Top 10 Free MSP Tools To Help Grow Your Business
With so many available tools and solutions for MSPs, it can be hard to know which ones are the right fit for your business. If cost-effectiveness is one of your main priorities when it comes to choosing, here’s a list that can jump-start your search. Behold, a list of the best FREE tools to help you run your MSP business.
If you need to create usage reports for Office 365, you’re going to love AdminDroid. While it does have tiered pricing available, the free version offers more than 100 reports and a handful of dashboards. You can run reports on users, licenses, groups, group members, devices, login activities, password changes, license changes, and more. There are no restrictions in reporting functionalities, so you’re free to customize, schedule, and export as you like.
Looking for a way to manage networks at multiple clients? Spiceworks offers a central hub for running your help desk, creating client reports, and more. Spiceworks allows you to collect network information from all your client sites (over secure HTTPS) – then consolidate and manage it all from one single, convenient spot! Here’s a rundown pf everything you can do with Spiceworks:
- Scan and inventory networks at multiple clients
- Manage tickets across clients with a help desk
- Monitor client sites for changes
- Report on client networks and activities
Veeam Free Backup for Windows and Linux
Windows and Linux work-from-home users rejoice! Veeam gives you a way to back up your endpoints, including laptops, PCs or Windows tablets, for free. If you have quite a few systems at home, you can use their Community Edition (also free!) which has central management and support for other types of workloads.
It’s pretty tough to help someone work through a computer problem when you can’t see their screen. TeamViewer is a free remote PC program that makes it easy to access a partner computer from anywhere in the world. You can directly access your family or friend’s home computer and reach all documents saved to the machine, so you can get to the root of the problem quickly and easily. You can even chat to them using TeamViewer’s messaging or video call capabilities.
ITFlow (BETA)
This one is for the busy MSPs! (In other words, all of them) ITFlow is an open source ITGlue alternative offering documentation, ticketing, and accounting system for small MSPs. With ITFlow, you’ll never have to spend time sorting through unorganized tickets and folders to try and track down information about your clients – you can start working on tickets right away. It also helps you take care of the financial side of the business, with pricing, quotes/invoicing, and accounting features. Of course, we have to address the security elephant in the room. As with any open source platform, you have to evaluate potential security threats, so keep that in mind when considering this handy tool.
Before you turn your router off and on again, find out if your go-to service is down and why with real-time problem and outage monitoring. If you want to take a deep dive into the nitty gritty of what happened, you can check out Downdetector Insights™ to learn the stories behind major outages.
Chocolatey – not just for your café mocha! Chocolatey wants to make managing Windows software less frustrating and time-consuming. This software helps automate your entire Windows software lifecycle from install to upgrade and removal with a simple, repeatable, and automated approach. By taking advantage of PowerShell to provide automated software management instructions, Chocolatey’s built-in functions turn complex tasks into one-line function calls. Celebrate your free time with a chocolate bar!
We all know the pain of needing to download something only to discover there’s no disk space left. Where did it go? TreeSize wants to help you keep tabs on your disk space, so you don’t have to scramble to delete giant files to clear up space. You can scan volumes in seconds and see the size of all folders – including all subfolders –and break it down to file level. Plus, you get a fun visualization of all your stuff!
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a diagram? While we can’t say exactly what it’s worth, we can tell you that creating said diagram can be done for free with Diagrams.net. Consider it an alternative to Visio – one where you’ll never have to pay to access premium features. Your data is completely secure, and you don’t even have to login or register to get started.
Did we save the best for last? We’d like to think so, but we’ll let you be the judge. Gradient offers the IT channel an integration platform where MSPs and vendors can easily connect, interact, and grow their businesses. The free billing reconciliation module allows MSPs to synchronize usage data directly from vendors so you can quickly review and approve changes. You’ll see instant insights on revenue and profitability per service and with single-pane-of-glass visibility, you’ll find any revenue that might be slipping through the cracks. You’ll also be able to glean insight into your most and least profitable service lines, helping you to identify cash cows instantly by understanding which service lines contribute the most to your revenue and profit. In short, you can spend far less time on billing reconciliation and more time on projects that can help scale your business, all while improving your bottom line. Win-win!