What does /r/sysadmin think of Action1

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I have been testing Action1. I really like it and May roll it out. I think we are at 100 managed devices, but by going over by 50 devices makes it $1800 a year, which works out at $3 per endpoint per month. I currently pay $2 and get bitdefender included from TechsTogether.

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Life-Cow-7945@reddit

I use it to handle a small side job, I use it for remote screen sharing and doing patching Would I buy it for a large org? No. Would I recommend it for the free tier? Absolutely

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MikeWalters-Action1@reddit

Why not buy it for a large org?

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Life-Cow-7945@reddit

I just didn't like it enough to pay for it. I use it for patching, and I think there are better options out there, like automox

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Bad_Mechanic@reddit

We're a long time Automox customer and are currently moving to Action1. We've found Action1 works better, has better reporting, better visibility, better logging, and it less than half the price of Automox.

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Life-Cow-7945@reddit

I can definitely imagine the price being lower

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MikeWalters-Action1@reddit

Fair enough! Can you specify which particular Automox features you like so much that makes it better than Action1 for a large org? Just so for the common good we could make them free with Action1 in the future.

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Life-Cow-7945@reddit

I guess it's just a better UI. Action1 does do more stuff z like remote control, I just found Automox to be more intuitive and much faster to get going on To be fair, the sample size was not comparable, 15 vs 250

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MikeWalters-Action1@reddit

Got it! We'll take a look into it.

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klaymon1@reddit

I'm currently using an RMM that uses VNC for remote system access. This lets me view and interact with the currently logged in user. Action1 keeps referencing RDP. Are they using the equivalent of RDP with /shadow /control switches? 99/100 times, I need to interact with the user on their session.

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MikeWalters-Action1@reddit

u/klaymon1 It's a bit confusing, but Action1 does not use RDP (as in Remote Desktop Protocol by Microsoft). Action1 uses a securely tunneled variant of the VNC protocol under the hood to allow you to interact with the currently logged on user. This also allows you to respond to UAC prompts. So yes, it should work just fine for your use case.

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klaymon1@reddit

Thanks for the feedback. This may warrant a look then.

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1xCodeGreen@reddit

I deployed this to one department so far, I was skeptical too! Runs well, easy to remote and update.

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Saditface@reddit (OP)

It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's free and nothing is free.

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1xCodeGreen@reddit

True, I’ll add I haven’t hit any “upgrade to premium now to use this feature” warnings. Everything has been legitimately free.

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Saditface@reddit (OP)

I am glad that it is working out for you and I'm tempted to offer it to my clients. Who doesn't like free. I just have the phrase "if it is free, you are the product" How are they using our data, how much are they collecting? We are giving the platform admin rights to our machines. That creates a Pandora's box of possibilities for data harvesting, inventorying, telemetry. How could I check if they are doing something? Or know what is collected. I believe these are valid concerns.

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MikeWalters-Action1@reddit

Yes, these are valid concerns. Unfortunately, Google and Big Tech gave the word "Free" a bad name... As I mentioned in my other comment, we are not Spiceworks or Google and our business model is not based on the user data collection. We should do a better job explaining it, as it sometimes seems like offering a free version does us more harm than good.

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