MSPs
and IT professionals use N-able™ N-central® to monitor and manage devices and complex
networks remotely. N-central provides
visibility and efficiency as the user's needs scale. N-central can help users:
1. Proactively monitor everything on a customer network—not just servers
and workstations—and troubleshoot.
2. Stay on top of threats with features like MFA, antivirus, integrated endpoint
detection and response, data backup, disk encryption, email protection,…
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TOPdesk
Score 8.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
TOPdesk is the flagship highly-modular cloud-based or installed ITSM service desk and asset management solution from the Dutch company of the same name, for enterprise companies.
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Pricing
N-able N-central
TOPdesk
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
N-able N-central
TOPdesk
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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The TOPdesk license model:
- Modular: Organizations purchase only the modules needed
- Saas or On premise
- Supports unlimited number of assets.
- End users OR service agents based. For flexibility in the number of agents for e.g. extra busy times of the year, the end user license allows adding agents without any restrictions, no day passes needed.
In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).
I think TOPdesk is best fitted in small to medium businesses, if there is someone capable of programming the rule sets. Those can be hard to create properly or maintain over time. The knowledge base and Self Service Portal can provide users with some insights and help, even if the SysAdmin is unavailable at that time. I don't think it is suitable for larger companies, because I personally think it will get quite messy then.
Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.
TOPdesk provides a clean and modern interface for all of its modules. Many of the modules have a similar look and feel, which makes it easy for users to utilize each one.
Its workflow system allows administrators and developers to define what needs to occur when certain events happen. This can ensure that processes happen in the correct sequence.
TOPdesk includes a vast API system to allow for external systems to integrate with it, and for TOPdesk to communicate with external systems.
The requirement to fill out certain fields before a ticket can be closed can be cumbersome. This could be a requirement for some organizations though.
The field mappings from Azure AD to user data could be a little more precise. Some of the fields just don't translate.
When setting up the system to intake emails as trouble tickets, it can be tricky when people reply after a ticket is closed. It will create multiple tickets from this.
Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.
As the project manager for the system, I find it to be intuitive and helpful to keeping our technicians in the field and working rather than running back all the time for paper copies of work orders. I think once we have a solid year under our belt there are things that we can work to expand on. The technicians like it because they can look back at old work orders to see what we did in certain locations to make repairs. All the notes are contained on the system rather than relying on someone else to put them in and dig them back out. The system benefits the technicians when they use it to their advantage. We are also finding reduced calls to the office asking about work order statuses. The customers are getting real-time updates on their requests.
The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.
Sometimes I think some things are hard to find. I often do not know if I have to search in Settings or in Modules. In some cases the user has to do a lot of clicks for example to link a key to a user. Something could work a little smarter.
Like I said somewhere else in this review: the helpdesk of TOPdesk is top of the bill! In the Netherlands, that is. I can not plea for the helpdesks in other countries, but I guess the TOPdesk organization will make sure the quality of the helpdesk is the same in every country.
Although being a SAAS solution, TOPdesk performs pretty fast. One can imagine that any SAAS solution is slow or has hiccups, but we have not experienced such with TOPdesk. Pages load quickly, logging in goes smoothly. We have made reports on premise in the past - that always took some time, as you might expect with such complex tasks. It seems that in the SAAS solution TOPdesk somehow has managed to make it even faster!
Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.
TOPdesk is easy to use and affordable with all the major features required for any organization to smoothly manage its services. We were not quite sure at the beginning if we should go with the TOPdesk for IT service management but we started getting used to it in just a few months. Now, after using it for 3 years, it has been a backbone tool of our organization. The customer support provided by TOPdesk is fast and reliable.
We had Topdesk in-house here training staff for almost a month (2-3 hour meetings 3x a week.) It was invaluable and we were able to take that training and share with the rest of our IT staff. Once implemented we were able to fly from there. The challenges we found were in how to get started. Once started the knowledge base offered from Topdesk has been invaluable.
Online training documentation is easy to access and consume. There is no real challenges with finding information on how to use the product and some really helpful knowledge base items that show us how valuable these options are in our own implementation of it. The online training we've used has been self driven
It was a challenge to port over years of the same thing and we ended up keeping old ideas in Topdesk that we will eventually weed out as time passes and we learn how users view categories and flows of tickets. Planning is key but bear in mind that just because you used to do it this way doesn't mean you still have to
Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.
TOPdesk was picked as our new Helpdesk solution due to the Asset Management module and the ability to integrate to Active Directory. When we work with the product demo we enjoyed the way TOPdesk does its work flow. Just about any field in the system is customizable. I have found their knowledge base of the product to be well written and up-to-date.
TOPdesk is very flexible and scalable. Every department in you organization can you the software. Perhaps some persons need some training, but that can be provided by TOPdesk ot some keyusers.
The self-service portal has allowed us to shift left massively. Students can find the solutions themselves very often.
It has allowed easier collaborative working between teams.
We are more efficient as we do not have to ask the student to repeat their question and we can record everything necessary in the incident. This provides an improved student experience as well as improved staff efficiency.
