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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Planview AdaptiveWork
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Planview AdaptiveWork is a web-based collaborative work management software. Planview AdaptiveWork enables users to connect employees and partners and create documents, reports and specialized workflow automation. Planview AdaptiveWork is designed to work across multiple teams to enable cross-company task, project, and resource management.
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.
I've been an AdaptiveWork (Clarizen) admin for the past 14 years, so I've seen much improvement since I started working with the product. I'm very happy we can utilize the hybrid mode by using the cards, I think this was long overdue but it works very well.
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.
Many ways to acclimate to the system; documentation, videos, community, and contacts.
Planview provides scalable customization options tailored to the unique needs of each business unit or department. Easily add or remove fields in the system. As the admin, it was easy to learn how to configure.
Offers flexibility to adapt to existing systems and align with organizational workflows and processes. There are multiple ways to customize each part of the system to meet our needs.
Planview AdaptiveWork's ability to create relations between work estimates, resources, and time is one of its strengths but also one of its drawbacks. The average user is a little less considerate of the way these things interact with each and the automatic way in which Planview AdaptiveWork will affect one or the other can occasionally create a confusing scenario if the user is unaware of how changing one will affect the other
I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.
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.
It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented.
The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.
Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.
Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable (By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.)
Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow
It's a good experience overall. Clarizen was useful when needed. It's mostly needed for advice on how to do more sophisticated actions or how to change something that was set up administratively. It's seldom used otherwise. The product consistently works, the documentation is acceptable, and the generally intuitive product is easy enough for most staff to pick up without much issue.
• We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period. • Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here
It's easy to access and frequently offered. Often I'm amongst only a few people on the call and get virtually individual attention. I also learn and share with the other attendees and we can see how we've each solved similar challenges.
We have been able to implement AdaptiveWork pretty easily but it requires updating of resource availability and continuous training as roles change and new people join the company. Other documentation is used such as spreadsheets for longer range planning and project approval
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.
Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew
Planview AdaptiveWork allows us to report out on the status of our real estate projects on a regular basis. We have internal objectives that need to be met for on-time delivery and Planview AdaptiveWork provides us the data to be able to show how the teams are tracking on delivery.
