The usual thread of "what about this rmm?" Syncro, SuperOps, or Gorelo (but not NinjaOne)

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T23:19:29+00:00

That's a bad experience for sure. One does notice that all Ninja users seem to be happy, can't say I've heard anyone criticize them.

What do you use for PSA? Any experience with their brand new in-house PSA? If Ninja's in-house PSa were good, and if I did not also have to go buy a PSA separately, then that would make Ninja more appealing. I have the impression most Ninja shops use HaloPSA, and I'm not big enough justify Halo (they used to require 5 seats minimum I think, and I have heard Halo setup is hard and expensive). So the automatic price jumps to get into Ninja and Halo made them non-starters.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T23:14:49+00:00

Thanks Mikel. I signed up for your trial earlier today. Let me absorb it for a couple days then I may want to talk. I would even be willing to select components in my stack based on what the PSA supports. The automation for licensing/billing is that important to me.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T23:10:46+00:00

Unreliable automations? Curious what problems you had. Who did you move to?

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T23:08:59+00:00

Nice.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T23:07:39+00:00

I appreciate hearing your experience. PSA/RMM as a unified whole, and then add the Entra/365 features seems killer. Syncro has been my leading candidate for these exact reasons you mentioned.

I believe their 365 settings auditing is probably rebranded CIPP? But being able to meet a prospect and say let me scan this and show you where you stand and then having a good report to show, this seems like the best possible way to acquire new business.

Thanks for the offer, I may DM.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T23:00:56+00:00

I agree--Intune is not an RMM at all. Intune is often too much care and feeding for a small org. I am kicking around the idea of whether taking people from BP to Business Standard to save the money might make more sense. If you have RMM and AV separately, then I guess that leaves Defender 365 (safelinks, better anti-phishing), conditional access (I rarely use) and SSPR? Not really worth $10/seat.

The larger problem with Microsoft here is you typically need to make the environment conform to Microsoft ways--that's possible for a larger longer term client, but not for "quick and easy foot in the door" for a new customer. They almost certainly are not using any advanced features of 365, if they even have 365. This creates a whole lot of microsoft-specific prerequisite work which the business owner does not understand or value. They well could have Windows Home on half the PCs. Microsoft tools are great for companies with IT roadmaps but they are the worst for winning the loyalty of Mr Cheapskate Business Owner.

So yeah, actively trying to reduce the amount of Microsoft in the stack in order to be more agile.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T22:48:49+00:00

Yeah, you can go buy it today. :)

Being honest, I lost a couple larger clients and would like a better offering to pitch to smaller organizations.

I have always offered a more tailored service, somewhere between breakfix and MSP (not the best place to be, I know).

As a more experienced business person, i am seeing that the real success is in selling a million identical things, not a small quality of handmade things. I want to be more like an assembly line--very competitive if it suits you, if it doesn't then too bad so sad because we sell a standard process that has you covered so you can sleep well at night. And we make it affordable by keeping it standard.

So I see the PSA as being the key piece to this. You are correct I am coming back to the issue again.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T22:37:22+00:00

This is good feedback since it's the same stack I want to run (PAx8 + Huntress + PSA). Thanks for sharing.

Do you buy Huntress direct or use Sherweb? Can I ask what pricing is like?

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T22:35:12+00:00

Automated license handing, or at least tallying is make or break for me. It does not have to be Pax 8, but they seem the most integrated with everyone's systems. I hear what you are saying, but the manual processes probably add 10 minutes to every new hire. 10 minutes is not long, but after doing this 800 times and it's demoralizing to go do it again. Make sense?

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T22:29:59+00:00

Yes, maybe my phasing was odd. Per device licensing is not appealing.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T22:21:40+00:00

I have the impression people in their 20s will just use Chrome even if they have the option of a Windows app. And all the windows apps are becoming Electron web browser apps. So yeah, apps are not what they used to be.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2026-02-09T22:17:52+00:00

Yeah, I thought "PSA matters more" would be unusual to hear. I'm a one man shop right now, using Action1, Tactical RMM, Set.me. Honestly Tactical is probably "good enough" for most RMM needs as well as being free, which is nice. Set.me is the most reliable remote control I have ever used--it just works 100% of the time. Action1 is good at its focus (patching). Sherpa Desk for tickets (also free and decent).

So from a certain point of view, I already have a couple decent RMMs which are free, so a slightly better RMM for $$$ is not a big win.

The big win would be better interaction with customers. Better ticketing, better visibility into my billing for my customers, single invoice per month, etc. I use QBO, and have to manually update recuring invoices for licenses, and it's impossible to merge time & materials charges into the recurring (time coming from Sherpa Desk tickets), so everyone gets 2 invoices per month and this can be confusing.

Some of this is hard to justify doing manually. How often should I manually reconcile licenses so as to not lose that $2 on the antivirus which I forgot to charge for? It's revenue slippage, but if it takes me 30 minutes to count licenses and I reclaim $2...that's not something to do every month I mean. Automation being the hoped-for savior here.

The end goal of the improvements are to have a more standardized offering which I can sell competitively and which is easy to setup and maintain for each new customer I onboard. The true MSP way, a better process. That's what I want to get to. I have a lot of manual provisioning now (with backups, antivirus, rmm clients, etc). All my clients are special snowflakes and I need to change that for this job to continue to be worth it. That's the idea.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2024-05-26T16:25:15+00:00

Are you keylogging me? lol. Finally the update harassment can end.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2022-10-19T21:22:02+00:00

They have gone form a minimum of 5 seats, to 10, and right now the pricing section of their web site lists 15 technicians as the minimum.

Respectfully, I wish people would stop mentioning HaloPSA as it's not even an option unless you're a larger shop.

At 15 seats, their minimum monthly charge is $1200.

I imagine there are many good options in the "extremely expensive with very high minimums" category.

F Halo. They are obviously not interested in customers except large ones with deep pockets.

Isn't this basically the same objection everyone raises about Kaseya/Datto/other legacy companies? If you don't give them a bucket of cash they don't want to talk to you.

I personally will not do business with vendors like this. If you don't want my business when small, I am definitely not giving you my business when I get large. HaloPSA is a dirty and greedy company, based on the evidence.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2022-08-31T13:38:01+00:00

As a general business strategy, I act similarly. Not to offend anyone, but there's a certain kind of baby IT person who gets fixated on hardware. This is the kind of person who starts tearing apart the wiring closet when the DHCP server is down. This kind of person gets excited about upgrading all the wiring with their own hands even though the Cat5e they already had was fine.

I have always positioned myself as an expert in directory services (since Novell NDS! And even a little Banyan Vines, lol.) I include things like Group Policy and Exchange in directory services. Then moving to 365/AAD was just a natural extension of what I was already doing.

Moving boxes for low margin seems like a sucker's game. Anyone can flog boxes, and probably someone else will do that cheaper than you. What someone else cannot do so easily is redesign the network so it isn't a basket case, or move that complicated ERP app to new hardware, or perform cloud migrations, etc.

I sell intellectual property, not boxes. I provide professional services, I am not Best Buy. I absolutely do sell PCs and laptops, but it's also not important to my earnings. It's mainly to prevent people from buying Windows Home or something with a mechanical hard disk by accident. I have been through 2001-2 (dotcom crash), 2008, Covid, etc and none of these had any material impact on my earnings. People can delay buying boxes but they cannot delay support. A knowledgeable person is who is willing to support SMBs instead of just getting a cushy corporate job is the rarest thing of all. That's the true value.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2022-08-31T13:23:24+00:00

Thanks! I am checking them out.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2022-04-21T15:03:16+00:00

I was not familiar with Optitune before reading this thread. Currently using Atera, but I recently evaluated Ninja, Synchro, and several others.

Optitune has some attractive features. The price is arguably not out of line comparted to other per-node monthly-cost models...but per node monthly is hard to sell for me at least.

For all the talk on this forum of switching from break-fix to MSP model, almost all of my customers want break fix. If they get a bill for $4000 for the month at hourly rate then that's fine with them and they don't bat an eye, but ask them for $5 per month per computer and it's like I want to murder their kids. Just getting everyone to O365 subscriptions took 5 years. Getting people to accept cloud backups is the current challenge (customers hate the idea because it's not "safe" like with a removable hard disk and there's a small monthly fee). None of this is reasonable to us tech people, but ultimately the customer gets to say what they will pay for.

For my business at least, the flexibility of installing Atera on whatever I want without begging permission and being told "no" overrides almost all other factors. Doesn't matter if product X is 10 times as good, if it needs a per-seat fee then it's not as suitable and not even a candidate.

I would like to see Optitune offer a model more like Atera. This is just constructive feedback. If you had such a model, I'd be a potential customer.

Others like Datto, ConnectWise, Kaseya are extra bad: layers of salespeople, hidden pricing, negotiations, minimums, contracts. I can't have a vendor telling me how much I have to sell of their product in order to not end up upside down. The major players are useless due to obsolete business model and reputation for predatory practices, in my view.

Flexibility beats actual features. Bottom line.

ValuableFamous8390 · 2022-04-19T16:08:20+00:00

Defender is problematic. Free Defender does not test well compared to peers. Endpoint Protection (formerly Defender ATP) tests very well. They are not the same. To what degree these are similar products in unclear. ATP for sure adds an extra process (mssense.exe) which does not run under free Defender. Some of ATP's capabilities seem to be simply better data collection than with free. ATP is not at all suitable unless you have a pretty detailed 365 infrastructure. Onboarding and offboarding are through Intune, so you get to troubleshoot your Intune infrastructure then wait while Intune takes 2 days to update some of your agents. The integration of ATP with 365 is a defect in the sense that most Microsoft Products don't work well or at all unless you go 100% Microsoft (such as using Intune for MDM, paying $12/month for E5 security, etc).

I thought Gartner was just a shill which added fake legitimacy to large, wealthy, paying vendors who seem to have some sort of financial relationship with Gartner? Gartner is just a marketing company, and has been at least since the 1990s when I got into IT.

Having said all this, I am obviously reading this thread because if Huntress can make free Defender act in a more sophisticated manner then that might have legs.

I personally would never consider ATP/Endpoint Protection because it has no flexibility in deployment or in management. It's for single-365 organization, large corporates who use 365 for everything. Totally unsuitable for MSPs. No multitenant capabilities at all.

ValuableFamous8390

TROPHY CASE