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
Hive
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Hive Technology offers their eponymous project management and process management application, providing integrations with many popularly used applications for productivity, cloud storage, and collaboration.
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.
Hive is a powerful tool for data analysis and management that is well-suited for a wide range of scenarios. Here are some specific examples of scenarios where Hive might be particularly well-suited: Data warehousing: Hive is often used as a data warehousing platform, allowing users to store and analyze large amounts of structured and semi-structured data. It is especially good at handling data that is too large to be stored and analyzed on a single machine, and supports a wide variety of data formats. Batch processing: Hive is designed for batch processing of large datasets, making it well-suited for tasks such as data ETL (extract, transform, load), data cleansing, and data aggregation.Simple queries on large datasets: Hive is optimized for simple queries on large datasets, making it a good choice for tasks such as data exploration and summary statistics. Data transformation: Hive allows users to perform data transformations and manipulations using custom scripts written in Java, Python, or other programming languages. This can be useful for tasks such as data cleansing, data aggregation, and data transformation. On the other hand, here are some specific examples of scenarios where Hive might be less appropriate: Real-time queries: Hive is a batch-oriented system, which means that it is designed to process large amounts of data in a batch mode rather than in real-time. While it is possible to use Hive for real-time queries, it may not be the most efficient choice for this type of workload. Complex queries: Hive is optimized for simple queries on large datasets, but may struggle with more complex queries or queries that require multiple joins or subqueries.Very large datasets: While Hive is designed to scale horizontally and can handle large amounts of data, it may not scale as well as some other tools for very large datasets or complex workloads.
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.
Simplicity, it offers a clean environment without risking the outcome. An example of this are the timesheets that allow a fast way to keep track of progress
Interaction, the different options make it faster and easier to interact and collaborate in the development of a product. An example of this would be Hive Notes for meetings
The different visualisations it offers allow to explore the best ways to affront your projects. I really like the Gantt mappings view to understand who can be contacted at each point
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
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."
Our CSR is easily accessible and they have support built into the app itself. They also have a pretty robust support site. We also took advantage of the free trial and learned so much by putting Hive through the paces and figuring out the best way to mold it to our needs.
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.
Hive is a bit different than Jira and Monday, which I used mostly. Overall does a great job managing project and helps with team communication. Removes dependency of asking team members for updates by going to conference rooms. With Hive, the team updates the status, and we can easily track it.
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.
