Kiteworks vs. SolarWinds Serv-U

Kiteworks is very good for securely sharing files external to your company and doing so without your customers knowing who each other are. The interface is simple and relatively intuitive. We have had some issues in getting timely support from Accellion this past year, but they seem to be doing better lately.

Incentivized

For anyone who needs to receive/send files between themselves and others, in an organized fashion, I would strongly recommend Serv-U as a great tool at a sensible cost. In our line of work, we can get several customers signed in at once, each sending in hundreds of Megabytes of data simultaneously. Serv-U has never struggled with this. We don't use the Quota set up for sending/receiving data but I can see it is useful where an exchange of information is the point.

• Microsoft Office Plugins
• Desktop Synchronization
• Mobile Ability
• Group chat
• File Filtering

• The Wizard allows us to create new user accounts very easily and quickly. We do not have a formal IT department so those of us "mere mortals" can use this easily.
• Using the Web Client has made it very simple to set up and instruct our customers on getting to the server from any device with a minimum of fuss. We have many customers with ESL, and school students including middle and high school. Most of them are not computer experts, just regular users so the simplicity allows to do the whole setup over the phone in minutes.
• The newer version of Serv-U does not appear to be very resource-hungry so our computer runs nice and fast, without having to be a top of the range powerbox. We concentrated on large storage to cope with the file sizes we receive daily.

• Encrypting our files appears to be less than 100% complete
• Software updates cannot be scheduled to take place automatically like their old product
• Detailed activity logging is not available to administrators. You must submit the logs to Accellion for analysis.

Incentivized

• The user interface on large screens becomes tiny and nearly unreadable without the aid of Windows Magnifier.
• Active Directory integration is either absent or not straightforward.
• Settings and configuration aren't always intuitive.

Support was the biggest hurdle for us. It definitely needs improvement, but not to the point of being a deal breaker.

Incentivized

The main reason for selecting Kiteworks is that when sharing files with multiple customers, each customer has no idea who the other customers are. To do that in Teams would require users to create a private team for each customer, which would be very [time-consuming].

Incentivized

Previously we have used FileZilla and Microsoft FTP services, but neither out-performed Serv-U. although it was easy to use, FileZilla required constant attention from IT staff and did not live up to security protocol in place. The Windows Server FTP was difficult to configure for clients due to the tight integration with Active Directory. This also limited who could help administer the server.

• Before then kitework we used 3 different products. It was expensive and difficult manage.

• I have been using it for over 10 years so the ROI was there for sure.
• It is not a constant attention needing program.
• Set up and it does its job.