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
monday.com
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
monday.com Work OS is an open platform designed so that anyone can create the tools they need to run all aspects of their work. It includes ready-made templates or the ability to customize any work solution ranging from sales pipelines to marketing campaigns, CRMs, and project tracking.
Connectwise PSA worked a lot better than ManageEngine because it could handle a lot more and had a lot more features than ManageEngine. Connectwise PSA is better than AutoTask in many respects but it lacks some other features that make AutoTask work better, such as the …
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 …
BrightGauge is essentially Power Bi at the reporting level. In Power Bi, the data must be modeled, and reports must be created, developed, and shared. BrightGauge is a buffet of report creation in a more straightforward form. I use Power BI more than BrightGauge in my current …
I would not have championed for the transition had I known how poorly the implementation would go and how antiquated the software really is. As a company serving technology providers CW knows we have an expectation of ease of use, robust offerings, straightforward …
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 …
ConnectWise, does more than one function well for a CRM, it enables managed service providers to place all of their services into a single solution, that helps smooth the running of the business. Now we don't have to have 4+ different software packages to provide customer …
We reviewed a lot more products than those listed above but in the end, we are told by our business mentors to just pick one and use it - everything has its learning curves. However, all of the other products we tried couldn't even come close to what Connectwise Manage could …
We chose ConnectWise Manage because it has integration into our distribution network. This feature is ok but given all of the other issues, we will more than likely be moving to Dynamics.
BrightGauge is by far the easiest to learn/use of the BI tools I have experienced. We had managers building their own dashboards with no outside help. It is not incredibly versatile though so if you want to get much more beyond taking the data and putting it in a chart or table …
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 …
Very odd that none of the tools we evaluated are on this list, including some much larger companies. Below are the tools we reviewed with some notes. Ultimately, we recently changed from SmileBack to CustomerThermometer as described below.
Any solution is better than ConnectWise at the current state of this company. We chose Pulseway. With them, we have a great easy interface, and awesome customer support. We can buy our licence ourselves. The price is on their site as opposed to competitors who hide their price …
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 …
Monday.com is very easy to use, and it is much easier for new team members to learn how to use it. I use it with our web developers, and the interface is much easier to navigate. Emails to clients/other resources that are generated from their tasks are much nicer looking and do …
monday.com feels like it offers a lower barrier to entry as well as more versatility, extensibility without becoming too complex. Atlassian is geared more for larger companies requiring a greater degree of granular controls.
Both platforms have a number of integrations (though, …
I used Pipedrive in my previous roles, so I did not evaluate monday.com as an alternative to Pipedrive. Similarly, Salesforce is not positioned as an alternative to monday.com for us. We currently use both Salesforce and monday.com, as they serve different purposes and …
Planner is very hard to figure out. Insightly is a good resource to keeping track of customers and their info but for tasks, monday.com is far superior
Workfront offered a more intuitive user interface, which made team adoption easier. It also included additional products that aligned well with the needs of our Dev, Work Management, and Service teams.
Cost is a big factor as the alternatives stacked up poorly in user costs and built in features. Also, the business was already using a different facet of monday.com so it was a quick setup and we already had experience and people were Jo knew the platform. Less complex and also …
monday is more capable and comprehensive when it comes to project and task management as well as the CRM side. However, Odoo is better suited for managing other areas that monday doesn’t cover, such as employee management, payroll, and invoicing. If one were to prioritize cost …
We have not used anything like Monday.com before. We used to do all of what I described on Google Sheets and share them with the company. It was very time consuming and cumbersome to remake new sheets every year, Monday.com gives us the freedom to add on year by year and not …
monday.com is far superior to Microsoft Planner and Basecamp, and arguably superior to Trello and Slack Lists as well. Asana (for work management and Zendesk (for request management) put it to shame. My main monday-using client selected it primarily because of its slightly …
We have only ever tried one other software that was designed to work similarly to monday.com. I will not name the company but our experience with it was just short of harrowing. The company was friendly and supportive but the product they designed was not user friendly. It did …
monday.com is so much better and cheaper. We moved from Zendesk because, in our experience, their customer service was terrible, they kept raising prices, and there was limited functionality relevant to our organization. The tools within monday.com allow us to use it as more …
It's been a while since trying Asana, so it's hard to say. I think they are very similar from what I remember, but maybe monday.com has more reporting and customization possibilities?
monday.com offer much of the standard tools and seems to be ever evolving. They seem to take feedback and constantly upgrade the tools. If all the tools are there, the differentiating factor might be the cost, any integrations you may need, and the visual "chemistry". To me, …
We chose to move from Zoho to monday.com when our company started growing exponentially. Overall, our team was thankful for the change because we were growing at far to fast of a speed for Zoho's tools to keep up with us. monday.com is a better, beefier platform with far better …
We decided to go with monday.com because they offered a free tier for nonprofits and because they are easier to use and offered additional features that we could not find on the other choices. Hands down, there was no better choice for us than monday.com.
When I arrived at my org, I was initially disappointed to hear that we used something other than Asana for project management. Fast forward just a few months, and I became a complete monday.com convert. While its organization is similar to Asana's, it's user interface, …
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.
The platform is very well suited for our nonprofit programs that serve low-income clients who need diapers, wipes, and period products. It has helped us run our programs, capturing information and allowing us to view the data for reporting purposes. The ability to filter data is very helpful by allowing us to categorize information to get a better picture of the progress of our programs.
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.
I like summary of subitems, especially with subitasks as subitems and add item tracking for each subtask it can show total tracked in parent item. Similar with other columns, like numbers, status, date.
Dashboard features, Many kinds of dashboard view available, we can utilize on the basis of requirements.
monday.com workform is very powerful, easily share form link when submitted it will create line item in board with provided data.
monday.com automation is very helpful in order to automate steps with specific rules and easy setup.
monday.com also provides integrations in order to automate processes if need to integrate multiple app together. or need to transfer data between multiple apps.
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.
The desktop app for Mac seems to have a few issues with visual glitches appearing on screen, it only seems to go away when I close the tool and reopen it
Subtasks don't show on the individual users to-do list, only main level tasks
The product works awesomely. The only factors holding back a 10 star rating are some of the upgrades that I believe are necessary. Namely, active directory integration for the customer portal is a feature that is long overdue. AD integration on the technician side should also be made available for subscribers of the cloud hosted solution.
Teams involved in content creation, such as marketing or editorial teams, could use monday.com to manage the entire content lifecycle. Boards might track content ideas, assignments, drafts, reviews, approvals, and publication schedules, helping teams collaborate and keep content production on track.
ConnectWise has been great for our help desk. Over the years we have used it (5+), it has responded to community-sourced feedback and improved its product. I have always appreciated the support given when required, and overall the program has helped our service desk to become more efficient. The automated aspect, including workflow rules, has been an important part of our overall systems. When considering a help desk PSA, ConnectWise should not be overlooked.
It's really about ease of use. I use Click-Up as well, which I really enjoy, but monday.com is a lot less complex to use. Its structure is a bit easier to understand and I got accustomed to the functionality very quickly. I have not explored enough of its functionality to comment any further but it's a really great tool for tracking progress and for capturing absolutely everything I need to save, including ideas, brain-dump, insights, continuous improvement on tasks and processes. I am lucky to be able to use monday.com as a member of my client's team.
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.
Overall, I love CW Manage. I think it is a great platform, but nothing is learned from saying "You're great!" So I will share 2 issues where I think improvement can be made. 1. There are times where service requests are closed inappropriately without explanation or warning which can be frustrating. I have learned that I must work extra hard to manage my open issues to ensure that they don't just disappear without resolution. 2. I recently found that I had mistakenly been charged $50 a month for a year for services I did not have. When I brought this to CW's attention, I was quickly given a credit memo and an apology, which was nice, but it was still annoying
Everything performs fairly well. Every now and then there are user errors where an employee will not click "ok" on a note they've created and simply exit out (I do wish that something was in place to prevent this, such as a pop "are you finished?")
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."
monday.com only really care about accounts that have 20 seats or more. While this is great for monday.com, it pushes smaller organisations to evaluate alternatives. We rate monday.com highly in our organisation because key staff have already got good experience with the application and we know we will get to 20+ seats one day. But, till then the billing model and lack of permanent enterprise features is a dread.
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.
To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.
Thoroughly review the training at ConnectWise University BEFORE starting. Ask questions to other partners - there is a huge community that is more than willing to help. Lastly, I recommend getting ConnectWise Consulting to help - it's a BIG product, and the money you spend on consulting will pay for itself by helping you and your team get off to a running start (in the right direction)
We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.
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.
monday.com feels like it offers a lower barrier to entry as well as more versatility, extensibility without becoming too complex. Atlassian is geared more for larger companies requiring a greater degree of granular controls. Both platforms have a number of integrations (though, Atlassian may have "more" because of it's marketplace and longer tenure), but monday.com may be easier to configure, though with potentially more limited functionality. monday.com definitely lends itself well to getting a business off the ground with simpler automations and the ability to grow you to the point of "graduating" to a more specialized tools.
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.
For it to work across multiple departments and sites, I would like to see improvements made with integrations and automation. For this question, I am acknowledging not only the addition of internal triggers/automation, but also an expansion on external ones.
For larger customers, the dashboarding has helped our customers to remain sticky and add services/revenue to our MSP. They want to add more fragments of their IT for the 1 pane rollup.
From a leadership perspective, BG has allowed me to make difficult staffing decisions with confidence. Detailed metric driven decisions on who is hitting KPIs/who isn't - as well as when data proved we were overstaffed and understaffed.
By using monday.com as an enablement tool for templated onboarding plans, we have been able to begin calculating the number of manager hours saved through our work (not defined yet).
monday.com's reporting tools also allow us to more easily report on the productivity and output of our team since we keep up with all projects and subitems in monday.com.