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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Spiceworks Help Desk
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Spiceworks offers a set of free tools for IT network management and help desk support ticketing. The inventory management system essentially provides comprehensive device information for asset management. The Spiceworks Network Monitor provides information on observed IT for problem tracking and server performance monitoring. And finally, the Spiceworks Help Desk Software lets IT personnel stay on top of issues across the network with a ticketing system. Help desk roles with role-based…
We found that for entry-level SMB in-house needs that Spiceworks had an impressive range of features and options at an unbeatable price-free! For our in-house and multi-tenant needs, we use a different product that is more appropriate to our particular needs, but with no cost …
Spiceworks does things Autotask doesn't and vice versa. However, if you remove the network inventory aspect from Spiceworks, it's inferior to Autotask in every way, with the exception of price. Autotask is a CRM, Time Tracker, Helpdesk, KB, Projects, all of it. Spiceworks …
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.
It's a great helpdesk solution - we currently have five years of data within it, roughly 25,000 tickets. The older edition is a great inventory and software license tracking tool. It is easy for users to use the interface and submit tickets and requests on the web, and its email integration is solid. The new version is a below-average system monitoring tool, only giving up/down status and a few other metrics.
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.
Spiceworks is a free tool, so there would be no hesitation if we are required to upgrade it. We have installed Spiceworks on a dedicated server with more than enough resources to get the most from this tool, so we will have this running in our department for years to come.
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.
Spiceworks is user friendly and easy to set up. It can be customized to suit your needs. If there are any problems, you can go to the community forums for support and be in contact with many IT Pros, as well as the Spiceworks support staff and development teams who are always happy to help users out
Spiceworks has been working out of the box, and some of the basic customizations have been successful with just our internal staff handling. We don't have any other issues with the tool. It provides us with the inventory information we want in a quick and concise report in a variety of formats for our team.
If you can spin up a VM to run it on, you'll thank yourself later. If you have remote sites, set up a local server (or dedicated computer) at each site and set them up as remote collectors for the main site. You'll save time and bandwidth
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.
EGroupware UI is clunky and hard to use, Jira is great but the pricing is expensive in comparison with spice works that has a free version and you can test it out properly before buying and make a correct decision based on your business plan and company objectives with the right software.
