Action1 vs. Symantec Ghost Solution Suite

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

It helps to manage the mass of computers we use. We use GSS to see where and who deployed software to what computers. This can particularly be helpful when dealing with license usage, and tracking how many licenses we have left, and where those licenses have been used. We are able to use it to manage clients.

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

• Ghost Cast [Server} gets the job done.
• Easy to use.
• Nice UI.

• 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

• Even though Ghost Solution Suite saves configurations, software settings and installation within the image, there is still some manual configuration that needs to be done once the image is complete.
• Installing Drivers for specific models of computers. With Ghost Solution Suite, it can be difficult to get the drivers for all the hardware of all the different model computers, so you have to create different images for different model computers. It would be nice to have the ability to have a hardware independent image for all model computers
• Image Size. Ghost does have compression to reduce the size of the image, but when you have to store all the drivers within the image it increases the total size of the image you need to manage.

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

I never contacted support services

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.

Based on our particular company needs, we selected Ghost primarily for the cost. There are better products out there to deploy new computers. KACE was one of the products tested. I used KACE at a previous company and I can say KACE is a more effective deployment method, but the cost prevented us form going with this product. Also, since we have one single standard image it was very easy to manage Ghost for all our employee computers. We also standardized to one single hardware model computer which also made the decision to use Ghost easier.

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

• Initial setup took a long time to nail down. Once support figured out the issues, it was smooth.
• After implementation, capturing and deploying images were smooth.
• Being able to quickly deploy software, or move users to new AD groups, or manage power of the machines quickly made us enjoy the software even more.

Incentivized