ConnectWise PSA (formerly Manage) is a business management platform for companies that sell, service, and support technology. The platform is cloud-based and integrates automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management, and business analytics. It is the hub of the ConnectWise suite.
$35
Per Tech Per Month
Freshservice
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
You absolutely need a full time individual on this program to manage it properly. It is likely a powerful application. However, you have to know how all the disparate parts interact with the other content in the application. How they actually interface with your businesses operation applications (really check this one out as it only seems to play nice with Microsoft suites based on our experience.) and decide how much time and additional money you are willing to bury into this. Figure at least 2x over CW cost your initial period of out-of-pocket costs
Freshservice is a complete ITSM solution. I have used some others over the years and moved away from them to Freshservice. I have implemented Freshservice in 2 new roles over the years, and everyone has loved it. The functionality that it incorporates, enabling IT teams to become ITIL compliant is truly useful. Compared to 5 other ITSM tools that I have used over the last 10 years, Freshservice is far better.
Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.
I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
Better Knowledge base section.
We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.
Change Management - Current system is geared towards full software or system change management. It would be great to have a simple Yes/No approval without having to utilize their workflow tools.
Data selection filters - Overall, their data filters are very good, but it would be useful to have "Last Week" and "Last Month" in the date selectors.
ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.
I have been using ConnectWise since 2004 and I am impressed with the progress they have made. However, there are still bugs that don't work quite like they should. If I were to run reports and get consistent answers along with a couple other annoyances, then I would score CW as a 10
On the I.T. side, the time to ramp up and understand how FreshService operates only took a few hours. After that, it was off to the races with configuration and customization. From the start, with minimal assistance, our end users found FreshService to be incredibly intuitive. At launch, we expected most to submit tickets via email, however, our analytics has shown that end-users actually prefer the portal for managing their I.T. tickets.
We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.
Some tab for certain areas load speeds could be better. Dashboards can load slowly when they reference multiple reports. Some reports can load slowly based on the tables and views they are accessing. At times the SQL queries being performed in the background can actually timeout and a tab or screen will fail to load.
The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."
I contacted support once and the person handling the request was very helpful. The staff is very competent. In my opinion communication could be improved as the level of spoken English is very high. I was unable to understand some words, in fact two people participated in the second meeting.
We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.
Rather than letting them sell you a block of time for implementation, create a list of things that must be completed do declare the implementation complete. The implementer will have the discretion on what they set up and in what order. They will be trying to end their services in as little time as possible and may not get things set up right. You are best advised to hire a third-party wizard that has done many of these setups. Record the audio and video of all of your implementation sessions.
think of what you want to do with FreshService : a clean start or a migration. Migration can be done with csv files, it's easy to do but you need to test it first.
ConnectWise, does more than one function well for a CRM, it enables managed service providers to place all of their services into a single solution, that helps smooth the running of the business. Now we don't have to have 4+ different software packages to provide customer tickets, account information, sales pipeline, and HR.
I've used monday.com for ticketing, but Freshservice is made for it and the asset management feature adds value. NinjaOne's ticketing is not built out so we only use it for its RMM features. Atera has a nice ticketing platform and looks similar to Freshservice but they do not have an onboarding feature and other integrations that Freshservice has
ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.
Freshservice has allowed our organization to better track the amount of tickets that come in for a particular individual. This allows us to better support a user that is having multiple of the same issue over an extended period.
The communication to the user has greatly increased due to the automated messages that Freshservice has built in.
