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
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$14
per month per user
Yellowfin
Score 8.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Yellowfin is a cloud-based business intelligence and dashboarding platform.
$250
per month
Pricing
ConnectWise PSA
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Yellowfin
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$35.00
Per Tech Per Month
Power BI Pro
$14
per month per user
Power BI Premium
$24
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConnectWise PSA
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Yellowfin
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ConnectWise PSA
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Yellowfin
Considered Multiple Products
ConnectWise PSA
No answer on this topic
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Verified User
Employee
Chose Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Each of the solutions has their pros and cons, but Microsoft's BI offerings provide the best "bang for the buck." Few solutions available offer the breadth of feature functionality in a single package, with BI and database generally being sold as separate offerings. However, …
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
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.
Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.
We can recommend this software without hesitation, as it has the ability to generate reports and data analysis, as well as process the data automatically, which saves time. It is ideal for small and medium-sized companies that wish to improve their services in the business world
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.
Yellowfin’s Storyboard, Timeline and Collaborative tools make it easy to share data and insights across an organisation.
Strong Operational and Executive Dashboards that reflect the business KPIs and can send out prompts to people within the business based on rules.
Yellowfin makes it incredibly easy to create dynamic reports and dashboards which incorporate maps through locational intelligence functionality.
Yellowfin is a single license and all access is via a web browser making it perfect for both on-premise and cloud deployment. Mobile apps are also available.
User roles and source filtering allows Admin/IT to offer different functions/views by user group/role.
Mobile BI applications to support any device ..
API connectors ( YF 7.2 on the way in Mar16 ) for a range of third-party Web-based applications, data sources, Enterprises CRM/ERP apps & open data platform apps, including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Twitter, Youtube , Zoho CRM, XE.com & more coming to make endusers to integrate their applications for better benefits
Yellowfin Integration with Predictive analytical and Big Data processing tools like R, UDF, Spark to build rich applications for end users
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.
The ability to predefine a colour for a specific graph as a selection option dynamically.
The ability to customise the label of a chart, especially with respect to performance related reporting graphs we need an increase in dynamic charting options to meet our more specialised requirements.
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.
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
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
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
As mentioned previously, if a newer company is looking for a strong, polished BI tool, Yellowfin would be a great software vendor to consider. Unfortunately, the high cost might be a barrier to these newer companies who dont have any legacy software/agreements such as an EA agreement with Microsoft.
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.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
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."
MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.
They have good support in what they provide. But what they provide is not what is promised. I would stay with them if I can. Be very careful before signing up with them. They are not what they seem in the sales pitches. Be very careful and make sure you test and test before you sign up.
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.
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
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.
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
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.
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
Yellow Fin platform is browser agnostic and is accessible from desktops as well as mobile devices. It is very simple and fast, it is integrated with Big Data, clients do not require a great training. It just works. But it’s easier to have things on the cloud, especially if you need to use different computers. Yellow Fin lacks the cloud feature.
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.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
