Kaseya VSA vs. N-able N-central

This package is well suited for businesses of any size that needs a method of connecting to systems on or off the network. This is one of the few packages that doesn't require the end user to provide permission before allowing the techs to connect which is what my agency needed as we have a majority of our systems are used by "general public" that walk in our doors and if they are doing something that they are not supposed to it would be unlikely that they would grant permission for us to access the systems.

Incentivized

In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).

• Scripting - Very powerful scripting engine that allows us to update/install applications and maintain PC's and Servers.
• Policy Management - Globally configured policies allowing us to make changes to thousands of PC's quickly.
• Monitoring - Monitoring engine allows us to Proactively respond to alerts quickly minimizing downtime significantly.
• Patch Management - This module requires minimal effort to manage and maintain.

Incentivized

• Robust patch management: it is easy to set up patching groups via tags, and configures patch management profiles and maintenance windows.
• Remote Control: as long as the agent checks in, it is very quick and easy to take control of an endpoint, either in a separate session (RDP, kick the current user out), or to join the existing session of the current user, to provide desktop support or collaborate remotely.

Incentivized

• The only area I can see where a lot of room for improvement can be made is in scripting of Agent procedures. Making operations more modular and able to be assembled by technicians who might not be strong in a scripting environment would be helpful. In the mean time, Kaseya has an entire site and a whole team of developers who write Agent procedures for common tasks and make them available for free to all Kaseya VSA customers.

Incentivized

• Expensive software
• The support team are terrible
• Sales team will promise the world to get you over the line
• Subscription management is tedious
• Old software with very little development and the support team will not provide any further information on this - no roadmap
• Integrations galore - but none of them are effective

Excellent product with easy learning curve

Incentivized

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

Incentivized

I think this is a solid tool for enterprise IT, however it would be higher if Kaseya VSA addresses the areas raised around recent stability, their support team, multiple session & screen support etc. It does do it's main job and allows an easy way for IT to operate and is mostly fine.

Incentivized

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

Incentivized

It was lots of back and forth email communication whenever I tried to solve my connection issues. I would send them detailed logs of the date, time, computer, and more of when I was experiencing connection issues. All I would get is an email back a few days later saying that they didn't find an issue in the service

Incentivized

Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.

Incentivized

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

Incentivized

We moved away from NinjaRMM for support of PowerShell scripting and APIs. Overall, the experience with NinjaRMM, though limited in features, was tenfold better than our experience with VSA. We have been desiring strongly to move away from VSA to N-Central (having been provided a full demo that we installed on our cloud infrastructure) but have been unable to do so due to Kaseya's draconian contract policies. It's important to note that NinjaRMM was allowing us to go month-to-month and switching to Kaseya VSA was one of the worst business decisions I ever made. It's equally important to note that, if you are considering Kaseya VSA, you will be locked into a 3-year contract that is nearly impossible to escape from once the documents are signed. SolarWinds N-central only requires a 1-year contract and then has month-to-month billing available. I can provide no good reason for anyone to consider Kaseya VSA when there are dozens of better systems out there to choose from.

Most advanced, and other technicians in the business already used it before. NinjaOne was a close competitor, but lacked some features that we ideally need. ITarian was too basic but was MUCH cheaper. For a startup MSP, it would be much more attractive. Splashtop was just for remote connections, which we used for some time before realizing full RMMs were a better fit for our requirements.

Incentivized

• It has increased the efficiency of operational tasks for our technicians
• It has change the speed at which we are able to deploy updates and software patches
• It caused us to spend additional money on more security tools due to concern from breaches

Incentivized

• The product definitely increases productivity. Technicians can spend a few seconds to take care of remote tasks with a few clicks as opposed to minutes to get a user to start a remote control session, or worse, going on site to work on a piece of equipment.
• The packaging of the features makes selling and pricing the product fairly straight-forward and convenient. This saves our sales team time from trying to work with add-ons when pricing our services - the product makes it easy to just have an "all you can eat" package at a set price.
• When something goes wrong with the product, our business and our customers suffer. If for example, a bug causes all managed computers to reboot, our customers call in, resulting in our technicians being booked solid doing damage control. This also causes loss of trust with our customers - we can't simply blame the product, the customer trusts us to provide them a service and if the product fails, we fail.