KACE Asset Management Appliance vs Lansweeper

The KACE Management Appliance does many different things, but does not do them as well as other products. It is an all-in-one system for Asset tracking, software management, ticketing system, Contact management, and reporting. If you require basic functionality for these, then this product will meet your needs. But when you begin needing advanced/granular functions from the appliance, it will fall short.

Lansweeper I believe is well suited for any environment - its low cost and small footprint make it an easy addition to any organization, big or small, that is looking for an asset inventory solution that can either replace or supplement existing asset management systems. It may not be well suited for situations where a lot of customization is necessary, such as pulling in custom fields or details from equipment that don't reside in a registry.

• Gives you real time data to systems on my network.
• I can get information on all applications running on devices on my network.
• I can get information on what systems are not currently patched and up to date with MS and Virus definitions!

• Inventory - LANSweeper scans the network for devices - anything with an SNMP trap or using AD or local credentials. We can get an in-depth look at devices.
• Reporting - LANSweeper can generate just about any report you can imagine. We can check RAM in groups and determine where upgrades are needed. We can find local printers (which aren't allowed on our network) and address that issue with the user. We can check CPU type to help determine end of life without our network.
• Printers - It's nice to have a quick look at printer statuses. Toner levels, out of paper, and service errors are all reported via LANSweeper.

• Configuring automated software installs is difficult, and logs do not present useful information for troubleshooting.
• Customer support will just refer you to search itninja.com when you call in for support issues.
• KACE community site (itninja.com), has outdated documentation, and answers to questions are usually vague at best.
• KACE Amp agent constantly breaks, and has to be re-installed on end user computers.
• A parent-child relationship in the ticketing system requires you to create a process.
• Remote provisioning fails consistently and does not provide any useful information as to why it failed.
• K1000 is overpriced for the jobs it actually performs and the work that is required to maintain it.

• Can only scan what it sees. Doesn't show every item on the machine. Patches are also absent.
• Software Recognition is OK with Microsoft. It is dire within our network of multiple products. Recognition is at about 35% with constant manual work needed to baseline for each manufacturer in each network
• Datacenter compliance is a manual project. We used Excel extensively.
• License optimization is limited to installations v surplus licenses. We need to know who's using what and how.

The price to function scale is so far towards function it would be stupid to get rid of it

Lots of info online there are tons of SQL Reports you can copy from the web as Lansweeper and users post many of them. They also send out alerts that pop up on Lansweeper, letting you know of an update that you need for certain software and provide an SQL report so you can scan your system to see what PCs need this update.

DAM blows away what Free wear we were previous trying to tweak and change for use to benefit the County. But as we looked into DAM we saw much more available with this product compared to what we had been trying to use over the last 10 years. It took a lot of convincing to get County Administration on board with County IT but after we had Dell come in and demo software and appliand to BOS and County Administrator they saw the added benefits of going with DAM! It has been a great addition to our County IT tools!

Though Lansweeper isn't designed as a live network management tool, it's intended as a static Networked Asset Inventory Manager. It does share many functions with other applications, and the reporting tool in Lansweeper is much easier to use and to customize (create your own SQL queries to extract information) as well.

• Asset Tracking works exceptionally well, until the AMP agent breaks an endpoint machine. Quick re-install of the AMP agent usually resolves the issue.
• The remote provisioning tool fails 90% of the time. If this worked properly or informed us why the remote provisioning failed, this tool could become an invaluable asset.
• We canceled the support contact because the renewal price was expensive and cost just as much as the initial purchase price.

• It had a positive impact on solutions expense cause several teams we're using different solutions with different costs that used several servers and DB resources. Now, we've been able to simply that a lot with Lansweeper.
• With my previous point, people had to train and learn about each of their solutions. Now we can put a team in charge and so the other teams can focus on other tasks.
• Last year Lansweeper changed their licencing prices a lot so it slashed our budget.