TeamViewer Business Reviews

We are in the commercial cinema theater business, like movies. We have things like simulators, advertising in commercial theaters all over the world. They sometimes have technical issues. So, we connect to see what is going on.

We use TeamViewer on computers, like laptops and servers. We also have tablets, but only one or two. Whereas, we have like 1,000 Windows Servers.

The sound and data transfer have improved the way our organization functions. For example, you can leave a TeamViewer application open and hear if a movie is playing with sound.

With an image, you can see immediately what's going on. You can run some tests. Without the solution, you need to do everything by telephone. It's not even thinkable. You would need to have VPNs with a lot of connections and virtual servers. This is so much more complicated. Weekly, we are saving dozens of hours using TeamViewer.

The remote connection process is pretty straightforward. Every new computer has a TeamViewer ID and password. 

The biggest advantage of TeamViewer is the way you can send files. For example, if you need to program something or exchange pictures, it's not that easy to to send a document to a secure network, like Boeing or a military company. Sometimes, sites even block all the Internet and you need to do everything by telephone. With TeamViewer, the main advantage is you can send files and documents easily. 

Another thing is you have sound, in the sense, you can hear. For example, we are playing short trailers, and you can hear it on the distant computer. This is useful to see if the sound is working. We will play trailers and see the image, but the customer will sometimes complain, "Hey, everything is good, but I don't have sound." With TeamViewer, I can hear the sound, not from my computer, but from his computer. This is super cool.

The chat function is handy, especially when we are dealing with people who don't have telephones in their projection rooms, or it's super noisy. Then, the chat is very useful.

Another feature that I like very much is the option where you can save the username and password. Once this is done, all you need to do is double click on the computer. It will connect directly. You don't need to type the password every time. This saves time because you cannot remember a dozen of passwords. You need to go somewhere and find them. But with this feature, you put them in once. Then, every time you are connected to particular sites, you just double click. There is almost no need for a repository for those passwords.

You can reboot remote computers with a feature called "Wait for Partner", so you don't need to monitor it. TeamViewer will pop up a little window when the client is back, saying, "Hey, I'm back online." You can work on something else, and if you need to reboot a computer, TeamViewer will notify you that the customer is back online. This is a nice feature.

You are limited with the regular TeamViewer. You have don't have sound. You cannot transfer things. It has been a long time (years) since I used the regular version.

In the beginning, you will need a bit of adaptation to use the solution. This is normal. For example, if you are switching to a car with the wheel on the left to a car with the wheel on the right, you will need a bit of adaptation.

Even now, we have customers who will not allow us to connect to them because of security sensitivity, e.g., military departments for clients. They will send us pictures or we can talk with somebody onsite, then we need to ask them questions. However, this process is long. It's costly also because of the time spent. Instead of spending 30 minutes, we will spend two to three hours for the same thing.

A feature that they could add is chat with sound to talk.

I have been using TeamViewer Business edition for six to seven years. I have been using the regular version for more than 10 years.

The product has been stable for many years; no glitches.

In the beginning, security was an issue because you could be hacked. Anybody could transfer data from your computer. Right now, from what I have seen and heard, they have put a lot of security in TeamViewer. It's very secure right now. Though, it is hard to be sure 100 percent all the time, especially in the movie industry. For anti-piracy and things like that, studios are very tricky and pushy to have tight security. The fact that they accept TeamViewer means they did tests trying to find security breaches, and everything has been good until now. 

There is not much maintenance need on our end as it is a lightweight program. The program upgrades itself.

We have a limited business license. We can have 10 people on it at the same time. We are doing support all over the world. With the version that we have, we are allowed to have 10 people using it at the same time. For example, because we are working with engineering of other groups, if we go over 10 users, the eleventh person who wants to use TeamViewer cannot.

We have about 1,000 clients. Our support team is six or seven guys, plus engineering. Though we are not all connected at the same time. For example, if five of us are support 1,000 clients, then individually, we are supporting 200 clients each.

We are sending out computers every day. So, we will probably double the solution in a couple of years. Right now, it's okay. There are some days when we need to ask somebody, "Close your session because we need another guy from engineering to connect." So, we will probably need more licenses in the future.

We never need tech support. We needed it once three years ago. We sent an email and had an answer almost immediately.

I used other solutions in the past, i.e., LogMeIn. At a certain point, we switched from LogMeIn to TeamViewer because LogMeIn was limited at 500 users.

It was a bit tricky because we had so many computers. We needed to generate IDs, passwords, and administrate passwords. We needed to have a machine to generate these, as this was sort of an additional software. We had thousands of computers, so we needed to have an ID, a password, and administrator password for each of them. So, we needed to have software to manually input this information in TeamViewer every time. Once we did that, it was perfect. 

We aren't launching all the computers at the same time. We are launching them one at a time. Today, we are doing a server. Then, tomorrow, we may put TeamViewer in two or three servers. It's not a single shot. It's gradual. To install TeamViewer takes five minutes on each device, maybe more time.

We contacted TeamViewer directly in Germany. We discussed the price and things like that. With TeamViewer, you go to the Internet. Everybody can do it. I can do it. My son can do it. You download the program. Then, if you switch from a normal to business license, all you need to do is just put your credentials in and the program will upgrade itself. It is very simple. All you need is the Internet.

We have solved a lot using TeamViewer. While I cannot quantify this in money, without TeamViewer, we would need to call everybody and work with 1,000 clients blindly. 

It is worth the money that you pay for it.

We have a corporate license. The maximum amount number of users changes based on the amount you pay. E.g., with our license, there is a maximum amount of users who can use the solution at the same time (10 users). 

The cost is in the thousands of dollars per year.

We have some sites with LogMeIn because it's a matter of politics. Some companies will not allow you to install TeamViewer. They will only allow you to install LogMeIn. Some others will not allow you to install any software like TeamViewer, LogMeIn, or others. Therefore, you need to go buy a remote desktop (RDP).

For sites that do not allow us to install TeamViewer, LogMeIn, or other software, we use Cisco VPN. This requires a lot of software to install. It needs to run a program through it. You need some administrative passwords that need to be typed every time. It's a lot of security. In the beginning, you don't have sound from the other computer, and it's hard to transport files.

While we use LogMeIn and remote desktop, in 99 percent of the cases, we are using TeamViewer. TeamViewer is very easy to deploy when you have a corporate license. It's easy to install. It's upgrading all the time. Everything is perfect, as long as you pay.

Screen resolution is a huge advantage of TeamViewer over LogMeIn. We have clients with multiple screens. For example, if the client has three screens, when you are connected, you will be on one screen and don't know which one. With TeamViewer, you have a selection. You can select moving from screen number one to two or screen two to three. You can also put all the screens into an all in one or see the best fit.

It is easy to use, but LogMeIn is also easy to use.

It is a great, amazing tool. All companies needs to have it. It's secure, fast, and reliable. 

In the beginning, you need to understand the features, e.g., what a button does. Once you get all of that, it's very easy to use. I'm a heavy consumer of TeamViewer, a sort of professional of it, so I know all the features. But, even for somebody seeing it for the first time, it is very easy to use.

We use TeamViewer's infrastructure. We have TeamViewer host clients running on devices, some wired in offices, some connected to WiFi or even cellular, and we use it to get quick access to the devices for technical support.

The other use case, which is a little bit weird, is that all of our clients are in healthcare so they are very particular about who gets into their network and who has access to their network. What we've found is that when a client has our company's software on one of the servers in their network, sometimes they don't want to give us access to their network to maintain our software. So whenever they have a problem with our software, we open a TeamViewer session from a desktop inside their network to our tech support group, and that person gives us access to the server so that we can maintain our software.

Again, that use case is a technical-support-type application, but it's a little bit different than us managing our own devices in the field. It is a tool that allows us to access our devices on somebody else's network under their supervision, without needing our own unfettered access. It makes it easier for IT security to approve us and it makes it easier for the client to get us in, particularly in circumstances where there's some urgency around that.

The vast majority of our users use TeamViewer on Windows machines. Some are desktops, some are tablets, and the latter range from a Surface Pro to a more substantial, military-ruggedized type of tablet.

The big benefit is that we can do things pretty quickly and easily, remotely. In many cases, we save a service visit to the field, which would otherwise require us to have a very large field service force or we would need to pay for and train somebody else's field service force. Quite literally, without TeamViewer's capabilities, we wouldn't be able to run our business.

Remote desktop control is what we use in TeamViewer for 99.999 percent of what we do. 

We occasionally use the integrated text chat. There are circumstances we've seen where certain applications don't respond because they've got some sort of security built into them so that a remote user isn't able to control them. We can log in with TeamViewer, view the screen, and then leave instructions in the text chat that say, "Okay, please do this. Now, please do this. Now, please do that." We can actually guide the client through what they need to do, even for applications that don't allow a remote-control user to modify them.

The other thing that we're beginning to use more is the feature where, at the end of each session, you can type a quick note as to why you were logging in to that device. We've started putting in notes saying things like, "I went in to update Windows software," or, "I went in to fix a bug," or, "I went in to update our own software." We have not gone to the next step of reporting on, analyzing, reviewing, or using those comments as a way to drive additional follow-up. But it does at least give us the first step so that if somebody says, "Hey, why were you in my machine?" we can produce documentation that says why.

The TeamViewer system has some built-in security. The TeamViewer client connects to the TeamViewer host securely. Only a certain number of authorized users on our side have access to the system. Even within that, an individual endpoint can be assigned to a group, where not everybody has access but, rather, just one or two people who are part of a support team might have access to that particular device. So TeamViewer has given us tools to be able to segregate who has access to different things. That's been pretty helpful in dealing with some of our clients who have more "buttoned-up" security. They're able to say: "These two people have access to the devices." We have designated support people for that client who can go into their device and nobody else can even see that the device exists. That's really helpful.

The remote connection process is totally simple. It's as easy as it comes. We do install the software on field devices, but we also have TeamViewer's widget on our website. So, if you go to the support page on our website, you can click a link and download a white-labeled TeamViewer app that pops up and gives you a service key that you can fill in. That's an interesting tool. It makes it easier for customers who are not one of our owned assets to quickly download and light up a TeamViewer session so that we can help them with software configuration updates. Sometimes it's not even things that are our problem, but they don't know who else to call, so they call us.

I find it pretty easy to use. They redesigned the interface a while ago, and, honestly, when I first looked at it, it seemed sort of clumsy, but, now that I've gotten used to it, it's pretty darn easy. At first, everything was totally different. Doing simple things that I used to do, like connecting to a certain device, went from being obvious to a situation where there were just so many more features available that I had to click through to find the simple thing that I was trying to do.

In addition, and I don't know if it's TeamViewer's problem or not, I do find that sometimes we'll have a device in the field, and I'll click on remote control and it says "Can't authenticate." I'll double click in a different part of the TeamViewer interface and it'll say "Can't authenticate." Then I'll do it a third time and it connects. It's possible that it's just bad luck. It's also very possible that it's some bug within TeamViewer so that with the first click I'm waking up the TeamViewer connection, and with the second click I'm starting the connection but it's taking a long time because it's in a bad cell zone. Then, the third time, it's working because finally the thing is awake and recognized and is passing everything through. It may have nothing to do with TeamViewer, or it may be a TeamViewer issue. I don't know. That's the only thing I've really noticed that is problematic from our perspective. We'll see a device, we'll see it's online and that it should be available, but when we try to connect it doesn't connect. So that's a challenge.

In terms of additional features, the more TeamViewer can work with, and on, different devices, that would be helpful. We're doing some R&D with Cisco for some modems that have an IOx, which is a Unix-based compute area. If we could control that device using TeamViewer, that would be cool because, otherwise, we have to buy a Cisco cloud management software system to monitor those devices; similar to the Cradle Point. I'm not aware of any sort of onboard storage where we could install TeamViewer on a Cradlepoint, but if that is the case, then they should let people know about it because that would be a useful tool.

One of the things that would be a cool feature, and I'm not sure how TeamViewer could make it happen, would be to take an ad hoc TeamViewer session from our support website and, in the course of that, install the TeamViewer host, so that a client device would then become part of our network of machines we can get to relatively easily. That would be a huge time and energy saver. One of the things we find is that there will be a device and the users of that device have to use our software from time to time, but they don't use it often enough to really be good at it. So each time they use it, they go back through the learning-curve process. If we were able to quickly jump on their machine and walk them through what to do and how to do it, that would make it easier for them and easier for us.

We've been using TeamViewer for four or five years. We started out on version 8 and we're up to 15 now.

The stability has been very good with the possible exception, as I mentioned earlier, of that three-clicks-to-connect issue, which seems to come and go. My guess is that it's something related to our devices being on cellular connections in areas with really bad cell service. But I've noticed it typically occurs when there's either a Windows update or a TeamViewer update, so it makes me wonder if maybe Microsoft introduces some sort of incompatibility that screws up TeamViewer and then there's a TeamViewer update that fixes it. We just have to remember to keep TeamViewer up to date on all of our clients in the field.

We only manage 30 devices. I could see, if we had a thousand devices, that the management part might become a little more complicated. Given that you can separate different devices into groups, and you can give different people access to different groups, it might be relatively straightforward. Huge scalability isn't something that we've had to deal with yet.

The monitoring, asset management, and endpoint protection are things we just haven't had the time or the mental energy to test. If they work as advertised, those seem like they'd be great features for simplifying remote management. In terms of expanding use of TeamViewer, those are next on the list. 

We'll be looking at endpoint protection; the patch-management and device health monitoring. Those are things we're very interested in. We want to do them to see how much, if any, additional CPU load and communication load is put on the device. We are a little concerned that we're going to clog up these fairly lightweight devices out in the field with a lot of administrative overhead instead of leaving them to do what they're supposed to do. We would probably do one or two as a test, just to see how it goes, and then start to crank it up. We have about 30 devices in the field that we monitor with TeamViewer; it's not like we've got tens of thousands.

We have used technical support very sparingly, but when we've used it they've been great. They are very responsive, very knowledgeable, and they typically resolve our issue with one or two calls.

We actually initially started using it because we're based on the east coast in Boston and Washington, D.C. and we had a client in Chicago who had our software on a number of devices. He wanted those computers to be someone else's problem, namely our problem. He asked us to have some sort of solution in place so that we could quickly visit the computer, check that everything was working, upload Windows updates, upload software updates for our software — whatever was needed to make sure that they were happy and healthy, including rebooting them from time to time. That's how we started with TeamViewer. Since then, more and more machines have been added to the list; some with this client and some with other clients. We found it so easy with that first client that we wondered why in the world we weren't using it with everybody else.

We find the initial setup of TeamViewer very straightforward, but not everybody finds it as straightforward as we do. It takes minutes. Deploying TeamViewer is incredibly easy.

I don't really have a firm answer for how many end-users can now be supported with one support person, versus how many could be supported in the past. We didn't really have a pre-existing field support organization. But it's very clear that by using TeamViewer and not needing to go do field views visits, that we're a million times more productive. The eight hours of travel that might've been part of a field visit to go help one customer now become eight productive hours that you can be helping other customers or doing other things.

A lot of the TeamViewer stuff is done by people who do technical support for sales or technical support for core development. If they can quickly pop into a user's computer, check something out, fix something for them, and go back to their work, they get a lot more development work done than if they have to get in a car and drive somewhere or get on a plane and fly somewhere to do that same look at the client's setup and what needs to be fixed.

If you take a $100,000-a-year employee and enable him to spend 20 minutes per service call instead of eight hours per service call, that's a pretty darn impressive return.

TeamViewer is a great value. We obviously wish it was less expensive because we want everything to be free all the time. But we do recognize that sometimes you have to pay for things, just like we try to convince our clients that they should pay for our software. 

TeamViewer is $600 or $700 per port per year, which we find that to be just fine. If we paid $100 per port per year we'd be happier, but we're very happy with the quality of the service and the capabilities that gives us. So it's been a great value for us.

I could go look up how many TeamViewer sessions we do per year, how many where we couldn't get the information through some other method, but that's where it becomes complicated to say specifically what the ROI is. 

It's clear that it's a valuable product. 

It's probably not valuable for everyone because there might be people who've got devices or systems where they have to hear it or smell it running to be able to diagnose what's going on. That's not really TeamViewer's strength. Its strength is getting visibility into a remote desktop, at least as far as we know, so that you can diagnose and treat a computer issue.

We've used a LogMeIn and there was something else that we've used, a solution that a partner of ours used which we tried for a while. TeamViewer seems to be a much more complete, stable, and reliable solution.

It's hard to make comparisons because it's been so long since I used LogMeIn. Longer ago than that, I used to use a VNC product that conceptually did the same stuff: gave me remote access to desktops. That was clunky, but it was probably as good as could be expected given the tools at the time. 

As a user who has been given remote support access via LogMeIn, what people have done with LogMeIn's help function seems easier than what we do with TeamViewer. That may be entirely because we're not organized well enough in our TeamViewer implementation to be doing it the right way. I certainly don't want to bash TeamViewer's capabilities, because I think it's more likely that we just don't know all the things we could do.

With LogMeIn Rescue, the technician gives you an ID number. You put the ID number in and they're in your computer. And TeamViewer can probably do the same thing. I just haven't gone through the process of learning how to make that happen. The way we do it via our website is that you click a link, you download something, it pops open, it gives you an ID, the person then tells you the ID, then you're in. It's a couple of extra steps, rather than just being a web browser access.

If somebody asks me what I recommend for remote support, I always recommend TeamViewer. If they say, "I use LogMeIn, and I love it," I wouldn't be surprised. I've been a user of LogMeIn's remote support, and it seems like a pretty effective and easy-to-use tool. I'm sure the market is big enough for more than two players, but we're pretty comfortably ensconced with TeamViewer as our solution.

Do it. It's outstanding. It's very simple. We love it.

TeamViewer has a lot of additional features. They do audio and even video chat through TeamViewer. They do patch management, asset control, and all sorts of other things and we've actually thought about some of those other services, but we haven't taken the plunge yet.

We have not integrated TeamViewer with a single sign-on application. We actually use the TeamViewer host as often as we can on our remote devices. The device in the field is always on and always connected, and the people on our side who need to log in and access those devices will use the standard TeamViewer authentication process, which is pretty thorough. It's a username and password and it has a visual Captcha and then, when you register a device, it also emails and says, "Hey, we saw that you just signed in on this device from this location. Is that you?" They know what they're doing.

The idea of using TeamViewer for 5G deployments and smart poles with IoT devices is potentially interesting because we have a lot of Cradlepoint modems out in the field and Cradlepoint has a cloud management console. If it would be possible for us to use TeamViewer to access and manage those devices, that would be interesting because we pay $80 a year per device for the license in the Cradlepoint console.

In terms of end-users of TeamViewer in our company, we only have three ports and we have five or six usernames. There are three or four guys who do most of the work, remoting into various devices and rooting around to see if they can fix something or if there are things that need to be fixed.

The primary use case is getting access to various test machines from one location.

AirTies makes smart WiFi technology which end up in people's homes. I set it up in a house with WiFi devices. We test our Extenders and gateways with a bunch of clients using TeamViewer. I can access the clients to view the data being collected or what's connecting to wired ports. I do this locally, and sometimes, I access the home office in Istanbul.

It is used on a mix of Mac and Windows machines. Even though we have Android and iOS devices to test for WiFi devices, we haven't put TeamViewer on them yet.

We have a lot of IOT devices, but we haven't used TeamViewer that much manage them or get to them. While I'm open to it, I'm not sure of the roadmap for the rest of the QA team.

We can get machines logged off and check statuses of what's going on a lot easier. Otherwise, you need to track things in the office or wait for someone to be online in Istanbul, which is a bit tough because Istanbul is eight hours ahead of us. 

I've had coworkers who have done remote debugging. So, they ask a client to install TeamViewer so they can access their network from our office and help them troubleshoot problems in the field. In these cases, it is more of a support type role offered.

TeamViewer shows you what is on the desktop of the target machine.

The two features that I use the most are getting onto a desktop, so I can access it, and File Transfer. Quite often, we need put new firmware out there across the network or I need to get logs from a device. So, I log into different PC and just use File Transfer to move stuff back and forth.

There have been a couple of times with the handy remote access feature, where I have been asked for something at eight o'clock on a Thursday evening and it is on my desk machine, but I am driving back to my office. With TeamViewer, I can just stay at my home machine, connect to my work machine, and get the data needed without having to drive back across town.

It does have screen recording, which is a cool feature that I have only used twice.

It has been pretty easy to use. It probably does more things than I know that it can do, so it's probably even more robust than I think. What I do use it for, it is a piece of cake to use. They changed a couple of menu options between versions 13 and 14.

The remote connection process is reliable, good, and fast. On occasion, when it can't connect to a machine, the error messages aren't always helpful to tell you why you can't connect, as the message doesn't help troubleshoot whether it is too slow, too much interference, etc. I usually have to run to another computer and figure out what is going on, then restart it. The diagnostics could be improved.

I have been using TeamViewer for a year and a half at AirTies at this location. It now is required with the job. I have a bunch of different PCs spread around the house which I need access to., but don't want to chase down. My previous experience before AirTies was hit or miss. I didn't use it too often, only if I needed to set up remote access for something.

It has been really stable. It has only locked up once, and I believe this was because I got confused over a network issue since I was changing networks. It is nice that the product is stable. So if I can't connect, it's probably a computer or network problem, not a software problem.

For everything that I use it, it has been rock solid.

I am the only official tester. So, I maintain all the systems. I don't know how many people are on the QA test teams in Istanbul. It might be around 30 people and need an IT team of about 8. However, I am not sure how much they do get called up to test and maintain TeamViewer. Usually, I'm doing all the IT functions.

It scales pretty well. Every time that we get a new machine, we install TeamViewer on it. However, we only buy a new machine every 14 months or so.

There are no obvious limitation to how many end users that we can support. E.g., our home office has six test locations with an entire development team and QA team where have 50 to 60 people.

Our development, QA, and IT teams have access to TeamViewer. Our development team uses it the most. The IT team, which is about eight people, uses it a little. The QA team use it as needed, but not daily. On and off, 20 people use it, but 60 people have access to it.

I haven't had a chance to use their tech support. I've only searched a couple times on forums.

For our client, we just download, install it, install another one internally, and generate the unique ID. Then, you're good to go. The only thing that we do change is the password. It's a lot easier to type it in than the computer generated one.

The install process takes 5 to ten minutes. This includes time to record the ID for look up later on.

It saves me a lot of trouble. Time-wise, it is probably saving me several hours because I don't have to travel anywhere. I just wait for the time difference. With the time difference, it is really hard to talk to people halfway around the planet sometimes.

It has probably saved us several thousands of dollars because we have quick access anywhere. We don't have to worry about finding people onsite or arranging conference calls. We also save time and money with it because we don't have to send somebody onsite to troubleshoot.

TeamViewer offers a free version to try. Download and give it a shot. See what it's like and if you like it, then buy the license for it.

We tell people not to license TeamViewer internally, but they can download it. The product is not quite organized for distribution.

I've used VNC in the past at another company. I like TeamViewer a bit better, as it has more tools built-in. The File Transfer thing is awesome, and it also runs faster than VNC. VNC is free and easy to set up, but it's not user-friendly nor does it have as many options as TeamViewer. VNC doesn't have the powerful UI that TeamViewer has nor does VNC echo the screen like TeamViewer does.

There is also pcAnywhere, which is more PC-centric (not sure if it will work on a Mac). TeamViewer has a lot less overhead versus pcAnywhere. Also, I know that TeamViewer can anywhere and on a Mac.

Test it out and see if it meets your needs. 

It's awesome. Nothing else compares to it at the same level.

Biggest lesson learnt: There are tools available which don't cost too much and can improve productivity. They can make it so you don't have to travel so much.

We haven't done any 5G stuff yet. All our stuff is done WiFi locally.

We use it for remote access to other machines. That was the main reason why we bought it. It is for our help desk and support guys to access remote users' machines.

Our users have it on their laptops. We can also do a bit of remote support for Apple devices, but it is basically a screen share. You can just see their screen. You can't manipulate anything, but you can see what they are looking at on their screens. Therefore, it's mostly for laptops, desktop machines, and the PC environment.

It is mostly for the regular support, for anybody who is having issues with a machine.

I use the solution quite a bit. I love it.

It provides efficiency, even if it is something as simple as just maintenance, something that is broken, adding something, a walk-through, or doing training. It is a great tool.

The remote connect process is super simple. As long as the user has an Internet connection and can get on the Internet somewhere, whether they are at home (on their WiFi), using portable Internet (Jetpack), or if they stop in a Starbucks to get on the Internet, I can connect to them. That is what is really convenient.

It was worth the investment. You can do file transfers and video calls with it. You can do a lot of copy paste stuff. E.g., if I have a file and want to place it on somebody's machine, I can just copy it off of mine and paste it right on their machine. I don't have to put it in a Dropbox account and have them log into it to pull it off. I can do all that right through TeamViewer. When you are looking at the TeamViewer screen, you think you are working on your own machine.

It is really easy to use. If I can get a machine on the Internet, I can get on it and fix whatever is wrong with it. I keep an individual list of all of our machines that TeamViewer is installed on. So, I have all the IDs, etc. This makes it easy for me to get to their machines.

This saves a ton of time. A guy can call me, who is out on the road, and say, “Hey, I left my machine on, and it is at home. Can you go in and..." either install software or fix something, because something is not working right, etc. Then, I can remote into his machine and fix stuff, before he even gets home. This rather than try to walk him through fixing something, which isn't always the easiest. So, I can jump on and fix something in five minutes, which would probably take an hour normally.

You don't need to be an IT professional to use it.

If they could figure out a little better solution for the iOS stuff other than just a screen share, even though it's an Apple thing, and Apple doesn't like to give up control of their devices. If they ever got to that point, and I could manipulate an iPad or iPhone, that would be awesome. Since we have a bunch of iPad users who are struggling with doing different things, it would be nice to be able to just jump on and actually show them, "Here, do this, this, and this." Similar to what we do with the laptops, e.g. for training.

We have probably had it three to four years. It has been quite a while.

The stability has been really good. I can probably count on one hand how many times that it wasn't available or that they had some sort of an outage, which has been pretty brief. I don't ever think it's ever been longer than an hour, and that has been rare. It is really stable.

You could add as many users on here as you want. We probably access around 500 devices.

We have eight licenses now. Therefore, we have eight users who can remote access machines.

I have three monitors that I use. While it's not real common, there are times when I'm on three to four people's machines at one time trying to fix different things. I imagine if I had more monitors that could be organized enough to make sure I am using the right stuff on the right machines, I could probably do whatever our Internet could handle. I could probably do 20 people at a time.

As we add more PCs (or whatever devices), TeamViewer gets added onto them. I use TeamViewer all day long, like it is my right arm. I haven't run a report in quite awhile, but I spend probably half of my day using the software on somebody else's machine.

The technical support has been great. The couple of times that I have ever needed anything, I will send an email. I receive a reply back pretty quickly, then a follow up. They will let me know, "Hey, somebody is either going to call you, or you will get an email follow up." It depends on what the question is, but I get something back very quickly. If I needed to get another license, I could send an email right now and have a license in probably 15 minutes.

We had another software that we used for a while called Virtual Network Connection (VNC), which allowed us to access machines. The problem with that solution was that it had to be on a VPN connection. They had to be connected to our network, so it was a lot more difficult to be able to get on their machines. For those machines, we added TeamViewer. Now, every time that they boot up the users' machines, it launches if they are on the Internet. It connects, and I can see whose machines are on and whose aren't.

The VPN solution was through Bell Labs at one time and has been around a long long time. It was a free solution that you just download off the Internet, if you want to. While it works okay, it's not the greatest. The problem with it is that you still need a VPN connection to our network for it to work. Because it is point-to-point, it won't go through the Internet. With TeamViewer, if the machine is on the Internet, it doesn't matter where on the globe the device is, it works. With the VNC software, you have to connect back to our network on a private connection, otherwise it wouldn't work.

The VNC solution was cumbersome to use. TeamViewer is so much easier.

The initial setup is real easy. We have the software loaded on all the machines that we send out. You just click on the icon to let it load. We put a username in it, then we set up an access password, and it's done. That is it.

It literally takes probably about two to three minutes from start to finish.

We did everything ourselves.

The tool cuts my time in half. If it's a 40 hour week, I would say that I am saving 20 hours a week. It is really that good. The time savings are substantial. That is not including if there are issues where I would needed to have had somebody send something into me, or when you tell somebody, “Well, click on the start button," and the response is, “I can't see the start button.”

I spend half of my day using it to access somebody else's machines. If I couldn't do that, and I had to have them send the equipment to me, the shipping, hours, and lost productivity would be a huge cost.

From just a cost perspective, it pays for itself within the first month, or probably less than that. Within a few weeks, it would pay for an annual licensing fee by what you would save in time and everything else per person.

The cost of the licenses depends on how you buy them. They just had a buy one get one free deal going, and they do that every once in a while. Where you buy one license, and they will give you the second one free, or you can try to get discounts. Most of our licenses that we have we tried to do something like that just to save some money. 

A rough estimate of our user cost is $500 per user annually. It is very cheap.

About a year ago today, an add-on channel was $232 dollars, but that was pro-rated because it was at the end of the month.

The only issue that I ever did have with it, and this was quite awhile back, was we were trying to get one of our licenses applied to a user. Because it was a user who had a license and we had previously removed it, then we wanted to give it back to them, and for some reason TeamViewer kept saying that the user already existed. We were like, "Well, no, that person left, and now, they are back again. " However, we threw them an email, and they fixed it. They said, “Try it now,” and it worked.

There were a couple of other vendors that we looked at, but we just liked TeamViewer. One of the guys that I work with had used this solution before, so it was sort of his suggestion. He had tried it at his place that he had worked before. and said, “We ought to try this, because we'll really liked it." So, we got its demo and had it for a couple of days. Then, I said, “I'm sold. This stuff is awesome.”

I haven't found anything else nor has anybody has pointed me in another direction saying, "Oh, you should use this instead, as this is way better." 

It is easy to use. It is a no-brainer.

The only access is from the IT department to the machines. Users don't utilize anything to remote control their own machines. That's typically an IT function.

We really don't need any type of tracking.

We use TeamViewer for support, controlling our ~2,500 end-user computers and our ~60 servers.  Our environment is primarily macOS, with about 95% of end-users on Macs, but our servers split between Windows and macOS.  We also have some digital signage devices that run Linux, and we use TeamViewer to control them as well.

We ran TeamViewer concurrently with LogMeIn for about year as we evaluated TeamViewer as a replacement.  TeamViewer's superior remote quality (especially in low-bandwidth situations) and ease of mass deployment, combined with LogMeIn's serious and longstanding bugs led us to recently discontinue LogMeIn in favor of TeamViewer.

Coming from LogMeIn, TeamViewer's remote control quality, Host reliability, file-transfer capabilities and ability to support multiple simultaneous controllers on a Host have been a great improvement.

TeamViewer's simultaneous-controller/tech licensing is better for us than LogMeIn's device-based licensing, because we don't have to worry as much about maintaining devices in the list as a driver of licensing costs.

TeamViewer's cross-platform nature is important to us, as we are about 95% macOS, and our IT organization is all-Mac, so we often use our Macs to control Windows machines.

TeamViewer is very fast, with very high fidelity and visual quality, in both high- and low-bandwidth situations, far better than our experience with LogMeIn.

TeamViewer's support for multiple Controllers on a Host is very convenient, allowing multiple techs to collaborate to help an end-user or to look at a server.  With LogMeIn, additional techs attempting to control a Host would either just mysteriously not be able to connect (there was no message or other indicator that the Host was already being controlled by someone else), or they would accidentally kick off the first Controller on the Host, which was inefficient and confusing.

Mass-deployment options for Hosts are excellent, making it easy to mass deploy on both macOS and Windows, and you can pre-configure the Hosts with settings and custom branding as needed.  Having said that, the experience with individual installations is nowhere as slick as LogMeIn, however: installing TeamViewer manually and getting everything configured is much more annoying and time-consuming than LogMeIn.

TeamViewer's file-transfer features are useful and comprehensive, with two options:  1) a drag-and-drop transfer mechanism for small files, and 2) a full-fledged file-transfer dialog that allows file tree browsing on both the Host and Controller.

TeamViewer is also free to try for personal use; as a result of that, myself and many of my staff were already familiar with the product from our experience supporting friends and family. That feature directly led to us being able to test TeamViewer extensively in everyday use, and as we looked for alternatives to LogMeIn, our familiarity with TeamViewer from personal use helped. LogMeIn previously offered the same free personal-use license but they discontinued that offering, which in my opinion was a very shortsighted move...and one that made me appreciate TeamViewer even more.

While TeamViewer has some great benefits, there are also some significant challenges and bugs. The biggest problem in our environment is that it's difficult, or sometimes even impossible, to properly manage granular access to a Host. It's a huge problem that mostly affects the Mac platform, but even with Windows Hosts the entire concept of how access to Hosts is configured centrally is a bit of a mess, especially compared to the true elegance of how LogMeIn worked.

With LogMeIn, we could centrally assign techs to a Group of Hosts, and those Techs could control that entire group of Hosts.  Even a one-off contractor could be temporarily or permanently given access to a Host, just using their email address. In addition to Group-based assignments, you could assign additional Hosts individually to a tech, so that they could control a single additional Host in addition to the main Host Group(s) that they had access to. It was extremely elegant, easy ton configure, made instant sense, and worked perfectly.  For example, I could have a group called "Servers" in LogMeIn, and I could give my infrastructure staff access to all of those servers. If I also wanted one of my Developers to be able to access a couple of those servers, I just gave them access to those individual Hosts in LogMeIn Central.

By comparison, TeamViewer is a complete mess. The way they do it is a total nightmare, and it does not work well. In TeamViewer, Techs can be given access to Host Groups...but a TeamViewer Host can't be in more than one Group...and Groups is the only way that you can give access to a user.  So the kind of granular control, giving access to Group(s) but also being able to give access to individual Hosts, is completely missing.  The workarounds for this are messy:  you can either split off any Hosts that may need individual control by other users into separate Groups, or you can have the Techs that need individual access manually add the Hosts to their "My Computers (Local)" Group in their own client, having to know the Host ID, etc.

In addition, the administration of Groups and access to Hosts in general is fragmented and confusing, with strange limitations. For example, let's say one of my departments needs to create a Group of Hosts. Only the individual tech who created the Group can control it: no one else can change the name or make other changes...only that tech that created it and  therefore "owns" it can. TeamViewer's "best practice" recommendation is to use a generic "Master" account to create and manage all Groups, having to login with that Master account rather than your own individual account, which is bad for many reasons, including making MFA more difficult and it has serious security and management implications.  

By contrast in LogMeIn, when a privileged administrator creates a Group, it just belongs to the organization, other similarly-privileged administrators can manage the Group, other techs can see it, and it all makes total, elegant sense.  Hosts can be assigned to multiple Groups or individual Techs, etc: it's extremely flexible and straightforward.

TeamViewer's macOS Host is unfortunately not up to scratch with the Windows Host: it's missing some extremely important features. I sincerely hope that the TeamViewer macOS development team is going to address the problems in the near future.

For example, you can't configure multiple "unattended control" passwords on the macOS Host, to give Host access to different departments or individual users but using different passwords. The Windows Host, by contrast, allows multiple unattended control passwords. Another way to accomplish this on the Windows Host is via Windows OS authentication, allowing users with either Windows local or central Active Directory (AD) credentials to authenticate to TeamViewer. This feature is also missing on the macOS Host:  there's no way to authenticate using local macOS accounts (which LogMeIn allowed), nor can you authenticate using AD credentials, even if the Mac is bound to AD.  So on the macOS Host, there's exactly one unattended-control password to control that Host, which is a big problem in my environment with giving granular control to server Hosts.

There is a workaround, but it's completely obnoxious: TeamViewer has an automatic Host-generated password, one that usually changes after every session. It's designed for the local user who's using the Host machine to be able to give a tech a one-time password for a single support session, and the password changes the next time. There is a Host setting, however, that instructs the Host to keep that random password the same after each session, so I can use that as a bad hack to allow individual techs to control Hosts where they shouldn't know the main unattended-control passsword (after they add the Host manually in their "My Computers (Local)" Group....sigh).  Unfortunately, this workaround breaks when you restart the Host or relaunch TeamVIewer on the Host, as even with the "Don't Change" setting for the random password, it still changes whenever TeamViewer Host launches.  So after every update or reboot, we have to distribute the new random password to some techs...time-consuming and messy.

Another big issue with the macOS Host is that it does not have a method of avoiding locking the screen at the end of a session. The setting to lock the Host's screen after a control session seems fairly random, and if the controlling tech forgets to manually disable that "feature" during the session, the user (or server) gets the screen locked in their face when the tech finishes.  That causes a lot of problems, especially with some of our servers that need to remain unlocked and by annoying the heck out of users.  On the Windows Host, there is an Advanced setting to instruct the Host to never lock its screen after a remote session, but that setting is missing on the macOS Host.

There are some miscellaneous features missing on the macOS Host, like auto-hiding the TeamViewer panel and preventing accidental quitting of TeamViewer. These features were deemed necessary (and they are) in the past and thus were implemented on the Windows Host: they should also be available on the macOS Host.

Another issue concerns Windows virtual machines. Unfortunately, TeamViewer has historically depended on the Host's MAC address as part of generating the unique TeamViewer ID, because the MAC address was a fairly immutable thing back in the day. However modern virtual machines (VMs) have dynamic MAC addresses, which means that suddenly a Host gets a new TeamViewer ID, and you have no idea what it is, with no way to control the VM.  TeamViewer Tech Support tried to help with some workarounds to try to assign static TeamViewer IDs, but none were successful.  Their recommendation is to manually manage MAC addresses on VMs, which is a non-starter in clustered environments where dynamic MAC addressing is needed.  TeamViewer needs to stop depending on MAC addresses as a part of generating the TeamViewer ID:  LogMeIn figured it out and so TeamViewer should be able to.

A final concern is the accidental renaming of Hosts with an unattended-control password.  As we've increased the use of TeamViewer, we've found that our techs accidentally rename Hosts in the background while they think they're entering the unattended password for that Host. The Host actually gets renamed with the unattended control password, which is obviously a huge security issue.  We're trying to be mindful of that bug to prevent it from happening, but it's extremely problematic.

One to three years.

TeamViewer is very reliable. Our major problem with LogMeIn was that it would just turn itself off randomly on Hosts, and LogMeIn Support could never explain for fix it... we literally tried for about two years with them. When we implemented TeamViewer, it was very  refreshing to regain a reliable solution that we can always count on working.

TeamViewer seems very stable. It doesn't just crash or randomly turn itself off in our experience so far.

The central TeamViewer service does have issues from time to time, but the longest we've seen it last is a few hours, and it seems to be mostly in the middle of the night, and they're all over it, including transparently showing the status of all services on the TeamViewer Status website.

TeamViewer seems to scale well in one sense, being easily mass-deployable to thousands of Hosts.  

But the badly-designed Groups and kludgy nature of the central management, combined with significant missing features on the macOS Host and lack of support for dynamic MAC addresses on VMs is a problem with scalability in a complex organization, and TeamViewer should address these major problems ASAP...right now they're just lucky that the other available cross-platform remote control solutions actually suck more than they do. ;-)

Technical support is excellent; they do a nice job and have high-quality support techs. The times that I've submitted tickets or called in, it's always been somebody who knows what they're talking about, friendly and knowledgeable. They can't make up for some of the flaws in the product, but they do the best they can with the product that they have, trying workarounds and even testing things in their lab while we're on the phone with them.  It's a pretty impressive support group.

We came to TeamViewer from LogMeIn and, before that, we had an older product called Timbuktu. 

LogMeIn's main issue that caused us to switch was that the Hosts would just randomly turn themselves off:  the icon would grey out and the LogMeIn Control Panel would show that the Host was off.  This of course disabled access to Hosts in a random and widespread manner, and troubleshooting with LogMeIn Support over the period of a year resulted in no fixes or workarounds, and it was causing enormous problems in our environment.

LogMeIn also did not allow multiple controllers on a Host, had no file-transfer capabilities (in the affordable "LogMeIn Central" version that we licensed), was licensed based on the number of devices, and had annoyances with Control/Command-Tab mapping from Controller to Host.  These weren't showstoppers, but they helped to push us elsewhere.

TeamViewer deployment is fairly straightforward:  knowledgeable techs can configure Host settings, brand the Host, and mass-deploy it pretty easily. Manual setup on individual Hosts is very clunky and time-consuming compared to LogMeIn, however.

We deployed it very quickly. We had not made a final decision on LogMeIn until very close to when our LogMeIn's licenses were expiring. So very quickly, within a couple of days, they were able to push out the TeamViewer Host to all of our devices.

Initial setup and ongoing management of Groups and other central management tasks is messy, time-consuming, inelegant and makes no sense.  TeamViewer needs to take a hard look at their hodgepodge and take a good long peek at how LogMeIn Central works and....be more like LogMeIn in central management.

We evaluated and deployed completely in-house.

ROI-wise, the savings from licensing have more than been eaten up by the soft costs involved in dealing with and working around TeamViewer’s feature deficiencies on the macOS Host, the terrible central management design, and the lack of support for dynamic MAC addresses.  If the TeamViewer developers get their act together and improve the product in those areas, the ROI will improve significantly.

Ultimately, however, even with all of its warts and problems, it's still the best, most reliable and most affordable remote control product, at least for our environment.

TeamViewer pricing is reasonable. 

It's licensed by simultaneous controlling tech, rather than by the device. I like that because previously it was always a struggle to keep the device list maintained. If we got rid of a device and we didn't remove LogMeIn properly, the device would remain in our LogMeIn Central account and use a license.

That's not a problem with TeamViewer's licensing, plus you can have as many techs as you want, but it monitors their simultaneous remote control usage with Hosts.  It can be a little tricky in the sense that you have to plan for the maximum simultaneous usage during busy times, and initially I didn't purchase enough licenses, but when we started hitting the limit, TeamViewer detected that and sent emails notifying us, then our sales rep very quickly added another license (allowing us to pay later via purchase order) to get us back in business.

In our environment, TeamViewer turns out to be less expensive than LogMeIn, at least so far.  We’re currently saving about 30 percent on licensing costs, and we don’t have to worry about maintaining/pruning the list of machines in the LogMeIn. TeamViewer's automatic emails telling us that we've hit the simultaneous limit includes stats on how many times it has happened recently, which helps in deciding whether to purchase an additional license.

This type of licensing does have a downside:  with LogMeIn, my staff were accused to controlling a client or a server and staying connected as needed, sometimes for hours if they were doing maintenance on a server or assisting a user with an intermittent issue.  But with TeamViewer, that chews up a simultaneous-use license and drives additional licensing costs, so we all have to remember to disconnect from Hosts.

We tested a number of other remote control solutions hoping for one that would stand out, because of the problems we had seen during our testing with TeamViewer on macOS. Unfortunately, they were all actually worse than TeamViewer.

In the end, before moving to TeamViewer, we evaluated LogMeIn, ConnectWise Control, Royal TSX, Devolutions, Dameware Remote, Goverlan Reach, and Radmin.

Make sure that you're okay with the simultaneous tech licensing. In my environment that works out great but I'm not sure if that's appropriate for all environments. And, if you have macOS Hosts, just understand what you're getting into and carefully map out how you're going to give granular control for Hosts if you have techs that need to control the same Host from different departments/groups.

In terms of how many end-users we can support with one tech,TeamViewer is about the same as LogMeIn. TeamViewer did increase efficiency in multiple ways, but at the cost of some significant management headaches because of the multiple issues mentioned above.  So it may be pretty much a wash, at least until they fix some of the issues.

The most valuable feature has been the ability to give control to others for support purposes.

This solution could be improved by offering more flexibility in terms of usage.

I have been using this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution.

We have received good support from the customer service team although at times we have waited a long time in the queue. 

Neutral

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

We use a paid version. The free version has some limitations and you're not able to make voice calls.

Not every solution is 100% and there's always room for improvement. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

On-premises

We primarily use the solution for remote access.

I used it mostly for Cisco remote support activities.

It’s so great for when you need to provide remote support. It allows us to troubleshoot in real-time.

The configuration and structure are good.

It doesn’t break down easily.

The product installs easily.

It is stable and can scale well.

The dashboards they have are good.

The solution isn’t expensive at all.

I don’t see any areas where improvement is needed. It’s been helpful overall.

I’ve been using the solution for two or three years.

It’s a stable product. It is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn’t crash on me.

I’ve never had any issues with scaling the solution.

About three or four people use the solution in my organization. While we don’t have plans to increase usage, we might down the line.

We’ve never really contacted technical support. I can’t really speak to how helpful they are as I don’t have much experience with them.

The solution offers a very easy initial setup. It’s not complex at all.

The licensing on offer is reasonable.

I would recommend the solution to others. I’ve used it a lot and found it to be helpful.

I’d rate it eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

This is a remote access tool. Usually, we just use it for our support team, to help them support our customers.

The interface is good, and it is easy to use.

The document control is quite good.

It’s easy to implement.

The product is scalable and very stable.

Sometimes it lags. They need to optimize it a bit. AnyDesk, for example, works faster.

We’ve been using the solution for five years.

The solution has worked flawlessly. It’s stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches.

It’s a scalable solution. The product is easy to expand.

More of our usage is coming from support, and we are about 18 support engineers we have.

We have not really used technical support. We haven’t come to a point where we have needed to seek help from TeamViewer.

We tried the other remote access tools like AnyDesk. We switched due to a management decision. We looked at enterprise options and user manageability. We wanted to monitor our licenses and also the usage we have. AnyDesk worked fast. However, sometimes the video quality is bad.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The instructions related to the implementation are straightforward.

The installation itself is also fast. It only takes two to three minutes.

We handled it ourselves. We didn’t need any help from anyone outside. We didn’t use integrators or consultants.

I don’t have any visibility in terms of licensing costs.

I’d rate the solution nine out of ten.