For example, you can set email alerts for your computers (with the "IT Support" edition), and you can monitor whether the AV is running. SplashTop is not quite as fast as TeamViewer / AnyDesk, but it does work, and it offers some nice extras that the other two don't. We only have it installed on some of our endpoints (for $8.25/month you only get to access 10), and wish that they released a self-hosted, one-time fee edition. It's not as fast as AnyDesk, but it's not far behind and the image quality is oftern better. We ended up subscribing to SplashTop because it works and is affordable - and the more expensive options really offer a lot of features that we might actually use one day. Possibility of direct local connections without cloud/internet access.Fast response times during use without significantly compromising image quality.Reliable connection through a relay server without having to configure firewall rules like port-forwarding.So, our requirements boiled down to this: We also wanted a solution that could enable us to access other computers on the local network directly, without having to jump through a relay server. TW had no problem with this but many other solutions did. This ruled out pretty much all VNC/Remote Desktop solutions. The client computers have to initiate communications and register with a management server "in the cloud" in order for us to be able to gain access and only port 80 and 443 are open, thus only solutions that could "punch-through" firewalls could work. One of our clients receives their net from a corporation next-door, and everything goes through the corporate firewall that we have no control over. Although the UI is a bit confusing (a case of over-simplification ending up making the software more complicated to use), it just works. We only need to log into a remote computer a few times a week, and that doesn't justify paying $50+/month. But.TW has become ridiculously expensive, well, for our needs anyway. Our first thought of course was to just buy it. We used to use TeamViewer (yes, the free edition), until TW justifiably blocked our access. Reddit is a great resource to read up on other people's experience, unfortunately even there we suspect that many "suggestions" are neither unbiased nor truthful. This is not one of those - you can see that none of our links are "affiliate links", and you may well disagree with our findings. During our research we came across a LOT of slanted "review" articles that were basically advertisements. So this should be a "living document" that we update every once in a while. We researched a number of products, and would like to write down our experiences for your benefit and also for ourselves in case we revisit this question in the future. And this is where remote access and rudimentary RMM (remote management and monitoring) come in. But we do need a solution to help us ensure that our clients' systems are healthy and protected. We do not spend our days maintaining thousands of computers. This little introduction should give you, our dear reader, an understanding of where we are coming from. This way we can focus on our core competency: software. Our strategy is twofold: find someone within the company who can perform basic IT administration, and handle more challenging issues ourselves. Although we don't specialize in IT infrastructure support, we do aim to fulfill all of our clients' IT needs. We are a small company in Hungary (in Central Europe for our oversear readers) with a number of ongoing programming projects, including open source software as well as proprietary solutions for out clients, who are also small businesses. And NoMachine? It's great for intranet connections and we'll be keeping an eye on it going forward! Background Silly name, great product that offers reliable connections and a nice sprinke of useful extra features that make it a pretty good deal - although the price does go up quickly if you want features like alerts etc. ![]() Unfortunately, it's doesn't offer a reliable method to connect to computers behind a corporate firewall with packet filtering. We also love SimpleHelp because it has a lot of useful features such as remote monitoring, alerts, and a "toolbox", and we may end up using it at one of our clients. We love the speed of AnyDesk but found it sometimes compromised too much in terms of image quality and it was also lacking in features. They all excel in different scenarios and offer very different features. ![]() Quick summary: after testing way too many remote access solutions, we ended up picking four favorites: SplashTop, AnyDesk, SimpleHelp, and NoMachine.
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