Cisco Crosswork Network Automation vs. Pulseway

Cisco Crosswork Network Automation has been great at reducing the workload our engineers face on the day to day aspects of their jobs. CNC has been able to reduce the time it takes to provision a device while using NSO and has provided valuable data to assist in troubleshooting network wide issues. CNC has been a pivotal aspect to our multi-million dollar network refresh

Incentivized

Pulseway is well suited for just about any situation where there is a need to remotely monitor and manage computers. The most basic features are available to anyone with a free account, so even a home user can set it up and use to keep an eye on computers. The more sophisticated features require a fairly inexpensive subscription, but are well worth the cost for a business wanting to monitor the health of their servers, etc. My experience with Pulseway is limited to using it in situations where there are fewer than a dozen or so computers/servers being monitored. I'm not really sure how well it scales up, so I can't say if it is a good solution for a large corporation with hundreds or thousands of machines that need to be monitored.

Incentivized

• Running windows updates: Pulseway really helps us keep our end-user devices up to date, without the need to handle each device individually.
• Sending notifications on our servers really helps with taking care of issues before they cause downtime.
• Pulseway's remote desktop client works very well, even over slower internet connections.

Incentivized

• File transfer
• There are a couple of computers that I keep ScreenConnect around for - as I lose connection with Pulseway and have to reestablish with ScreenConnect. I can't seem to get tech support interested in resolving this issue and it cost's me many $$ just to keep ScreenConnect running.
• There is an issue with Webroot, their new endpoint solution. I can't get it to work - again, no help from Pulseway - they ignore my emails.

Incentivized

Giving this a 5 as CNC classifies to a specific set of users. CNC is not an 'easy to use' product and thus requires some training to ensure that it can be used to the best of its capabilities. CNC can when used fully provide valuable data that Network Engineers would otherwise have to hunt for on their own.

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use however it is can be daunting with the amount of features available in it. Last I checked, their knowledge base was not very expansive and they relied a lot on the changelog for how to do some stuff. This can make it hard to learn how to do some more advanced things like the automation.

Incentivized

I have never had to use the support for Pulseway. However, when initially starting out, we would receive emails every so often asking how we are doing and if there is any support that they can provide. I would imagine that any request would be supplied with the same great support!

Incentivized

The 2 major factors were: 1. The fact there was no contract, we believe vendors should have to validate the usefulness of their product and their support to their customers every day, not just 1 or 2 months every few years. This is the same reason we allow our clients to leave at any time if we fail to meet their standards. 2. The ease of managing the product, we demoed other products that would have almost required a full time employee just to manage the RMM tool itself. The ease of use of Pulseway meant a tech could manage it as part of their other duties much improving the ROI. Note: We also felt NinjaOne met these same conditions but we evaluated it after having used Pulseway for a few years and while we found it a great product, possibly even superior, we didn't find enough reason to go through all the work and retraining to change over.

Incentivized

• Problems can be dealt with more rapidly because I have access to systems from anywhere. I don't have to carry a computer with me nor do I have to find a location with potentially non-secure wifi to gain access to my systems.
• I can handle 99% of my system admin tasks using Pulseway and never have to touch a system or connect to the console.
• Pulseway gives so much control over a system that I don't need to spend extra money on other software to perform management tasks.

Incentivized