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.
Connectwise PSA worked a lot better than ManageEngine because it could handle a lot more and had a lot more features than ManageEngine. Connectwise PSA is better than autotask in many respects but it lacks some other features that make autotask work better, such as the …
ConnectWise PSA compares pretty closely with autotask based on my usage as a technician. I cannot address it beyond ticketing. Zendesk was a much simpler ticketing system and did not have much of the more complicated functions. Zendesk did at the time integrate very well with …
BrightGauge is essentially Power Bi at the reporting level. In Power Bi, the data must be modeled, and reports must be created, developed, and shared. BrightGauge is a buffet of report creation in a more straightforward form. I use Power BI more than BrightGauge in my current …
I would not have championed for the transition had I known how poorly the implementation would go and how antiquated the software really is. As a company serving technology providers CW knows we have an expectation of ease of use, robust offerings, straightforward …
Everyone but dynamics had holes in it. Dynamics is good, but it requires more development time. I spoke with some people that have CW and liked it. But when I inquired after our frustrations, I discovered they had a full time scheduling & logistics CW manager and the field …
Verified User
Consultant
Chose ConnectWise PSA
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 …
We reviewed a lot more products than those listed above but in the end, we are told by our business mentors to just pick one and use it - everything has its learning curves. However, all of the other products we tried couldn't even come close to what Connectwise Manage could …
We chose ConnectWise Manage because it has integration into our distribution network. This feature is ok but given all of the other issues, we will more than likely be moving to Dynamics.
Verified User
Analyst
Chose ConnectWise PSA
BrightGauge is by far the easiest to learn/use of the BI tools I have experienced. We had managers building their own dashboards with no outside help. It is not incredibly versatile though so if you want to get much more beyond taking the data and putting it in a chart or table …
ConnectWise Manage is a very robust tool with multiple uses. If you have the money to spend, it is a very good product. The ability to centrally manage all of your tickets, users, computer information, as well as it's reporting functionality makes this product stand out above …
We used to use Commit. While it was good. Connectwise manage is better as far as keeping track of things and being able to automate a lot of things so that we dont have to remember to do it. Takes the human error out of a lot of issues. We also went with it because we were …
When we picked this product, it was the best and has since been surpassed. We chose ConnectWise Manage because the salesperson glossed over all of the features we wanted and it ticked all the boxes. We should have done more research. We stick with it because once you get into …
Very odd that none of the tools we evaluated are on this list, including some much larger companies. Below are the tools we reviewed with some notes. Ultimately, we recently changed from SmileBack to CustomerThermometer as described below.
Any solution is better than ConnectWise at the current state of this company. We chose Pulseway. With them, we have a great easy interface, and awesome customer support. We can buy our licence ourselves. The price is on their site as opposed to competitors who hide their price …
Our team previously used ServiceLedger prior to switching to ConnectWise. I do not personally have experience with ServiceLedger, but I am told the switch was made due to the more extensive functionality that ConnectWise offers. ServiceLedger looks to be more focused on service …
BrightGauge lets us know when we have critical issues that need solving. A massive influx of tickets all at the same time triggers an investigation. Usually, it is tied to a server going down, which we can address. It would not be helpful for a small MSP or IT department with just a few daily tickets. The stats are better used to track a large amount of clients.
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.
Annual or more than annualized data is desperately needed for MSPs to show trends, current limitation is previous 240 days for ConnectWise tickets
Alerts when datasets do not sync properly, I have to rely on my team to notice vs get an automated alert from BrightGauge
Small thing, but it would be nice to have more options on the report scheduler to enable a start date. If you wish to do it quarterly, you have to start the schedule exactly 3 months from the next run.
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
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."
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.
Everyone but dynamics had holes in it. Dynamics is good, but it requires more development time. I spoke with some people that have CW and liked it. But when I inquired after our frustrations, I discovered they had a full time scheduling & logistics CW manager and the field people were using it purely like any other more simplistic ticket system. They said it would be impossible otherwise. The one big difference is the transparency of the sales effort. The other sales people were honest on the limitations or potential challenges and worked with us. They also worked with our agenda. At CW they don't have that option. The consulting time is eaten through a pre-formatted agenda which they communicate too you, not with you.
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.