Jira Service Management vs. N-able MSP Manager

Great to manage your issues in a clear and centralised way. If your development teams work with Jira, it will all naturally come together. Great way to manage the issues from end to end. - Very flexible if you have people who understands the set up and is able to configure it for your needs - Maybe not the best if you want something with very easy set up

It's a good company to grow with because as needs change there are more features available.

Incentivized

• Highly configurable Notification Scheme, allowing free customization on who receives notifications and when
• Ability to add extra features through the highly diverse Atlassian Marketplace.
• Simple and highly customizable ticket interface. The Software can be almost completely branded in every aspect to represent your organization.
• Integration with Jira Software allows support tickets to be moved into other Log Term projects as necessary.

Incentivized

• Help Desk Ticketing is very easy to use and organize.
• Billing is robust and keeps track of client contracts and time very well.
• Role management and ticket routing client are very robust.

Incentivized

• Some of the built-in functions and workflows are surprisingly limited given the fact that you can customize a lot with JQL. These limited areas do not allow you to use JQL. For instance, the built-in notifications are lacking. They have one that is great-- "notify on critical ticket creation"-- EXCEPT that it does not allow you to notify a group or anything, only individual users.
• The ticket interface is a little odd for agents. Changing the status is not a simple drop down from unassigned to open to in progress to pending, etc. There are a couple of tabs ("investigate", "pending", "workflow") where you can change the status in different ways. Maybe I am just not used to this way of doing it, but I feel like it could be simplified.
• It can get complicated deleting/changing some of the out-of-the-box fields and rules, because you never know what will break workflows or other automated/built-in features.

Incentivized

• Labeling/titling work "labels" without all the extra steps.

Incentivized

I have given this rating because, in my opinion, I don't see any downsides of Jira until now. We can customise workflows based on the project needs, including task workflows. Jira is very extensible, which is one of its most important features.

Incentivized

I gave JIRA a 9 rating since for me JIRA works according to its purpose. Since there is a customer portal, our clients can leave a comment or communicate with us using the PR ticket that way it is easier for us to also request any additional information we need for our investigation.

I had the chance to talk to SolarWinds reps at their Empower conference. They asked how we liked MSP Manager. (For full disclosure, we use their whole suite of products). I told them it's the worst ticket software I have ever used. They said that it wasn't the first time they had heard that. I did not doubt that he was telling the truth.

Incentivized

We chose Jira Service Management due to its easy integrations with the rest of the Atlassian tools, as we have also invested in those. For the price, the ability to add or remove agents, and the cost being reflected in that, it was an excellent medium for us. For the foreseeable future, I do not see us moving off this platform.

Incentivized

I want to be clear. I did not choose MSP Manager, it was thrown at me, purchased by someone who did not understand how bad this tool was. I have used other ticket systems, Remedy, Spiceworks, and ServiceNow. Those all work, and do a lot of things this can't. We have to export a list of all tickets, then use BI tools to try and work the data, just to get reports on completed tickets. It's truly terrible. I would recommend having users send a carrier pigeon over using this awful awful tool.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to take on a larger volume of work at a faster pace.
• We have established best practices with the tool that we have taught and sold to clients.
• It has allowed for further collaboration with a larger team.

Incentivized

• For my managed service clients, MSP Manager has seriously reduced the time I spend billing. Overall data entry time may be the same, but now it's focused on documenting the work that was done and the billing simply follows.
• The first few months of learning MSP Manager definitely meant doing lots of admin work twice, and double-checking the MSP manager invoices against the paper trail, to ensure it was accurate and working. Plan for this extra time overhead during the learning phase.

Incentivized