Best MSP Documentation App in 2024 (ITGlue Still Wins)

Which MSP application to use for client documentation will be the discussion of today's important topic.

Back when I started my first MSP in around 2004, MSP documentation applications did not exist. It legitimately was a nightmare and I talk about trying to cobble together my own MSP documentation application using Microsoft CRM back in those days.

Today is different and while there is a significant number of MSP documentation tools on offer today, I am only going to be discussing knowledge base tools I have direct exposure to and even then, I am only going to mention in passing the applications that I considered lacking in features or structure.

Ultimately and practically it leaves two MSP documentation platforms to consider and that is either IT Glue or its direct competitor, Hudu. They both have advantages and disadvantages which I will go into below.

While you are here, Take a look at some of our other Technology Consulting related articles below that may interest you:

MSP Client Documentation NON Contenders

I have experienced many MSP documentation management apps over the years and for the most part, they can be discounted from consideration either due to being designed more for internal IT departments than MSPs such as Passportal to being an ill advised add on from a MSP vendor that specializes in something else such as an RMM tool and has thought it was a good idea to divert effort from their main product and create something woeful that when measured against the market leaders is substandard in almost every area such as ITBoost by Connectwise.

Below is a list in no particular order of the current offerings that I have tried and found lacking because they lack the basic features such as client documentation management, appropriate levels of integration and in one case, no search functionality! I have also not included tools that are sometimes shoehorned into documentation such as Sharepoint and OneNote.

The primary reason why the MSP client documentation apps above are discounted is that in most cases, the client documentation component is substandard and in the rest of the cases, non-existent.

Passportal for example, I had heard many great things about it and obtained a client that used it as their primary documentation platform and I have to say, it was woeful. 

So much so that I do not believe it was really designed for an MSP. It seemed as though it was made for an internal IT department. 

There was no client documentation component and no easy way to segregate and publicly share client specific articles not to mention you had to reinvent the wheel for each client. What I mean by that is I had to recreate the documentation framework for each client instead of being able to recreate the documentation framework from a single original template.

MSP Client Documentation App Requirements

Just so we are all on the same page here, when I speak of the client documentation side of an MSP documentation application, I am talking about the functionality built into the app so that it makes it easy to create and maintain a repository specifically for a single client.

Below I will go into the specific features that I consider requirements when it comes to proper client documentation capability.

Easy To Use Out Of The Box

There are only two options for MSP client documentation that are currently worth considering and that is Hudu or ITGlue out of the box and even now I hate to admit it, ITGlue with its MYGlue unlimited number of free read only accounts wipes the floor with the underdeveloped customer portal of Hudu.

The MYGlue integration with ITGlue is very intuitive even if you have never used it before and the ability to setup myglue users and myglue groups is pretty painless. 

You cannot really make the mistake of accidentally giving access to the wrong organization when creating a myglue user because they are only able to be added to a single organization.

How Organizations And Locations Are Handled

This is another area where ITGlue just handles things so much better. For example when ITGlue is set up, it syncs the organization along with the locations of that organization with your selected PSA tool.

I have always found creating a location in the PSA tool is preferred rather than trying to create it in ITGlue because for some reason, creating it in ITGlue often causes sync issues where either two identical locations are created or it disappears. Creating it in the PSA is bulletproof.

Locations in Hudu need to be filed under “I thought that locations would be a basic feature” You have to either create child sites under the parent organization or create an asset class and call the asset class “Locations”.

Honestly after hearing all the praise about Hudu, I was left a little shocked that the client’s sites are treated in a half hearted way, actually that is a polite way of saying they are completely ignored.

The big gotcha here is that with Hudu, to access the client documentation, the created user is only able to access a single site from the user portal meaning if you have a big organization with 30 sites, good luck creating a client side portal user because they can only access one of those 30 sites. It is a logistical nightmare. 

I do not want to complain but one of the reasons many move from ITGlue is due to Kaseya’s woeful business practices and lack of acceptable development in the product so it disappoints me to see that Hudu have had this listed for 3 years within the top 30 requests and it has not even been looked at. 

Now if my experience with ITGlue is anything to go by, this means it is an issue you will just have to live with as it will not be worked on anytime soon.

The beauty of MYGlue is that it is basically the same database that ITGlue runs from so there is no need to replicate information. It handles permissions slightly differently and the client has the ability to create passwords that you can half see which leads to confusion.

So the passwords created by the client that have not been assigned ITGlue permissions will be missing from the clients password folder list under their organization however will show up in the global password tab under the client.

I found this frustrating because they most often do not follow our naming convention and have not been filled out correctly. I am all good with that, if the client has passwords that we do not manage and want to keep them confidential as long as it does not mess up my mother beautiful global lists which of course they do.

I have circumvented this by having our own MYGlue user where we can log in and modify the permissions so that we can modify to suit (obtaining client permission of course) as well as ongoing client training on naming conventions.

PSA Sync To MSP Client Documentation

The fact Hudu still is unable to sync locations untouched from Connectwise PSA  or many other class leading PSAs into Hudu and the sites need to be created separately is a real dealbreaker.

Because of the way I set up the MSP documentation app, the PSA is the truth teller, it is the first and final place where company and location information is guaranteed to be accurate. 

I find the idea of introducing such a large chance for human error not to mention the excessive man hours required to maintain two completely separate versions of your clients organizational structure in the form of the sites that make up the client to be unacceptable.

I set up ITGlue so that only two types of organizations exist, clients and vendors. 

These entities are set up in Connectwise Manage and I ensure that these organizations are filled out completely and the naming standard is on point both for the client name as well as site names.

This ensures that when doing a global search in ITGlue, I can bring up every single client head office by typing in 01 because my naming convention for a head office is 01 Head Office (State Abbreviation) 

I use 02 for branch offices, 03 for home offices and 04 for virtual offices or data centers. This exact structure then syncs to ITGlue without any further effort and zero chance of human error.

This structure is also available in MYGlue as part of the client side documentation interface without having to do any further work and again zero chance for human error. 

A bonus is that you can lock down assets via group permissions in ITGlue and so can choose if you want to make locations available to view to the client.

As mentioned, the free read only portal user can only access one client site per user in the Hudu customer portal which is just outrageous and something I hope gets changed. 

Honestly, looking at the Hudu feature request list that all MSP vendors seem to have, it is actually giving me ITGlue development flashbacks. Of the top 35 most requested features, none of them are in progress and most are many years old.

I get pretty annoyed when I see a vendor put something up like a feature request board and request that we as clients come up with the most popular and required functionality only for that information to be completely ignored. 

Currently the features in progress are almost all features that are at the very bottom of the feature request popularity scale as determined by existing clients, it is infuriating!

My question has always been to vendors, why put up a feature request board that tracks popularity of requests if you are going to just completely ignore the information it provides. 

We the clients gave you the information you have requested and you should now use that information to prioritize the development path. It is not a hard game… anyway where were we?  

Company Type - Control On Sync

File this under “I cannot believe the ability to filter company types does not exist” because on ITGlue under the sync settings with Connectwise PSA, with a tick in a box, decide what types of companies I allow across with ITGlue.

Using CW Manage as an example here, most of us have been in the game for 20+ years and if you were like me at the start, I legitimately had no clue how to set up CW Manage effectively. This means that there is an evolution that has occurred over a long period of time.

You probably have 23 different types of companies of which 21 should never make it across to the MSP documentation platform. Either they are a client or a vendor, no other company type should exist in your documentation platform.

You cannot do that in Hudu, so brace yourself as 3000 companies of which 2547 are no longer relevant for reasons such as never having become a client or you setup an organization types incorrectly of Rotary Client, business breakfast client, large client, small client, anyway you get the picture, you have pointless client types.

The first job is to change the client type to either client or vendor in ITGlue and then tick two boxes that allow those two organizations to sync while leaving the junk back in your PSA. Unfortunately with Hudu there is no way to do this.

Client Documentation User Permissions

Once again, ITGlue decimates Hudu in this department although it seems Hudu has put the feature of folder level permissions under review. 

Something to be aware of here is that the “under review” status has been set on all feature requests in that status within about the last 3 months from the date this article was written. 

The review process trigger should be a considered decision and there should be a random number of feature requests put into that status over a medium to long term time scale.

It would be the equivalent of an MSP finding 50 tickets that had been forgotten about and then mass updating them to in progress in that the status change signifies almost nothing. 

My guess is folder level permissions will be at least another 3 years away for Hudu which coincidentally is about the same length of time it will take me to update all of my KB articles one by one.

Without this feature it means that you have to apply permissions to individual knowledge base or SOP articles and trust me, it is an absolute nightmare to manage across a large number of clients. 

ITGlue in tandem with MYGlue handles access really well via ITGlue group permissions that flow down in a hierarchical fashion.

This means with both ITGlue and MYGlue (Customer facing documentation system) I can create a folder structure in the documents area and apply permissions to a folder. 

Every document placed in that folder will inherit the permissions of that folder meaning you do not have to be forever applying permissions to specific articles.

Client Documentation User Groups

I promise I do not receive kickbacks from ITGlue, in fact the business practices of Kaseya has me desperately wanting Hudu to come out on top as far as client documentation for MSPs is concerned. 

Unfortunately it is just one area that Hudu has deemed a low priority and that is the self service client documentation side of things. My view it is up there with among the most important features a competent MSP client documentation package can offer. 

IT Glue user groups are simple, intuitive and surprisingly effective given their simplicity. I can add the same user to multiple groups of which the most restrictive selection is the dominant selection.

This means if I have a user in two groups and one is denied access to the organizations passwords and one is allowed passwords then the user is denied access to passwords. 

Now I am not saying it is as streamlined as permissions or security in active directory but it is good enough for most use cases and ultimately it is too bad if it isn’t because unfortunately there is no other product that is better than IT Glue and MYGlue in this area.

Hudu on the other hand handles user permissions in the oddest way. You can only add one user to a single group meaning it really requires significant pre planning and as mentioned above this is compounded by the fact you cannot apply permissions to a Hudu folder only to the article.

Imagine having 2000 knowledgebase articles which is not unreasonable in a medium sized company and having to apply the permissions to those articles individually?

As a heavy ITG user, it is very easy to restrict sensitive financial or human resources knowledgebase articles by applying specific group access to the financial or human resources folder under the root KB folder however the only way to really be able to do this in Hudu is to create a fake organization such as “MyCompany - Finance” and or “MyCompany - HR”.

This allows for a somewhat effective way to restrict permissions however it goes against every principle I have learnt about in the management of IT documentation. It means breaking up and segmenting your company information into multiple fake organizations within Hudu.

Imagine being asked by the client to do this for them as well. Suddenly you are going to have duplicate organizations popping up like some sort of infection. It is just quite impractical for clients because of this which means there is a serious lack of granularity when it comes to permissions when using Hudu on the client documentation side.

In summary, ITGlue wipes the floor as far as group and folder permissions are concerned on both the MSP side as well as the MSP Client documentation side of things.

Feature Request System For Client Documentation

This is not directly related to the actual client documentation management however having an MSP vendor take the feature requests of their clients seriously makes a massive difference to the confidence in the documentation app being used as well as the long term outlook. 

Most of us are pretty reasonable and understand any piece of software or cloud based application will not be perfect all at once. As service providers the last thing we want is dishonest claims about ongoing improvement.

This is the very reason there has been an exodus from IT Glue. To be fair to Kaseya, IT Glue were woeful in product development right from the very start even before Kaseya was ever involved.

They even used it to determine what paid add ons they could profit from rather than using it to add features to the existing product. Then Kaseya took over and turbo charged the poor treatment of their clients through deceptive business practices especially with regards to unauthorized billing, overcharging and automatic multi year contract renewals without providing reasonable warning.

Now having looked at the feature request system of Hudu, I am left having flashbacks and cold sweats as they appear to be heading down the same direction as ITG did. Their top 30+ most popular feature requests are on average 3 years old and not a single one of them is being worked on.

Looking a little deeper and I cross reference the in progress feature requests to find most of them are the least popular requests with most having less than 20 votes. Compare this to the most popular which have 550+ votes and that irritating behavior of ignoring clients is quite obvious.

So in summary, nobody here comes out looking good as far as product development is concerned. 

Hudu did seem to be doing well there for a while and their reputation online always seems to be quite positive however just by looking at the actual facts of the matter, my view is that currently that reputation is probably overblown by MSP owners who are positively reinforcing the move they made away from ITG rather than giving an honest comparison.

Conclusion

At the time of writing this article, it pains me to say this however when it comes to managing your MSPs client documentation, IT Glue is still the leading documentation platform. Yes it costs more, yes you will be locked into a multi year contract and will probably feel abused by the way Kaseya treats you as a client.

None of that matters when compared to the deficiencies that Hudu still exhibits. They have had a good 3 years now to get to the point of being a superior product and I am so disappointed after my testing that it is still so far behind in what I would consider basic features.

Other irritations with Hudu that have been standard for half a decade with ITG that while not being deal breakers are still frustrating such as lack of 2-way sync with your PSA or RMM, a very limited integration selection, lack of DNS tracking, wild card searching or having the ability to copy/paste html directly into the document edit area, you must use the WYSIWYG.

Even 1-way sync with Connectwise PSA does not work properly because while yes it syncs some limited information across at the time of the sync, it is unable to detect changes on the CW PSA side meaning if you edit something in CW Manage, you will end up with incorrect information in Hudu until a full one way sync re occurs.

My view is IT Glue will remain the class leading client documentation platform in the form of MYGlue for at least the next few years. 

I say this because these are not small items to rectify and I suspect if Hudu worked on these one after the other starting today, it would still take at least 3 years to complete.

I think I can summarize it best by using an analogy here. ITGlue under Kaseya is the abusive girlfriend that treats you poorly yet nothing else compares while Hudu is the drama free long term girlfriend that started out with so much promise and yet no longer excites you. She is understanding although keeps failing on promises made yet does not really do anything wrong except you are now seeing some of the same behaviors you disliked in the abusive girlfriend with none of the benefits.

As anything in life, you get what you pay for!

We have a number of other MSP Consulting articles listed below that will provide you with more detailed information on a number of related topics:

https://optimizeddocs.com/blogs/consulting/consulting-index-page-01

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