ScreenConnect Reviews

We use it for the IT team. We have installed it on all of our staff computers. We have about four hundred and fifty almost five hundred computers that it's installed on.

We use it to do remote support on those computers. We use it to get to servers. If we need to get to servers, we can. We use it to run updates. We can do command-style prompts through ConnectWise Control. I used it just to check system resources or what version of Windows someone's running, it's very quick to sort of check what they're using for the system.

It's crucial to our day-to-day solution because we can very easily remote to a user's computer. For example,  I'm home today. If someone opens up a ticket, I can remote straight to their computer using ConnectWise Control and work on that system with them. They're able to watch me, and we're able to work together. This is as opposed to a remote desktop session where I would take over, and they couldn't even see what I was doing.

iI's just invaluable to us day in and day out for our IT needs.

I like that it's a remote control product. That's kind of the focus. That's the most important piece.

It is stable.

The solution can scale.

The setup process is simple.

Pricing is reasonable.

I've noted an ROI while using the solution. 

It overlaps with some of their other products a little bit right now. I would like to see more overlap, meaning, I would like to be able to see what processes are running on a computer, for example, or what services are running. However, they have another product for that, so they're never going to add that usability to this product even though it would be more useful for us to have it all under one umbrella.

It does not need any other features. It is already as robust as it can be.

I've used the solution for about ten years. I've used it for a while at this point. 

So far, the stability has been a ten out of ten. We've had no problems.

The scalability is good. I would rate it at an eight out of ten. It expands well. 

We'll continue to use this product for the foreseeable future.

I haven't had to use technical support almost at all. It's been three years or more since I've reached out to them for anything.

Positive

We have used LogMeIn before this at a few different companies I work for. In comparison, it was a more expensive option.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. 

I have witnessed an ROI while using this product.

The price is very reasonable. Initially, it was a little bit expensive; however, then year to year, it's extremely reasonable to use. 

I'm on the latest version of the solution. I just updated it yesterday. 

While we have the solution on-premises at this time, we'll likely move to the cloud later this year.

They have a trial version that you can try. They have a free version that you can try as well. I use it myself to support my family. I would try the free version or the trial version depending on your business. They can set you up and you can get to see all the features. I would also advocate going to the cloud version. Don't bother with the on-prem. It's just easier to jump to the cloud.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use ConnectWise Control as a great remote access tool.

The primary support or the remote access support is really what we use ConnectWise Control for, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Even people outside of the organization would benefit from this. We do push out the agents, but if somebody, for whatever reason, like our board of trustees, don't have the agent on their computer, we can create a support session so they can just join via a web browser and we can support them in the same manner. It's very handy. It's very beneficial.

It also has the ability to have online meetings, like a WebEx scenario.

I haven't really played around with it too much, but what they refer to, what ConnectWise calls the unattended access, I would say is easily 80% to 90% of what we've used here and in previous lives, so it's really great.

This solution is very feature rich. It has a Wake-on-LAN ability.

You can also run commands against the machines, e.g. for old guys like me who prefer that instead of the fancy GUIs. It's similar to a DOS window where you can run different types of commands against it.

It does come in handy if you just want to do something in the background, e.g. schedule reboots, and you don't want to become too invasive to what the user's doing. Especially in our situation, a lot of times they're teaching a class and it's like: "Ugh. We don't want this to pop up." They've got their laptops connected to an interactive display most of the time, so they don't need to see what's going on in the background. It's pretty awesome.

I also like the fact that it does do an audit, so you can see who's connected to the machine. If somebody, every once in a while, and this isn't exclusive to ConnectWise Control, we'll get a call saying: "Hey. Something's not right with my machine. The mouse is moving on its own...", and we take a look, and sure enough: One of the support agents has taken control.

That's the draw back of any type of unattended access: They can just do that, so I've always put in a policy saying: "Hey. You need to make sure that you have the user's permission before connecting to their machine just so: A. You don't freak them out, and B. They know what you're doing." The audit trail on that is very good. It can show that.

The other nice thing is it has a two-way instant messaging feature built in, so if you're trying to communicate with somebody who maybe doesn't have a phone or whatever the case may be, you can type messages back and forth. This is a nice feature too.

The ability to block guest input is really good. If you are connected to somebody's machine and you're working on it, e.g. you're just on your screen Googling something and then they take the mouse and start moving it around, and you'll have to tell them: "No, don't do that. Don't close that."

You can block them from having control, so you're not fighting over control, e.g. mouse control. Another example is if you have the need to enter a password with additional access, e.g. an admin password, you can blank out their monitor so they can't see what you're typing. That's very, very handy because you don't want the end user to be able to get that password, and if you mistakenly type it in the username field, it will be in plain text. It'll be there until you do your password change.

We actually have this solution set up quite slick where there's different modes for it. We use what they call unattended mode, so the way it works is it pushes out the agent to all the Windows-based machines. They're in a "by school" type of thing in our example, but you can do it by department or groups, or by custom groups. We have full control over the machines. You can do whatever you need to do as if the machine was right in front of you.

One of the other features that is very, very strong in ConnectWise Control is the shared toolbox. It gives you the ability to have certain applications that you can't push out to machines for some reason, e.g. you can't use a GPO (Group Policy Object) because they're not on the domain, or because they're just totally remote. You can push out a portable support tool through the toolbox, for example: if you want to do a disk cleanup because you're getting a low disk space warning. There's hundreds of examples I could share with you. The shared toolbox feature of this solution is very popular.

I've been here two and a half years now, and previously I was in a managed service provider. We used this solution per instance, per client and it's just been enormously powerful for that. You can set up the remote access and get pretty granular as far as permissions go, but it's just been a fantastic tool and I would highly recommend it to anybody.

When I first looked at this solution, one of the things that I thought was incredible that they've given a lot of thought to, is the ability to reboot machines and not lose connection to it. That's something that some of the competitor products could not do: When you rebooted the machine, you literally lost sight of it. If it came back up, great. If not, then you'll be in a bad situation.

ConnectWise Control has two options for that. You can reboot to normal mode or to safe mode, which has been pretty handy from time to time when you need to get into safe mode in case there's a potentially corrupt operating system. I use that not very often, but just knowing that it's there when it is needed has been really good.

I did mention the toolbox which is really good.

The granular groups is also good because for a managed service provider, to be able to just really get that down, e.g. you don't want to give full access to everybody, it's just fantastic with that.

From my standpoint, I'm quite happy with this solution. There's nothing more I would want to do with it for improvement.

I've been using it for 10 years now.

I find ConnectWise Control to be a stable product. It's very, very rare for bugs, glitches, or performance issues to occur. No software is absolutely perfect, but every once in a while you'll just see something, e.g. the service is unavailable. This happens just once a year, and it's very, very short lived. It's just a matter of getting coffee, coming back, then it's fine.

This solution is absolutely easy to scale.

We had almost 6,000 endpoints in one of the MSPs that I worked for, and I didn't find any issues with that at all.

Right now, we're hovering around 1,000 endpoints, with no issues.

In the larger MSP that I worked for, my remote team consisted of 20+ individuals, and this product went through the paces, but I've never heard anybody say, "Hey, you know what? This is just too slow. I'm going to wait until somebody's off to continue because it's unusable."

The only time I've ever had to contact tech support is to purchase additional licenses, and they would just send me over to the sales department.

Now I don't even have to do that because they have a self-serve portal. If you do have to contact support, you can do that right on the main screen.

If I remember correctly, they have a chat feature too, so it's not like you have to wait in queue for an agent. There's somebody there to at least chat with. With a company the size of ConnectWise, I would expect them to have very strong support.

There was a time when we were using Google Remote Desktop. There were a lot of the things that I didn't like about it, particularly the security it provides.

ConnectWise is a lot more secure than TeamViewer, Zoom, and Google Remote Desktop, especially in schools which has been a known area where malicious activity has occurred. I just don't hear the same thing, nor have I experienced the same security risks from ConnectWise Control.

There were definitely features I found in this solution, e.g. the ability to reboot in safe mode which aren't available in the previous tools that we had in place.

ScreenConnect or ConnectWise Control as it's known today has been my go-to solution for the last decade. The other products we used previously had a lot of performance issues.

Talking about VNCs, they were not as usable at times. The VNC was such a poor technology. We tried different products, so it's not just one product that was an issue.

TeamViewer was a solution I found really, really heavy. It needed a lot of resources. The juice just wasn't worth the squeeze. It was a lot of work and we really didn't benefit from it.

When I was introduced to ScreenConnect or ConnectWise Control, it was almost too good to be true. We did a proof of concept for six to eight weeks on it, then we started switching over to it as our primary tool. Nothing was preventing us from doing that, not even the price, because it was totally reasonable, totally doable, and the rest was history. We never looked back.

We also used LogMeIn in the past. It was a scaled down version, or it could have been another acquisition called join.me. There was some acquisition there, but I can't keep track of all these acquisitions. They were okay, but not feature-rich. LogMeIn and join.me suddenly had significant price increases, so they were almost pricing themselves off the market.

The initial setup is easy. With no exaggeration, from the time you sign up for your free trial to when your instance is created, it takes less than 10 minutes per person.

It's just really a matter of how granular you want it to be, how many groups you have, and your group structure. I have fairly bad OCD, so I have subgroups on top of groups.

If you just want to use it out of the box and deploy an agent, you'll have the machines checking in easily within 10 minutes, then you can just sort them from there if you want to.

It is as simple as can be.

We saw a return on investment from using this solution.

It's just really difficult to put a price tag on ROI because often times we deal with non-technical individuals who just get very frustrated and they can't exactly express themselves very well with what's happening. We get this feedback from them which is not uncommon: "It just doesn't work. I don't know what's going on. There's this message here."

We help them with their concern and say: "Hey, can we just connect to your machine and take a look at what's going on, because it's a lot easier to visualize?" Just by not having to drive out to rural Alberta where there is a lot of snow, and we're up to about three feet of snow this year. It's not exactly easy to drive anywhere, so the ROI on this is easily less than a day, and that's really not an exaggeration. It's totally worth the money.

ConnectWise Control is not an overly expensive tool.

When I first bought it 10 years ago, I paid about $4,000 for a one-time license for unlimited connections. The price has gone up over the years, but the current pricing only costs us $35 a year for each license. We're a small team, so we're on a very, very basic plan and we've only got four licenses. Pricing for this solution is reasonable.

I found the invoice for this solution and it's $840, so the $35 was actually per month. It's the per month charge. It's reasonable. If somebody uses it once a month, it more than paid for what we would've had to do for going out. Literally, the team's in there all the time. Not a day goes by that everybody hasn't used it.

I don't recall any additional fees on top of the licensing cost. There are different licensing models and you get more features depending on the model.

Because of our size, there's a free version that I use for my home, which is great. When you sign up, you get the free trial and all the bells and whistles. In a larger organization, whether in the public or private sector with multiple departments and a number of buildings, they may benefit from that. For the most part, I don't know if there's anything additional that you would really need. It's just bells and whistles.

I was able to evaluate TeamViewer, Webex, Zoom, Google Remote Desktop, LogMeIn, and several different VNCs.

This solution used to be called ScreenConnect, then ConnectWise bought them out four or five years ago. A little bit of background on the organization: We're a rural school division in Northern Alberta, so we have to cover a lot of geography. It's been apparent in the last couple years with COVID that going out and seeing machines just isn't the way to go like it was 10, 20 years ago.

We're using this solution as SaaS (Software as a Service). I don't know if they're still offering it on-prem. I think that they went away from that. For some reason, that rings a bell.

I'm trying to think of anything else that might be a room for improvement for this product. Something I really haven't played around with a whole lot is the PowerShell through this, but it might also just work through the commands section of it. I can't see that as something that's missing in the product. In all fairness, I haven't really done a lot with that as of late.

Currently, we have six people using this product.

The beauty of ConnectWise Control is we really don't have to do anything for maintenance. We only need to do a little bit of housekeeping, e.g. if we decommission a machine, we just remove the agent from there and it's gone.

Any app-specific maintenance is done by ConnectWise, so we have zero responsibility for that. ConnectWise is always great about sending a planned maintenance message out, e.g.: "Between the hours of 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM, the service will be unavailable.", which is the perfect time. I've never had an issue where I've gone in and said: "Oh, they're still doing maintenance. Something must have gone wrong." This is a solid solution.

Increasing usage of this product isn't out of the question, but not at this point in time. There are some features that are in there that we don't use today, but as far as the number of individuals, it's going to depend on whether my team grows or not. We don't have plans of increasing usage in the near future, but it's not a definite no.

I would say to anybody who's even thinking about using this solution, is to definitely sign up for the free trial, even if you don't decide to go with it. The setup is so easy. You get 15 days to try it out and that's more than enough time to see exactly what you can do with it and if it's a good fit. I'd be surprised if somebody says: "No, I really don't like this." It's so intuitive. I've got non-technical individuals who just do app support, so they know that one application, and they don't know a lot about servers or computers, but they just absolutely love ConnectWise Control because it's so simple. They search for the machine, double click it, and they're in. That's not oversimplifying it at all. That's literally what they do.

Definitely do the free trial and let it speak for itself.

I'm rating this solution a 10 out of 10. It's easily a 10 out of 10, because even though there were some glitches and bugs, it's very rare. I can't even remember anything off the top of my head that was so significant that made me say: "I'm not liking this at all." I'm typically pretty hard on these products because there's so many of them out there, but we definitely have a choice.

In my company, the solution is used as any other product in the market that provides users with remote control or access. I don't think it's any better or any worse than any other solution in the market.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from areas like remote scripting and a function named Powershell.

All the features provided by the product in terms of screen connectors have been good.

There can be some complexities when running patches or when building up all the profiles, making them areas where improvements are required. There is some amount of effort required to learn the platform, but it is pretty reliable once it starts running in your organization's environment. The aforementioned areas can be considered for improvement.

I have been using ConnectWise ScreenConnect for a few years. My company is just a customer of the product.

It is a stable solution.

It is not an easily scalable solution. No maintenance is required for the product since everything is handled in the cloud.

Only I use the product in my company.

The solution's technical support is good, and the response is quick. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Sometimes, getting a solution from the support team can take a while since they may not understand the problem that you are facing with the product, but they understand the platform, which is good.

Neutral

I have experience with TeamViewer and AnyDesk.

AnyDesk is more useful for people who want a tool that can be quickly downloaded. The integration offered by ConnectWise ScreenConnect with the rest of the platforms I use is really good. The other tools in the market operate as

standalone products, so such solutions don't have the same good integration capabilities as ConnectWise ScreenConnect.

The product is really easy to deploy.

The product's deployment phase can be done by just sending the user a link, who then needs to click on it to complete the installation process.

The solution can be deployed in a few minutes.

I download the product for free with ConnectWise RMM's license.

Scenarios where the product was useful in the area of remote access revolve around incidents where every time the clients call our company for help, I can just use the solution to connect and help them out instantly.

The performance of the product is fine. I rate the ease of use that the product provides a nine out of ten.

In terms of the security features of the product, I assume that everything is encrypted. I haven't compared ConnectWise ScreenConnect from a security perspective with the other products in the market.

Only I use the product in my company.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use the solution ourselves. It supports our customers and their systems. It's for remote support since our entire company, all the staff, are working remotely, and we support our customers across South Africa and in other places on the African continent.

It's quite often the auditing that is useful to us. The fact that every session is being recorded is great. That for us, from a quality control perspective, is useful in that it helps us to know exactly what our engineers are doing and if they are doing it in the correct way. 

Another component that's very important is the fact that the whole system is integrated with our on-premise authentication mechanisms, so we can control the access directly. It cannot be accessed by any other third party. This ensures security.

The system is incredibly secure and one can harden your security through various mechanisms with multifactor authentication, et cetera.

It is fast to set up. 

It's very low maintenance.

The solution is very affordable. 

At the moment, there's absolutely no specific feature that we actually need additionally since all the features that we need are available. There may even still be some features that we are not using. At the moment we don't see any new features that could improve the system. 

I've used the solution for close to ten years now. 

in the ten years that we've been using it, we've never had any issues with the system at all. I'd rate the reliability ten out of ten. 

The amount of users varies. We currently have about 80 customers that we support. We've got about six engineers that are using the system, and they are supporting 80 customers. The combined number of users among all our customers is probably almost 100,000.

The system is incredibly scalable. We've never encountered any performance issues whatsoever as the system has been growing. There's absolutely no problem with scalability. I'd rate scalability ten out of ten. 

We've never had to raise a ticket with ConnectWise whatsoever.

The initial setup is very quick. In fact, it can be set up in a matter of minutes. After setup, you can customize it quite significantly for your specific use cases.

After the initial configuration, we were probably up and running within ten to 15 minutes.

I'd rate the ease of implementation ten out of ten. 

There is no maintenance needed. It's a system that is maintaining itself. As updates come out, it updates automatically. Even the remote agents that are sitting at our customers are also updated automatically.

We handled the setup ourselves, in-house. 

If you need to support a lot of customers remotely, the system will pay itself within the first day of use due to the time it saves you in traveling to customers, et cetera. It really pays for itself.

The price is definitely affordable. It's not licensed for the number of end users. It is licensed based on the number of support technicians that will be using it concurrently. It is an extremely well-priced solution compared to many of the others in the market.

There's only standard pricing that we pay per technician and that's it. There are no additional costs.

I'd rate the affordability ten out of ten. 

We're an end-user.

The cloud service is provided by ConnectWise themselves, however, it's not like a shared service. It is a dedicated instance that we are using.

Overall, I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's impressive. 

We buy licenses for our help desk so that when our end-users are having problems with their PCs, our help desk can remote to the end-user's PC to troubleshoot and solve the problem. 

This year, we recently purchased another license so we now have a total of five licenses.

ConnectWise Connect is very convenient as we can remote to a PC even when it is not within our LAN.

We can do almost everything from our local PC to the remote PC. We can copy and paste to the machine we are remoting with. We can message the PC we are working with. Anything you can imagine to remote to the PC, the end-users PC can be done with ConnectWise.

I would like ConnectWise Control to be more transparent on the real costs to renew their license. When we tender a renewal with our vendors, the vendors see the cost of a new license and not the renewal fee so they quote us higher than what it actually is.

I have had three years experience working with ConnectWise Control.

Prior to ConnectWise we were using TeamViewer however due to security purposes in 2016 we stopped using TeamViewer. 

We have also used Windows Remote Desktop to remote to desktops, however, you can only remote within the local area network. Our firewall and VPN now restrict the use of Windows Remote Desktop.

We pay an annual licensing fee.

I would recommend ConnectWise Control to others to use. I rate it a 9 out of 10.

Basically, in a previous company where I worked, I was a product owner and our company searched for tools that would be able to remotely connect to our customer computers and assist if some IT issue arises. 

We have customers outside of our office that we are supporting. We cover all IT devices, including computers and Windows machines as well as our applications. If an employee of these third-party companies has any issue they call a support number and communicate directly with an engineer. He can directly connect and take over control of their machines if necessary. This is helpful, for example, if an employee cannot describe what actually happens on his computer during a problem and network activity still exists. Our employee engineers can jump on the computer and witness it from the perspective of the user. 

The price is very good. The licensing is simple and they offer discounts for remote renewals. 

The support is quite nice as well. 

I do love the monitoring page. If you are using ConnectWise Control, which is the on-prem version, when you are logged into the admin panel, there is a status page that checks network connectivity, the status of the license, and so on. If monitors different parameters. If some issue arises, you just need to log into this admin page and check to see if all positions are green. If something is red, we would investigate further to find out what is going wrong.

In our experience, we've had a price issue and the one was related to licensing. We had a valid license, however, something happened on the vendor side. When we started getting alerts that something wasn't working, the admin went immediately to the admin page and saw that there is a license-related issue. We raised it with ConnectWise, and, after ten minutes, we were back online.

It's quite easy to set up this product and configure it. 

The on-prem installation uses something like an Emulator, which emulates the Windows environment to a written application to run on Linux. We faced different issues related to security which are easier to overcome on a Windows machine. Also, the configuration and maintenance are easier when the implementation is done on a Windows Server if we are speaking on-prem version.

There is if documentation of ConnectWise Control on-premise, however, on a Linux machine, there are different limitations that are not there on a Windows Server. Much more limitations exist on Linux deployments.

Companies that support some others in computer-related things or large organizations that have an internal service desk support team should be able to connect to own devices and assist employees in case trouble happens.

In the on-prem version, operators need to tell those they are assisting to visit a webpage, where they will see a welcome screen banner and they must enter their ID. After that, a small client must be installed on the computer. For large corporates that have introduced different security measures, such as Microsoft Adblock, sometimes it can be an issue to connect. 

I've worked with the solution for four years. 

The product works well and is quite reliable. For example, we've had a lot of IT systems in our environment and usually, with ConnectWise Control, we have only had one incident in three years. It runs well and just needs a one-time configuration.

Even after upgrading, we haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It's been seamless so far.

We have 15 users who are on it on a daily basis and using it to assist customers. 

We haven't tried to expand it. We had a rather small installation and have no plans to increase usage right now. At the outset, we didn't really look into its scalability as we knew we didn't have plans to grow beyond what we initially planned for. 

Support is great.

They respond very fast on support tickets because we've had experience with other products and with different supporters and product-wise really answer fast. If they cannot answer immediately, they always come back without the need for us to reach out with a reminder. It takes one to two hours and they come back with a solution. Consultations on our tickets are opened and dealt with quite fast.

We haven't really used any other solution before we chose ConnectWise. For internal users, we used SCCM to connect to our corporate computers.

The functionality would be the main differentiator between the two solutions. There is the possibility to enter some automated jobs in ConnectWise. In SCCM, this was not possible. Basically, ConnectWise has some small features that engineers can utilize to assist with troubleshooting and may make the tasks go faster and be much more comfortable.

The initial setup is straightforward. In every setting, you have a GUI and you can see all configurations. You can choose which type of configuration you want and you're good to go.

The first step is to collect the requirements from the internal department, which provides support for external customers. It's important due to the fact that, when you are building an IT solution, it's important to know what exactly the needs of the internal customer may be. We did our research and looked at different options and did a demo to make sure it matched our requirements. 

A server for the on-prem version is needed and it's important to sync which one Linux and Microsoft Windows. We do recommend a Windows Server. Linux has its limits and limitations.  For us, after a major upgrade, we needed to migrate to Windows. You will need to understand your RAM, CPU and so on.

It's important to have a discussion with the network team and to have documentation that can be used for communication. The network setup must be done on firewalls, on the switches, and so on. When you have your network and your server, you can proceed with application installation. 

It happens quite fast. When you are installing, you must have the appropriate license. When calculating your license requirements, it's important to understand how big the workload is in your company in order to estimate which license will be appropriate.

If you want people to be notified via emails, you must set up SMTP servers. It's possible to do a white label web branded landing page that can be customized fully. Your information, brand, and custom colors can be added.  

For us, the deployment took three working days to set up. They have up-to-date and technically deep documentation, which allows us to do a fast setup. Only one integration was with the Active Directory to be able to authenticate users by their corporate credentials and it was done also in three days. It was quite easy as there was a graphical user interface that simplified the process.

We did not have a large deployment. We had 15 engineers which are supporting external clients. The deployment itself one person did it in three days. 

There isn't really any maintenance needed. There may be some occasional patching, however, that's basically it.  We tend to update the solution quarterly.

Four years ago, when we bought it, it was the cheaper side and we had a new license and we got good discounts. We might have originally had a 50% discount due to the fact that we had licensing previously. For some products, if you have, for example, a subscription, this license is valid for two years or one year, and then you must pay full price after that. ConnectWise has the benefit of, when renewing a license, getting quite large discounts.

We looked at various products and the best option for us regarding functionality, ease of use, and, of course, the price was ConnectWise Control.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We used an on-prem server and I just started using Linux, however, we don't recommend using Linux. It's better to go with a Windows Server machine.

We do recommend using the Windows Server for our clients.

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

I'd advise potential new users to understand all the needs of the company first to make sure the solution will cover what you would like to be accomplished. If ConnectWise Control is chosen, do the trial license. It doesn't take a lot of effort to deploy it. Take some time in the demo environment and see how it works for you. If the functionalities are there and it is meeting your expectations, proceed with the next steps.

As an ICT solutions and software development company, our clients are spread across the globe.  We monitor client systems and provide support services and implementation services to all of our clients irrespective of their geographic location. Once a client reports an issue, or we are alerted of problem situation, we are virtually on-site within seconds to tend to the reported issue.

Due to the fact that we can help our clients by being on-site virtually, the solution has allowed us to reduce our travel costs by about 90%.  This also ensures that we can address client problems in a much shorter time frame.

The solution's ease of use is one of its most valuable aspects. It's very quick to establish a remote session with the client, unlike a similar solution called Bomgar, which was a little bit more problematic in terms of that.   With ConnectWise Control, a client can be connected instantly. You can be on the phone with a client and they will say, "I'm having a problem." You can immediately say, "Okay, you're not registered on our system." A minute later, with ConnectWise Control, the client will be registered and one can remotely provide assistance to that client with a simple one step action.

The security of our clients is of utmost importance, and comparable solutions such as TeamViewer and AnyDesk just did not pass our security compliance requirements.  With ConnectWise Control we are in full control of the security access of the system.  Activating the Multi-Factor Authentication capabilities enhances the access security even further.

ConnectWise Control also integrates with other Managed Service Provider systems such as NinjaOne with ease.  This capability provides your support teams with even more flexibility to support clients.

What we like about ConnectWise Control is that you can brand it as if it is a service provided by your company, and not by some other organisation. You can replace all the branding components so that the product that faces the client only represents your organisation.

The reporting capabilities have also greatly improved over the past few years and assist us to provide compliance reports to our clients.

A major feature is the ability of a client to "show" you via a mobile device what the problem is in case you cannot establish a remote session to the client because the client's system may be offline and only a visual inspection of the issue is possible.

Since my last report three years ago on ConnectWise Control they have addressed my entire wish list for future enhancements.

We've been using the solution for more than five years now.

The solution is unbelievably stable. There was only one instance where we had an outage. It was a planned outage from ConnectWise themselves, where they notified us upfront that between certain hours the service would not be available. That only ever happened once. Other than that, it's always been available. They always notify us upfront when there's going to be a system update. What we like about it, is it updates itself and all agents running with our various clients automatically.

What we like about this system is that we can scale up and down.  You can increase your concurrent agent license requirement automatically online and it's effective immediately. That way, you can support more agents quickly. It also works the other way. Once any spike in workload is going away, you can reduce your license account again. It's really very scalable. 

At the moment, we're supporting about 40 different clients and that encompasses about 300,000 users.

We are constantly using the solution 24 hours per day.

Their support is pretty proactive. We have never had an issue except once. The one time we had an issue, it was actually an installation on a Linux machine. Technical support was pretty reactive from their side. We've been quite satisfied with their responsiveness.

Positive

We previously used Bomgar, which has since been acquired by a BeyondTrust. We switched because it was so expensive. We were very unhappy when our appliance broke down and they said you have to pay five years' worth of backdated software maintenance. They wanted to charge us about 100,000 ZAR, and we backed away, as it was way too much for our small 24 person company.

We switched to ConnectWise's Control, which we found extremely powerful. It can provides us with basically similar features that we used to have with Bomgar. As a remote control solution, it works extremely well.

The key difference between the two was the licensing cost. Bomgar (BeyondTrust Remote Support) is also a very good product. What we did find is that ConnectWise has got slightly more support in terms of integration into other systems than what Bomgar used to authorize at that point in time, over five years ago. It may have changed since then. However, the costs, including the peer cost and the costing model, are quite high.

The solution is actually extremely easy to set it up. It takes less than an hour to set up the framework. Then, if you want to brand it for your own organization, that takes a little bit longer because it depends on how many customized graphics you want to implement on the system. 

We handled the implementation ourselves. We didn't need the help of a consultant or integrator.

With a 90% cost saving on travelling, it pays for itself within days.

You only need to license your concurrent support agents.  We also recommend that you integrate ConnectWise Control with your internal identity providers to ensure that your access to ConnectWise Control is managed by your organisational security frameworks.

We actually looked at a couple of different solutions. We evaluated TeamViewer and AnyDesk. We were not satisfied with these solutions at all due to the fact that they just do not from a compliance auditing perspective satisfied our needs. They didn't meet our security requirements. The majority of our clients would not have allowed us to implement these solutions because the majority of our clients require exceptional security standards. Most of them are governmental institutions and we are under extreme scrutiny in terms of auditing. We need to be able to play back events to demonstrate exactly when we had access to each system at the client site. ConnectWise Control manages to provide all the requirements that we need from a security and compliance perspective.

We are only a ConnectWise customer. We don't have any other business relationship with them.

We are always up-to-date with the latest version. It's automatically updated on the system due to the fact that the service is hosted in the cloud even though it's not really a cloud service. We have our own instance, and we are completely in control from a security perspective. One of our biggest requirements was security. Our users need authentication via their user credentials, which we control with our on-premise security framework.  It's extremely difficult for someone to bypass that security, especially with our added multi-factor authentication.  Even though the service is hosted in the cloud, we have full control over access to that service, unlike TeamViewer and AnyDesk, which is purely a cloud-based solution. 

Any person or company that really wants to have a very efficient and easy to use remote control solution really should evaluate ConnectWise. The solution has a trial period which is valid for 14 days, and you can test it out for free. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We went full remote after COVID, so all of our employees are off-premises. We use it primarily as a remote deployment, remote connectivity tool for doing troubleshooting with our clients.

My group that uses it is my service desk and my level two support staff. Some level threes use it for connecting to servers, but this just because it's so much more convenient than RDP. We're able to use it to do screen-sharing sessions, troubleshooting, and resolving customer issues from our service desk and our level two desktop support personnel.

There are a lot of good features in this product but there are two of them that I like the best. One feature is being able to remote-run commands through the client and not having to connect directly to the machine. You can bring up a command prompt remotely and execute commands without having to disturb the user.

Another feature that's really handy is all of the data it brings back after we push the client out with Intune. When it returns, it brings back a lot of useful data that we utilize while troubleshooting.

After you figured out the interface, using it is pretty straight forward. It is much better once the initial learning curve is over.

I really didn't care for the onboarding process and it is something that should be improved. They just sent me an email and said, "Hey, here's your account", and I have a group of folks using it. I had to go through and figure out specifically how to do it. It's really a combination of onboarding and support. It wasn't great. I would have rather them just let me upload a list of who all needs it and then send everyone directions on how to get it.

I would love to see the ability to send out bulk updates to third-party tools through their command line. This would mean being able to write a script and execute it on a group of machines, all at the same time.

In my past, I've used software like Dameware Mini Remote Control, which is now part of SolarWinds. In that software, the reporting was very good. For example, you could specify a group of machines and send a query to ask a question like how many of them have Adobe Reader installed. The report would be generated pretty easily.

We have been using ConnectWise Control for between three and five months.

The stability has been great.

I'd say it's pretty extensively used by the groups who rely on it as their primary tool. I don't know if we have any plans to extend this product, specifically, but we are looking into implementing some of the other ConnectWise tools.

I think that it's pretty scalable. We've increased our license count since we first purchased it.

I've got seven people total using it, including our service desk staff and our tier-two, or desktop support. Our level three engineers use it because they enjoy the flexibility of connecting to servers with it, versus using a remote desktop.

We haven't had to use technical support.

The company had used a couple of different products and it was kind of a scattered bag. We used Teams, which wasn't very good. They used Remote Assistance, which I think was from TeamViewer. Then, I think someone used VNC for a short time, but we put a stop to that quickly.

Our deployment only took about half a day. We wrote a PowerShell script and deployed it through Intune.

The deployment was done in-house and I have one staff member who handled deployment and is responsible for maintenance. This is our senior cloud administrator and the deployment was taken on because this person found the product for us, then did the implementation.

It's interesting, and this is kind of anecdotal, but I think it applies. We are more efficient at resolving end-user tickets as a result of implementing this product. We've seen our ticket count lower and our ticket throughput increased.

I think it really has to do with ConnectWise because prior to that, it was clunky trying to get connected to people, screen-share, and those types of things. Whereas now, we just click a button to connect and we're off and running.

We pay $3,000 USD for the service, yearly upfront. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

During our evaluation, we looked at ConnectWise, TeamViewer, and a third one. TeamViewer was a heavy favorite because it integrated with Intune.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is if they have the ability to bundle it with ConnectWise Automation, to do it from the start. We would really like to implement ConnectWise Automate, but it is probably out of our price range right now.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that not all remote connectivity software is equal. My team thinks that this product is pretty good.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We're an MSP using ConnectWise ScreenConnect to support our customers.

The ConnectWise ScreenConnect tool is very good for remote access. It's very robust, and I love that it works across reboots and everything else.

The solution should add the ability to video chat with the user on the other end.

We have been using ConnectWise ScreenConnect for three years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

I rate ConnectWise ScreenConnect ten out of ten for scalability.

I have previously used Remote Desktop, Quick Assist, and TeamViewer. We switched to ConnectWise ScreenConnect because it was integrated into the ConnectWise agent that we're using.

The solution’s initial setup was very straightforward.

ConnectWise ScreenConnect is a great remote access and support solution. I would recommend the solution to other users because customers who use it through us love it.

Overall, I rate ConnectWise ScreenConnect ten out of ten.

We are a 100% remote company, so we use ConnectWise Control primarily for remote support. I also have a guy who goes through periodically, probably every week or so, and uses Control to pull information about all the PCs and make sure that the patch levels are showing up correctly and that we are where we said we were going to be.

Control lets us do remote management of machines without having to be on the VPN. It's super simple and super easy, so that's really where the advantage comes in for us.

There could be improvement to the remote command line tools. You can do what they call "Backstage," and run commands behind the scenes. It's a little quirky.

The solution is super stable. I have never had a problem with it. 

The solution scales well. 

We pay $85 per month for each user for a ConnectWise package with multiple solutions. 

I suggest that if you have a mobile device manager, like Intune or whatever you use to push your software out, use it to push the client out. Then every time a new device comes online, it's automatically put into ConnectWise Manage, and you can manage it right from the start.

We've never had to use tech support. The solution is just super simple and straightforward. I would rate it as a ten out of ten.