As an IT service provider, my company Fresh Mango relies heavily on remote access tools to provide our customers with quick desktop support. For years our weapon of choice has been LogMeIn and so we have a lot of time and money invested in it, after seven years however: we’re moving to BeAnywhere.
In the hope it well help others considering what support tool to go for and in the vein hope LogMeIn will take on-board some of my comments and sort their act out, I decided to do a brief write up. Separately I have written real world review of BeAnywhere here which you can read in my blog post here.
It would appear that I am not alone in my frustrations either, Bruce Beris has posted an excellent piece here detailing his reasons for leaving LogMeIn: http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/04/leaving-logmein/
Pricing
LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon is no doubt enjoying a new megayacht..
As with any business, we’re always looking at our outgoings and recently, despite no real innovation or increase in features or functionality, our LogMeIn Central price went from $300 per year to around £1500 per year, an increase of 500%.
What I dislike most about this is that we only found out about the price increase a few weeks before so had no time to move all of our clients to a different platform – this is essentially extortion.
In an article on MSPmentor, a LogMeIn spokesman said:
One of the biggest changes with this move is the elimination of purchasing individual seats of LogMeIn Pro (for host computers) separate from Central. Historically, Central customers would be purchasing two SKUs – the Central management console and individual LogMeIn Pro seats, which would be installed on every computer they managed. Our customers regularly voiced concerns around the inherent complexity in that model
Despite these increases, as another user notes here, without ALSO paying for the Pro version of the LogMeIn Client, half of the features touted in LogMeIn Central (update management, alerts & monitoring, etc.) are unavailable.
Given the issues we’ve had with LogMeIn (see below) and with no new features to justify the cost, this was the last straw for us.
We spoke to BeAnywhere and explained the situation and they were willing to give us a slight discount because during the transition we’d be paying for both services. We are now on BeAnywhere’s better, more feature-rich platform for less money than the basic functionality of LogMeIn.
LogMeIn Central
Considering that LogMeIn Central was the first part of the LogMeIn ecosystem that we began paying for, I expected a lot more from it.
Unfortunately as a web interface, its really lacking some basic functionality such as:
Bulk Actions
There’s only one bulk action: delete. If you want to move a bunch of machines to a group at the same time, you can’t, you have to do them one by one.
Single Tier Groups
At present you can only have one tier of groups which – if you have a lot of customers – simply isn’t enough. BeAnywhere allows for a hierarchy (see BeAnywhere review here).
Totals/Count
There’s no quick way to count how many machines there are in total or in a specific group).
LogMeIn Client (AKA Ignition)
The LogMeIn Ignition app, which should be a beacon of light in terms of quick and easy remote access, has unfortunately been plagued with bugs, many of which have never been solved.
Unless you pay a premium on top of the already extortionate LogMeIn Central pricing, it also has a very limited feature set, simple file transfer for example should be a given, as well as a basic overview of the specification of the system you are working on.
I’ve outlined some of the bugs that I can remember below (will update as I remember more!):
LogMeIn Client (AKA Ignition) Saved Passwords Problem
When saving the username and password for some computers in Ignition, it seems to store them incorrectly. You can return only five minutes later, try and connect to a machine only to receive the dreaded ‘Login Failed’ error.
If you get that, you can assume Ignition will never successfully save the password you are trying to store, no matter how many times you try.
Your only option is to right click the machine, go to Properties and click ‘Forget Stored Credentials’ then enter the details manually every time forever more. While I’ve never tested it, I’m pretty sure this only affects passwords with uppercase letters – yep that’s right, I don’t think LogMeIn Client’s password store is case sensitive.
LogMeIn Client (AKA Ignition) Sorting Problem
A recent update to LogMeIn Client caused the client to lose sorting sorting of the companies/group – we have A LOT of companies and finding a specific one is now a nightmare.
At the time of writing there is still no fix released (but fortunately some clever peeps found a workaround and passed it on to me), despite it having been a known bug for several weeks and lots of paying customers complaining about it.
Interesting! I just made the same decision to leave LogMeIn for BeAnywhere, and wrote up my own explanation of the reasons here: http://www.brucebnews.com/2015/04/leaving-logmein/ It’s a shame – LogMeIn has been a trusted friend for a long time, but there’s something that feels very wrong about their business decisions for the last couple of years.
Hi Bruce,
Wow – it really looks like LogMeIn have dropped the ball huh? Like you, I’ve been a long time customer but I agree completely with you – things have gone sideways the past few years. Thanks for the comment and the link – I’ll reciprocate!
I totally agree with the author of this post. We also decided to switch to another software after 4 years.
I stumbled upon your blog looking for similar experiences with logmein.com since they have been giving me a hard time lately. And the company I work for.
It seems I\’m not alone and I wish that more blogs and magazines would direct some attention to the way this company is doing business and how they treat their loyal customers. Maybe you could write a follow-up article about them, considering your decision to leave them. Some exposure would not hurt at all and hopefully protect others from these scammers.
In short our story (and a lot of similar stories are to be found on their own forums and the internet):
– After yet another enormous and sneaky, silent (no communications at all!), price-hike of their services, we decided that\’s it was time to stop using Logmein Pro within our company.
– So we searched for a online way to cancel and stop auto-renewal. None of these options exist in their online dashboard. Since we started online, we figured we could also stop online (as all major companies offer these simple option). Not Logmein. Noooo, they make it very hard to cancel your subscription. You have to contact them, preferably by Phone (!!) to cancel your subscription AND auto-renewal.
– The credit card we used for the Original purchase (around 89 euro\’s) was already expired. So I guessed they would not be able to charge it and thus it would automatically stop. But no. Logmein.com figured it was completely \’ok\’ to go and change my credit card details to my new credit card en go ahead and charge that one for a whole new year. No communication, no questions, no consent what so ever. You feel where i\’m going?
– Upon receiving my credit card expenses-overview by mail I not only got angry because of them using my new credit card (I did not give them these details), but also because of the enormous price hike that was (again, without consent) done.
Of course I complained and they responded. They hide behind their ‘no refund policy’ and other stupid conditions that make no sense from a customer-friendly perspective.
Just take a short look into their own forums (search for ‘auto-renewal’ for instance). To see i’m not alone. I told them to go public and take it to my credit card company to take legal action/refund. That’s where I\’m at now, emailing you this story to be spread.
Maybe you can help and warn people for these scammers and very, very sad business operations.
What you think about LiteManager remote access software, I use it intead of LogMeIn ?
I am fuming at Logmein. I am a healthcare professional and need to occasionally go into my computer to check my schedule. I did so tonight so I could appropriately schedule an emergency tomorrow. Seems the people as Logmein are requiring a reset of all passwords due to some social media breach. I don’t use social media so that is not me but I was required to reset my password anyway. When I pushed the button it sent what I needed to my office email, an email I have no access to at night except by Logmein. So I am stuck. I called support only to hear they can’t do anything (They recommended I call someone at the office to get the email- Obviously they are in a different time zone since it is 10pm and it is closed.) They should have other contacts on file to send a password reset to. I can only imagine there are others who have time critical business to transact that are in the same situation as myself.
Like most of the posts, I happened onto your blog by accident. I too am having similar issues. 2 years ago, I was offered a bulk subscription with Central as a solution to the removal of the Logmein Free licenses. Up to that time, I had been paying for a handful (about 8) licenses of Pro for the users that required remote printing etc. For my work (sysadmin) I could easily do with the free option for all the other machines. The bulk subscription would give me a number of pro licenses and large number of not-pro for $500, including Central, enough to cover what I was already using. This was a good deal as I was already paying a similar amount.
The following year, my renewal jumped to around $1400, and I begrudgingly paid it. In the back of my mind, I had decided it was time to start looking for an alternative; but of course, got busy with real work, and forgot… until a couple of weeks ago when my subscription came due at a “discounted rate of $2438”. Discounted??? How do you figure??? Well, the real amount this package costs would be $5999.00, so $2500 is discounted; I guess. Needles to say, leaving Logmein is now a very real necessity. I can see that my next year renewal will be in the order of $3500 or higher, and that is just not acceptable.
I will be checking out the BeAnywhere option, as well as a few others.
PS as for the sorting issue in the client… If you don’t want to use the groups (I don’t), the system I came up with was to name the computers “domainname.COMPUTERNAME” and that automatically groups and orders them…
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to vent 😉
I canceled my subscription! I was a loyal customer since 2006.
My anual payments to Logmein for a pro account.
Dec 2013 = 43.50
Dec 2014 = 70.71
Dec 2015 = 86.67
Dec 2016 = 162.22
Log Me In are rip off artists!!! I have tried repeatedly to cancel my subscription and have complained to my credit card company but to no avail. Although I have stopped using Log Me In since 2016 they continue to bill me. I have to date not seen or heard an apology or consideration about the status of this continued effort to bill me for a service I no longer use. If anyone out there knows how to get this done, please let me know.