ConnectWise PSA vs. LiquidPlanner

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
ConnectWise PSA
Score 7.8 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
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
LiquidPlanner
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
LiquidPlanner is a cloud based predictive project management solution. Some key features include: Dynamic Timeline View, Workload View, and Real-Time Activity Stream.
$0
per month per user
Pricing
ConnectWise PSALiquidPlanner
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$35.00
Per Tech Per Month
Free
$0
per month per user
Essentials
$15.00
per month per user
Professional
$25
per month per user
Ultimate
$35
per month per user
Enterprise
CALL FOR VOLUME PRICING
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConnectWise PSALiquidPlanner
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
ConnectWise PSALiquidPlanner
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
8.1
87 Ratings
1% above category average
LiquidPlanner
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets8.887 Ratings00 Ratings
Expert directory6.550 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications7.760 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation7.467 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission9.287 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket response9.186 Ratings00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
8.0
81 Ratings
3% above category average
LiquidPlanner
-
Ratings
External knowledge base8.367 Ratings00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base7.776 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
8.7
84 Ratings
12% above category average
LiquidPlanner
-
Ratings
Customer portal7.379 Ratings00 Ratings
IVR9.521 Ratings00 Ratings
Social integration9.528 Ratings00 Ratings
Email support9.079 Ratings00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration8.275 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
-
Ratings
LiquidPlanner
8.1
15 Ratings
6% above category average
Task Management00 Ratings8.711 Ratings
Resource Management00 Ratings8.69 Ratings
Gantt Charts00 Ratings8.68 Ratings
Scheduling00 Ratings8.810 Ratings
Workflow Automation00 Ratings8.47 Ratings
Team Collaboration00 Ratings8.911 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology00 Ratings7.76 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology00 Ratings8.46 Ratings
Document Management00 Ratings9.93 Ratings
Email integration00 Ratings7.914 Ratings
Mobile Access00 Ratings4.89 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking00 Ratings7.210 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management00 Ratings7.66 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
-
Ratings
LiquidPlanner
8.3
5 Ratings
10% above category average
Quotes/estimates00 Ratings8.64 Ratings
Project & financial reporting00 Ratings8.45 Ratings
Integration with accounting software00 Ratings7.94 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ConnectWise PSALiquidPlanner
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Planview AgilePlace
Planview AgilePlace
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.8 out of 10
Planview AgilePlace
Planview AgilePlace
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ConnectWise PSALiquidPlanner
Likelihood to Recommend
7.6
(118 ratings)
8.5
(17 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.6
(25 ratings)
4.4
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(30 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
8.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
1.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(20 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Online Training
5.0
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
1.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
1.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ConnectWise PSALiquidPlanner
Likelihood to Recommend
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
LiquidPlanner is amazing for any time of project management scenario where you have to manage several teams and details. Running a project through LiquidPlanner is so easy because it lets you break down the project into sections and folders and small tasks that you can assign to specific people. With a small to medium size team-- LiquidPlanner is amazing for organizing and tracking details. If you have a huge team or not a ton of details to track LiquidPlanner might not be right for you because it is a software that requires some good training to learn and has tons of functions that can be utilized so it seems better suited to be used by a smaller group looking to coordinate or for people who have lots of details that can be difficult to track.
Read full review
Pros
ConnectWise
  • 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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
  • Priority based planning. Every other planning software we've used relies on dates and therefore needs constant attention. Priority based planning means that the plan is always up to date.
  • Ease of use. LiquidPlanner has a very short learning curve. This is critical to getting team members to use it.
  • Forecasting. LiquidPlanner makes it very easy to run scenarios by simply dragging and dropping projects and reassigning resources.
  • Awesome Support. I get personal responses very fast. Usually within a couple hours. And, they listen and ask for more information.
Read full review
Cons
ConnectWise
  • 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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
  • The interface is messy and cluttered. The best way to find things and see what you actually want to see is the main Projects view which is also the most cluttered and hardest to maneuver in.
  • Clicking an external link someone posted in a comment or task description doesn't open in a new window by default, so we are constantly having to go back to get to LiquidPlanner again.
  • The way that the interface saves your state globally (rather than per tab instance) means that if you click a link from someone else to a task that's not yours, then it adjusts your filters on the Projects page. Then if you refresh another LiquidPlanner window where you were on the Projects tab, suddenly all of its filters are updated and what you were looking at may no longer be there.
  • It might just be the way that we use the system, but the Home and My Work tabs are fairly useless for us. They typically don't show the tasks we're actually looking for.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
We may not renew LiquidPlanner's contract, but only because my company has recently been acquired and we'll be adopting some of the software that they're using to standardize process. LiquidPlanner's development team releases new features pretty often, so it seems like the gaps and inefficiencies are slowly getting smaller/less frequent
Read full review
Usability
ConnectWise
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
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
Easy to learn and utilize. Can export charts and reports for sharing with colleagues.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
No answers on this topic
Performance
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
ConnectWise
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."
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
They have been great in trying to come up with creative solutions to help us do what we want to do with the platform. I would say their support has been exceptional because we have hit them with some complex requests.
Read full review
Online Training
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
Miro is a more versatile tool, but not quite made for planning and organizing. LiquidPlanner is very intuitive, fast to learn and easy to communicate. The added value of prioritizing tasks, personalized boards and gantt charts are really important during the planning and design thinking in the business. LiquidPlanner is simplified yet more helpful.
Read full review
Scalability
ConnectWise
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.
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
ConnectWise
  • 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
Read full review
LiquidPlanner
  • LiquidPlanner really forces you to map out your workflow. For me, honing into a template that I can later adjust as needed has been huge, as there is less time at the beginning of a project trying to assign and figure out what needs to happen when usually it never changes.
  • Communication between employees, especially ones not immediately available in the office has been very welcomed. It helps having conversations documented in a public, logical place that is easy to find and refer to as the project continues.
  • Our productivity has definitely skyrocketed as we've really gotten a feel and committed to using LiquidPlanner daily. As we move forward, we continually try to add more and more ways for us to use the service.
Read full review
ScreenShots

ConnectWise PSA Screenshots

Screenshot of Service Ticket ExampleScreenshot of Ticket TemplateScreenshot of Work Plan TemplateScreenshot of Calendar TimeScreenshot of Meeting InvitesScreenshot of My Calendar

LiquidPlanner Screenshots

Screenshot of Project Dashboards allow users to build high-level views that help visualize data.Screenshot of Workload Views allow users to see an entire team's workload at once and make resource adjustments in stride.Screenshot of Time Sheets keep track of hours per task and automatically update project estimates.Screenshot of Project View allows users to view any project in detail, assign tasks, set their priority, and access schedule risk.Screenshot of My Work View is a personalized view of all work to always know what to work on next.