ConnectWise Automate Reviews

ConnectWise Automate is ideal for an MSP because it includes patch management. It has monitoring, maintenance, and excellent scripting.

It's a very good IT tool for a company that provides IT services.  It is very helpful for technicians to work with the tool to see all of the customers in one place and then manage all of the computers in one place.

They are good. One of the main reasons I switched to ConnectWise was because they are extremely responsive in comparison to other products on the market, and I felt very comfortable working with them.

There is always room for improvement.

I haven't had any problems, and they're doing a great job, in my opinion.

They're doing quite well. In most cases, when we discover an issue, we report it to their engineers, who then schedule a fix. Normally, when we request something, I can see it happening within three to four months. 

This is a raw system. Of course, it has some flaws that could be improved. But, it's something that we will have to work with to get to the point where we need this, we request it and they do their best to make it happen.  

There is a lot of integration with other applications through Automate, and I believe they are working with all of the industry leaders to get the integration going. I am very pleased to be working with them.

We have been partnered with ConnectWise Automate for approximately a year and a half to two years.

It is cloud-based. I'm using the cloud-based version, it's always the most recent.

I was impressed with the stability of ConnectWise Automate. It's a stable solution.

ConnectWise Automate is a scalable solution.

Technical support is good. I would rate them a four out of five.

We are using ConnectWise Automate, ConnectWise Control, Manage, and Command. ConnectWise Fortify is new and is something that we are going to try.

The initial setup is complex.  

It is complicated in terms of deployment time as well as configuration. 

When I switched, it took me about five months to fully migrate and configure it.

Initially, it is a complex process.

It's a raw platform in the sense that you have to configure it based on your needs once you get it.

That's what it took for me, plus the learning curve for the technicians. I also had about 1,800 computers to migrate, which is probably why it took so long.

We dedicated a team of three engineers to fully implementing this.

Because of the system's capabilities, my team is able to significantly reduce the work that they were previously doing. More than 40%, in my opinion. The tasks took us about five or six days to complete. We can actually run it through Automate in three or four hours.

I believe Automate is available for around $2. I'm not sure, but if an IT company wants to purchase Automate, they will need to negotiate with the sales team.

I was considering purchasing CrowdStrike Falcon and SentinelOne to see how they work. I simply did not have the opportunity to learn more about it. But I would like to get to know SentinelOne better. I am working with ConnectWise, and I am considering purchasing their cyber security products, possibly the EDR and SIM as well.

I am a managed service provider. We are partners.

People like me need to know what they want. However, in comparison to other products on the market, ConnectWise was, in my opinion, the most responsive in what they do.

When compared with other products, available, I would rate ConnectWise Automate a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to patch our servers and desktops. 

The most value we get from this solution is that everything is on a patch cycle, so all my team has to do is go through patches, whereas previously, they were doing all the patches manually. It saves us a ton of time that we used to spend every week making sure everything was patched.

The fixed client for Automate is slow. The web client is not very intuitive. It could use some updating and some thought around the UX. Also, with the scripting, I would like to see something where it could have third-party scripts already pre-built, and all you have to do is say, "Hey, I need this," and go load it. It's not as automated as I'd like it to be.

This solution is pretty stable. Sometimes it rebooted servers when I didn't want it to, but I think that had more to do with the setup than anything else.

It's pretty scalable. Primarily, two people on my team use this solution. The maintenance and everything is handled in the cloud, so we don't have to touch anything. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would give their tech support a five. 

Neutral

This solution was not straightforward to set up. One of my guys took care of it pretty well, but we had issues for a while that we had to go in and tinker with.

I pay $85 a month per user for a ConnectWise package that contains multiple solutions. 

I would say if you had someone who was at least partially dedicated to this product, who could learn the scripting language really well and was good at building packages, that would be great. I almost would rather have a different tool, but I'm not sure which one yet.

I would rate this solution as a five out of ten. It does its job. 

We are a vendor that provides ConnectWise, which is pretty complicated. The end users do not know how to operate it and so they actually hire us to come in and manage admin and build stuff for it.

Most people are just using it for remote and basic monitoring and then that's why they hire us to come in and actually make it do what it's supposed to do, which is fully monitor and do automation. It's an automation foundation.

The UI is not too bad; it's more policy-driven stuff as opposed to individual stuff.

The database is great. It's a nicely ordered database.

Technical support is helpful.

The solution is stable.

I love the power shell cut and paste - that's amazing.

The solution needs to improve Event ID monitoring big time. They're behind the game on the other RMMs, and we support multiple RMMs. For instance Kayesa - the way they're doing event ID monitoring is local. ConnectWise has to ingest all of the event IDs and that equals large database growth and therefore nobody monitors those event IDs. That's a hurdle.

Scheduling of automation could be improved and made more simple. 

Obviously, performance across the board for everybody needs to be better. 

There are aspects of monitoring that are problematic.

Adding stuff that automates, and offering a better best practice out-of-the-box would be better.

The ability to control where the temporary folder is for automation and not having it in system 32 would be very useful.  

Maybe support for Python would be good, although that's not really even needed. The SQL's good already.

The solution could be better with not having to install a client locally, to be able to do the advanced stuff. If it was a totally web-based solution for instance. An engineer wanting to make changes and next-level automation stuff has to install a client locally right now. Removing that requirement and going full web, would be a good play.

We've worked with the solution for many years.

The solution is pretty stable. there are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution has got the same limitations as any other RMM - you're going to hit problems at around 6,000 to 10,000 endpoints, however, that's pretty much standard. At that point, even SAS can scale a little better. I don't think there are any issues with the scalability before that point. At that point, you will need to start fine-tuning what you're actually doing as every little thing hurts at 10,000 endpoints. Scalability is fine compared to all the other RMM solutions.

Technical support is really good. They are helpful and responsive. 

Usually, pro services will leave customers at a point where they're able to remote and where they've got some basic monitoring. It's really difficult from there for the customer. They actually would have to hire someone in-house to maintain this solution. Typically, that's why clients hire us.

When they hire someone, they get the benefit of additional implementation. That said, pro services are pretty good. 

What we've seen is the MSPs don't have time to keep adding to it. When we see it, it's not bad, however, they're not seeing what drives are dying and they usually have got a bunch of stuff incorrectly set up, and they think it's working and it's not patching. Patching compliance is pretty low out of the box.

If knowledgeable ITs are setting it up, then it's pretty straightforward. The complexities average a five out of five. 

Most everybody we've seen uses ConnectWise pro services to get it going and then from that point, they're at least at a point where it's operational. That said, in terms of adding stuff to it, they just don't do it.

We have supported customers with all versions for multiple years.

We consult, there's no partnership. 

I would advise potential new users to hold off for now, as we don't know what's going to happen with the purchase of Continuum. ConnectWise bought Continuum, which is a totally different RMM and we know that the RMMs are being merged; Automate is being absorbed by Continuum. We don't know to what degree and we don't know what that product afterward is going to look like. There's a lot of change right now.

The key thing, and obviously for even us and all the other MSPs, is we don't know what it's going to end up looking like. Is it going to be more Continuum? Is it going to be more ConnectWise?

Continuum is a great product for MSPs that are smaller MSPs that don't have the time to do anything. There's no custom stuff, which is great due to the fact that it works.

ConnectWise is the complete opposite of that. It's very custom. You could do anything you want with it, however, it also requires skill and labor.

The question is where does this new merged product sit? If I have an MSP that's asking which arm and platform to go with, it might be an amazing product. It's probably going to end up being an amazing product, however, we don't know where it's at currently - especially for an on-prem customer. It's a big investment to not know what's about to happen.

I'd rate the solution at a solid seven out of ten. In my book, it's the top two compared to the other RMMs out there. It's a double-edged sword, however, with the customization you can do. That can work for you or against you. 

We primarily use the solution to manage our clients. We use the solution to get into their computers for remote support and tasks of that nature.

The reporting on the product is great.

Remote fixes are very useful. There are some of the automated fixes and patches, which is stuff that we really don't have to worry about too much anymore.

The stability is okay.

The initial setup is easy and the deployment is quick. 

The solution can definitely scale. 

The product needs to offer more integration with other tools. 

Their support needs to be better. 

I've been using the solution for about two years. It's been a while. 

The stability is mostly pretty good. There are no bugs and it doesn't crash or freeze. However, their email connector is kind of spotty sometimes.

The solution is scalable. There shouldn't be an issue with expanding if a company needs to do so. 

We have 50 people on the solution right now, which is basically everybody, and we wouldn't have an issue going up and having more users. I'd say, at this time, the solution is being extensively used. 

The technical support on offer could be better. It's just the process that's not so good right now. For example, there are no phone calls. It's all on email. If I were to rate their level of service, I'd give them a six out of ten.

We have used different solutions in the past. I'm not a hundred percent sure why we ultimately switched to this product. It was a decision that was above my pay grade.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have any issues with it.

We kind of did the deployment over time, however, it didn't take long to deploy. We had it up and going relatively quickly. It took maybe a few hours in total. While it took a few days to compile a few details, we'd do an hour here or an hour there with a consultant over that time to get it done. 

There's no real downtime in terms of updates and maintenance. We get an alert that there's an update and we do it in production so that we have no downtime. 

During the implementation process, we used a consultant from ConnectWise. It was part of their setup offering. Overall, the experience with them was very positive. 

While it's my understanding that we pay for the solution on a monthly basis, I cannot say what the exact costs are. 

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We've got probably the most recent version. We update it every time we are able to.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten, mostly due to the fact that it is very scalable. 

We primarily use the product for incident handling in our networking and security operations center.

The product has been very stable so far. 

Technical support was helpful.

The scalability on offer could be improved.

While it's a good tool, in the environment that I was using it there is a lot of customization required. If there's a bad implementation and excessive customization, you can run into issues. However, I have seen this with other tools as well. It's not unique to Connectwise. 

Maybe they could improve the capability to be multi-tenant. Mainly, on the part related to the process, the BPM part inside ConnectWise, we'd like to figure out how we can write the process inside in a way that can be correlated both inside the environment and outside of it.

I've been using the solution for nine months at this point. It's been less than a year. I haven't used it that long and I don't use it too regularly. 

The stability has been good so far. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is reliable. 

I have found the solution to be not very scalable. They could work on this aspect a bit. 

We have about 100 users using the product in our company right now. 

I'm no longer at the company that still works with this solution. I can't speak to if they will increase usage, however, it's my understanding that they may be moving to a different product altogether. 

I have had experience dealing with technical support. In the past, when I needed something, they were very helpful and responded quickly. They provided me with the information and documentation I needed. I was very happy with how they handled me as a client and am quite satisfied with the level of support we get. 

I have experience with other products such as Zabbix and Service Desk Manager.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I can't speak to how easy or difficult the process is, or how long it took our company to set it up and deploy it. 

We only had one person set it up and they also maintain it. This is a risk I was hoping to avoid, however. If you only have one person in the company watching it, you run the risk of everyone not knowing what to do if they are off or leave and something needs to be addressed. 

You do have to pay for a license. If there are specific features you need, that may come at an extra cost. Support, however, is not an extra charge. 

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

It is a monitoring and automation platform. So, you handle alerts, and then you automate the fixes.

We are using its latest version. It is cloud-based.

It is very scalable. 

Patching and reporting need improvements, especially reporting. The reporting engine is quite outdated, so you end up having to use your own dashboard.

It should have an Azure functionality because, at the minute, there is no Azure functionality we can automate. It is missing the Azure functionality out of everything. Other than that, it's great.

It is very scalable. I would rate it quite highly there. 

We are an MSP and distributor. We have over 500 customers.

Their premium support is great. If you don't have premium support, you can sometimes have a lot of difficulties with getting the correct point across.

Its initial setup is complex.

I'd probably rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of ROI.

I would recommend it. I would advise ensuring that you have a team behind it that can run it internally as well, and you're not just relying on ConnectWise themselves.

I'd rate it a nine out of 10. 

We use ConnectWise Automate to monitor and maintain customer systems. It allows us to administrate remote access chains. So basically we use it for administration, remote access, assistance, and help desk services. We currently have about 10 staff using it on our side. They're support specialists ranging from tier one to tier three.

ConnectWise Automate made it easier to keep in contact with customers while working remotely.

ConnectWise Automate's interface is pretty easy to use. It's pretty intuitive to get around and navigate it. It does what I need, which is usually connecting to the client and customers systems. I can just help them from home or from work.

There could be better linkages between ConnectWise Automate and Manage from a ticketing perspective. Automate and Manage each has its own ticketing system. We use the one in Manage, but it'd be nice if they were linked directly to the one in Automate.

We've been using ConnectWise for a couple of years now.

So far, Automate seems pretty stable. I don't think we've had any big issues with having to reboot it that often. Once in a while needs a reboot, but It's too frequently as far as I can tell. Not too terribly much.

I'm still unsure about ConnectWise's scalability. Automate seems like it can scale, but we don't have the biggest customer base in the world, so it is hard for me to say.

Since I didn't implement it, I only have advice on usage. So far, it's doing what we need it to do. But as is the case with most of these types of products, eventually we're going to need to go to a remote solution that's not third-party.

I would rate ConnectWise Automate a seven out of 10. It's pretty average for what we're using it to do.

Automate also pushes out patching and different things to different products that we have. We also use it to desktop manage, et cetera.

Our third-party provider uses ConnectWise as their ticketing system.

It's definitely improved the help-desk servicing, et cetera. 

The solution is very stable.

I don't know whether it's a third-party provider, however, the reporting, et cetera, is not what I would expect. They offer their reporting outside that system. I would say that either it's not turned on or not configured. I don't actually have the licensing for that product. That's my MSP, however, in terms of what I'm able to see and what I could see, I would say that it really needs to improve on it. They need better visibility and reporting and alerts and different things.

They basically need reporting and transparent overviews and management of analysis tools and different things like history graphing. They could use some automated alerts particularly when we're talking about an MSP that might shoot over. It would be good if they could say "Hey, we've had a cluster of incidents," that would trigger our automatic updates. That would be really good.

We've been using the solution, likely for less than a year. 

The solution is very stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution seems to be scalable. We've continued to use it as we grow and it's been fine for us so far.

Just the IT team uses the solution. There are five internal users and about seven external users that log onto that system and use it. Automate pushes out and connects up to all our devices, et cetera, and pushes out updates. However, in terms of people that actually sign on to the program, it's just the IT team.

While I'm sure that they offer technical support, I have no direct experience dealing with them and therefore I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

The product seems to be pretty straightforward to implement. 

We do have one license, however, mostly we use the web link that they've given us. I would say that it was a fairly quick install for them to get that up and running. 

The deployment process was pretty quick. It was likely less than a month.

We don't pay for that license, et cetera, due to the fact that we use an MSP.

As we use a cloud deployment, we are always using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution at a five out of ten. It's just a bit basic.

I wouldn't recommend the solution to others at this time. 

Scripting and patch management are really important for us. Patch Manager is something that we use a lot, and we would love to have it continually improved. It is one of the most useful features for us for controlling patches and other things for different clients.

We use monitors to keep track of our machines. We use a pretty good portion of information from Automate.

In Patch Manager, there should be more reportability so that it is easier to see the updates that I have applied to a machine and when the next update will happen. A lot of times, it seems like all the information is kind of thrown all over the place, and you can't really see it all at the same time. There should be a simplified patch data view that allows us to quickly confirm that our various clients are getting patched as they should be.

We would love to get feature updates and cumulative updates fixed. I know they aren't really supposed to be pushed with Patch Manager. We've got recommendations from ConnectWise to use the scripted feature update installs, scripted KB updates, etc. Having these in Patch Manager itself would be great.

The wait time for a support ticket to be addressed needs to be reduced. They take a couple of days to get back. It is a little frustrating when we have to wait for a couple of days. A lot of times, the issue is critical for us. If we're reaching out to their support team and submitting a ticket, it is because we need it handled quickly. 

I have been using this solution for one and a half years.

Its stability is quite good from my experience. Most of the time, if there is an issue, it is because of something that caused it. We don't seem to experience random issues very often. We are able to deal with and handle most of the stuff that we encounter.

Now that we have it in place, it is quite easy for us to scale. If we onboard a new client, we can quickly put them in there with little to no effort. It is very scalable for us.

Their tech support is hit or miss from my experience. There are two support lines. You have the immediate chat where you can just do a live chat with an agent, and then there is also the ticket submittal kind of process. From my experience, rather than actually providing specific solutions, the people in the instant chat end up saying, "Go to this link." They pretty much just send us to various ConnectWise documentation pages rather than actually providing a solution and helping us dive into the issue. Their chat is like, "Well, this documentation page is in reference to what you're referring to. So, take a look at this."

One of the things that I would ask them to improve is the wait time. If we're in the instant chat system, a lot of times what happens is that we'll get to a point where the person on the instant chat says that he or she is going to escalate this up into a ticket, and then they'll have somebody reach back. In our experience, when that happens, it means that we're not going to hear back for a couple of days. A lot of times, the issue is critical for us. If we're reaching out to ConnectWise's support team and submitting a ticket, it is because we need it handled quickly. So, a lot of times, it is a little frustrating when we have to wait for a couple of days before we even hear back.

I do know that they used Kaseya previously, but I wasn't here at that time. I am not sure about the specifics of differences, but I do know that we are happier now after switching from Kaseya. I know they had difficulties with Kaseya, but I don't know the full extent of it.

I was not a part of the initial setup. It was somebody who used to work for us, but I do remember overhearing about it. It definitely was a long setup process. It required some adjustments, etc.  

From what I've overheard, it is pretty comparable to other solutions in terms of price.

It is as powerful as you use it to be. If someone is just going to use it for remote access and things like that, they will be wasting a lot of money. It is as good as you make it. My recommendation would be that if you're not going to use all of the features, you can use another solution. For example, ConnectWise Automate implements ScreenConnect, which is another one of their products that provides just the remote access screen connection to the machines. For some of our clients who don't really need full monitoring, we just have a screen connection available.

I would rate ConnectWise Automate an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for managing systems, being able to see them online and offline. I use the solution as a shortcut to ConnectWise Control, because the way our permissions are set up in our actual ConnectWise Control portal, our internal systems can't be reached. I need to use Automate in order to control my system at the office if I need to do something inside the company LAN. I'm the VoIP network engineer at InfiNet Solutions.

The automated scripts feature means that we can set up for a lot of different things and they have reduced tech input drastically, in the sense that a task only needs to be done once instead of 100 times.

I have issues with the menu, a lot of the time it doesn't load properly on initial login and I have to refresh and reload everything before I can actually search through agents. It can just sit there and spin on you at the initial login. I know we get some false positives at times, where things report offline and then when we connect to them with control they're connectable. They're definitely online, the agent just fails to report sometimes. I don't know the specifics of why it does that.

I've been using this solution for almost four years. 

The stability is okay. There's random stuff that we find all the time, just like with any software. You can always find something if you look hard enough. The main issues that we've had as far as bugs or glitches go are related to other things, like when an AWS stack went down and it knocked out our sign-on server, cutting access for four hours until we were able to actually manipulate some code in their database to stop accessing that sign-on server and allow us to use the local log-ins we used to use. That's more connected to the ConnectWise as a whole, not Automate.

The solution is scalable to any size you want to scale it to. We currently have 15 techs using it. These are level one, two and three service technicians.

I can only comment as a user where it's just a matter of logging in because everything has been created on the administration backside. There's not really much setup at all that I go through as an end user.

I would recommend exploring the features and the pricing model before purchase. It seems like a few years ago our pricing model was a little better than it is currently. I know there are solutions coming on the market with some pretty aggressive pricing models where you're paying on a per tech license rather than a per agent license. Automate is a per deployed agent rather than per tech so if we're 15 techs working on 3000 computers, it's a lot better to pay the tech license than the agent license.

I would rate this solution a six out of 10.