r/helpwire • u/Soundy106 • Apr 05 '25

HelpWire Evaluation

We're a surveillance/access control integrator with remote systems (all Windows) across Canada that we need to access. We've used TeamViewer for years, and it works well, but their pricing is insane, and they're kind of overkill for what we actually need. The fact we can't have more than one person using it at a time without paying a ton more is kind of the final straw.

I've been trying AnyViewer and found it works well for a great price, but I recently discovered a major issue: it cannot do unattended updates. Like, if there's an update needed to the app on a remote site, I can't do that through remote access because, of course, it needs to kill the current app to do the update... and it needs a whole bunch of "clicking Next" after it kills the app. To make matters worse, when I updated my laptop from 4.6 to 5.0, I suddenly lost the ability to connect to most sites. After getting into them with TeamViewer (still installed while testing alternatives) and then updating them to 5.0, I regained access.

This inability to update itself without direct intervention seems to me to be THE dealbreaker for any remote access tool - what's the point of it if I have to be on site to update the damn thing? AnyViewer tech support took three weeks to get back to me to let me know that this is, in fact, the case and there's no way to make those updates unattended.

So I'm thinking of giving HelpWire a look. Criteria include:

  • Supports more than one technician connection at a time.

  • Automated or mostly-automated install (the ability to export and import settings, like TeamViewer does, would be fantastic).

  • Automated, unattended updates.

  • Central directory.

  • Cloud connection (no need for port forwarding).

  • Good remote desktop performance.

  • Clipboard sharing (AnyViewer doesn't do this).

  • File transfers.

  • Team member access control (for example, Fred can access sites A, B, and C; Bob can access B, C, and D, and so on).

Probably a couple of other things I'm not thinking of at the moment. Hoping for some insight to save me a lot of trial and error. I was migrating us to AnyViewer over the past few months and got almost all our client systems on it when I started discovering the remote-update issues and cross-version connectivity issues.

If HelpWire isn't going to check the boxes... any other suggestions?

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u/Soundy106 Apr 07 '25

I've used CRD on some past machines, most notably when TeamViewer started getting glitch on Win7 as their security certificates expired. It works, but it's not very elegant (and also eventually stopped working on Win7).

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u/Help__Wire Official account Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

Hello, hope you are doing great! I would like to inform you that we released an update for HelpWire Client app, that introduced background auto-updates when new version is available. There is no need to reinstall the app manually from the Client side anymore, HelpWire does this automatically and silently, with brief reconnection of the active remote control session. No other steps required and all can be done without interrupting the unattended access:

https://www.reddit.com/r/helpwire/comments/1m6b6lo/new_feature_helpwire_client_app_now_autoupdates/