An MSP's viewpoint on ConnectWise Control: "A foundational pillar of our business model"
May 20, 2019
An MSP's viewpoint on ConnectWise Control: "A foundational pillar of our business model"
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ConnectWise Control (formerly ScreenConnect)
I operate a Managed Services Provider that focuses on serving small businesses. I've used several remote control / screen sharing solutions in the past, but out of all of them, above and beyond I would continue to recommend ConnectWise Control. We signed on when starting our company after trialing a couple different vendor's solutions. With remote control software, there is one thing above all else that it should accomplish: quickly connecting you to the desired workstation, without any worry of technical delays or difficulty. For this we've found Control works flawlessly. When our clients call with an issue, they don't have to sit around or worry about downloading another tool to install. We simply search their computer in the dashboard, and connect without problems, every single time. The peripheral features are extremely helpful as well. The integrated chat is very important for working with users who can't take a call, but are needing assistance. The bi-directional clipboard and file sharing is near seamless. And the dashboard provides plenty of information without having to dive into our RMM.
- The remote session is often very low latency, and there have never been noticeable issues in the connection quality for our staff.
- Installation is a breeze for remote clients. And for those that need a little help, being able to convert on-demand sessions into permanent ones is a major plus
- The file sharing just plain works. I've used several competitors that haven't quite lived up to this so having a seamless solution is quite nice
- Multi-monitor support is perfect!
- I'd like to see the ability to selectively log off the remote machine via a button on the toolbar. Currently it's a setting to always lock on disconnect, or never lock on disconnect, requiring the tech to manually lock the machine if called for at the end of a session. Its a small time save that would add up!
- The chat feature could be expanded to be a lot more useful. Allowing clients to start conversations, and have conversations ping an email address if no one is monitoring the dashboard would be extremely valuable.
- Some clarity on licensing when providing host-passes to guest technicians would be a boon, especially for one-off support sessions with vendors.
- Quite simply our business could not function without a form of remote control software. Control has done an amazing job at filling a core foundation pillar of our business model as an MSP, having some clients in very remote destinations, we can still service them through the use of Control.
- We pay per technician for an unlimited number of endpoints, and this pricing model has served us very admirably. As a smaller startup MSP, the cost of paying per endpoint would only serve to hurt our growth. Being able to pay a flat rate based on staffing is very desirable.
- The whole experience using Control is polished and speedy. I couldn't imaging going back to a slower solution, the value Control brings is palpable in our business model.
- TeamViewer, LogMeIn Central and Solarwinds Take Control (formerly SolarWinds MSP Anywhere)
I used TeamViewer for the longest time as a young IT professional, and had a fair dabbling with LogMeIn and MSP-Anywhere. Each of those solutions has polish in some aspects, but none of them ever had the complete picture. TeamViewer suffered rampant security issues, and has always felt like a tool geared towards personal users and non-tech departments. It was always too in your face for end users. LogMeIn is expensive. No getting around it. And their product has always seemed slow and often very feature-light. For the cost I'd expect to be getting a Ferrari, but when a Civic pulls into the driveway its a little lackluster. MSP-Anywhere always seemed to suffer technical issues. Especially with multi-monitor computers, changing which monitor was displayed could result in total session lock up, which AFAIK still isn't resolved to this day.