Datto Autotask PSA vs. HaloITSM

In my opinion, Datto Autotask is exceptionally complicated to set up, manage, and use on a daily basis. I would think the target market for this product would be someone managing a team of 20 - 50 people, possibly more. In my experience, for it to run properly you will need to dedicate at least half an FTE to running this product in an organization of that size per month. I would not recommend it for companies with less than 10 people or for companies that value quick communication with their clients. I would not recommend it for companies using Datto's RMM product. The integration exists, but it is clearly a bolt-on. They were not developed together and they are slow to talk to each other. Frequently you cannot add details from RMM sessions into the PSA without manually copying the ticket number, and if the ticket is more than a week old, then you can't even find it with the ticket number.

Incentivized

HALO is very much suited to the IT Support Desk environment and works very well. It offers all the functionality that is required to run a service plus much more. I can't really comment on the other modules yet as we haven't really fully utilised them, but hopefully will in the future.

• AutoTask allows for us to receive and work support tickets very easily. We've setup various 'Issue Types' that in turn are bound to SLAs ensuring that items are worked appropriately as they are received.
• The automation that AutoTask allows for with regards to various emails/requests coming through has been great. It allows for us to not have to constantly "watch the queue" as when a critical item arrives the appropriate persons are notified and can work it.
• I feel that the management of AutoTask for both user setup, and various automations is done well. We're able to copy settings as needed, and create templates for multiple items.

Incentivized

• Ticketing Structure
• The ticketing structure (allowing us to add custom fields and tables) and the process are quick, clean, and easy to adapt to our changing needs. Change requests are processed within a few hours (complex ones take longer, purely for testing), however, the whole solution is geared to customization and the more you work with it the more you get out of it
• SLA's
• Detailed SLAs for each part of the business, with multiple tiers, time frames, reporting, and alerting options - a different config for every team configured with a few simple clicks
• Time Management
• Excellent granular reporting that lets you drill in, both from a business perspective as to how many hours are being spent on different activities and from a support perspective, where are your teams spending their team.
• Reporting
• Excellent set of customizable reports (hundreds of them) along with a reporting tool (For which a little SQL does go a long way) and for those fiddly reports, free support is only a call away.
• Role Assignments
• Simple role assignments that make updating changes to teams and departments the work of minutes rather than days. Easy to apply and each person can have multiple roles. Simple but powerful and very sleek.

• The GUI is a little dated.
• Some integrations are limited for not being a Datto product.
• While not as complex to set up as Connectwise, it definitely requires some serious thought during the initial setup.
• Email processing could offer more options for parsing keywords and allow for more automation.
• The mobile app is just not worth using in my experience.

Incentivized

• Support for M365 \ Power Platform, Power Bi reporting in particular
• Feel the asset management side of the product is not as good as the ticket management
• Support is excellent but maybe an old school user forum where other admins can share and discuss ideas

After using multiple products on the market, Autotask was intuitive and easy to manage.

Incentivized

Datto Autotask PSA is a full featured product that can do almost anything you need. There is a significant learning curve to get started which requires several hours spent in product training. Additionally, several hours / days are needed to get clients imported, contracts configured, and integrations implemented. Once the setup and user training is complete, the product is very functional, but it's imperative to not get overwhelmed when starting out.

Incentivized

Its simple and intuitiuve - requires minimal training to get people in and working at speed

They are fairly quick at returning a response to a problem and have been able to fix all issues for the most part.

Incentivized

I've made overall positive experiences with the Halo support. The only thing to increase would be some follow ups on feature requests. If someone would reach out to me, telling me wheter or not my feature request will be considered in future updates or not.

Incentivized

The portion of Autotask that we've used other companies for prior to using Autotask is the Endpoint Management. The Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM) portal integrates perfectly with their PSA/CRM tools. It's alerting features are much better than the above software as there aren't a bunch of superfluous and unneeded alerts. Instead, it only alerts for things that you specify that you want. Alerts aside, for the PSA/CRM, I don't have much to compare it to as Autotask was the first PSA we tried. It's hard to imagine a PSA having more features or doing a better job than Autotask.

Incentivized

Based on our requirements, this is how we scored them. Halo - 78, ServiceNow - 77, Ivanti - 67, Jira - 57, Freshservice - 41. This was based purely on our requirements and whether additional modules required additional licences.

Incentivized

• We were able to identify the profitability of our entire client base.
• We identified a loss of over 1 million dollars for time unbilled consultancy fees using metrics derived from Autotask.
• Autotask helped us serve our client base in a professional manner, it's like having an entire department at your finger tips.
• Autotask is the heartbeat of our operation.

Incentivized

• It enabled us to allow our Service Desk Staff to work from home during COVID and this has continued ever since.
• We have halved our average resolution time.
• Some of the automation processes, when implemented alongside the MS Power Platform, have saved approximately 30 hours a month. This includes times when customers were unable to access the system until they had been trained. This is now automated via Halo and they get sent to on-demand training, instead of waiting up to 3 weeks for the next scheduled session.

Incentivized