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Datto Autotask PSA vs. Symantec Client Management Suite

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Autotask PSA

    Score7.7 out of 10
    N/AAutotask PSA is designed as a complete IT Business Management Platform for MSPs, now from Datto (resulting from the Autotask merger with Datto in 2017).N/A

    Symantec Client Management Suite

    Score2.5 out of 10
    N/ASymantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.N/A
    Pricing
    Autotask PSASymantec Client Management Suite
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Autotask PSASymantec Client Management Suite
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Autotask PSASymantec Client Management Suite
    Considered Both Products
    Kaseya
    No answer on this topic
    Broadcom
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    11 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    91%
    Delivers good value for the price
    10 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    92%
    Happy with the feature set
    11 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    78%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    80%
    Implementation went as expected
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    Autotask PSASymantec Client Management Suite
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    Score8.8 out of 10
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    Medium-sized Companies
    Workday Professional Services Automation
    Score8.2 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Planview AdaptiveWork
    Score8.8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Autotask PSASymantec Client Management Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (30 ratings)
    8.9
    (14 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.4
    (4 ratings)
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Autotask PSASymantec Client Management Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Kaseya
    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
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Kaseya
    • 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
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    Broadcom
    • Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
    • Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
    • Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.
    Read full review
    Cons
    Kaseya
    • 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
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    • More transparency with the roadmap would be a welcome change. New and upcoming features are usually a surprise until a major Symantec Event takes place but little is heard about those features before and even after, in some cases, leading up to a release.
    • Documentation for some items is poor. Especially around the Workflow product. It was intended that the documentation for the elements in a workflow would be crowd-sourced, which is a good idea, but in order for that to happen, more people need to be using it and taking the time to draw up the documents.
    • Cost. Its always a big topic, especially in higher-ed, but Symantec could do more to lower its costs for some product lines in order to gain more acceptance and support. If that was done and more institutions could get their student workers to use the product, once they leave college and go into the "real-world" there is a possibility that they would start recommending Symantec products because of their use in College.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Kaseya
    After using multiple products on the market, Autotask was intuitive and easy to manage.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    So far so good - no major issues with that technology.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Kaseya
    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
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    Broadcom
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Kaseya
    They are fairly quick at returning a response to a problem and have been able to fix all issues for the most part.
    Incentivized
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    Broadcom
    Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Kaseya
    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
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    Broadcom
    Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element from an endpoint and provide detailed reports or great graphs for the C-Level
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Kaseya
    • 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
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    Broadcom
    • SMP allows us to centrally manage all of our endpoints with little to no end user interaction.
    • With the new P2P downloading our bandwidth constraints have been almost completely removed.
    • Cloud Enabled Management (CEM) allows our remote users to receive the same updates as in-network devices without the need for a VPN connection.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots