Pulseway vs PingPlotter: Which is a better fit?

Bryan W.: My name is Bryan. I'm an IT specialist over at Shopper Approved. We've got about just under 50 employees. I give Pulseway an overall rating of five stars. Before Pulseway, I was using Action1. The problems with Action1, it was an early product. It was lacking some features that a more mature product offers. Pulseway gave me those tools, better remote support and better reporting, various other features like that. The biggest reason we went with Pulseway is price. I looked at several other competitors, and Pulseway offered the best price for what we got. And it gave us third-party patching. It gave us a great remote tool that offered remote file transfer. They have a network discovery feature in there, so I can use it to automatically look for new devices, things like that. Yeah, getting started with Pulseway, they gave me a trial, if I remember correctly, and using that trial, I was able to sort of test things out beforehand. And then, once we decided on the product, they were able to take that trial environment and just turn it into the full one, so I didn't have to do any additional setup. But they did give us additional onboarding, so if you didn't do the trial or didn't set up anything, they'll help you and walk you through setting it up. The agent's super easy to install. You can deploy it across the whole fleet if you needed to. It even has Active Directory Discovery, so if it's connected to a domain, it can just install it that way. If you're looking at getting Pulseway, I would just make sure you do look at other competitors. If there's something that you can't afford, there are definitely better products that offer more features or better robust features for a higher price. So, if price isn't an issue, it may not be a bad idea to look elsewhere. But if you are trying to find something on the budget side, Pulseway is a great place to start. They offer lots of add-ons, lots of integrations. Do know that the product is owned by Kaseya. Some people may not care for that. But that's [inaudible 00:02:35].

Paul: Hi, I'm Paul. I'm the director of institutional research, and I give PingPlotter a five out of five. For more reviews like this, click below. Previous to using PingPlotter. I was suffering along with the command line ping tracer through Microsoft Windows. And what that required is for me to identify every hop in my path to the destination that I was trying to access. And it just wasn't working. PingPlotter does a great job of providing all of that information on one easy to see screen. I chose PingPlotter at the recommendation of our in-house IT department after experiencing serious packet loss and connectivity issues with our ISP. Once the pandemic started and everyone was working from home, the traffic demands were not enabling me to connect to our virtual network and to do the things that I needed to do in order to be productive. After a lot of frustration and troubleshooting by our IT folks, they suggested installing PingPlotter and tracing, snapshotting, and forwarding to the ISP the various error reports that I was receiving. And that really helped to resolve the connectivity issues I was having. Getting started with PingPlotter is dead bang simple. You're going to need one thing, and that's the IP address of your destination. PingPlotter provides some pretty common places like Google and CNN and Akamai, but in my case, I needed a very specific IP address for the virtual machine that I was trying to connect with through our virtual network. And that's the hardest part, but our IT staff gave that to me. I entered the numbers and went off to the races. Now, it's just a matter of opening up PingPlotter, selecting that destination, and I get the map and the results, and it runs in the background without problem. I would recommend that PingPlotter is a great place to start. There are several different versions of it. One of them is free and the version that I've been using is actually the free one. There are a few limitations to it, but not many. And I'm able to get around those limitations by using snips and snaps, screenshots to capture the data that I need. But if you want to cough up for a more elaborate, more capable program that has that functionality built in, you can pay a subscription fee. Our IT department uses a third version of the program, and that's really geared at network administrator types and has much more technical information than I need access to. But the way to start with PingPlotter is with the free version.