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
Vtiger
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Vtiger is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution with sales and marketing automation, project management, and inventory management capabilities.
$28
per month per user
Pricing
ConnectWise PSA
Vtiger
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$35.00
Per Tech Per Month
One Professional - Single App
$28
per month per user
One Professional - Standard
$42
per month per user
One Enterprise - Single App
$42
per month per user
One Enterprise - Standard
$58
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConnectWise PSA
Vtiger
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$10 / user / month
Additional Details
—
Discounts are provided for both annual subscriptions, and for high volume users.
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.
vTiger packs a ton of functionality and capability, but the challenge is getting there. In today's day where everyone is doing more with less, having a solution that meets a couple specific needs and does that well is essential. To me, at times I feel as though vTiger is trying to be a "jack of all trades" solution which ultimately ends up making it more confusing to use. However, on the flip side of that, if you take the time to learn everything about vTiger, I am sure it is an awesome tool but there is a learning curve associated with it. Finally, I would like to see more integrations with other vendors moving forward so if we cannot use vTiger for everything, at least it would have the ability to "talk" with other 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 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."
It is as good as you could expect for a company that operates from another continent. Emails are quickly responded to and do not usually require additional questions or answers. It is quite rare for a company of their size to be as responsive as they are and that makes them a sound choice to deal with.
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.
VTiger had better overall cost and native capabilities that other solutions lacked. We used Nutshell CRM for over a year. It was a very efficient contact management system, but it seemed that if we needed to do anything but record contacts, we had to use an add-on. We spent a lot of time exporting and importing between different services. Quoting, invoicing, and payments all had to be manually transferred to our accounting system. It was very frustrating
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.
Integration Across the Organization - What started out as just a CRM tool for sales is now being used for ticket management and project management.
Steep Learning Curve - It is not as intuitive out of the box and really requires a dedicated person to be a vTiger expert which can be challenging and time consuming.
Reliability - Sometimes features that worked yesterday don't work today, thus causing more time to complete the same exact task that was done previously. The thing that comes to mind specifically is the main search box as 1/2 the time it works, 1/2 the time it doesn't work.
