Action1 vs. KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA)

For small teams having to deal with significant ammount of devices, I can't express how useful Action1 is. With very small effort, you can easily keep track of your devices, keep them up to date, deploy new software to your users, create recurring reports/alerts and so on. Initially, the 100 endpoints for free was also a nice touch. Now, even better since they increased to 200. For the forseeable future, I have not to worry about costs and still can't believe it's a full solution for free, not those freeware stuff where what you really desire is behind a cost.

Incentivized

I think it has added value for any organization. It reduced our Tech Support cost by: -Supporting users anywhere -Reducing users downtime as well keep them informed with the status of their tickets -Managing software and hardware actively -Processing automation -deploy mass software installs, patching or updates - Provide approved software's to users to install without IT help

Incentivized

• Provide a friendly and easy-to-use interface to manage all my endpoints
• Provide automated patch management that can be placed on a schedule. Patch approval is easy and intuitive
• Scan for available software updates and readily report critical updates
• Uploading and installing software via the Action1 console is very easy to use
• The app deployment works very well and fast

• Helpdesk ticketing, the software allows not only the building of a portal that the users can log into to submit the tickets, but it also allows them to generate a ticket via email, which is a huge successful implementation that we have had.
• Live inventory tracking. With an agent installed on a PC, as long as we maintain the data, it can report back information that is crucial to the machine.
• Web portal makes for easy maintenance and implementation of the software and updates.

Incentivized

• Lots of times Action1 will identify a program that needs to be patched, but then not really have a path laid out to get that done...so they just remain as they are, but are tagged as such.
• Really wants to replace the windows update mechanism. Resists (or did at least) you if you try to keep updates as they are and update occasionally from Action1
• Could develop the scripts section a bit more, looked pretty sparse last time I checked it out.

Incentivized

• Administrative interface can be slow at times, and does require some decent PC specifications to run adequately.
• The cost of the KACE solution can be very expensive depending on how many agents you plan to deploy
• There is a learning curve in order to master KACE's capabilities - however Quest does provide lots of resources to dig into. It is not as intuitive as it could be.

Incentivized

Price, functionality, and continuous improvement of the product.

Incentivized

Agent deployment is simple (and silent) - once that is done, you're good to go. Everything is simple, centralized and very easy to work with. There isn't one aspect of this platform that requires crawling over forums and Google, it just works!

Incentivized

Overall, the software is simple to understand and use. That said, most vendors have been slowly updating their user interfaces to HTML5 so that they have a clean updated look and feel. This is where KACE falls short in that the UI is great for a packaged software 10 years ago. This isn't a major limitation as the software is really meant primarily for technology users.

Incentivized

I never contacted support services

Incentivized

KACE does exactly what you need it to do, it maintains your computer environment. You can set patch schedules, inventory computers, setup software catalogs; basically everything you need to ensure the computers on your network are being actively managed. This is all with little need for constant configuration or updating the setup.

Incentivized

very easy to start using it.

Incentivized

After looking at different solutions, Action1 [Cloud Remote Monitoring and Management Solution] was the perfect fit for us that delivered all of the features we wanted without being as costly as some of the others alternatives we've looked at. There was no minimum endpoint count and they even offer up to 50 endpoints for free, which is really great for a small organization like us to help us lower our starting costs and still allows us to grow at our pace without having to commit to a defined amount of endpoints to start.

For our size organization, KACE offered a more complete solution that was easier to understand and deploy when compared to Ivanti. It was also more affordable to get the features we wanted. Ivanti might be more appropriate in a larger environment. You would definitely need someone that was primarily dedicated to run behind Ivanti.

Incentivized

• Saved hours per week on patching and able to ensure a 100% patching success rate.
• Able to create custom alerting on potential problems as well as able to create some automation to automatically address problems.
• Improved support to our remote locations and users.
• Custom deployments allow us to have a mechanism to deploy custom applications we build as well as other third party applications we need to distribute.

Incentivized

• The time savings on Windows patching through the KACE SMA alone has helped us in saving hundreds of technician hours.
• Ticket tracking through the KACE SMA has reduced the amount of calls to our helpdesk asking about the status of a ticket.
• The tracking of licensed software through the KACE SMA has kept us in compliance and saved time from having to run around and look to see where the software is installed.

Incentivized