ManageEngine ADAudit Plus vs. N-able N-central

ManageEngine is mostly a "check the box" solution for SIEM systems. We needed something that satisfied our customer and was cost-effective. I would highly rate the system on "worth what paid for". Support is eager to please and prompt. My only issue is that it's mostly based outside the US with helpful, but non-native speakers so it's hard to understand them. I wish they would spring for better help "phone lines" so I'm not dealing with difficult to understand and unclear speakers.

Incentivized

In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).

• Logons - reports are very clean and concise and accurate
• Account Lockouts - very challenging to do without ManageEngine ADAudit Plus. The tool allows us to easily locate the device or, at the very least, point us in the right direction!
• AD change management - IT admins should consider this a necessity, and ManageEngine ADAudit Plus facilitates this seamlessly

Incentivized

• Robust patch management: it is easy to set up patching groups via tags, and configures patch management profiles and maintenance windows.
• Remote Control: as long as the agent checks in, it is very quick and easy to take control of an endpoint, either in a separate session (RDP, kick the current user out), or to join the existing session of the current user, to provide desktop support or collaborate remotely.

Incentivized

• In earlier releases there were quite a few bugs and performance issues. These have since been resolved.
• When integrated with the Log360 Suite, it can be confusing on whether EventLog Analyzer or ADAudit Plus are "managing"/"Ingesting" the data from a given endpoint.

Incentivized

• Expensive software
• The support team are terrible
• Sales team will promise the world to get you over the line
• Subscription management is tedious
• Old software with very little development and the support team will not provide any further information on this - no roadmap
• Integrations galore - but none of them are effective

It works great for everything we need and use. Any issues in the software are pretty easy to resolve with tech support. And they are very responsive to resolving issues. Even ones where a fix/patch are required. At present, the software does everything we need it to for compliance, audit, and account review.

Incentivized

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

Incentivized

ADAudit with its cloud and on prem install option allows any organization to get in on AD report management. Whether you need to report internally only for for external audit controls its a great tool with flexibility to handle most any user or group report capability. Since this also includes m365 integration it enables IT pros to administer usage, license, cost control and permission access to most anything in Microsoft's portfolio. Its a great tool all around for AD integrated access needs.

Incentivized

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

Incentivized

uptime good

Incentivized

Integration/overlap between products could be improved

Incentivized

The attention to cases or situations with the tool has been exceptional. being able to count on the manufacturer either by mail, call or chat. generate cases directly from the application allows you to have personalized support in order to solve problems that has been able to appear.

Incentivized

Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.

Incentivized

knowledgable and prompt response

Incentivized

The remote setup team helped when i needed it and setup weas very straight forward and easy. The advanced setup for an external db and customizations for our latest version AD environment went pretty easy once they found documentation on customization.

Incentivized

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

Incentivized

In terms of features, ADAudit Plus offers a comprehensive set of features for monitoring and auditing Active Directory, including real-time alerts, detailed reports, and user behavior analytics. The platform also offers support for multiple platforms, including Windows, UNIX, and Linux, as well as integration with other ManageEngine tools.

Incentivized

Most advanced, and other technicians in the business already used it before. NinjaOne was a close competitor, but lacked some features that we ideally need. ITarian was too basic but was MUCH cheaper. For a startup MSP, it would be much more attractive. Splashtop was just for remote connections, which we used for some time before realizing full RMMs were a better fit for our requirements.

Incentivized

updates are effective and system is reliable

Incentivized

The visibility of changes made in AD are very helpfull. We had an admin that made a change in a GPO that causes some strange behaviour in our environment. Normally that would take days to find, especially because the admin was a few days out of office and couldnt tell us the change he made. But after looking into our alerts we found very fast the specific change that was made to a GPO that pointed us in the right direction to solve the problem within 30 minutes.

• No more ghost accounts and password never expires in our AD, the security level is therefore much higher then it was before. And we need less manhour to maintain that.
• Before ADAuditplus we had several hundred accounts with password never expires and at least 15 changes on that item every week. Since we have ADaudtiplus we have no accounts with password never expires and we only see modifications on that item sometimes when a new IT employee starts within our group. IT crew learns fast what to do and especially what NOT to do in our environment to keep things secure.
• Before ADAuditPlus I wrote PowerShell scripts to create reports for management, since ADAuditplus the reports are build automatically every month and send to management.

Incentivized

• The product definitely increases productivity. Technicians can spend a few seconds to take care of remote tasks with a few clicks as opposed to minutes to get a user to start a remote control session, or worse, going on site to work on a piece of equipment.
• The packaging of the features makes selling and pricing the product fairly straight-forward and convenient. This saves our sales team time from trying to work with add-ons when pricing our services - the product makes it easy to just have an "all you can eat" package at a set price.
• When something goes wrong with the product, our business and our customers suffer. If for example, a bug causes all managed computers to reboot, our customers call in, resulting in our technicians being booked solid doing damage control. This also causes loss of trust with our customers - we can't simply blame the product, the customer trusts us to provide them a service and if the product fails, we fail.