ConnectWise Automate Reviews

This product has a uniquely limitless capacity for growing the operational process of managing computer systems. Great out of the box monitors and functionality. Unparalleled remote control. Large user community and expansive plugin ecosystem.

QA is is lacking on new releases. Support takes a long time, with the exception of down situations. Slow release cycles. Lots of legacy functionality that is deprecated litters the product. Exceptionally slow at times.

It is a very powerful tool to manage our clients machines. It can run custom scripts and do a lot of proactive maintenance.

It is very fast when remote controlling other computers

The scripting engine is very powerful

It pulls a huge amount of data

It is very customizable

It can be a little complex for new users

The integration with Connectwise: Manage can cause some issues with ticket entries

Customizing it for your needs can be time consuming

I

It was included in the costs of outsourced IT

It hardly would connect and allow me to work with systems when it was most ciritical

Once setup it does what it does well.
Very few issue after setup and config.
Gives a wealth of information on devices managed.

Can be a burden to setup and config
Takes a good amount of training to really use it well
Being good a scripting is a must

It does a lot of things and helps us keep tabs on hundreds of clients. Remote access, patch management, remote diagnostics, integration with ConnectWise PSA and a host of other third party products.

Setup time can be cumbersome and some of the advanced features you really need to work with a lot in order to become a master at it.

Screens are configurable to fit business needs. Automation inside for regular processes is stellar. Well designed for MSP-style setups, with multiple networks/customers and multiple configs.

Database needs careful manicuring to make sure it doesn't get filled with garbage. Quoting tools need improvement. Built for IT people yes, built for sales people no.

LT has big amount of great functionalities right out of the box. Lots of custom alerting and monitoring sets. It will allow you to completely automate patches and updates from Microsoft. A great built-in remote support tool with screen connect.

normally to make the complete setup takes a while due all the custom options of alerting and patching but I think is normally in this kind of tools

This software is robust. Management of assets within this software seems endless. Company locations can be organized as groups ("locations") and further broken down into subgroups. Hardware and software on each machine the agent is installed can be closely monitored. Alerts can be configured for just about anything, then delivered in a preferred method of logs or emails. Can also be integrated with Chocolatey to provide IT professionals with the ease of installing and updating software remotely. It can also be configured to handle Windows updates!

Slow to load. I recommend loading this software at the beginning of the day, because you never know when you have to immediately ScreenConnect to a machine and resolve an issue. There is also a huge learning curve. My company contracted someone to come out and train us and help us configure it.

We love you can monitor and do many task in remote computers. I love you can run scripts, commands on CMD, Regedit and Explorer.

Is quite slow, and because it have many features you never finish of understand it and explore it

Let’s me remote in and run scripts easily enough.

Scripts can be hit or miss. There’s a lot of “gotchas” when running them

Patch management is way easier than using WSUS.

User interface is not intuitive. Lots of training required. Very little useful documentation. Connectwise support will not help you understand the scripting features at all. The documentation for scripting is litterally 4 pages of what you can see in the user interface. The scripts debug process is horrid. It takes 50x longer to do a script in automate over doing a powershell and bash script to do the same thing. Change requests, and features are not being answered or added in a timely manor. This software is stale.

Clients and Locations are organized in an easy-to-view tree, which allows easy access to a customer's inventory.

Several dataviews are available from a Client or Location to quickly gather information of an environment. For example, a list of 'scheduled tasks' configured on every system can be gathered from all systems to determine why a particular event occurs every Saturday at 4am.

Remote Control of a system can be envoked with standard tools such as VNC or RDP, as well as ConnectWise Control (formerly Screen Connect).

Reports of client environments are just a click away, whether a question regarding system health is of issue, or if all systems have the latest patches and Anti-Virus updated.

Software runs on a MySQL backend, but only on Windows. Keeping MySQL tuned properly for environment size can be chore, whereas DB Engines such as MSSQL are a bit more automated and forgiving. As you bring more agents into the system, it's a good idea to run performance metrics on the MySQL server to see if any adjustments are necessary to maintain best performance of the system.

Telephone Support for the MySQL backend tends to yield different answers from each representative you talk to, and in my experience it was best to use general MySQL tuning documents that are available from Oracle.

Automate allows you to pretty much do anything you need for an RMM. It allows tons of customization and enhancement to increase its power. There are also tons of free and paid integrations that even make it work better. You can also script pretty much anything throughout the product.

In order to get the full power you really need to dedicate the time and resources to add what you want to it. Reporting is abhorant and got even worse with the new reporting engine. There seems to be more increasing bugs in later releases and all new patches focus on bug fixes rather than any enhancements so the functionality of the product really isn't improving.

The quality of first level support has also slipped. They used to be able to address most issues, now it tends to be limited what they can help with.

After using a lot management tooling, I'm now using ConnectWise Automate (former Labtech). Monitoring, manage, implement manually or thru scripts, almost everything is possible with this software.

Setup is easy with their support, but getting completely up and running is a differnt story. Especially in small IT companies where maintaining this software is just very small part of your job it sometimes getting complicated. Adjusting reports can be improved. A simple report where you select the begin and end date in the past is not possible.

What I really like the is the granularity of alerts that can be set up for customers systems. Also being able to group similar systems together makes it easy once you do the initial setup.

Omce the software is great overall The main issue we had is the learning curve curve for employees.

What I like the most about this software is that I can remotely login and help my employees with any issues they are having on their computer from anywhere. This is extremely helpful because I look over 11 stores and I am not always at the location that needs help. I can just remote in and help them!

What I like the least about this product is that I have to have a two factor authentication key emailed to me every time I login to use this product. I understand that this is a necessary security measure, but it slows me down when I'm in a hurry. Other than that minor annoyance, I have not had any issues using this product.

How it is able to connect so well regardless of bandwidth constraints, Able to manage updates, antivirus with ease. Scripting is extremely easy.

The software removal process often will not work as it sometimes requires accessing the PC. Sometimes registering new machines can be a trying experience without admin level access.

I love how easy it is to use the software. After training we have been able to apply blanket policies to each client (ie push all windows 10 updates via one policy) and control server updates differently.

The software can be extremely hard to use at first and requires training from Connectwise in order to understand how it fully works.

Intergration with so many services, multiple service boards, permissions and project management. BILLING and managing agreements? I've yet to find a replacement for the sheer amount of features Automate brings to our business. There is even a web interface that can be dispatched to users!

It can be a little fiddly when it comes to custom applications and processes - there are often changes that completely change the way the software looks and feels.

It is a great way to take a glance at multiple computes/networks/clients (depends on your use case). It has a lot of updates that pack a lot of new features.

It has A LOT to it. It can be overwhelming to learn, but that is part of what makes it so powerful.

Works well for the intended purpose. Customizable for each client. great support and communication from the support staff.

A little slow to load even on fast internet connections. have to reload to get updated info sometimes.

Nothing.

The only thing that works well is a product, Control, which they didn't develop themselves.

Stay away from this product.
You will always need technical support, but the support is very very poor.

Look for products with less functionality, but more stable and with better support.