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
Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
VMware acquired Airwatch in 2014. Workspace ONE is a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solution and is available in Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Advanced for VDI editions.
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.
Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management is best suited for mid to large-size companies that require all the functions that it presents. It is a plus if you are well known with the VMWare "Horizon" ecosystem and use some of these solutions. It's to hard and resource intensive to setup and manage for small companies. Next to that it is to costly for only basic functionality compared to other solutions
Enrollment is a snap with many different options. This allows organizations with corporately owned or BYOD programs to bring devices under management in a flexible and scalable solution.
Deployment of apps-AirWatch makes deploying apps across your organization simple a quick.
AirWatch is usually close to "Zero Day" ready with major hardware manufacturers updated features. Many of the Android and iOS updated features are incorporated into the environments almost as soon as they are released.
AirWatch has great customer service. This was not always the case but as the company has grown over the last year in particular, I have been receiving better customer service compared to other MDMs.
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.
On-Premises solution is very slow compared to SAS and which is causing many issues while accessing emails on a device, server management, contacts sync issues, Reporting issue
AirWatch Inbox application was very buggy and created a lot of issue in our organization and it seems no one is happy with the performance AirWatch Inbox is giving.
It is very costly as per analysis provided by Gartner quadrant and for a small organization or for small user base it is not that much suitable.
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.
We've used it for 3 years and our contract is up later this year. We own the licenses, but we would have to either renew cloud services or bring the services in-house and install on servers here. We may want to see what's new in the marketplace that could be just as useful and cost effective.
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.
It works well for our environment and what we're using it for. It actually does more than we're currently utilizing, but I believe our needs will change in the near future and we could utilize more features.
Just in the past few weeks our staff has had several issues with the website. It is either taking a long time to load anything or we are not able to get in at all. This is very frustrating when you are trying to manage and enroll users. It was down 2 days in a row just this past week. Not good!
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.
Went over the availability just a minute ago on the last rating. Don't use the reporting too much but will likely begin that soon. Integration with Active Directory doesn't seem to bog either system down.
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.
There is a separate portal for Workspace One + Chat function. The support is fast but sometime you need a little but luck that the right person is supporting your case. Case escalation is not really working.
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.
AirWatch support was included and helped with every step of the implementation. They have their "university" with helpful documents and phone support 24x7.
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.
Airwatch remains a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant and meets the data mobility needs of our organization. We are looking at moving to the cloud with Office365 and are evaluating the Intune/EMS/MAM/Rights Management suite. We have set up both Airwatch and Intune/EMS/MAM/Rights Management in a lab environment and have compiled some good comparison data and are looking to further evaluate these products. From our testing Airwatch has good integration with Office365 and is more feature rich and has more robust controls in both the MDM and Data Management/Security space. If someone is looking for a more simple solution without MDM and they are considering providing email and calendar access only Intune/MAM may be the way to go.
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.
Visibility of all support team, their location, apps installed on devices and security level, which guarantees information is secure.
Users don't have the time to be spending their telecom plans on apps that are not accepted for corporate use. So, this plans can be controlled and money saved.
Cost happens to be an OpEx one, and even though it is not visible in ROI, when you calculate how much money represents data leak, information lost, users not arriving to attend customers, and more. The cost is giving you a return on customer satisfaction and continuity.
