I use RDP for work, and TeamViewer if I need to fix something for my parents. Chrome Remote Desktop is one other alternative I've used but not in anger.

I've dealt with just about every RAT in existence, and they all have their tradeoffs, and some were good and then got bought or changed to pricing that became prohibitive.

In DoD side, they tend to use DameWare. It was stagnant for a while but has gotten better and even has a linux client now. Think "ugly but powerful".

I've seen fly by night engineers hurdled by IT deps using TeamViewer way more than I would ever want to admit. It "just works" but doesnt have many of the management features.

I had an awesome experience with on-prem ScreenConnect, but then they changed their licensing and names and all kinds of other things. Nice featureset, writing plugins was easy. I still might consider it if I could get a decent deal.

Bomgar was pretty polished and has some interesting mobile/mdm stuff in the works last I tried it, but that was a long time ago.

GoToMyPC and LogMeIn both tend to be favorites of MSPs for some reason, I never really liked them mostly because of the management interfaces and constant license changes.

Citrix really seems more focused on real enterprise. Features are nice but the price reflects it, good support.

RDS/Terminal Services in the windows world is a staple, just have to watch for licensing violations which happen a lot. Lacks a lot of the management features other things have, but is built in.

Then you get into open source, which really comes down to some variant of VNC (choose your poison) which is really all just remote desktop with no management features. There is also noVNC and Spice which are pretty cool and used in more and more foss software (like proxmox for example).

There is Apache Guacamole which is like a gateway to access RDS/VNC et al instances, which is pretty cool.

So yeah, it really all depends on your use case and budget.

I use AnyDesk now as TeamViewer became annoying with their need to install and things like disconnects every x-minutes. Didn't look back since.

I switched from TeamViewer to AnyDesk too. Sensible licensing, protocol compatibility between versions, Linux versions _and_ repositories... Fantastic product!

https://www.cloudberrylab.com/remote-assistant.aspx Not only free, they don't even have a paid version.

If I can't understand the business model, I'm probably not going to use the software.

They primarily sell backup software, and they show the occasional ad to you in the app.

If the business model for a piece of software is ads I will not be using that software.

It's ads for their own products, not third party ads. (It's a little sidebar you can close).

Anyway, no one is forcing you to use it, but it seems a reasonable free choice for now (teamviewer and splashtop, for example, don't allow free commercial use...and commercial means connecting to your own work laptop, not just using it directly for money making activities like paid support.)

"It's ads for their own products, not third party ads. (It's a little sidebar you can close)."

Are these ads delivered over the internet, or served locally?

Don't know, I didn't try to break down the data being transferred. More likely than not internet, so yes, I assume they could change this to third party ads in the future. Or even if it's local, a update could change that. It's a sidebar you can fully close, so it's not annoying in any way...for now at least.

You can read a detailed breakdown here

https://medium.com/@chribonn/howto-use-of-msp360s-formerly-c...

Chrome Remote Desktop.

Teamviewer it the only reliable enterprise solution I've found so far

For just remotely logging in Splashtop is great and a lot cheaper.

ssh, RDP

What? How is a user supposed to show you and reproduce their problem when you're connected over SSH or RDP? Both run in a different session than the user's

Windows has a built-in remote assistance mode that uses RDP: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4026516/windows-use...

It's more of a pain than TeamViewer though.