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
Autotask PSA
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Autotask PSA is designed as a complete IT Business Management Platform for MSPs, now from Datto (resulting from the Autotask merger with Datto in 2017).
N/A
Pricing
ConnectWise PSA
Datto Autotask PSA
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$35.00
Per Tech Per Month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConnectWise PSA
Autotask PSA
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ConnectWise PSA
Datto Autotask PSA
Considered Both Products
ConnectWise PSA
Verified User
Manager
Chose ConnectWise PSA
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 …
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 …
ConnectWise Manage is better than all of them. It's more complete and has a consistent interface across all of its modules. Very easy to filter and find data with Views. I like that it has its own program too, not just a website. I think the program is essentially like a mini …
Autotask and ConnectWise Manage are the two heavy-hitters in the PSA space. Autotask has a much more updated UI and is much more user-friendly than ConnectWise Manage. ConnectWise Manage is more popular than Autotask in the channel and often products are integrated with …
We selected ConnectWise Manage because they did a customer demo for us answering all the questions we had prepared. The other companies had generic demos and didn't seem to be able to answer our specific questions. ConnectWise was able to help us setup the account and made …
We have tried other and have found ConnectWise the be the best. It is the most comprehensive, offer the best integrations and did not require a complete overhaul of our work flows. We also found the training to be superb and the support, especially the online chat, to be highly …
I had looked at Autotask when I was looking for a CRM for IT and at the time it just didn't compare with ConnectWise. ConnectWise had much more features we needed and also their sales team was very helpful in explaining the features and limitations. We were using Commit CRM at …
We chose ConnectWise because it has a reputation of good support. I am glad that we have chosen ConnectWise as our platform for support, because that has definitely been our experience. When questions or issues have arisen, ConnectWise support was able to help us get things …
We used Autotask for 5 years prior to switching to CW. Many of us still miss it after 2 years of CW, but we do feel that we made the right choice. CW consistently improves, has a great user base and tons of 3rd party integrations.
Autotask - very similar functionality, some great additional benefits, We chose CW because there was an on premise solution and there was far more user engagement. As the years have gone on, the support has been waning and Autotask has had positive feedback from peers that …
ConnectWise Manage is a far superior product to Salesforce and to Autotask in many ways. First, neither has the ability to integrate with other software programs like ConnectWise does. This integration makes working with Connectwise so much easier, as we do not have to …
I have 5 yrs experience with Autotask, which is a comparable platform. Where Autotask fell flat was its lack of integrations with other products. Connectwise has been smart with its acquisitions of Quosal, Labtech and ScreenConnect, and is now tying them together in some …
We've evaluated several options in the past, but none offered all the features, integration, and control that ConnectWise does. Autotask is the classic competitor that never quite stacked up, while Kaseya BMS is the newer rival that is also short on some features, as well as …
It was so long ago I don't recall the exact reasons but I do remember that flexibility was an issue with Autotask and BillQuick was more or less just a billing system and did not do everything we were looking for.
ConnectWise beats Autotask hands down. I did a 30 day trial of Autotask and quickly realized that the capabilities were inferior to what ConnectWise has.
ConnectWise shows vision and leadership unlike their competitors. Their community is heads and shoulders above their competition. Their vendor integrations are better. Their workflow management is better. ConnectWise's basic issue tracking and documentation systems are way …
We used Autotask before. We found that CW is much easier to use. Less steps are required to input a ticket. Implementation and support were better for us.
We moved from AutoTask to Connectwise ~3 years ago. I understand that AutoTask has made some great improvements since then, but Connectwise has served us well especially with integration with LabTech and Quosal.
It has been many years since we compared Autotask to the competition. We made the decision early on because of the overall solution that Autotask provides. It suits our needs well and we have not had a need to change since.
Autotask stacks up fairly well against software like Kaseya, ConnectWise, and Tigerpaw. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, however I feel that ConnectWise and Autotask have improved the most as of the last 10 years. The reason we chose Autotask is because it …
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.
In my opinion, Datto Autotask is exceptionally complicated to set up, manage, and use on a daily basis. I would think the target market for this product would be someone managing a team of 20 - 50 people, possibly more. In my experience, for it to run properly you will need to dedicate at least half an FTE to running this product in an organization of that size per month. I would not recommend it for companies with less than 10 people or for companies that value quick communication with their clients. I would not recommend it for companies using Datto's RMM product. The integration exists, but it is clearly a bolt-on. They were not developed together and they are slow to talk to each other. Frequently you cannot add details from RMM sessions into the PSA without manually copying the ticket number, and if the ticket is more than a week old, then you can't even find it with the ticket number.
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.
The graphical calculations on time spent on requests, how long they were open for, who worked on a ticket last.
Grouping by priority so you can determine easier what needs to be addressed sooner rather then later. This also helps if Account Management has conversations a technician is not aware of so they can prioritize efficiently.
The email updates that are sent out to the technicians so they are aware of upcoming or stale tickets.
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.
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
Datto Autotask PSA is a full featured product that can do almost anything you need. There is a significant learning curve to get started which requires several hours spent in product training. Additionally, several hours / days are needed to get clients imported, contracts configured, and integrations implemented. Once the setup and user training is complete, the product is very functional, but it's imperative to not get overwhelmed when starting out.
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.
The portion of Autotask that we've used other companies for prior to using Autotask is the Endpoint Management. The Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM) portal integrates perfectly with their PSA/CRM tools. It's alerting features are much better than the above software as there aren't a bunch of superfluous and unneeded alerts. Instead, it only alerts for things that you specify that you want. Alerts aside, for the PSA/CRM, I don't have much to compare it to as Autotask was the first PSA we tried. It's hard to imagine a PSA having more features or doing a better job than Autotask.
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.