ConnectWise PSA vs. Creatio

MSPs wanting to find a single system to fill all their needs. Businesses wanting to increase their ability to deal with tickets, with advanced management and KPI monitoring. Small IT business who need more than just a ticketing system and are looking to make the leap to a full PSA with integration options, client portal and advanced configuration.

Creatio is well suited in following scenarios: Complex Business process modelling and automation, Low code No code development which is best for efficient timelines, customized reporting and dashboarding, seamless integration with other technologies. Scenarios where Creatio is less appropriate: Solutions which require high cutomizations on the frontend side as this can be done by javascript modifications but it increases the load on the page and slows it down.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Creatio's client success team is super. The team is collaborative, solution-oriented, and client-driven. We have weekly meetings with the team. They show up prepared with solutions/ideas to business requests and they are clearly engaged.
• Creatio's infrastructure team has been critical to our ability to execute our cloud strategy. They have worked with us to set up our testing and production environments within Azure, assisted in testing, and are responsive and flexible to our unique requirements.
• Creatio has been very flexible to requests for customization. We have taken their low-code out-of-the-box solution and "Ringlerized" it. The benefit for us is an application that meets our niche business needs.

• 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.

Incentivized

• When we started using Creatio in 2022 the new user interface had just been released and did not include all the features we needed; however, we used a more classic user interface and were still satisfied with the results.
• The ability to capture a digital signature directly within the application was missing in the base system; however, Creatio connected us with a partner that provided a solution for this specific situation.

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.

Incentivized

We have always used a CRM and Creatio has proven to be much more effective in meeting our needs than our previous provider. Its customizability will allow us to adapt this product as our business may change in the future.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Because it is so easy to use and navigate through - even the most technophobic people in our company are using it on a regular basis. It is easy to change around and switch through different sections and keep neat and tidy.

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.

Incentivized

Other than the daily maintenance window where the server may be inaccessible for a few minutes, there have been no issues with accessing our Creatio site. The daily maintenance window is outside normal business hours so it does not affect our Users - just myself when I am looking to implement changes.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Some Users have reported slow responses from the server at times which seems to be localized. Users are based across four different time zones and the issue is intermittent.

Incentivized

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."

Incentivized

The people at the Creatio offices world wide are very friendly, patience and always happy to help. I have a huge respect for them, especially the people that were based in the Ukraine. Still in these strange times they always keep the focus on the customer, where we would have totaly understanded it if it was any different. So huge compliments to the whole team, keep up the energy and the good work

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.

Incentivized

Most of the roadblocks to learning were not discovered until the users were actually in the system using it on a day to day basis. Our Customer Success Manager has offered to setup additional training sessions as needed to close the gaps in our learning. Some areas which required some additional training are setting up filters, dashboards, and generating reports.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The project manager for our implementation was great to work with and took the time to understand our business. We felt very comfortable going into the project with a reasonable scope of work to provide us with a functional version of Creatio to meet our needs. Unfortunately, we came across multiple challenges with this partner in their deliverables and timelines. Thankfully Creatio was able to provide support resources to ensure we were able to launch. We have since changed partners for our third-party support.

Incentivized

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.

The user-friendliness of Creatio was a big selling point along with the low-code initiatives, both of which were important to our business. With Salesforce, unlimited wasn't really unlimited. You couldn't deploy an on-site instance and the overall cost of the system far outweighed the ROI. These are all things Creatio offers, out-of-the-box.

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.

Incentivized

I can see the promise of how it can be customized to other aspects of our business.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is no one has to return to the office to look at notes - they can look up the support ticket on their laptop, tablet, or phone.
• The positive impact on ROI is keeping all of your support tickets organized in one spot and multiple techs can update them.
• The positive impact on ROI is that you have happier customers as you can update the support tickets no matter where you are at

Incentivized

• We went from manually processing Work Orders into Invoices once a day - representing significant impact to turn around speeds - to submitting automatically in real time, eliminating a great deal of human transcription errors and freeing up a great deal of operations time
• Custom Implementation automation in Creatio has eliminated 4-6 hours of configuration work per sale in comparison to our old manual methods