In the last 12 months we actually made a decision to go away from TeamViewer. Part of it has to do with the fact that TeamViewer is very expensive.
What we find as a small business owner is that TeamViewer seems to be one of the more expensive products there are for remote management.
The problem is the valuable features don't come with the free version, they come with the paid version. The valuable features are being able to boot a remote computer into safe mode, being able to reboot the computer and to reconnect again, file transfers is not the most important thing in the world, although some people think it is, but it's not.
We've been using TeamViewer Remote Management on and off for four to five years.
Almost every product is very, very stable now. I've left Splashtop running for seven or eight hours connected to a system. I've left TeamViewer running for seven or eight hours to a connection or two. I have a hard time working out on four computers at a time, but three is not impossible for me. So even if I've had three computers connected it has been fairly stable.
I don't think that's really a relevant question. Scalability. It's not a database, you're not running a database. You're running remote access. You're either RDPing or you're actually going into another computer, so how many computers can you go into? Some of the products are scalable, in that you can have an enterprise version where you can have 10 technicians accessing 100 computers.
LogMeIn or Citrix, or any of the other ones, or even Splashtop, has the same thing. I don't run the enterprise version on the one we have, but we have access to many computers. I have more than one technician, so we have more than one technician license, and we have more than 100 computers that are permanently accessed. And they allow you to access ad hoc, as many as you want. We only do that if a client has a problem. I say, "Okay, go to our website, go to this page, click on it and run that program" and that downloads the streamer for the client end, and they give me the numbers and then we can attach.
I've never had to use tech support for any product.
We've used TeamViewer and a whole bunch of other products. I've been in this business for a long time. We've seen some come and go in the remote access field. We used to use OS/2 for doing this, as a matter of fact. So that goes back a long way, we're talking about the nineties, so over 20 years.
We had been using two products. We used TeamViewer and we used Splashtop.
We use Splashtop now. I'm into four workstations right now. When I was talking with you earlier, I was in nine different stations, nine different systems on one network. But we have used a bunch of different products. When Windows 10 came out, we found that the product that we were using then wasn't as good and TeamViewer had become better. It was a pretty good product, but it always tended to be a Cadillac in pricing. And the pricing model they have now seems to be expensive to use from last time I checked. Small users don't want to pay the kind of money, or can't afford the kind of money, that they were charging.
As a matter of fact, one of my clients is a single user. He wants to access a single computer. He doesn't need 15 technicians or one technician or to be able to access a whole bunch. He wants a one-to-one solution. TeamViewer doesn't really offer that. They offer the free one, but every time they make a change on the free one, you have to update both ends.
Sometimes you don't have the opportunity of being on site to be able to update it. Now they have changed that so that you can update it remotely, but you have to be able to connect first to do that. And then you're in the stage of where you're always trying to remember what version is at what client. Or if it's a one-to-one what version is there.
When the pandemic hit last year, they took the time limit off. So they gave relief to a lot of people to be able to use it. But at some point they changed it again and they put the time limit back on and they charged for it. And then if you have one version, like if you have version 14, and the client has version 15, you can't access his computer. If the client is on 14 and the technician is on 15, he can't access the end user who's at home.
So there's a disparity in versioning.
In terms of advice, it really depends what you're using it for. TeamViewer can be from about $20 a month to $200 or $500 a month depending on how many managed devices and how many unmanaged devices there are. TeamViewer has gone to a monthly subscription rate, so you have to get it monthly. Although I think Splashtops is the same way. There are some products out there that you can buy a license for and have permanent software. The problem with that is that you don't get updates. What I see when comparing one versus the other, is that TeamViewer for small users is more expensive than some of the other ones. It maybe has some better performance or better features, but it probably depends if you're on a good internet. I'm on a rural internet so I don't have the benefits of having one gigabit download and upload and speeds. Most of my clients have a minimum of 60 megabits per second synchronous connections or fiber connections.
Because most of my clients, 99.5% of my clients, are in major centers like Toronto, Montreal, Washington, New York, Ottawa, Dallas, they don't appear to have issues. The biggest issue is me. Every time there's an upgrade to the pipe, we jump on it. I'm not in an industry that can survive at five Meg or 10 Meg a second any longer, although I feel like I get that still with what I have.
It depends on the size. You have to decide how many end points you need to manage? How many technicians do you have to manage those end points? Are you managing from within a ticketing package? Do you need your ticketing package to integrate with your remote management packaging?
On a scale of one to ten, I would give TeamViewer Remote Management an eight.
