5 Best PSA Software for Managed Service Providers and IT Service Providers

Cost of the PSA solution

Companies all over have been calling for more efficiency and cost cutting measures. In fact, the whole point of a PSA is to make the workflows more efficient, save time, increase output, optimize resources and thus improve margins. This means in your bid to find a great PSA system for your MSP, it is important that you do not overspend or go over budget. This is even more important for the small businesses unsure about implementing PSA solutions or the benefits they would derive. For such cases, it's not just pricing that matters but also the availability of a free trial.

SuperOps provides a free 14-day trial and among the other PSA solutions under our consideration - Atera, Syncro, and Halo offer 30-day free trials. You can try Kaseya BMS on a 14-day trial while Naverisk’s trial duration is not specified.

As for pricing, we found a couple of models working here:

Per agent model: The most popular was the per agent/month model billed monthly or annually with even more discounts. This is the model of choice for most modern PSAs as SuperOps, Atera, Halo and Syncro follow it.

Custom pricing models: This is not transparent and you have to request quotes from the platforms. This is followed by legacy players such as Naverisk, ConnectWise, Autotask and Kaseya BMS offering custom quotes.

While custom quotes may sound nice and personalized, the lack of transparency is a bother. Surely you can compare them with the prices of other PSA solutions out there in the open but how do you know that this price is among the best ones they have given out among their clients. If so, what is the criteria?

We believe in avoiding all this confusion by providing transparent pricing for everyone. And among the other such PSA solutions, SuperOps takes the cake with our “rise” (PSA only) package starting at an extremely competitive$59/agent per month. Opting in for RMM will take it up to $99 per agent/month with support for upto 150 endpoints per agent. You can add more endpoints at a cost.

Syncro provides similar services but their plans are slightly costlier at $119/agent per month paid annually. Atera comes in at a pricing that ranges between $99 and $169 per agent/month depending on features you may choose to include like support for Mac and file transfer capabilities. While we think Atera charging extra for basic features is not great, we must note that both Atera and Syncro don't limit endpoints per agent - something that may interest companies needing RMM. But do you really want your agent to handle more that 150 endpoints?

Halo shines bright with its pricing policy, which given the size of your company can go anywhere between $45 and $95 per agent per month (i.e for a team of 100+ agents to only three or less agents). Also, Halo is only a PSA and an RMM integration will cost extra.

So if you’re a small MSP who just just needs a PSA solution for your company then you can 

and see whether the features with the $29 plan works for you or you need the $45 option or the $99 one. At this price, if you have a high number of users, you can also try out Halo. But if you need an RMM tool, SuperOps and Atera are our go to.

So here’s our final ranking for pricing:

1. SuperOps

2. Halo PSA

3. Atera

4. Syncro

5. Naverisk RMM & PSA, Autotask PSA, ConnectWise Manage & Kaseya BMS

Features and integrations

This tells us how many of your needs or your problems does this PSA solution fix and how many of your other tools can it work with seamlessly. Remember, implementing a PSA software should make life easier for users across your organization. If any of the major sections of your company has a critical tool that does not integrate with this PSA, chances are your automation plans will not succeed.

The most important feature for a PSA tool is automating MSP tasks and—all our contenders provide automation features. It’s the ease of deploying these automations that make SuperOps the leader, followed by Atera, Halo, Syncro and Naverisk. Autotask is all about automation and many people love it as the platform's USP but we found few reviews that critiqued their updated system for email automation. 

Among others, the most commonly used features is support for billing and  invoicing and project management capabilities provided by all of our contenders except Atera and ConnectWise. Things everyone gets right are the provisions for Help Desk Management, issue management and scheduling. SuperOps, Atera, Navrisk, Halo and Syncro also support RMM and patch management. SuperOps does fall behind in one aspect - that is the absence of an inbuilt CRM.

Atera, Navrisk and Halo also provide backup and recovery services. SuperOps, Naverisk, Halo and Atera provide IT documentation management too, which is a critical feature for IT MSPs.

Remember not all of these features may come bundled with your PSA solutions’ basic tier. You may need to purchase additional features separately; maybe together as a bundle or individually.

So if you have to purchase features separately, why not look at the better option, which is integrations.

Why should you only be happy with the features provided by this particular PSA solution provider? There might be an external SaaS tool that may do a function better or maybe you were using that tool all along and want to integrate it into the PSA solution. This is where modern PSA tools trump the legacy ones—the ease of integration.

Almost all the solutions we tested integrated easily with the most commonly used MSP platforms like Teamviewer, Quickbooks, Azure, and more. PSA solutions like Atera also sell add-ons that give even more functionality than integrations.

Remember the Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) feature that we discussed earlier—they are key features for Atera, SuperOps, Navrisk and Syncro. Autotask is from the house of Datto—a popular RMM, which did appear on our list of notable RMMs for 2022. It was also recently acquired by Kaseya, which means two of our contenders not just belong to one group but have many competing products as Kaseya VSA competes with Datto in the RMM sphere just as BSM competes with Autotask. Maybe they will merge in the future but until then, we can hope for a friendly competition to continue. Finally, we have ConnectWise Manage, which is part of a bigger product suite with ConnectWise RMM being a popular sister tool.

Here’s our ranking, based on features:

1 Atera

2 Halo, SuperOps

4  Navrisk, Syncro

6 Autotask, Kesaya, Connectwise

UI and ease of use

While we felt that we could compare UIs objectively and share our opinions, we will be using Capterra and G2 review scores to actually grade these PSA solutions for ease of use for fairness.

So we will keep the discussion about UIs short. At SuperOps, we are really proud of our modern intuitive human-centric user interface that is not just easy to learn but also fun to use over long durations. Everything is easily accessible, manageable, and customizable.

But there are others that are fairly good too, for eg: Halo has a really nice interface that is clean and modern. Atera has worked hard to solve the lag that users were calling out sometime back. Syncro users are meanwhile still waiting for improvements. Naverisk, Autotask, and ConnectWise have functional UIs with nothing much between them.

For ease of use, we used an average score from Capterra and G2 Reviews and here’s how it goes:

It is a bitter pill to swallow but we are firmly placed in the middle of the list, but are climbing. . This is followed by veterans Naverisk and Syncro. We feel that we have the disadvantage of being newcomers here and people may warm up to us in the near future. Kaseya, Autotask, and ConnectWise need to work hard to get back into user good books in this aspect.

Built-in-analytics and easy data visualization

Until you know the numbers, you can’t be sure of how well you’re managing support for any of your clients and what you can do to do better and finally how you can show your client the actual value in using your services. All this can be attained with better reporting systems and as an extension of it, better data visualization.

Here’s how each PSA tool performed in this aspect:

Atera gives basic reports and you can get most of the data you need very easily through the dashboard. As far as visualization is concerned, it’s the usual charts, diagrams and graphs. This holds true for ConnectWise, Kaseya BMS and Naverisk.

Autotask’s reporting interface seems a bit livelier and can be customized by individual users.

Syncro does one better with intelligent built-in reporting and robust business intelligence upgrades powered by the good folks at Domo Inc specializing in turning data into actionable insights.

HaloPSA not just reports data and provides analytics but goes a step further by letting you link it to KPIs and other business metrics to visualize efficiency and utilization better.

And finally, and you can blame us for keeping the best to the last, at SuperOps we believe in cutting down all the noise and bringing your data to life with best in class data visualization. What else? We also let you share this information with your clients right from the dashboard.

So for this particular exercise, we have

1. SuperOps

2. Halo

3. Syncro

4. Autotask

5. Atera

6. ConnectWise, Kaseya BMS, Naverisk

Implementation and support

If you’re looking to make a purchase decision for a PSA solution, you would definitely want one that will be easy to introduce into your existing workflow with minimal disruption and training. You will also gravitate towards one that assures you maximum uptime and best support because any downtime for an MSP will be a downtime for a client and that’s bad business.

In terms of implementation most cloud based PSAs can be easily implemented into your existing workflows and integrated with tools you already use. By comparing implementation what we really mean is the quality and ease of training.

Here’s how the comparison looks like and we have a clear winner in Halo that slightly edged us over with availability of in-person training. While we do not think that in-person training holds such importance even as we have created a detailed library of videos, documentation and conduct live training, it’s an option we are looking into and you can discuss it with us, if you feel that this option is a must-have.

Pre-sales discussions, onboarding and implementation can go perfect but it all falls apart if we do not have proper support. A PSA solution for MSPs is only as good as the support it provides. We must say all the newbies understand this much better than Naverisk and Kaseya do. Hopefully with the purchase of Autotask, Kaseya gets better in this regard. Improvement is definitely possible, considering that Syncro had added a lot of these things in the recent past.

Considering all these aspects and the respective performances of PSA solutions for MSPs in general, we can now double down on our claim that the best PSA tool for Managed Service Providers is SuperOps. Try SuperOps for free for 14 days.

But we have our work cutout in staying on top for much longer. While tools such as Atera and Syncro, whom we dethroned in the past, are constantly evolving and trying to regain their lost ground,  PSA solutions like Halo surely keep us on our toes. Here’s the final ranking and verdict:

1. SuperOps - the most cost effective PSA that starts at just $29 for enterprises with not many integrations needed. It is modern and boasts of intuitive AI. RMM and other integrations are easy and reporting is done right. Training and support standards are among the best.

2. HaloPSA - If you’re an MSP with more than 100 agents requiring access and/or a lot of integrations, give Halo a shot.

3. and 4. Syncro and Atera - The stalwarts are hanging on. Both offer tons of features and integrations. Good, if you are looking for RMM+PSA solutions at $99/agent per month or above.

 5. Naverisk - a lot of great features and good reviews, but pricing is a gamble.

This is our list of five best PSA software for MSPs, or as our office counselor calls it  - vindication!

If you feel that our research has some merit and rounds up most of the points that you include in your own research for software purchases, we suggest you give us a chance to prove all of us right by trying SuperOps for free for 14 days 

And in case you disagree, take the trial to prove us wrong, we are waiting.