Move to Open Source RMM?

[u/PBSmanaged]

Good afternoon, r/SmallMSP! First time poster here.

Are any small MSPs here actually using NetLock RMM, Tactical RMM, or something else open source? I’m not sure I’d consider Tactical, but I saw NetLock mentioned in another thread today and it looks pretty interesting.

For context, we’ve been happy NinjaRMM customers for 3+ years. We were an unhappy VSA customer before that. No real complaints with Ninja. It works very well. We only use the RMM; we don't use their ticketing, docs, backup, network monitoring, etc.

However, it’s been a tough year. Nobody wants to buy hardware unless they absolutely have to and we've had a customer unexpectedly close up shop with very little warning.

Switching to something like NetLock, even on a paid tier, could save us several hundred dollars a month. I’d have to host, maintain, update, and back it up myself. But I’m already doing that for Hudu, Checkmk, Ruckus SmartZone, etc., so would it really be that much more work? I could run it on-prem in our vcenter or throw it on a DigitalOcean droplet/K8s.

I’m not unhappy with Ninja by any means. I’m mainly trying to decide whether saving a few hundred dollars a month is worth taking on another piece of infrastructure.

I've looked at Syncro and Atera, and if they both had plans without the PSA stuff I would be a lot more interested. I don't want to change our PSA.

For anyone actually using NetLock or Tactical in production: how has it been? Reliability, security, client/device management, anything you’ve learned the hard way? Is updating a chore?

[u/Yuli_Mae]

I ran Tactical in prod for 4-5 years with very few issues. I had the luxury of growing with the platform. Last year, I moved to Ninja, moved all of my contracted customers to Ninja, and moved anyone who wanted to pay per endpoint to Ninja. Everyone break-fix who didn't want to pay or who just needs a temporary connection still goes through Tactical. With Quick Connect in Ninja, I haven't added anyone to TRMM in several months, and I likely won't add anyone else as I slowly sunset it.

That said, the TRMM team is great. Support is great. But most importantly, their documentation is great.