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ManageEngine Endpoint Central vs N-able N-central comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

ManageEngine Endpoint Central
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Client Desktop Management (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (4th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (2nd)
N-able N-central
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. ManageEngine Endpoint Central is designed for Client Desktop Management and holds a mindshare of 34.5%, down 42.0% compared to last year.
N-able N-central, on the other hand, focuses on Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM), holds 9.2% mindshare, down 11.4% since last year.
Client Desktop Management
Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM)
 

Featured Reviews

Charles A - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective vulnerability, desktop, and patch management
We are using ManageEngine Endpoint Central primarily for desktop management. It allows us to deploy patches, manage antivirus, control endpoints like DLP, and more The most valuable feature to me is the vulnerability management. It also has effective patch management capabilities. The main issue…
Dimitri V G - PeerSpot reviewer
Maximizing operational efficiency with comprehensive monitoring and automation capabilities
There are areas in N-able N-central that could be improved. We always started it from the basic purpose of monitoring hardware, where vendors such as HP and Dell try to sell their own services which monitor and provide a dashboard, which is their logic. They want to make their own recurring revenue on that. We notice that SNMP has had a good run and still sometimes is used, but it's becoming an issue to maintain the same capabilities because HP makes it unreliable or even removes certain features that we used to be able to validate redundant array of independent disks. Our service that has been running for 15-20 years suddenly is not working anymore because HP decided in generation 10 plus and above, or generation 10 hardware in servers, storage controllers particularly, they just didn't put the SNMP OIDs anymore. We are now following that market change or business change in hardware monitoring and the future is Redfish, REST API, IPMI type of monitoring with the REST API and Redfish being most common. We have to do the effort ourselves because Enable is not really strategically going there because I assume there's not much money to make to improve that or to convince customers to start with their product. That issue could be better if they would be more prepared for that change and give us customers more tools, preconfigured, pre-available custom services for Redfish, REST API, where we just have to put a few items username, password and address and some dots and commas, but that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, which we are doing at the moment. We are using HP iLO commandlets and REST APIs for Aruba. Dell is making it very hard to monitor their hardware. If it has an iDRAC, I can manage it and monitor it, but if it's something that's less common or due to the portfolio, they have done a good job at not exposing information about health. We would just want to have a red or a green dot that indicates if this device is healthy or not healthy. Since nobody's investing in SNMP because it's a liability in security, they should invest in making a REST API and preferably also do the work on making it easy to pull or push information. That's something that the industry in general and Enable in particular could do a significant job to help us monitor.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"One of the benefits of Desktop Central is it made the provisioning process simpler because now we have a provisioning package. We have around 1,500 laptops at the moment and all these PCs were provisioned by a provisioning package. In the provisioning package, we have integrated every aspect of renaming, deploying applications, patching, etc., so we simply execute the provisioning package and as soon as it's executed, it will install the management agent. Once the agent is installed, it will take care of all the tasks, so we don't have to sit in front of the computer to prepare the machine. This really helps us to provision the PC quickly with our agent."
"ManageEngine Desktop Central has greatly improved our organization by utilizing Service Desk Plus to monitor and keep track of issues that our end users report to our Help Desk Department. We also have written in the ode of our company's software to notify Support if an end-user experience an issue and does not report it."
"Its cross-platform capabilities and the ability to do both OS-level patching and third-party patching are valuable. It is difficult to find a software product that will do all that for you out of the box, and you don't have to do any configuration other than your initial setup. Once you do that, there is a very minimalistic approach to getting it operational. You can have it up and running within a 20-minute time span."
"The reporting tool is very good."
"The most important feature we found to be useful in the COVID situation is the secure connection, which gives the IT support staff the ability to seamlessly connect with the users remotely and in a secure way."
"ManageEngine Desktop Central is stable."
"The dashboard has been very useful."
"Desktop Central has improved these organizations and this is why it has been repeated multiple times at multiple organizations. If something works and is getting better it is worth repeating."
"I like the remote connectivity, reporting suite, and patch management module."
"N-able N-central has numerous good features. The asset tracking capability is powerful, allowing you to track hardware and software on devices connected to your network. The remote control is smooth, securely enabling remote access to servers and routers. It can be integrated with ticketing systems and other tools like CrowdStrike and N-able EDR for comprehensive network monitoring and security. The automation feature is handy, allowing you to schedule tasks, respond to system triggers, and automate problem resolution, such as handling disk space issues automatically."
"The support is at a good level. So normally, we can always get to a solution when we are stuck with some monitoring problems that we encounter."
"The most valuable features of N-central are its ease of deployment and ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of N-able N-central is the many options it has."
"The most helpful features of N-able N-central include providing a single pane of glass for many insights in an environment regarding their patching, their assets, their devices in general, and the active issues that they show."
"It's a very robust product. They're continuing to invest and put new enhancements into the product. They're very open about what their roadmap is, which is very good for us because then as a business, we can plan."
"N-able N-central is very scalable."
 

Cons

"The product's remote access manager needs improvement."
"Documentation could improve so we don't need to create the support requests first."
"Even when it shows Java as up-to-date, it might not be. So, to make it better, they should improve the accuracy of Java patch reporting."
"I would like to have the option to install the agent remotely."
"Desktop Central has very good information, however, you can't customize the dashboards."
"I would like to see them include the ability to find out the network usage but I believe that might be a feature of it already."
"The reports provided by the product are an area of concern where improvements are required. The visibility provided by the reports is not very attractive."
"The product must provide more API integrations with different ERP tools."
"The support from our direct team is very good, but the support from their day-to-day ongoing help desk isn't that good. They have still got some work to do on that, but they have been focusing on that a lot over the last number of years. So, it has gotten a lot better than it was."
"The industry has moved towards Redfish for out-of-band and in-band monitoring, yet N-able N-central still relies on older protocols like SNMP."
"N-able N-central could improve the remote access, my technicians have complained about it. They have used other free tools instead to compensate, such as TeamViewer. Additionally, when using remote access on the web, it is lacking reports."
"The integration with other applications could be better."
"There is room for improvement in the development of custom monitoring services."
"The solution's overall integration should be improved."
"Involving AI in the platform could improve it further."
"At this moment, we encounter stability issues with N-able N-central from time to time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is cheap."
"The pricing is average."
"The pricing is very low, compared to other products. Compared to Intune or SCCM, it's much less. I can say it's a good product for less of a price."
"The initial purchase was around $6,000 or $7,000. We most probably are not on an annual subscription. We bought it, and then we pay for the maintenance. I'm not 100% sure how that's working out."
"There are multiple flavors of the app. They have a distributed version for enterprises. It depends on your size. They price it on a per machine basis. 250 or 500 is probably their least amount."
"Affordable for any customer."
"The product is not expensive."
"I have been using the free version and am in the stage where I have to decide if I will proceed with the paid license, or instead choose another product."
"N-able N-central is not an expensive solution."
"The pricing and licensing are average, almost six out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Performing Arts
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How to choose between ManageEngine Desktop Central and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (formerly SCCM)?
ManageEngine Desktop Central is very easy to set up, is scalable, stable, and also has very good patch management. What I like most about ManageEngine is that I can log on to every PC very easily a...
What do you like most about ManageEngine Endpoint Central?
Well, what we like is that it catch actually a lot of features constantly upgrading. So all the three maybe there there were some features as the tenant on the earliest version. Now it's it's almos...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ManageEngine Endpoint Central?
The pricing is cheaper compared to other MDM products, but I don't remember the exact details.
What needs improvement with N-able N-central?
There are areas in N-able N-central that could be improved. We always started it from the basic purpose of monitoring hardware, where vendors such as HP and Dell try to sell their own services whic...
What is your primary use case for N-able N-central?
My use cases for N-able N-central always start with hardware monitoring, but since Enable expanded its portfolio, it's always getting more and more options and use cases. Sometimes we start with th...
 

Also Known As

ManageEngine Desktop Central, Desktop Central, ManageEngine Desktop Management MSP
SolarWinds N-central, SolarWinds MSP N-central
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Strathallan School, BMI Healthcare, Comercial Kywi, First Priority Federal Credit Union, Gerab National Enterprises
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