Datto Remote Monitoring and Management vs Microsoft Configuration Manager comparison

"The alerting system helps us determine what are high level alerts, and what are alerts which can wait for a day or two. We catch RAID failures, hot servers, bad drives (or predicted failures on drives), etc."

"The project management and task management features work well. It's a decent product in that regard."

"AEM support is great for Macs."

"I also like how Datto integrates seamlessly with the Autotask ticketing system."

"Even when the connection to the server is lost, the monitoring continues without interruption."

"It has a single pane of glass, and it integrates well with other software."

"The remote tool is nice. If a user needs assistance, I don't have to tell the user to do anything. I just ask the user if I can remote in, and 30 seconds later, I have remoted in. It has been really handy."

"The tool's main valuable features are its ease of use and intuitive console. It's very easy to implement and create policies. I don't need highly technical staff to manage the tool, which is a big advantage."

"Endpoint Manager is valuable to our organization because it allows us to connect to our enterprise from remote locations securely. The most useful feature is its robustness and scalability. It is highly scalable and flexible, allowing us to use it in various environments. Additionally, we can specialize the policies related to each device group. This ensures that each group has access to the applications they need for their work and non-work hours."

"It has the ability to perform mass distribution."

"The solution effectively handles inventory management, deployment, and reporting."

"The solution is highly scalable."

"The technical support is good."

"Automation of operating system, application, and update deployments massively reduces IT operations effort."

"SCCM is a stable solution."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is the software deployment. Additionally, Microsoft integrates most of the other solutions well with one another."

"The main challenge was implementing patch management for software that was not in the tool's standard library or catalog."

"Be prepared to spend a lot of time on conversions if you have a lot of clients."

"The CRM capabilities are not very good. It's clunky and could work a lot better than it does. There are no marketing add-ins, for example."

"The only area where I see room for improvement is the ability to delay the application of patches for a set number of days."

"Sometimes we have some downtime when Datto is doing updates. Maybe it's because of the cloud service they use. I'm not sure if they're going through AWS or Azure or what. That's happened, but the outages have been few and far between."

"I would like the ability to remotely manage configuration and settings on individual units. Some organizations have a certain device configuration that needs to be consistent across all computers. For example, if we have computers that cannot go to sleep or hibernate because they're being accessed remotely, we need to be able to quickly configure those computers to not hibernate. With Datto, there is no easy and/or direct way to accomplish this. I can't create a group called No Hibernate and drag all those computers to that group so that they do not go into hibernation. There is no easy way to put in a policy or a procedure like that. It's still back to going to each computer and doing it by hand, which is what I'm trying to get away from. I want to automate and simplify as much as possible. I write code and scripts to do most of my work anyways. The intention is to get away from me having to be so hands-on."

"They have a tab to provide information about the type of hardware the computers have. One thing they don't specify is what model of hard drive the computers have. Identification of storage models would be nice."

"The actual setup and the automation of their product are horrific. When you buy it, there is nothing out of the box. You have to custom design it for everything you want it to do. You pay for implementation, but they don't really do a whole lot to help you get it going. I know it does a lot more than what ours is set up to do, which is frustrating. When I've demoed other systems, their setup is so much better. When you pay for their setup, there is so much more, whereas I just feel like we didn't get a very good setup."

"It does seem a bit buggy from time to time."

"The main thing is that SCCM has to become an appliance instead of a server. When I say appliance, it has to come preconfigured so that it is drop-shipped into the enterprise and then you activate the feature sets that you want. It should pull down all the latest binaries. Once that is all there, it should have a discovery tool which goes out and discovers the assets within an enterprise. If the server, workstation, and applications are all coming from the same vendor, why not have the vendor do this work for us and automate it as much as it possibly can?"

"Marketing: Our management doesn't understand that there is a piece of software which helps them automate and manage the entire network, as far as operating systems on computers."

"The tool's deployment can be cumbersome."

"They should improve their anti-malware policies like the SCEP policies. For instance, you can't have different policies for different servers, there is only one policy in all the servers, and everything is covered under that. For example, say you want to scan one group of servers on Saturday, and then you want to scan another group of servers on Sunday, you can't do that. You have to scan all your servers, a regular scan or a full scan, on the same day and at the same time. That's definitely one thing they need to resolve. In the next release, it would actually be nice if they included Apple products. It will also help if you can use Intune again. Their compliance reporting feature could also be better. They can maybe work a bit on that for patching now. It would be better if SCCM came with the functions of Right Click Tools built-in. If SCCM would have all those functions already built-in, we won't have to go and spend $5,000, just as an add-in from another company to get those functions."

"A lot of experience is needed in terms of troubleshooting, as this is one of the most difficult tasks in MECM. We were seven people in a group and I was the only one that had the patience to do the troubleshooting at times."

"SCCM should strive to enhance the accuracy of its reporting functions in order to avoid any issues with incorrect or inaccurate data."

"The tool's deployment is complex and depends on the architecture you want to implement."

"It goes by how many endpoints you have. It is about $3,000 a month for us. If we can't figure it out ourselves and need additional help to set it up, we would have to pay for that."

"Regarding pricing, Kaseya sells it as part of a bundle called Kaseya 360. This package includes several tools, such as EDR, ransomware protection, and more. Considering the bundle, the price is reasonable. However, where I am in Brazil, the high dollar rate and taxes make it not cheap for mid-sized companies. Still, it's competitively priced compared to similar tools."

"AEM is a lot more scalable as you just pay per agent instead of having to purchase expensive licenses."

"It fluctuates on the number of computers you have. Depending on the number of computers you have, it can fluctuate anywhere between $5 to $10 per computer per month, which is not too bad. I am not aware of any additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee. It was one flat rate per device."

"The license typically depends on the number of endpoints. On the RMM side, I think we're paying around $2,250 per endpoint. Then there is also a license per user and tech, so that comes out to about a hundred bucks per tech, give or take."

"We had to pay out some overtime for a few problematic sites. Sites on domain networks are incredibly easy to install. We learned a few tricks that streamlined the process, but in the beginning, it was a bit tedious."

"Microsoft provides a steep price for their enterprise products, but they offer very competitive pricing for their legacy customers."

"The solution is expensive. Microsoft Configuration Manager would likely be considered high-priced for small businesses because they may not fully utilize all of its features and capabilities."

"Pricing and licensing are horrible. You have to not look at dollar value to use SCCM. It's super-duper expensive but it works. The acquisition cost is expensive, it's labor-intensive. But it works."

"There is not a license needed to use the solution."

"The price is competitive and reasonable."

"Presently, I am using a free trial version."

"I would rate the cost as eight out of ten."

"The price of SCCM depends on the size of the organization. The price is competitive."