to which an employee has access and ensure a list of tasks are created to get them access to those systems during on-boarding makes on boarding smooth. It's perfect for maintaining compliance during off-boarding.

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.

• Access tracking and revocation.
• On-boarding and off-boarding workflows.
• Systems spend tracking, per team.
• Internal access and purchasing ticketing.

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.

• Integrations with all systems for automated access grants or revoking.
• Ability to create a user within corporation prior to their start date.

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.

We initially investigated other alternatives, but found that Blissfully was well suited for our needs. It had a good amount of pre-built functionality which was built based off of Blissfully's expertise; but also the ability to customize where we needed. Additionally, other solutions try to do A LOT more, which makes it much more cumbersome to move over to because you're changing multiple systems as opposed to augmenting specific processes.

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)

• Eased our path to SOC 2 compliance.
• Makes on-boarding more smooth.
• Allows finance more insight into each teams spend.

Incentivized

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