ConnectWise Automate Reviews

They have conflicting scheduling paradigms. When scheduling patching for clients, the 1st Friday is interpreted as the very first Friday of the month, even if this is the 1st of the month. For scripting, the 1st Friday of the month is interpreted as the 1st Friday of the 1st FULL WEEK of the month. This makes no sense to have two different interpretations, and makes it unreliable to schedule recurring scripts to fall when recurring maintenance does. The scripts need to be done manually because of this.

There is no way to dictate reboot orders for patch policies. This tied directly in with my first point. We have some clients that require reboot orders. This is not possible without having different patch policies for each server and specifying a time this way. But, there aren't small enough increments of time to make this reliable, plus patching duration might vary. Excluding reboots with patching and scheduling reboot scripts fixes this. However, this can't be done once on a recurring schedule due to the different scheduling paradigms already discussed. We have to schedule these manually each month.

Due to its many features, it seems some areas are a bit difficult to configure.

Performance

Integration

You can track all your clients information and every single job you do for them. You can do quotes, send them, add providers to compare prices, manage the calendar of the employees, assign tickets to the correct person, there is nothing you can't do with this tool.

Inside all the greatness, there are some works around that you have to do for specific duties that could be automated.

Make sure you keep notes on each client profile, you can use the private note section, it is secure and it works as a reminder of everything you need to do about that specific client, only you and your employees will see those.

The local client is very robust, but it can be a resource hog.

The web client is not as full-featured as the local client but runs much faster.

Updates on the local client are installed automatically when you launch the application, but they can take some time to run. Since there is no option for a window to install them, this can cause delays when launching the software for the first time after a period of inactivity.

Patch management is always a little finicky. Gets better every time.

If you decide to hitch your MSP to ConnectWise Automate, make sure you have a clear plan of what you want to accomplish and please, save your self a ton of hassle and use ConnectWise consulting to get things going initially.

Conflicting answers from support on more complicated items.

Not sure if this applies, but you need to have someone at your MSP whose job is the care and feeding of Automate, as well as that script and automation creation. Not really a complaint, more along the lines of "you are buying a business automation platform, you need to dedicate people to get the most out of it."

It can be painfully slow.

It's quite complex and needs a lot of training.

New UI is built to be pretty, but it's bloated, slow, and lacks the information that used to live on the main screen. You now have to dig to get information that was once easily at hand...

Too Noisy - it alerts on EVERYTHING, and it's very difficult to tone it down without missing things that are important. This puts a drain on staff time... We can't respond to every ticket, and then important details get lost in the noise...

No Mac/Linux client - my admins need access to a Windows PC to function...

Honestly, there is not much I would change.

As far as I am concerned; it is the best by far.

Might be a little expensive for small MSP's...But worth the investment.

Wish is was cheaper. This is a competitive market and they should lower the price to be more competitive.

The GUI needs to be cleaned up and more streamlined. Currently it's a mess.

Tech support could be better.

We have some issues with the managed devices actually being online but no connection through the application. Have to restart the service on the machine.

A little slow for the application to load on startup.

Resource heavy.

The GUI interface is archaic.

Scripting engines could use work to be more PowerShell native.

Ability to work in VDI environments.

It is a little slow some times.

It can be difficult to set-up and maintain.

The interface is not very intuitive for new users.

Having to pay for licensing in advance. If you need additional licenses you need to plan ahead to have them available.

Some ConnectWise Automate options such as third-party patching could offer patching for more software.

ConnectWise Automate can be very complex so it can take time to understand all it can do. The more time you invest in ConnectWise Automate the easier and more powerful it becomes.

Its interfaces have a wide variety of looks and feels, and it might be nicer if it were more cohesive.

Documentation of usage and features can be hard to locate at times.

A little more memory stability would be nice.

The cost of the product is way too high.

A better GUI and wizard would help streamline the process.

The auto-install process for other applications could be made a lot better.

The biggest issue for Automate is their support. They seem to be completely overwhelmed. Chat support for simple questions can be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes in the queue. Then when you are connected they are doing little more than creating a ticket that will take days to hear back from them.

Patching. The documentation and advice from our implementation person do not match reality. The process of denying a patch is documented, but doesn't work. We were unable to block certain patches from being distributed until we spoke to a specialist about it. He couldn't explain the mis-matched documentation.

Speed. Using the Automate client is painfully slow. Very sluggish and non-responsive at times.

That's a tough one! Great program, great features already.

Possibly allowing the chat box to remain on screen. It closes when you connect to a program or open windows on the screen.

Allow more than 1 username/ password to be stored for the auto access. Notes made on different machines seem to disappear if there is an upgrade. I lost some notes I had made on sites I support using this feature.

The upgrade GUI is a little hard to use out of the box

It disconnects randomly sometimes

Some commands like rebooting can be a little slow

Because Automate is so configurable it also requires the most time put into it of all RMM products we have used. It requires a dedicated employee to just managing the product and the services provided by it. Without that dedicated resource, many alerts will be missed (due to configuration issues).

Support is not very good. This is a larger scale Connectwise issue.

The product is very resource intensive if you host locally. Upgrades are usually pretty buggy and add the need for extra resources.

We found VMware and Dell Open Manage monitoring to be very weak compared to other RMM products.

Sometimes computers show as offline when they are really online.

We find that sometimes a computer will show in the program multiple times.

It often will not update the current username so makes it harder to find computers sometimes.

Patch Manager could use improvement. At times, it will crash in the middle of patching, or switching between configurations. Setting the patch priorities seems a little convoluted.

The ability to copy over a file using the silent File Explorer would be nice. Rather than having to interrupt the user to replace a file or execute a download.

I would like to see more details in script logs. I want to see why a script failed, what step it was executing.

Patch Management can be un-reliable at times

Easier UI

Better integration with AntiVirus providers

Steep learning curve, program can be very intimidating when initially configuring and deploying.

Software version upgrades can become a bit clunky and "undo" some progress. Recent version upgrade revamped entire Windows patching system and required setup from scratch.

Limitations on hardware monitoring, especially for hypervisors with VMWare.

Patch Management

Ease of implementation

Script library updated