Datto Autotask PSA vs. Oracle IT Service Management Suite (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

It is helpful when someone wants to reassign issues and delegate tasks to other co-workers. However, it is not a good place for documentation because it is difficult to navigate older issue tickets. This is my personal experience with RightNow, an Oracle application used to manage our incident reports and project tracking documents

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It kept a log of all our issue tickets going back many years.
• Oracle made it easy to collaborate on issue tickets and work with my team members.
• It offered a number of features for formatting and inserting images and links, to make our issue tickets resemble an email.
• Oracle helped our department to delegate issue tickets and monitor each other's projects.

Incentivized

• The GUI is a little dated.
• Some integrations are limited for not being a Datto product.
• While not as complex to set up as Connectwise, it definitely requires some serious thought during the initial setup.
• Email processing could offer more options for parsing keywords and allow for more automation.
• The mobile app is just not worth using in my experience.

Incentivized

• The search function was very poor, which made it difficult to find our issue tickets in RightNow.
• The Reply feature was kind of messy at times, it was difficult to find out who originally sent in tickets and reply all to people.
• It could have looked a bit sleeker, it looked somewhat outdated in the RightNow function.

Incentivized

After using multiple products on the market, Autotask was intuitive and easy to manage.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

They are fairly quick at returning a response to a problem and have been able to fix all issues for the most part.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We were able to identify the profitability of our entire client base.
• We identified a loss of over 1 million dollars for time unbilled consultancy fees using metrics derived from Autotask.
• Autotask helped us serve our client base in a professional manner, it's like having an entire department at your finger tips.
• Autotask is the heartbeat of our operation.

Incentivized

• It was helpful because it was our only system for organizing incident reports, and it was where I worked 70% of the time to correspond with our customers.
• The interface was sometimes time-consuming to use, and I wondered if there would have been a more streamlined program to use. It made our work seem slow at times.
• This program did provide us with a back-log of all of our issues, so it was important for us to use to in order to find repeated incident reports.

Incentivized