ConnectWise Automate Reviews

ConnectWise Automate solutions is a remarkable ITSM Solution that has a strong and accurate agent that will make a complete inventory of all the IT assets of your organization. Strong scripts capabilities to automate tasks of maintenance and preventive support. Provides simple, fast, and powerful remote access capabilities.

For Junior IT Admins has a higher complexity to achieve proficiency to manage the tool. New versions are kind of unintuitive and sometimes difficult to figure out.

Before Automate/Labtech 12 the best thing about this software was being able to see, at a glance, all the information you needed about a particular managed computer. They are moving back in this direction it appears. The scripting and monitoring systems are robust and allow you to do pretty much anything you can think of.

The GUI update that came with version 12 is not good. It uses a bunch of giant squares to present information and you have to drill into each one to find the specific info you are looking for rather than the at-a-glance experience I had before. Support leaves something to be desired. Just starting to chat with someone there can take 45+ minutes, then the person you are chatting with does not have the knowledge to fix the problem so you have to open a ticket anyway. Lots of time wasted there. Furthermore sometimes the inexperienced technician will offer suggestions to resolve the problem that have nothing to do with the problem which underlines the fact that they do not understand the problem.

The inclusion of ConnectWise Control is the single greatest part of using ConnectWise Automate. It is amazing.
The scripting features are very good. The ability to create custom processes is exceptional.

The ability to monitor and manage network devices is not good at all. Automate struggles to manage devices across subnets that other platforms seem to be able to do with ease. So bad that we had to bring in Auvik to do this task. It was money we would have rather just spent with ConnectWise.

Reporting is also a disappointment. The included reports are very simple and not geared toward a C level. They are also not easy to build or manipulate.

Screenconnect - A real asset to the platform.
Scripting
Tunnel options - Can tunnel into your customer network using the agent.
Powerful Automation and patch management

Complex
Growing expense
Out of date knowledge base / manuals.

It has a large interface composed of various options that enhance its use, it works well enough to carry a monitoring on your devices, you will have detailed information of each action that this takes, you can even display any action by means of commands.

CW Automate is a fairly complete software, but with a support team that leaves a lot to be desired for certain problems, the resolution of problems is not very complete.

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.

The amount of features that you have at your fingertips to remotely assist users is phenomenal. I can't count how many times this software has made life so much easier.

When the app is slow to load, it's slow to load. It's the only downside I've had with this application.

- Mostly intuitive GUI
- Packed with tons of functionality; Been using the product a little over 2 years now and still learning neat tricks/tools to use
- Great asset management
- Great at pushing remote commands
- ConnectWise University offers tons of training on their products

- Because it is so powerful, there is a lot of training that needs reviewed to become proficient in working and navigating
- Been experiencing an issue where I need to re-launch the control center because otherwise the agent tree will refresh forever
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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.

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.

We love Automate. We use it to manage patches and updates across thousands of computers. We also use it for customized monitoring and alerting on workstations and servers. Monitoring is really robust and granular. It does a great job of gathering a TON of data about the network, and that data is searchable. There are a bunch of different reports built in. Integrates with Manage, Control, and other applications. It does a ton of stuff out of the box, and has endless customization options.

It may not do quite as much as you want right out of the box, and it will take some work to set it up. You'll need someone on your team willing to invest the time and energy into making this software do everything you want.

The remote control product is quick and works. The desktop version still provides the best daily interface over the not finished web version.
The extra data fields do provide us with easy to access information.

The product is slow and complicated. The new web version is just another overlay of the main product and database. This web version is not nearly complete, which has been worked on now for years.
Most parts of the product are complicated to setup, when you go to the University of connectwise to find the information, often it is lacking.

For a small to midsized MSP, connectwise makes a few must-have's.
Connectwise Automate makes it easy to monitor, and perform tasks on remote systems, as well as offers a decent out of the box ticketing system, with end user ease.

Many Many options, Which is good, but a pain to setup and have working how you want it.
Should have more out of box preset configs to get up and running quicker.

Connectwise automate is by far the best RMM tool on the market, It allows you to create a ton of custom monitoring alerts and the wizard makes it super easy to accomplish.

The implementation can be very dry but just hang in there as it is all worth it.

The product has a lot of potential and from a sales standpoint the have the features that you would want..

They provide you with no support and as a MSP you can not even talk to someone on the phone. Count on issues taking you days to weeks to get support to address. Third party vendors and products take twice as long.

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.

The format of the software and also how it keeps you updated to current events going on. The layout of the product is great and easy to understand.

Some of the reporting is off but mostly it pretty accurate. Also noticed when a user is inside a ticket and they change it the notes disappear.

Single place to manage your workstations. Great patching product, great control product, awesome scripting engine.

Most of the rich automation is done in a fat client that is heavy and slow to launch. Once in the product everything performs well it's the startup that can take some time.

Connecting to users workstations is a quick and painless experience, with the ability to search workstation names or ID's making it a breeze to reach who you need to.

Software takes anywhere from 1 to 4 minutes to load up, and often times that's just the login screen. At worst, it's taken me 15 minutes to get to the Control Center after restarting my workstation

Provides you the tools that you need in order to streamline your systems and automate a lot of your processes as a MSP

Overwhelming for new users, need to introduce them slowly to all the features that it includes

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.

There are tons of features in this software. It provides a console interface with verbose information that allows a tech to do quite a bit of troubleshooting before having to remote onto the computer. You're able to run commands from CMD, view mapped drives, view/add local user accounts, and more. What I also like is, after establishing a connection to the computer remotely, you can also close the console window without having to close the remote session window.

Some info in the console can be hard to find because there is just so much information. There are two features I feel are missing from the console though:
1. The ability to view and edit the registry from the console.
2. The ability to view the file system from the console.

we love that we are able to do so much with the computers that we manage on this software. Also love that we can find out hardware information through this secure application.

do not like the time it takes to load, but it makes up for the capabilities that it does.

The ability to connect via web portal or application. I can see my items on the fly even when I'm out of the office

The application crashes quite a bit when not a very steady connection which makes it difficult to open items

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.