ConnectWise Automate Reviews

There are many, many features in Connectwise Automate that will help you help your customers with their computer needs.

Although the software is very feature rich, it seems very cumbersome and not easy to use from day one. In almost every step, we have had to take classes to figure out how to do things.

The best part of this software is how robust the software is. When you purchase this software, you receive control and "WSUS" as part of your package. The software contains reports, pulls data on each computer, provides some integration and overall is a great automation and remote access tool.

Support is very slow to respond. Getting credits for downtime on their hosted web server is like pulling teeth. When you get into the chat queue, you may be waiting an hour or more for someone overseas who doesn't know how to fix the issue anyway. Then you have to wait until someone gets back with you when they "open a ticket." Honestly.... the only reason I WOULDN'T buy this software is their support system lacks ability for true support!

The software has its pros (connectwise screenconnect is the only good thing). The automation will automatically restart services or auto-approve and apply windows update on a schedule. When it isn't crashing or causing servers to crash that is.

It CONSTANTLY crashes. It will cause servers to crash. Only some automation features work. No support is ever avaaible to resolve issues. The ones that do respond don't know their own product.

I really like the features that Connectwise Automate offers. The ability to remotely patch servers and endpoint devices is excellent.

The only issue we have with this software is the customer support and occasional instability of the software.

The feature set has been astounding from day one.
With the big rebrand and integration with ConnectWise Manage the duo are now all that much better, complementing each others previous, non-focused features.

Truly forward progress was the main issue. During the time we actively used LabTech/Automate was during the transition years of the name and aesthetic. Things are definitely driving into the right, unified direction for all of their tools and that is exciting to see!
Learning the tool, like most ConnectWise products, can be daunting but there are lots of resources to pull from and well worth the investment.

Again, I suspect due to the years of bringing the tools together, Automate seemed to somewhat stall/lag on added features for awhile. They certainly had the most initially so it wasn't a drastic fall-behind, but new tools were taking the slow moving to catch up and the market is certainly competitive again.

Patch management is way easier than using WSUS.

User interface is not intuitive. Lots of training required. Very little useful documentation. Connectwise support will not help you understand the scripting features at all. The documentation for scripting is litterally 4 pages of what you can see in the user interface. The scripts debug process is horrid. It takes 50x longer to do a script in automate over doing a powershell and bash script to do the same thing. Change requests, and features are not being answered or added in a timely manor. This software is stale.

This software provides multiple connectivity options.
It can show a lot of information (see least favorite list below)
Great organization!
Easy integration with Connectwise Control and Manage
Lots of option for Scripting and API connectivity to outside applications

The interface was changed to a much less intuitive environment about a year ago. I use it and have started to get used to it somewhat, but it still is not what I would call good.
There's problems if you don't run the Control Center as an Admin, but it doesn't want to run as admin by default
The uninstaller for the client can sometimes not uninstall.

It does a lot of things and helps us keep tabs on hundreds of clients. Remote access, patch management, remote diagnostics, integration with ConnectWise PSA and a host of other third party products.

Setup time can be cumbersome and some of the advanced features you really need to work with a lot in order to become a master at it.

This software is robust. Management of assets within this software seems endless. Company locations can be organized as groups ("locations") and further broken down into subgroups. Hardware and software on each machine the agent is installed can be closely monitored. Alerts can be configured for just about anything, then delivered in a preferred method of logs or emails. Can also be integrated with Chocolatey to provide IT professionals with the ease of installing and updating software remotely. It can also be configured to handle Windows updates!

Slow to load. I recommend loading this software at the beginning of the day, because you never know when you have to immediately ScreenConnect to a machine and resolve an issue. There is also a huge learning curve. My company contracted someone to come out and train us and help us configure it.

I love how easy it is to use the software. After training we have been able to apply blanket policies to each client (ie push all windows 10 updates via one policy) and control server updates differently.

The software can be extremely hard to use at first and requires training from Connectwise in order to understand how it fully works.

We love Automate. We use it to manage patches and updates across thousands of computers. We also use it for customized monitoring and alerting on workstations and servers. Monitoring is really robust and granular. It does a great job of gathering a TON of data about the network, and that data is searchable. There are a bunch of different reports built in. Integrates with Manage, Control, and other applications. It does a ton of stuff out of the box, and has endless customization options.

It may not do quite as much as you want right out of the box, and it will take some work to set it up. You'll need someone on your team willing to invest the time and energy into making this software do everything you want.

Screenconnect - A real asset to the platform.
Scripting
Tunnel options - Can tunnel into your customer network using the agent.
Powerful Automation and patch management

Complex
Growing expense
Out of date knowledge base / manuals.

Before Automate/Labtech 12 the best thing about this software was being able to see, at a glance, all the information you needed about a particular managed computer. They are moving back in this direction it appears. The scripting and monitoring systems are robust and allow you to do pretty much anything you can think of.

The GUI update that came with version 12 is not good. It uses a bunch of giant squares to present information and you have to drill into each one to find the specific info you are looking for rather than the at-a-glance experience I had before. Support leaves something to be desired. Just starting to chat with someone there can take 45+ minutes, then the person you are chatting with does not have the knowledge to fix the problem so you have to open a ticket anyway. Lots of time wasted there. Furthermore sometimes the inexperienced technician will offer suggestions to resolve the problem that have nothing to do with the problem which underlines the fact that they do not understand the problem.

It has a large interface composed of various options that enhance its use, it works well enough to carry a monitoring on your devices, you will have detailed information of each action that this takes, you can even display any action by means of commands.

CW Automate is a fairly complete software, but with a support team that leaves a lot to be desired for certain problems, the resolution of problems is not very complete.

You can access it anywhere. If I am on vacation in Mexico and the office back in the states needs support, I just open up chrome and go to my custom made website that CW gave me and I am in. I can see everything about a persons computer by just scrolling side to side or double clicking. Their customer service is also 24/7 AND they assign you technicians to help with implementation along with connectwise university to ensure you are ready to use their product to the fullest extent!

Its sort of difficult to learn. They have the university that helps with that, but some of their classes are outdated and some just sprint through the lesson in the hopes that you might have caught a thing or two that they just taught you. Also, their scripting language is their own(proprietary) and you have to learn it. So if you already know Java, C++, Python, etc, it doesn't matter.

Set up monitoring alerts, script automated processes, control end user and servers remotely with a couple clicks. Ad-hoc sessions allow admin access remotely, even if the user does not have rights. Fantastic experience overall and only have minor pieces I wish I could see

Wish there was some more customization is some of the views. Would like to see some more basic information on the main screens, as opposed to having to dive into the properties to find. Seems that it can get a bit slow and unresponsive with certain actions. Not sure if this is our server or the software though.

The amount of features that you have at your fingertips to remotely assist users is phenomenal. I can't count how many times this software has made life so much easier.

When the app is slow to load, it's slow to load. It's the only downside I've had with this application.

If you can imagine it, you can do it. It really does have all the tools to do whatever you desire remotely. You can access almost any aspect of a managed machine without even interrupting the end user. The built-in ignite monitors are pretty amazing on their own.

It can be incredibly slow at times, you have to have a lot of patience. The script editor being object and mouse based is very clunky, I'd prefer to learn the syntax and just type it all out, but that option isn't readily available in the GUI you have to dig into the guts to do that. If you use ignite monitors you'll need to parse out the noise they create for items you don't want to be notified about. Integration with Connectwise Manage is still a bit quirky but it works.

- Mostly intuitive GUI
- Packed with tons of functionality; Been using the product a little over 2 years now and still learning neat tricks/tools to use
- Great asset management
- Great at pushing remote commands
- ConnectWise University offers tons of training on their products

- Because it is so powerful, there is a lot of training that needs reviewed to become proficient in working and navigating
- Been experiencing an issue where I need to re-launch the control center because otherwise the agent tree will refresh forever
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The inclusion of ConnectWise Control is the single greatest part of using ConnectWise Automate. It is amazing.
The scripting features are very good. The ability to create custom processes is exceptional.

The ability to monitor and manage network devices is not good at all. Automate struggles to manage devices across subnets that other platforms seem to be able to do with ease. So bad that we had to bring in Auvik to do this task. It was money we would have rather just spent with ConnectWise.

Reporting is also a disappointment. The included reports are very simple and not geared toward a C level. They are also not easy to build or manipulate.

I like that the management of a lot of computers

Not really much to not like about it, but sometimes the windows updates aren't always working correctly, and sometimes it reports disk space critically low when there's is 50+GBs left on the system

The ease of setup and installation for customers is substantial when considering this tool for MSP. New customers can be setup with ease, configured and once agents are installed Automate can significantly reduce information gathering for system resources, and discovery of behind the scenes issues. Scripting and Automating are easy to do with the built in examples and wizards, which makes customizing alerts and monitors a breeze.

The monitoring will come with lots of defaults right out of the box, so there will be a lot of "noise" to sort through and remove/adjust after initial installation.

For a small to midsized MSP, connectwise makes a few must-have's.
Connectwise Automate makes it easy to monitor, and perform tasks on remote systems, as well as offers a decent out of the box ticketing system, with end user ease.

Many Many options, Which is good, but a pain to setup and have working how you want it.
Should have more out of box preset configs to get up and running quicker.

ConnectWise Automate empowers users to perform generally complex tasks such as patching and monitoring with ease.

The scripting engine is extremely powerful and allows anyone with zero to little programming knowledge to perform automation tasks.

ConnectWise has yet to realized the world is moving to the cloud. Monitoring servers is no longer important, cloud services are.

There is no cloud awareness in the system, which is going to force partners to pilot to other systems.

Clients and Locations are organized in an easy-to-view tree, which allows easy access to a customer's inventory.

Several dataviews are available from a Client or Location to quickly gather information of an environment. For example, a list of 'scheduled tasks' configured on every system can be gathered from all systems to determine why a particular event occurs every Saturday at 4am.

Remote Control of a system can be envoked with standard tools such as VNC or RDP, as well as ConnectWise Control (formerly Screen Connect).

Reports of client environments are just a click away, whether a question regarding system health is of issue, or if all systems have the latest patches and Anti-Virus updated.

Software runs on a MySQL backend, but only on Windows. Keeping MySQL tuned properly for environment size can be chore, whereas DB Engines such as MSSQL are a bit more automated and forgiving. As you bring more agents into the system, it's a good idea to run performance metrics on the MySQL server to see if any adjustments are necessary to maintain best performance of the system.

Telephone Support for the MySQL backend tends to yield different answers from each representative you talk to, and in my experience it was best to use general MySQL tuning documents that are available from Oracle.