Autotask PSA is designed as a complete IT Business Management Platform for MSPs, now from Datto (resulting from the Autotask merger with Datto in 2017).
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Kantata PS Cloud
Score 8.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kantata Cloud (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) provides project management and collaboration software for small to mid-sized professional services companies. Features include resource management, project dependencies, time and expense tracking, file sharing, versatile user permissions, private messaging, planning and reporting.
In my opinion, Datto Autotask is exceptionally complicated to set up, manage, and use on a daily basis. I would think the target market for this product would be someone managing a team of 20 - 50 people, possibly more. In my experience, for it to run properly you will need to dedicate at least half an FTE to running this product in an organization of that size per month. I would not recommend it for companies with less than 10 people or for companies that value quick communication with their clients. I would not recommend it for companies using Datto's RMM product. The integration exists, but it is clearly a bolt-on. They were not developed together and they are slow to talk to each other. Frequently you cannot add details from RMM sessions into the PSA without manually copying the ticket number, and if the ticket is more than a week old, then you can't even find it with the ticket number.
Mavenlink is useful for planning and maximizing our resources. Improved resource visibility and control. It helps us determine who is accessible in terms of skill and competency, as well as the amount of work they are capable of handling. Mavenlink is beneficial for forecasting resource needs and reallocating resources to meet goals. Mavenlink is useful to have a control over the work minute by minute, without having to wait for answers. It's flexible to monitor how time, money and margins are managed from anywhere at any time. Mavenlink allows us to examine and act through an industry-leading business intelligence layer that provides you with dozens of well-crafted reports to solve pricing, profit, usage, and availability issues.
AutoTask allows for us to receive and work support tickets very easily. We've setup various 'Issue Types' that in turn are bound to SLAs ensuring that items are worked appropriately as they are received.
The automation that AutoTask allows for with regards to various emails/requests coming through has been great. It allows for us to not have to constantly "watch the queue" as when a critical item arrives the appropriate persons are notified and can work it.
I feel that the management of AutoTask for both user setup, and various automations is done well. We're able to copy settings as needed, and create templates for multiple items.
Although the company I currently work for does not use the product I have recommended that we do switch to Mavenlink. We will be opening some new sites internationally this year and I can see that Mavenlink would be a great product for us to use
Datto Autotask PSA is a full featured product that can do almost anything you need. There is a significant learning curve to get started which requires several hours spent in product training. Additionally, several hours / days are needed to get clients imported, contracts configured, and integrations implemented. Once the setup and user training is complete, the product is very functional, but it's imperative to not get overwhelmed when starting out.
Only the app is bad; everything else is fantastic. It has a logical user flow and I barely needed any guidance on how to use it when I first started. As with most softwares there are unseen capabilities I've needed to be shown in order to use, but for my day-to-day tasks I could have figured it out without any training
Very good integration with Google apps. Some complexity is called however in the synchronization between Google Tasks and Maven links tasks. This can sometimes lead to duplicate records in Google Tasks. It has been dissolvable that becomes cumbersome if not properly curated.
Kantata support is fantastic! Any issues that arise are always handled quickly and efficiently. Granted, we haven't had many issues to report. Typically, my team tends to only reach out to support if they need assistance remembering how to do something or asking about an improvement. We had Kantata build an integration when we first started using the software, and the support team worked hard to listen and improve the integration.
We prepared questions in advance, and our trainer was an expert in what Mavenlink was and wasn't able to do. We were able to have multiple people trained at once.
The training was very well-organized. We were able to send questions in advance so the instructor knew what to cover, and the brought up related topics to maximize the usefulness of what they were teaching us.
Dedicate as much internal time to the implementation effort as possible, even if you're using a 3rd party or Mavenlink services. Your team knows your processes the best
The portion of Autotask that we've used other companies for prior to using Autotask is the Endpoint Management. The Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM) portal integrates perfectly with their PSA/CRM tools. It's alerting features are much better than the above software as there aren't a bunch of superfluous and unneeded alerts. Instead, it only alerts for things that you specify that you want. Alerts aside, for the PSA/CRM, I don't have much to compare it to as Autotask was the first PSA we tried. It's hard to imagine a PSA having more features or doing a better job than Autotask.
I have not had much experience with this other product, It was only for a few months during a part-time so I did not have to interact with the product on a regular basis. However, Mavenlink is much more intuitive and requires little to no training prior to using it. It is also more flexible in its ability to display project status in a variety of ways.
Manvenlink is perfect for showing expenses and income over time and across people.
Manvenlink is adaptable for the integration and automation of the processes of each of our projects in order to optimize resources and improve operational performance.
Mavenlink allows us to determine if our projects are profitable or not, as well as save significant time by automating components such as recurring tasks and having templates, among other things.
Manvenlink is advantageous for our operations due to its simple portfolio management of our projects: manage several projects at once and receive a complete perspective of the development of each one at a glance.
Manvenlink kindly provides us with robust discussion threads, access restrictions, and built-in document management, allowing us to contextualize communications.
