ConnectWise PSA vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)

MSPs wanting to find a single system to fill all their needs. Businesses wanting to increase their ability to deal with tickets, with advanced management and KPI monitoring. Small IT business who need more than just a ticketing system and are looking to make the leap to a full PSA with integration options, client portal and advanced configuration.

[SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)] works well in education, I'm responsible for over 500 classrooms, thousands of users and computers. Using WHD to keep track of who has what devices and which devices need to be retired has helped the user experience. I'd recommend this product to anyone managing an IT department.

Incentivized

• Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
• Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.

• Email notifications are pretty good; you can add hidden notes, close/resolve/update tickets just by selecting the appropriate link in the email that is sent when a ticket is created or edited.
• It provides a great deal of information to both the user and tech.
• It allows us to automatically update asset information with our mobile device management system by using an extension.

Incentivized

• I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
• A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
• Better Knowledge base section.
• We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
• Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
• A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
• The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.

Incentivized

• I have been a user for over 8 years and the product continues to exceed my expectations!
• I am amazed at the fact that the users have an impact on how the product continues to evolve
• Continued efforts put forth on the security of all the SolarWinds products have been amazing

Incentivized

The product works awesomely. The only factors holding back a 10 star rating are some of the upgrades that I believe are necessary. Namely, active directory integration for the customer portal is a feature that is long overdue. AD integration on the technician side should also be made available for subscribers of the cloud hosted solution.

Incentivized

We are definitely going to be sticking with Web Help Desk for the foreseeable future since the product is very inexpensive for the features that it provides, the integration that it has with our existing systems, and the ease for managing users, assets, locations, and tickets. Web Help Desk is a great product that is backed by even better support, which is well worth looking into if you are considering moving to a new ticketing system.

Incentivized

ConnectWise has been great for our help desk. Over the years we have used it (5+), it has responded to community-sourced feedback and improved its product. I have always appreciated the support given when required, and overall the program has helped our service desk to become more efficient. The automated aspect, including workflow rules, has been an important part of our overall systems. When considering a help desk PSA, ConnectWise should not be overlooked.

Incentivized

It's not cloud based so users have to be on the network to submit a ticket. It doesn't plug into Google or Microsoft Azure so all inventory has to be manually entered. It seems like solar winds is allowing the product to slow fall into obsolescence

Incentivized

We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.

Incentivized

Overall, I love CW Manage. I think it is a great platform, but nothing is learned from saying "You're great!" So I will share 2 issues where I think improvement can be made. 1. There are times where service requests are closed inappropriately without explanation or warning which can be frustrating. I have learned that I must work extra hard to manage my open issues to ensure that they don't just disappear without resolution. 2. I recently found that I had mistakenly been charged $50 a month for a year for services I did not have. When I brought this to CW's attention, I was quickly given a credit memo and an apology, which was nice, but it was still annoying

Incentivized

The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."

Incentivized

SolarWinds is a great customizable and affordable ticketing system. We use SolarWinds Web Help Desk for IT and Software
Development trouble ticket tracking and resolution. The reporting that
SolarWinds provides is great since it helps us discover problem areas and fix
those areas so they don't keep reoccurring

Incentivized

We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.

Incentivized

Thoroughly review the training at ConnectWise University BEFORE starting. Ask questions to other partners - there is a huge community that is more than willing to help. Lastly, I recommend getting ConnectWise Consulting to help - it's a BIG product, and the money you spend on consulting will pay for itself by helping you and your team get off to a running start (in the right direction)

Incentivized

Take the time to roll out a test VM to configure and make changes to before doing a live deployment, this way you don't end up with a VM that has been tweaked and re-tweaked until it's perfect and instead end up with a final, polished product. I would also recommend taking the time to read through the support forums for figuring out minor issues that may pop up, chances are that you aren't going to be the first one to encounter them. When all is said and done, SolarWinds Support is VERY responsive and you shouldn't hesitate to contact them.

Incentivized

Everyone but dynamics had holes in it. Dynamics is good, but it requires more development time. I spoke with some people that have CW and liked it. But when I inquired after our frustrations, I discovered they had a full time scheduling & logistics CW manager and the field people were using it purely like any other more simplistic ticket system. They said it would be impossible otherwise. The one big difference is the transparency of the sales effort. The other sales people were honest on the limitations or potential challenges and worked with us. They also worked with our agenda. At CW they don't have that option. The consulting time is eaten through a pre-formatted agenda which they communicate too you, not with you.

I used ManageEngine ServiceDesk and ServiceNow at previous jobs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk was in place when I came to this job and I was disappointed when I started using it as it has a more clunky, less intuitive interface, and lacks the features of those products. And it gets frustrating because sometimes it doesn't work right. Like I will open a ticket and click on the button to add a note and instead it will close the Notes section. So then I have to close and reopen the ticket and try again. Same with closing a ticket. I change the Status to "closed" and click on "Save" and it doesn't save. So I have to keep repeating this until it works. Also, it's lacking features like the ability to unmerge or split tickets, that I had in other products. And sometimes when users reply to tickets it creates another ticket instead of adding it to the existing ticket and then we have to merge tickets. Also, it's lacking the integration with users and assets that those other products have.

Incentivized

ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is no one has to return to the office to look at notes - they can look up the support ticket on their laptop, tablet, or phone.
• The positive impact on ROI is keeping all of your support tickets organized in one spot and multiple techs can update them.
• The positive impact on ROI is that you have happier customers as you can update the support tickets no matter where you are at

Incentivized

• Overall we have become more efficient using this tool and our ROI for implementing this has been great. By having a service tool that can manage inventory, tickets, as well as change management just to name a few, our company is better off in our support.
• The core business community has seen quicker responses to tickets through use of the ticketing tool. Business continuity has had less disruptions as we are better able to anticipate or respond to issues.
• Finance has been happier with our ability to do cost analysis by using the various tools in SolarWinds help desk.

Incentivized