Power Doesn’t Have to Be Painful: Why MSPs Switched from ConnectWise to Syncro

Welcome and Introductions

Andy Cormier: Hello everyone, welcome. My name is Andy Cormier. I am the Channel Chief here at Syncro and author of So You Want to Be an MSP. Today, we’re gonna talk to several MSPs that have made the switch from ConnectWise over to Syncro, along with everything involved in moving between Point A and Point B.

Andy Cormier: Now one of the most pivotal decisions you can make as an MSP are the tools that you decide to put into place to run and grow your business. None, of course, being more important than your RMM and your PSA. Everything you structure in your business needs to work within the confines of those two platforms.

Andy Cormier: With the vast majority of us on this call being tech people by trade, I’d say logic would dictate that you go and grab the most powerful platform you can possibly find. That’s one of the things that we’re here to talk about today, and more specifically, a concept I speak to in my book called achievable power. And here’s what I mean by that. If a platform can successfully run an MSP with hundreds or even thousands of technicians, the level of power required to do so confidently is enormous. Is that level of power actually attainable for my MSP? And do I have the full-time staff on hand to dedicate to managing a platform like that at scale?

Andy Cormier: So today, we’ve brought on three MSPs who’ve made this very transition from ConnectWise to Syncro. And we’re gonna dive into what led them to making that decision, how they fared since completing a successful migration to Syncro, and any advice they might have for other MSPs on this call finding themselves in a similar position.

Janice Mahlmann: Sure, I’ll start. My name is Janice Mahlmann. I am the CEO and founder of August eTech. We’ve been around for 24 years now and going strong. We specialize in MSP. We have just introduced this year MSSP services. So we’re getting into the security side of it. It’s not cybersecurity, it’s just adding an additional component of security to make sure infrastructure and especially cloud infrastructure is protected. We have really expanded in the last few years, and we have used Syncro to help us manage that expansion.

Michael Paranich: My name is Mike Paranich. I’ve been with August eTech for 13 of those years. Not to jump right into the Syncro side, but working as we’ve been growing into the MSSP area, it’s funny that Syncro’s growth has kind of matched a lot of the same things that we’ve taken much more seriously, including the Microsoft security scores which are now being Beta tested as accessible through Syncro. In the last year the tools that have been added, Syncro’s growth has kind of matched our own on a parallel. And we’re very happy to be here today to help anyone who’s interested in Syncro.

David Carreiro: My name is David Carreiro, owner of CEU Technologies. We’re in the Chicago area. We do a whole bunch of clients in the Chicago area all the way up to Naperville. We’ve been in business for about 11 years. When we first opened up the business we started with ConnectWise and we’ve been running ConnectWise for 10 years, and just made the move in March 2024 to Syncro.

Philip Semplice: I’m the President of Safe Secure in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. We’ve been in business since 2013 under a different name, but full-time Safe Secure since 2017. Six technicians. We were a bunch of other management tools before Syncro. Not a bunch, but at least three. And we’ve been with you guys since April 2024. We hit the ground running and I’m glad the partnership developed. I don’t want to look back.

Andy Cormier: Fun fact for everybody: I hosted a similar webinar a little over a year ago, and I’d actually been talking with Philip in the weeks prior in the sales process, because at the time he was still a ConnectWise customer. He was looking at Syncro. And I actually remember me and Steven had invited you to that webinar, and you were actually in attendance during that call.

Philip Semplice: Yeah, and it sort of pushed me over. And I’m very glad that it pushed me over, because we are where we are today. The CEO of your company actually called me. I thought that was pretty awesome. Nobody from ConnectWise is calling me, especially the CEO, unless they’re trying to sell me something.

Why MSPs Originally Chose ConnectWise

Philip Semplice: The one thing that stands out is that we were already using Acronis with ConnectWise, and we were already using Bitdefender Gravity Zone with ConnectWise. I already had to move all of our agents. Those were two less things that we had to move, whereas when we’re talking to NinjaOne and the other competitors out there, none of them had these tools. So that was a really big determining factor.

Janice Mahlmann: We had ConnectWise for about five years. I went to it because it was the enterprise product. It was going to solve all of my problems. It was gonna be great. And I found the migrating to it was difficult. Once we got it set up, it never just worked the way that I felt it should work. I always felt it was very clunky and complex.

Michael Paranich: ConnectWise is a very powerful tool. And I think the misunderstanding for me at least was that ConnectWise became my part-time job. ConnectWise was like a giant box of Legos. It’s great once you get all the pieces together, if you stop knocking pieces off. It’s almost a full-time job in upkeep with automations, with ticketing. There’s so much to it. I would almost say it was almost too big for us. It really belongs in a manufacturing or really large company that can dedicate a person to its maintenance and upkeep.

David Carreiro: For me, I picked ConnectWise as my PSA and actually picked LabTech as my RMM, and then ConnectWise actually ended up buying them out and calling it Automate. The biggest thing that drove me to ConnectWise at that time was the fact that they actually were an MSP in the Florida area, and that to me was, hey, these guys built this in house. They should know how to really build a tool for MSPs.

ConnectWise Pain Points

Janice Mahlmann: Customer service just really went down the tubes. Every time I try to run a somewhat sophisticated report, we would go to ConnectWise and they’d be like, oh, we’ll charge you $500 to write a small report. It’s like, no, I should be able to do this. Can you just give me some guidance? The worst thing had to be the chat. The chat used to go from actually helping me to just constantly sending links. Oh, here, just read this.

Janice Mahlmann: It was just clunky the whole time. I couldn’t get basic reports. I just felt like I was paying a lot of money for a lot of nothing. So it just really hit the head, end of 2023. I’m like, I’m done with this. There’s gotta be something better. There’s gotta be something that looks like it was actually developed yesterday rather than in the nineties, that things work together.

Michael Paranich: Their support system was too gauged into the large company status. Every phone call went to the same group. That same group only knew how to read a script. As technical people as we all are, we’ve probably diagnosed three quarters of the problem in anything in ConnectWise before we’ve called. But you still have to do the script.

Michael Paranich: We jumped into their marketing program, their CPP marketing program, thinking we’re going to partner with them. Well, they gave us a bunch of free tools. The problem is their billing platform couldn’t credit us for the things that were supposed to be free. And then we couldn’t get a credit until they stopped billing us, but they couldn’t figure out how to fix it. So after two or three months I had to cancel the marketing partnership program and then wait another month to get a credit back. But then they kept calling me to ask me if I wanted to try it again.

Michael Paranich: How much is that worth to each of you? To anyone who’s thinking about leaving ConnectWise? If you could reduce the amount of time you put into your PSA 25% because you don’t have to jump through hoops, you don’t have to chase them. These problems that go away save your company money and save you headache. How much more work could I have got done doing important things, or how much less overtime would I have needed to spend if I wasn’t spending two or three hours a day trying to chase down the people who were supposed to be giving me the level of support that didn’t meet my expectations?

Philip Semplice: Nothing worked right. They buy everybody and they try to make it all work, and it’s all these different products that don’t integrate properly. We were using Automate for the first few years. Then they sold me on the RMM which they bought from Continuum. Automate looks like it’s from 1999 but it worked way better than RMM, but neither of them ever really integrated well with Manage.

Philip Semplice: We literally worked with them for a year trying to get alerting. Simple alerting. The server was offline, the server’s back online. It did not work. And I have no idea why. We never even got that far because it was a year, and by the time we moved, it was over.

David Carreiro: It was just so stale. Them buying out other companies and not doing anything to that platform. Very little items were introduced to Automate. I attended the live meetings that they had in Florida. They kept on talking about a single point of glass for years upon years. They never came up with it. Their single point of glass is a website that just sends a link to their other products, which was just not a single point of glass by any means. The Automate scripting was very proprietary where you kind of have to learn that world. With Syncro it’s all PowerShell, and if you’re good at PowerShell you can almost do anything and everything.

Evaluating and Choosing Syncro

Michael Paranich: I like your PSA. I will say to anyone who’s considering the move: it took me one day to train my staff, because your ticketing PSA system is as intuitive as it could possibly be while following a pretty standard format in ticketing systems. So it was very easy to learn, very easy to move people into, and it felt very familiar.

Michael Paranich: When we were vetting out all the different companies, it comes back to the exact same thing that I was complaining about with ConnectWise. We heard back from you guys in a timely fashion. We got the answers that we needed in an explanation that made perfect sense that we didn’t feel like was being rushed. The explanations felt well thought out, as if the people who were explaining it maybe had once worked in an MSP and understood the pains that we were going through.

Michael Paranich: We looked at Atera. Atera didn’t get back to me for a week when I was reaching out about pricing. If the salesperson can’t get back to me in a week, how fast is anyone else gonna get back to me? I like the guys over at NinjaOne, nice bunch of guys, we had good conversations. You guys edged them out. We looked at N-able. We wanted something agile, web-based. We wanted to move off of a server somewhere. We really wanted something that looked and felt 2025.

Michael Paranich: When I told them how many tickets we needed to bring over, because we take our audit trail very serious, and we brought about a million tickets over from ConnectWise, they didn’t even bat an eye. Your engineer was fabulous working with us. We hit a few bumps and they really dug into the SQL, the database minimum settings and the standard settings, the default settings and the timeout settings. They really went step by step with us to make sure we had the best possible move.

Philip Semplice: Everything being in one portal, fantastic. You answered every question. Everything that I was looking at within Syncro, I like didn’t find an equivalent with ConnectWise. I’m like, okay, this doesn’t work in ConnectWise. Is this gonna work here? And it was instant, yeah. You kind of looked at me like, this is easy.

David Carreiro: I looked at Syncro five years ago, three years ago. Syncro was not what it was five years ago. It was actually a lot better, had a lot of things I had issues with that were already resolved and fixed. And now with the new team and how they’re just developing, what was from a year ago to today is insane. It’s a whole different product. So to me, it was seeing that I’m gonna get into a vehicle that is growing and it’s upgrading and it’s constantly evolving, which a lot of PSAs and RMM tools are not right now.

The Migration Experience

Philip Semplice: You have to reinstall the agent, that’s with anything you’re moving to. But the script works. I don’t believe there were any issues besides the fact that you have to tell all your users to make sure that the ten computers that they stacked in the closet are powered on so the agent will run. The one thing that we had to our advantage was that we were already using Bitdefender Gravity Zone and Acronis, so those didn’t need reinstalled.

Philip Semplice: We had like eight months to do it. If you needed to do it in 30 days, you could. You would just probably have to have a tech dedicated at your office, that’s their full-time job for a month. I think you guys even gave us the script and we ran it right out of ConnectWise RMM.

Michael Paranich: We had a layover of about three months when we overlapped because we knew that we were gonna have to track down equipment. We were able to run a script in Automate that installed Syncro. They worked side by side together very well. There was no conflicts. At that point we were able to remove them from Automate.

Michael Paranich: I would say that it probably had a tech that spent about an hour a day running the two reports, run the report to see it, run the script to see how many actually moved over. We check the numbers every day. We just watched them do this, and then as all MSPs know, then you have to run out there and find the ones that are in the closets that nobody has turned on for six months.

Michael Paranich: The ticketing, I was surprised how easy that actually was. You guys have a web page and an app. We set up a key between the ConnectWise server and the Syncro server and we told it to run. Working with Dan, one of the things we found out is that there are limitations to the database and we were only able to move about 50,000 tickets at a time.

Michael Paranich: It took us a week to bring our tickets over, but we also planned on not being in a rush. We were more concerned about accuracy, so we also spot-checked as we brought over. The tickets come over with the timestamps, so it shows you the date and the time, and it brings over the name of the technician on the notes that are in the ConnectWise ticket. So I could still look at the notes and know that Bob, Ralph, Larry worked at this date, this time, and here’s his notes.

Michael Paranich: One of the things I wish were better is not about the migration, but you don’t realize that ConnectWise doesn’t store your attachments with your tickets. Your tickets have a number that reaches out to a separate pool of information where they store all of your screenshots and attachments separately. In the transfer, we downloaded all of our data. So we transferred all of our tickets, we downloaded all of our data.

David Carreiro: I did have some hiccups. But the biggest difference that I saw with Syncro is just that you had support. You had help. You specifically helped me out dramatically. I had Charlene helping me out on the other side. The amount of white glove or touch or help that I got to do that transfer was amazing. Yeah, you can run into some hiccups and issues. But you have the people here to help you get over that hump.

Life After Switching: Feature Impact

David Carreiro: What Syncro has done in the last year since I’ve been on board is just amazing. Every time I log on it says a new feature. The patch management part of it has been absolutely amazing. I can get things in one single pane, look at the patches but also remediate and reboot, it’s just insane. The XMM stuff, I can reset my passwords now and reset MFA right in Syncro, not having to log on to Microsoft 365, saves us tons of time. The ticket views are just completely changed. It looks completely different. I can see things a whole lot clearer and I can manage my tickets and my team a lot better.

Philip Semplice: You started doing the third-party billing integration. The one that we’re currently using, I think we were even the pilot or the first ones to do it, was Proofpoint. It was super easy to set up. We set up the Proofpoint integration and once a day it checks back. I think the most you’re gonna lose is a day versus the old Pax8 sync that was this weird situation where it would sync once every so many days or on the fifth of every month.

Philip Semplice: We forklifted all of our Proofpoint Pax8 billing over directly to Syncro. We had to spend about 45 minutes going through each invoice within Syncro and adding it. And once it’s added, it just syncs up and that’s it. And I want to say that you have Acronis coming down the line, and that’s gonna be a massive one because the data changes so often with backups.

Philip Semplice: I think our billing is a quarter of the time that it used to be. It was exhausting. It was horrendous. And now it literally syncs. QuickBooks just syncs with Syncro. Everything just comes over. It syncs with Pax8. All that stuff syncs pretty much perfectly.

Advice for MSPs Considering the Switch

Philip Semplice: I would honestly say just do it. You’re not gonna regret it. I look back now and I think of all the time I was wasting every day with that product. All that wasted time is gone. I’m telling you right now, just don’t even think twice about it. Just move. I don’t know of any of the ConnectWise products that you’re gonna be married to that you wouldn’t be able to do within Syncro. Just set up a trial. Use it for a month. You’ll see right away that it’s gonna do exactly what you need it to do. I literally have hours of extra time a day after switching.

Janice Mahlmann: You guys grow with us. That’s another important part. You guys grow with us.

Andy Cormier: Yeah, and if we don’t, you don’t. So we’re all in this together.

Syncro Platform Overview

Andy Cormier: Quick 60-second rundown for folks on the call who aren’t very familiar with Syncro. We are a full-blown combined RMM, PSA, and remote access platform under one roof. That includes things like asset management, scripting, alerting, ticketing, invoicing, payments, reporting, you name it. We’ve got it.

Andy Cormier: We really have everything that you need to effectively grow your business at scale, and that includes a myriad of integrations with popular third-party platforms. We also just announced our industry-first XMM offering, which now includes RMM, PSA, remote access, and Microsoft 365 management across all of your customer tenants right inside of your Syncro instance.

Andy Cormier: We do all of that while offering a radically different pricing model. Syncro is not priced per endpoint like ConnectWise is. It is priced per technician. In fact, with Syncro you get unlimited endpoints at no additional cost. We also offer month-to-month pricing options, meaning we’re one of the few platforms out there that truly has to earn your business every single month. And I’m truly happy that we earned all of yours on this call today.