http://www.mspcomparison.com/ http://www.mspcomparison.com/images/stories/web_links.jpg http://www.mspcomparison.com/ 37-220 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/37-tigerpaw-crm.html As a company our experience of Tigerpaw software has been abysmal. There were problems from the beginning. The biggest problem is the software itself; at 700mb for the client, it is bloated. It runs very slowly, and appears clunky most of the time. On all of our machines the software crashed regularly, but the automatic emails to support with the diagnostic information never got responded to without being chased. Secondly the technical support is abysmal. The people on the phone rarely have an answer to anything beyond the most basic "how to" type questions. Escalated queries get forgotten about. Overall, I wouldn't even bother. Their sales staff offer a money-back guarantee, which is verbal and totally worthless. ]]> Sun, 15 Apr 2012 20:29:29 +0100 34-218 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/34-connectwise-msp.html Awful software. We have been using it for about a year now, and it takes more time to create and add time to a ticket than it does to actually work the ticket. It's called a cache, but apparently the CW developers are unaware of why a bloated quasi-browser front end is a bad idea. I'm sure there is some reporting on the back end that is useful for management, but as a tech that has to use it dozens of times a day - I hate it. I've honestly thought about writing my own front end. Every single step requires far too much complexity. Even entering time is cumbersome. I'm sure all the complexity adds up to some nice back office reporting and tracking - but from one of the grunts who has to use it all day, I can say look somewhere else. ]]> Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:45:12 +0000 34-213 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/34-connectwise-msp.html Our company has been using ConnectWise for almost two years and I cannot wait to move to another platform. Their support has been horribly slow, our cloud-hosted solution has been slow, and our experience in general has been terrible. They roll out updated with no apparent testing, which has taken down our company on invoicing days multiple times. You can't call for support without getting transferred to someones mailbox, which leaves you with chat or email as your only options. It seems like they couldn't care less about our business, as long as theirs keeps growing. I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and attribute these issues to growing pains, but it just doesn't appear to be the case. There are so many intuitive reports that are not available. For example, if i want to know how much of product X have we sold in a certain date range, it isn't possible. Downstream IT and reselling CW to clients are both complete nightmares, and CW seems to just throw their hands up at both. The sales module, inventory/purchasing module, marketing capabilities, configurations, integrations with RMMs, etc. are all so cumbersome and complex that they are nearly unusable. In an nutshell, CW does a lot of things okay, but does none of them well. It is very difficult to find someone at CW who actually cares about what you are going through or has any sort of pride in the service they are providing. I can't wait to get away from CW! ]]> Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:30:49 +0000 126-173 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/126-salesforce-professional-services-automation-psa-by-financialforce.html We can generate our invoices from salesforce in just one click!! The analytics are awesome, uses data already in CRM - real time. The best online accounting software! ]]> Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:49:03 +0100 31-171 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/31-autotask-pro.html Autotask is one of those really great products, that just works. I wrote a blog post about it a few months ago, which says it all. http://www.christimm.com/?p=73 ]]> Wed, 20 Jul 2011 08:39:55 +0100 30-169 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/30-autotask-go.html As someone that has had an Autotask session open on my desktop for the past 8 years you can be sure I'm both a fan and a critic. Autotask is the ultimate hosted IT service management platform. Since this review is for Autotask Go! I will assume that you are a smaller shop (1-3 person) that is tired of keeping customer asset, time entries and issue resolution documentation (knowledgebase material) in disparate systems or on yellow notepads to one day get entered into a spread sheet or billing system. You are losing billable time, you can’t grow your business that way and frankly, you customers deserver a more responsible method of data management. For the small price per month (1/3 of a cell phone), you can centralize all your data and billing and even utilize workflow to ensure nothing fall through the crack. You will never look back! ]]> Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:24:45 +0100 31-137 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/31-autotask-pro.html Our 3 person MSP switched from spreadsheets, sticky notes, and e-mails to Autotask two years ago. Prior to the switch we were dropping client requests, double and triple entering information, not communicating effectively, and flat out leaving money on the table. The other reviewers have covered much of what I was going to say. Suffice it to say that we were going down in flames and needed help, badly. After evaluating TigerPaw, ConnectWise, CommitCRM, and Autotask, we chose Autotask Pro. We went Pro right away even though Go! was for three users as we saw the advantages of the extra users. Two months later we added our 4th employee and were even happier to have Pro. My admin has told me time and time again she will leave if we ever get rid of Autotask. She loves the ability to easily put tickets in, check ticket history, and quickly invoice clients and transfer to QuickBooks. My techs like it because of how easy they can enter tickets, track time, look up resolutions in the Knowledge Base, and keep their service calls synced with their Exchange e-mail. The ability to use any web browser or mobile phone to work tickets is also a hit. I love it because Autotask is cheap and makes us money. I can quote, manage a project, and see everything that's going on in my business from one program. The reports are critical to understanding where we are compared to where we need to be. I also like the fact that AT runs fine on very slow connections; my competitors have to pay for employee Internet upgrades so they can work for home - not me! Since we have implemented Autotask our client communication has gotten much better, ticket resolution is faster and more accurate, and client satisfaction is way up. The seamless and beautiful integration with our Level Platforms RMM has been an important part of this increased efficiency. We actually converted two break/fix clients to Managed Services Clients when we rolled out the ticketing as they believed we were now "big time IT players." As one reviewer said the sales part could be better. That is the only negative I can say about Autotask Pro. The seamless integration with QuoteWerks has resolved any issues we had there. In short: Autotask Pro is awesome!!!! Every quarter there are new features rolled out, the service has never one down, and I don't have a server to patch, backup, support, and upgrade. Autotask is one bill that no one at VanGuard quibbles about. ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 20:53:24 +0100 31-53 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/31-autotask-pro.html We switches from a manual system about 12 months ago and haven't turned back. Even for a small house, our billing is nearly double some months due to us capturing all the billable time. As with any system of this size, there are some downsides, but we haven't found anything that we haven't been able to work around at the moment. We did try the sales module, but it wasn't great 6 months ago. They did purchase VAR Street but it isn't released in Australia as yet, so we still use a manual Excel based system and hoping this works. A fast internet connection is a must with this product as it is hosted. If you are in a poor Internet area, you will have a slow experience (when we use it on 3G wireless Internet dongles it is a much slower experience). ]]> Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:07:17 +0100 34-27 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/34-connectwise-msp.html Kinda huge, kinda slow, but lots of value for the money. CW has really helped us as far as sales tracking and integrating things a little more cleanly. We already had a product that did what CW does for support, asset management, and contact management, but we just shifted the $$$'s we were paying a developer over to ConnecWise and got so much more in return. It's funny, we went to the CW conference in 2006 and Arnie polled the audience for how many people use what modules. After ticketing and contacts, man, next to no one was using any of the other things (and I still don't use the project management, it is just to much trouble). But, the CRM and Sales tools are where the rubber meets the road folks. There may be better PSA tools that handle ticketing, or assets, or crm, but none do all the tricks as well as ConnectWise. As a bonus, CW has a prety active community that had broad knowledge of the product and how their businesses use it. ]]> Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:44:12 +0100 37-26 http://www.mspcomparison.com/component/content/article/917-psa/37-tigerpaw-crm.html We have been using Tigerpaw since 2002. It is hands down the best CRM/PSA software on the market for Managed Services Providers. Tigerpaw has many excellent features: First and foremost it is an excellent architecture because it Flexible enough to be customized for nearly any MSP function, Scalable enough to handle growth in your company, Performance is optimized so it runs very quickly, and we have never experienced any problems with Reliability (Accuracy). However, out of all of the architecture attributes, Availability is the perhaps the strongest attribute of Tigerpaw. In 8 years of use, we have NEVER had a significant support issue. In fact, 99% of the calls we make to tech support are training questions when we ask "how to?” Secondly, Tigerpaw is simply powerful. With its Master Tables and Custom Fields and Folders, a novice user can easily customize Tigerpaw to achieve nearly any conceivable task. We absolutely love the ability to control the product and customize it to our needs. Thirdly, Tigerpaw has a wide variety of "connectors" and interfaces including a 2 way interface with Kaseya and at least one other MSP platform. Other connectors include an email connector, a manual and automatic QuickBooks interface and other accounting interfaces, and an Exchange connector. The Kaseya interface is very effective and significantly improves our ability to provide managed services to our clients. Finally, Tigerpaw is the BEST CRM product on the market because of the team that supports it. The entire Tigerpaw team from sales, to service, to development to executive leadership are all easily accessible and are all committed to providing their customers with a world class product and a world class service. Incredibly enough, they still maintain their own in-house technical support team, usually with less than a 15 minute wait time when you call in. Management is involved in a Client Advisory Group that routinely communicates with everyday users and incorporates their feedback into the product. We recommend Tigerpaw CRM+ over any other PSA/CRM software on the market! ]]> Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:23:32 +0100