Kaseya Vs Zenith Managed software solutions
| Kaseya |
Zenith |
|
Software only
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Software and Managed services with NOC in Mumbai
India
|
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Great scripting capability
|
 |
|
Cost: (as of 4/10/2008)
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Cost: (as of 4/10/2008)
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100 licenses $13,200 – Maintenance after first year – 20% $2,640
First year $9.75/month/client
Remaining years $2.20
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$20/server/month – Live Monitoring
$37/server/month – Live Monitoring + help
$16/WkSt/month – Help Desk
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| Backup Cost: Acronys |
Backup Cost:
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$4275.00 includes
100 license – 85 WkSt and 15 Servers
Or
$50/WkSt and $1000/Server
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$80/month up to 5 servers
Can be replicated offsite
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| Virus Protection: Avg Engine |
Virus Protection: Avg Engine
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100 licenses ($2400)
$24.00/lic/year
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$2.25/station/month
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Great site for a comparison by a user. http://smallbizthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/12/zenith-vs-kaseya.html
I am also wondering if this might be some sort of solution worth looking into http://manageengine.adventnet.com/. Â And http://www.levelplatforms.com/. Let me know if you know anything about these products.
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Level Platforms has all or more features than Kaseya at a fraction of the price and is offered on a subscription basis.
Thei product is provided on premise (like Kaseya) or hosted (like Zenith) by a number of service providers that provide remote NOC services from the US or from India - your choice.
Level Platforms does not resell other products like back up and anti virus as this is not their core competency. They assume that each VAR will want to chosse the products that have the right combination of price and functions for their own markets and customers. They have web services integrations with a large number of back up and anti virus products and services so you can choose what is right for you and often at a lower price.
This information is completely incorrect. Please update. Going to Kaseya with our company and they do have a NOC, just one thing they don’t mention above.
We’re currently doing the very same research. Listening to IT shops using Zenith and Kesaya, shows that they both work. Now we are really to find out what the difference is between the two. And there are a lot.
We tested Zenith and Kaseya. Here are our preliminary results:
[THE PLATFORM]
Kaseya installs on your own server, so you need to buy a good one that is reliable and ca accommodate for growth. Then you need to buy all the licenses (windows server, sql server, backup software, etc.). Then you need to host it (most likely a colo, because you don’t want to have to buy redundant internet connection, redudant power and redundant a/c yourself). And you need to maintain it (software upgrades/fixes, database server, backups, etc..).
With Zenith, everything is ready for you. No need to buy any hardware, no software, no monthly colo, no maintenance, no backups, etc. They already have the colos with redundant-everything.
[THE COST]
Kaseya is asking you to buy a whole big lumpsum of licenses at a time. Used to be 100, now it’s 50. And they are more expensive than purchasing a pack of 250 or 500. Their sales will push you to get a 500 or 1000 pack, so that you get the best price point and you don’t need to re-purchase more when you grow. And you pay monthly. Their pitch is “with your first down payment, you can already deploy and charge for your 500 licenses!”. I guess this is a valid point for those IT
Firms who can find customers who will sign a managed services contract right away, for a total of hundreds of devices.. but that’s not our case. Even when you have a large customer base, you still need to convince your customers to migrated to an MS model… If you really think about it, you always pay for more licenses than you really use, because the day you reach the exact number of managed devices than licenses, you got to go buy another one for the next customer buying a new workstation or the next customer with 10 workstations… and you’ll most likely buy a pack of 250 or 500.. and there you go you have 200 you don’t use yet…
With Zenith, you only pay for what you instal. If you install 5 clients, you pay only for 5. If they want to cancel after 10 days, you uninstall it, and you stop being charged. It’s as easy as that. And prices are actually cheaper than zenith if you compare the costs over a 24-months period (which is the typical lease-to-buy from Kaseya).
Kaseya has really a lot of hidden costs.
[THE SUPPORT]
With Kaseya, the support/upgrades is included for the first year… but then you need to pay yearly maintenance if you want to continue being up to date (latest agents compatible with the latest OS, etc.). Also support is only available during US hours.
With Zenith, the support is included for the price, and you get it all the time, 24h/day, via phone, chat, or ticket.
[USABILITY]
Okay, on this one it’s a tie. Both products doesn’t have a good documentation that really helps you fully understand the product.
[LEARNING]
Kaseya sells training. If you really want to get everything configured properly and understand the product well from the get go.. you got to pay thousands of extra dollars (another hidden cost). With Zenith, all training materials and webminars are free.
[COMMUNITY]
Zenith just recently started their forums, and they are not very active yet. On the Kaseya side, we have not been able to test, as this is only available to pay customers, not to trial users.
[FEATURES]
Featurewise, both companies bring the same amount of features. The sales rep from Kaseya told us that Zenith had no scripting: it’s a lie, Zenith has integrated the “Automise” software into their agent, and the IDE is really nice compared to Kaseya’s way to write scripts. The sales rep of Kaseya also said that with Zenith you can’t setup your own agent threshold’s for alerts, and that you were at the mercy of Zenith pre-defined thresholds, and that’s also a lie. You can do it. We also like that Zenith can monitor Linux machines “out of the box”, which Kaseya can’t.
[ANTIVIRUS]
Kaseya only integrates with one antivirus. Zenith integrates with 3 different antivirus. And you can even buy the license through them, on a monthly basis. Which means you can also start and stop the antivirus on any day at your existing customers, and you stop having to pay for it. really convenient.
[MARKET SHARE]
This part is difficult to evaluate. We can’t look at the number of licenses sold yearly, because folks like Kaseya force you to purchase 10 times more than what you’ll really use, while others charge you only for what you use, so it’d be a wrong comparison to look at that. The right number would be the exact number of agents deployed, as well as the retention rate, but we have not been able to obtain these data from the vendors.
[PERCS]
Kaseya doesn’t come with any additional percs, while Zenith has a lot:
* If you have any deployment problem, or you think an agent caused an issue on a computer: they will connect to every machine you need help with, and fix it for you, while you take care of other things.
* If you wish so, you get a phone call for all alerts. Zenith agents will try to call you on various numbers, to get you informed that a problem occured. If for some reason your Kaseya’s server has an issue, the mail server didn’t work, or whatever else, unless you have a tech assigned to monitor your Kaseya’s server at all times, you don’t get the notifications.
* Zenith offer the server ‘care’ option: for a slightly higher fee, they will remotely login to your servers when a problem occurs, to try and fix it for you. if they can’t get to fix it, they’ll contact you a post a ticket. i really don’t mind them remoting onto the server to fix a common problem of restarting the exchange routing service, or
* The Zenith agent comes with LogmeIn Reach at no extra cost. NO NEED to do anything on customer’s firewall, logmein transverse every network as long as there is network access. And the LogMeIn agent is undoubtly the very best remote control software ever. Kaseya comes with the cumbersome and unstable VNC.
* Zenith offers Helpdesk. With the same agents you have already installed, for a very low fee you’ll be able to offer 24/7 us-based techsupport to your customers. The helpdesk agents are using the tools you already deployed, and all you have to do is fill out the secure password vault for them to access the workstations or servers to help your customers. We tried it, and our customers have been very happy with the hold time (barely any), the skills of the agents, and the great follow-up. We also get a call from the agents to let us know what happened, and whether or not we need to do something on our end. Very nice. Kaseya will recommend you some very expensive third party, but we haven’t tried them (way too expensive).
* The BDR product uses the same agent as the MS agents… So if you want to offer both, then only one installation is required. Everything fits nicely together.
So far, we really think Zenith is a better choice, especially for starting businesses.
Oh, btw, we ruled out Level Platforms, for 2 reasons: first of all, like Kaseya you have to buy for a large number or licenses and you pay over a 12 or 24 months period, but if you decide you don’t want to use the software anymore, you still have to pay until the end, whereas Kaseya gives you an option to stop paying and stop using the software (or some licenses you might own, on a pro-rated basis), and being that it really takes longer than the trial period to really find out about all the ins and out of the software, we didn’t feel confortable with it. And second reason is that on all the successful MSP companies that we researched on, they were either using Zenith or Kaseya. Might just be a conincidence, but we didn’t get the feeling that Level Platform is a real player.
Hope this will help you guys.
We’re still evaluating….
thanks for the valuable feedback of zenith vs. kaseya ! i am also going to choose zenith. our number one reason: they call you over the phone whenever a ticket is raised (24/7) and if you get the server care level, they’ll even fix the issues for you! and with this option it’s still cheaper than kaseya !
Im the Sr. project mgr for our company and we started out MSP offering with kaseya, subsequently switched to Zenith and are now considering going back to Kaseya. We will however keep our relationship going with Zenith for the BDR which is an outstanding product that they support when issues arise. My main gripe with Zenith is that the NOC really doesnt do much, the recently started to charge for support issues and call them projects. Above it stated they support 3 AV products and they do, however they started with AVG, the update to 8 somehow was an issue so they pushed the migration to bitdefender. After they soured that relationship the went to vipre. Harrowing to say the least. You would think that a helpdesk would be able to perform a simple task like an offince exchange degfrag should one of my tech’s leave an external usb drive connected to the server and they will.. but they will want to charge for it. Additionally, i see many, many NOC tasks assigned during or at the end of business for completion that night get pushed back to us in the am with some erroneous question and the task uncompleted. This is after we informed the clients they would have no remote access/email/whatnot that evening only leaving us to have to tell them again on a subsequent try. Zenith does support scripting if you learn to script. while kaseya scripting is easily accomplished and their basic scripts are highly usable. For any MSP there comes a time that one grows too large to use Zenith but for the small business that can deal with highly erratic support, and manage employees 5ooomiles away due to lack of choice, go for it.