#Low cost alternative to teamviewer for free#
#Low cost alternative to teamviewer install#
#Low cost alternative to teamviewer upgrade#
#Low cost alternative to teamviewer android#
#Low cost alternative to teamviewer software#

Bomgar and ConnectWise (formerly ScreenConnect) offer self-hosted options but both were priced well out of my range.

#Low cost alternative to teamviewer software#

Last but not least, the software had to be affordable for a one-man shop.ĭoes anyone meet all four (five) criteria?Īfter spending hours searching, reading, pricing, eliminating options that were not self-hosted or that priced themselves clear out of reach, I finally settled on ISL Light.

#Low cost alternative to teamviewer android#

(As far as I know, they are unique in this respect some other brands, including other flavors of Android and iOS, allow view-only access.) Sometimes it’s awfully handy to help a struggling mobile user by simply running his phone for him for a bit. Samsung actually allows remote support software to control their Android devices. Occasionally I need to remotely control Android phones. And in the service business, time is money. Many people I support remotely are not that computer-savvy, and having to lead them through a complicated connection process is frustrating - not to mention, time-wasting.

I wanted to run my remote support software on my own server. The cloud has its place, to be sure but in my opinion the race to the cloud is getting completely out of hand.

I am not a fan of the way so many services are moving to the cloud. Basically, I had the following wish list: I had some criteria in mind, however, which helped to narrow the selection pool considerably. There seem to be dozens of remote support software options, and choosing one was difficult. So, the search for alternatives began in earnest. But it didn’t take me long to decide I simply was not going to pay $650 every year for the privilege of keeping my license up to date. But with version 11, as host I can not control clients running version 12 (and now, 13). I can control client computers running 11, 10, 9, 8… and so on. In other words, if I’m running version 11, I can control anyone running any version of TeamViewer up to version 11 but no newer than that. Note that the way TeamViewer is set up, a host can control a client running any version of software equal to or less than the version of the host.

#Low cost alternative to teamviewer upgrade#

But the TeamViewer software has a sly way of popping up a banner notifying users that a new version is available, and the upgrade process is easy… so of course, as time went on more and more clients no longer used version 11. For some time this still worked fairly well, because many of my clients still had version 11. For “just $639,” as I recall, I could upgrade my commercial license to version 12! Well, I still wasn’t quite over the sticker shock of what I’d paid them about a year prior, and refused to bite. About a year later, TeamViewer 12 came out and I started getting “special upgrade offers” in my inbox.

#Low cost alternative to teamviewer for free#

And then there were updatesĪs promised, we got the TeamViewer 11 upgrade for free and all was well.

So I jumped in and (somewhat unwillingly) paid TeamViewer about $1,300.00 CAD.

#Low cost alternative to teamviewer install#

The cheapest license, which as I recall was in the neighbourhood of $650 or so, wouldn’t work for me because that only would have allowed me to install on just one of my computers because of the way I worked, and the fact that I worked at home part-time and in another office (book-keeping job) part time, I had to be able to support customers from any computer I happened to be in front of. So I bought a license for TeamViewer 10, with a free upgrade to the upcoming TeamViewer 11, which was to be released within about a month. This is to be expected, because the personal version is not to be used commercially and it was inevitable that we’d have to purchase a commercial license eventually. This arrangement worked for a time, but then the TeamViewer software on my computer figured out that I was spending considerable time controlling quite a number of unique client computers… and began throwing up warnings that I was using it for commercial use and would have to pay to keep using it. I chose TeamViewer simply because I was familiar with it (who isn’t?), and it works well.

Our business budget was small, and I started out with the free version. When CareTech was just beginning and our office was a corner of our living room (yes, my dear wife patiently put up with that mess, bless her!), I started using TeamViewer for our remote support needs. Official TeamViewer pricing as of February, 2018.