ConnectWise Automate, formerly LabTech, is a remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. It provides powerful automation to discover and manage devices, monitor for problems, and scripts repetitive action.
$700
Qualys TruRisk Platform
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Qualys TruRisk Platform (formerly Qualys Cloud Platform, or Qualysguard), from San Francisco-based Qualys, is network security and vulnerability management software featuring app scanning and security, network device mapping and detection, vulnerability prioritization schedule and remediation, and other features to provide vulnerability management and network attack surface reduction.
I recommend it to all IT colleagues; regardless of the size of the PCs with which you work most of the time, the application allows connection stability between computers that make it possible to continue working or taking care of the infrastructure from afar.
Qualys Cloud Platform is well suited for organizations that need additional tools to secure and bolster their security from end to end. The automated, real-time threat protection is very quick to notify an admin of potential vulnerabilities and risks, as well as recommending quick fixes to resolve/close the gap before an incident occurs. QCP excels at portraying all of these in a single pane of glass, and find that the Qualys reports are more detailed than competitor product lines. One of our big issues with QCP is that you do have to pay for each scanner, which can quickly add up to large costs. For this reason, I would rate Qualys at a ~7 due to great features and functionality, but overall value could be better for a large organization. I would also say that QCP may make more sense for smaller organizations due to this pricing model.
It really does well at vulnerability scanning, which it is well known for. It's accuracy at finding vulnerabilities is top notch, more so than a lot of other vulnerability tools out there. In an organization/company you want this kind of accuracy at finding vulnerabilities in your network/endpoints
It is very good at managing endpoints on a consistent basis, meaning you can add endpoints to Qualys and have the platform scan/track/protect for vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis, without user intervention
It does really well at separating out and identifying what levels of criticality each vulnerability should fall into. This way, an organization/company can attack the more critical vulnerabilities first
They have conflicting scheduling paradigms. When scheduling patching for clients, the 1st Friday is interpreted as the very first Friday of the month, even if this is the 1st of the month. For scripting, the 1st Friday of the month is interpreted as the 1st Friday of the 1st FULL WEEK of the month. This makes no sense to have two different interpretations, and makes it unreliable to schedule recurring scripts to fall when recurring maintenance does. The scripts need to be done manually because of this.
There is no way to dictate reboot orders for patch policies. This tied directly in with my first point. We have some clients that require reboot orders. This is not possible without having different patch policies for each server and specifying a time this way. But, there aren't small enough increments of time to make this reliable, plus patching duration might vary. Excluding reboots with patching and scheduling reboot scripts fixes this. However, this can't be done once on a recurring schedule due to the different scheduling paradigms already discussed. We have to schedule these manually each month.
This program is really complicated, the multiple functions that are presented to us are not very clear and in some cases, it is a matter of intuition to execute a function, it is not very informative.
The interface of this program can be a real problem; for our taste, this program looks a bit messy, and the interface does not help or guide you to find the options you need.
The primary reason for this rating is that ConnectWise Automate is currently so integral to our operations that moving away would involve more man hours than we would realistically have to invest. However, ConnectWise Automate is also completely capable of meeting all of our business needs and customizable to the point where if something is not meeting those needs out of the box, it can be modified to do what we want. From only installing software on machines if a different software package exists, to push a new version of that software is available, to check if credentials for user/machine have been updated to our new standards and then updating them if they have not, ConnectWise Automate is capable of doing everything we ask of it.
Basic use of the product is fairly easy. Information about the machines you manage can be found in customizable dashboards, which can be unique for each user, and, therefore, properly suited to the users' needs/job function. This is not a 10 because some of the interfaces are very clunky (Patch Management), and some features are not intuitive and not well documented (reporting). Scripting and Patch Management have a fairly steep learning curve (For structure in patch management and syntax in scripting), but once learned, they work well.
Again, the usability of Qualys has been a pinpoint for this entire review. It was easily the worst thing about the product and because of this, I would not recommend Qualys to anybody in my field. This should be something that Qualys strives to improve if they wish to stay in business.
It used to be great, but then they broke reporting, speed and responsiveness with version 11 and the new Patch Manager. It's really bad and their support people are way behind on fixing so many bugs. They have really gone downhill. If they don't get it together soon, we'll start looking around.
ConnectWise Automate lets you manage more endpoints, with enhanced productivity and improved service, all without increasing expenses. It can manage patches and updates across thousands of computers. We also use it for customized monitoring and alerting on workstations and servers. Monitoring is really robust and granular. It does a great job of gathering a TON of data about the network, and that data is searchable. There are a bunch of different reports built in. Integrates with Manage, Control, and other applications. It does a ton of stuff out of the box, and has endless customization options.
They had a support page within the WAS to report any concerns or seek help. But the UI of that is not smooth. Regardless support staff were pretty responsive and helpful. They scheduled calls to understand and address our problems. Email support is good as well.
The Online training has been re-done and needs a lot more work. When you look at training in different roles, it shows a lot of the same topics but no explanation to what is different about them. Several times that topics are the exact same, but they make you re-take the same information for a different topic, instead of marking that you have already completed that portion of training.
Start small and learn the in's and out's before making policies and rolling things out company wide. Ask the questions of why if you don't agree with something or your company does things a different way. Usually they are done a certain way for a reason. Start simple with roll out and slowly enable or add on the functionality that is needed.
I believe the monitoring and alerts in Continuum command is better, but [ConnectWise Automate (formerly LabTech)] does have stronger scripting, and perhaps a better interface. N-Central is inferior on all fronts to both. I did not make the purchasing decision. I would myself likely pick Continuum if I had to make a on the spot choice.
As described before Qualys is used to scan periodically the environment in order to check if there are some packages (Linux) or Applications (Windows) outdated, generating reports to the Service Owners, fulfilling what's is expected from us, attending all our expectations regarding the tool. That's why we'd choose Qualys to our organization.
We found we were able to provide good monitoring of our customers sites which was an objective. However, that came at a significant time investment that never seemed to be finished.
We were able to negotiate a price that worked for us for an up-front purchase which was nice.
We found the pricing to be very competitive.
Bottom line for us was despite the pros of the product, we found other RMM solutions to be a better overall "value" due to not having to dedicate technicians to maintaining the product.
