Autotask PSA is designed as a complete IT Business Management Platform for MSPs, now from Datto (resulting from the Autotask merger with Datto in 2017).
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Jira Service Management
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk, now including features from the former Mindville Insight, acquired by Atlassian in June 2020) is a service desk software that is purpose-built for IT, service, and support teams. The software provides everything IT and support teams need out-of-the-box for service request, incident, problem and change management. Jira Service Management integrates seamlessly with Jira Software so that IT and development teams can work better together. Users…
Datto Autotask PSA is probably the best all-in-one platform for MSPs. It's targeted and designed specifically for MSPs, whilst most service desk software/PSA is often just general service desk software.
Autotask is more robust than simple ticketing systems. It provides better billing ability that many ticketing systems and works well with existing clients. The invoicing options provided are beneficial to the business and streamline the process. The ticketing system provides …
In my opinion, Datto Autotask is exceptionally complicated to set up, manage, and use on a daily basis. I would think the target market for this product would be someone managing a team of 20 - 50 people, possibly more. In my experience, for it to run properly you will need to dedicate at least half an FTE to running this product in an organization of that size per month. I would not recommend it for companies with less than 10 people or for companies that value quick communication with their clients. I would not recommend it for companies using Datto's RMM product. The integration exists, but it is clearly a bolt-on. They were not developed together and they are slow to talk to each other. Frequently you cannot add details from RMM sessions into the PSA without manually copying the ticket number, and if the ticket is more than a week old, then you can't even find it with the ticket number.
I think using a ticketing system is very easy to use and allows multiple teams to create help desks in the same portal. In terms of internal usage, I think this is a great option. However, suppose you're trying to keep internal items and external helpdesks in the same instance. In that case, this is not ideal, as there is no effective way to separate the two instances to protect internal data better.
The graphical calculations on time spent on requests, how long they were open for, who worked on a ticket last.
Grouping by priority so you can determine easier what needs to be addressed sooner rather then later. This also helps if Account Management has conversations a technician is not aware of so they can prioritize efficiently.
The email updates that are sent out to the technicians so they are aware of upcoming or stale tickets.
Integration with many of the most common tools companies are using (Slack, MS Teams, Salesforce, ... etc)
Natural workflow with Jira (as product development / project management tool) which makes the full fix and follow up of the tickets / issues very easy to follow
Allow multiple different entry points and work flows for as many different needs your teams / company have
In the current contect the requirments is around having a tool that is focused and can handle large ticket volumes and tracking incident, problem and user requests concerning end users. Jira has built in functionality to address the above practice needs faily easily and has a substantial amount of customizable reports for generating the relevant intelligence.
Datto Autotask PSA is a full featured product that can do almost anything you need. There is a significant learning curve to get started which requires several hours spent in product training. Additionally, several hours / days are needed to get clients imported, contracts configured, and integrations implemented. Once the setup and user training is complete, the product is very functional, but it's imperative to not get overwhelmed when starting out.
If you're used to other tools in the Atlassian ecosystem, you'll feel right at home with JSM. It's also a platform that technical folk can easily pick up. However, I wouldn't recommend using JSM as a company's first jumping off point into Atlassian. There are a lot of other 'newer' tools that provide sleeker ITSM systems at a similar cost.
I gave JIRA a 9 rating since for me JIRA works according to its purpose. Since there is a customer portal, our clients can leave a comment or communicate with us using the PR ticket that way it is easier for us to also request any additional information we need for our investigation.
The portion of Autotask that we've used other companies for prior to using Autotask is the Endpoint Management. The Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM) portal integrates perfectly with their PSA/CRM tools. It's alerting features are much better than the above software as there aren't a bunch of superfluous and unneeded alerts. Instead, it only alerts for things that you specify that you want. Alerts aside, for the PSA/CRM, I don't have much to compare it to as Autotask was the first PSA we tried. It's hard to imagine a PSA having more features or doing a better job than Autotask.
Zendesk is a similar ticketing system that our organization used before JIRA Service Desk. The main drawback of Zendesk was that it can only be used as a cloud service. This means that our company data would be living on the internet at the hands of their security team. Another drawback of this is the price is significantly more expensive rather than hosting it yourself. Zendesk does have some additional features such as commenting on multiple tickets at once that JSD does lack. However, switching to JSD was significantly more cost effective because we have the ability and the infrastructure to host our own ticketing system, something that Zendesk could not provide. Ultimatley switching to JSD saved us money and allows the ability for integration with all of the other Atlassian Suite products that we use on a day to day basis.
