ConnectWise may require a significant investment... but you can't run your MSP without it...
November 20, 2018
ConnectWise may require a significant investment... but you can't run your MSP without it...
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ConnectWise Manage
ConnectWise Manage is the backbone of our IT managed service provider. We use it for ticketing, invoicing, procurement, and sales. While there is no way we could run the company without it, the product is certainly the 800lb gorilla that we have to learned to live with. Once you sign up for ConnectWise, they will try to sell you their whole suite of products, and before you know it you'll be spending more with them than you're taking home...
- Ticketing - rock solid, keeps good history, and transitions to invoicing smoothly in most cases.
- Integrations - Integrates to more IT products than any other PSA platform on the market.
- Expense Management - allows us to reimburse employees for expenses quickly and accurately.
- Sales - even with plug-ins to tools like ConnectWise Sell or QuoteWerks, the product lacks any sort of prospecting integration. It's VERY hard to run a sales team in this tool.
- Dashboards - this should be a permission to play product by now, but third party products are required for business analytics.
- Commissions - you can't pay your people using the CW commissions functions.
- Calendar - as a business owner, the product doesn't let you see your life in one place. It separates Sales Opportunities/Activities from Tickets and Project tickets to a point that you operate in little Silo's and can't see your life in one place.
- Customer interaction - even though we have closed loop ticketing (tickets update clients with emails when we work on them) the client communication stinks for things like Projects. An integration with Trello or something would go a long way - but why should I need that when the product is supposed to handle customer facing projects?
- The Client Portal is hideous... (they are working on a new one).
- Better visibility into client lifetime value and margins
- Better time tracking and higher accuracy on invoicing
- Historical information on client relationship that we never had before it...
- ConnectWise Automate (formerly LabTech)
I was honestly coerced into it by my peer group at the time... but it was the right decision. We transformed from a break/fix to a Managed Services business and probably couldn't have made that transition without ConnectWise or some other tool like it. It allowed us access to tools and community knowledge that we just didn't have before....