Remote Utilities

[Nathan Igo]

While searching for a decent remote connection suite a few weeks ago I came across Remote Utilities. I have been testing it a bit now and so far have not run into many hiccups, other then just about every virus scanner warning about the agent when configured through the msi tool, and was wondering if anyone else here has looked into it lately.

I searched through the forum and have seen it mentioned a few times but not much more than a "we have used it in the past" type of response in the last year. I had planned to eventually purchase Teamviewer but simply cannot devote the funds for a license right now and need something in the meantime for quick support and management as I am still growing. If anyone has more insight with the software or has checked it out lately I welcome a second set of eyes as there may be something commonly used that I have not stumbled upon yet.

 

[katz]

I've looked at Remote Utilities recently, but it's too much $$$ for me. There are better priced options out there such as AMMYY, imPCRemote, AeroAdmin, and Anydesk to name a few.

 

[trevm999]

I've been trying to use it, but only 1 out of the 7 computers I installed it on I still have remote access to.

 

[BJW1981]

Give http://www.ninjamsp.com/ a try works great and the price is reasonable

 

[fencepost]

There are a ton of remote options available, and a bunch of them won't trigger antivirus/antimalware/google.com blocking the domain the way Ammyy and some others will. I'd much rather pay a little bit more for a good tool than spend the (nonbillable) time explaining to customers how & why it's OK to circumvent or ignore virus warnings and why I'm using tools that have all these problems.

 

[Nathan Igo]

Thank you for everyone's recommendations and I have looked into each of the ones mentioned but I think fencepost is right and I just need to bite the bullet and eat the upfront cost for a proper solution. In the end it will save time and increase my potential income.

 

[fencepost]

Depending on your use case there are some not-too-expensive options. The cheapest "non-questionable" option for attended-only remote access (user must start the connection) may be SplashTop's SOS product at $100/year for a single technician (up to 2 concurrent sessions per tech). Other folks have talked about Zoho, Chrome Remote Desktop (not recommended by me) and some other options, there are multiple threads on here active within the past year or so.

If you need unattended access and only have a few techs (or just one), then SplashTop Business seems like the cheapest option I've really seen at $60/$120/$180 for 10/20/unlimited unattended remote stations - those are per-year prices.

SimpleHelp may be the next cheapest at $320 (first year/$64/year afterwards) for unattended remote access; it has the ability to add monitoring and some remote management on a limited number of workstations (40 per simultaneous session you're allowed) but you pay an extra 50% on top of the base price for that. If you're looking at pricing over the space of several years or are going to resell remote access to customers (thereby getting the benefit of the extra sessions while they pay the monthly $$) then it makes sense, but it's definitely more up-front and I haven't priced it out vs. some of the cheap RMM or monitoring options (e.g. Kabuto.io, where you can also add antivirus).