ConnectWise PSA vs. Gist

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.

Gist is perfect for SaaS I'd say, and perfect for long sales cycles with lots of lead nurturing involved, and for scenarios where you re-market via FB ads, because there's FB custom audience integration built into the workflows. Perfect for customer service and support. Really outstanding there. It's a little less suited to ecom but they're hammering out the finishing touches to make ecom cart recovery easier.

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.

• Gist provides endless ways of interacting with customers. I can chat and email with them, track their usage on my site, qualify them, add tags and other profile information, and so much more.
• There is even an awesome live view that lets me spy on visitors to see how they're using the site.
• The tools are powerful, easy to use, and constantly getting improvements. It seems like every week there is another update being rolled out that substantially extends the functionality or usability of the features in Gist.

• 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

• Free plan limits are too low.
• Chatbots should work not only for Gist's native online chat, but also for the other chat-based channels such as Facebook. (instead of having to use another software for that purpose)
• Pricing structure - Support bot should not be an add-on but a core feature.

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

Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder

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

Gist does pretty much anything you want it to when it comes to managing your contacts. Sometimes I wish it updated faster, but wait a few beats and it gets there. I really love that I can show a colleague how to use the chat messenger and they understand it right away. Very user friendly!

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

I have communicated with their team multiple times and every time they have been very responsive, knowledgeable, and polite. They work to make sure you are happy and informed of what is going on. Better their team keeps up to date with their app, giving you new features, and keeping you notified and educated about what they are and how to use them. A+

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

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.

They both seem to have parity with each other with each having their own small advantages. I went with Gist because it was more affordable. Infusionsoft customer for almost 5 years and it seemed I was always working more on getting it to work instead of getting work done. Gist is so intuitive I had it setting up and running the basics in a few hours.

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

• Our ROI has increased significantly because of Gist's chat and app integration into our website. Contact forms are great but a real-time conversation means you can be more effective in meeting your customer's needs.
• The additional features in the recent upgrade mean we can use Gist for more. They have always been effective for email campaigns, but the addition of the knowledge base and more effective workflows means we can automate more. This has saved us from buying more software.