When this MSP started looking for a Syncro alternative, the search took a year. A 10-technician hybrid MSP and IT consultancy based in the US, operating for over 15 years, had already cycled through ConnectWise Automate and Syncro before settling on Gorelo. Four months in, the founder reports saving roughly eight hours a week across the business, processing well over 1,000 tickets on the new platform, consolidating their stack, and uncovering one major client contract that was generating less profit than they had assumed once support hours were factored in.
Client Overview
- Customer: Anonymized at customer’s request
- Company: 10-technician hybrid MSP and IT consultancy
- Position: Founder / Owner
- Location: United States
- Industry: Managed Services Provider with co-managed IT and consulting practice
- Endpoints managed: 1,000+
- Years in business: 15+
- Co-managed business mix: ~50% of operations
- Migration path: ConnectWise Automate → Syncro → Gorelo
- Migration started: January 1
- Tools replaced or consolidated: ScreenConnect, Teamwork.com, Hudu, external estimating
About the MSP Partner’s Company
The company is a 10-person MSP and IT consultancy that has been running for over 15 years. About half their work is full-stack managed services for SMB clients. The other half is co-managed IT, where they support internal IT teams at larger organisations rather than fully managing every endpoint themselves. The mix gives them a slightly different profile from a pure MSP, and they need a platform that handles both shapes of work without forcing one to look like the other.
Their platform history reads like a timeline of the industry. They started on ConnectWise Automate. Moved to Syncro a few years before COVID. Migrated to Gorelo in January. Each move came from a real breaking point with the platform they were on.
The Problem: A Platform That Stopped Evolving
ConnectWise Automate (originally LabTech) was the founder’s starting point years ago. By the time they left it, the platform felt antiquated. Development cycles had slowed, ConnectWise was acquiring other companies and putting its energy into new platforms like ASIO rather than the one their customers were on, and prices climbed. When the Automate sunset was announced in favour of the new cloud product, it was the trigger to start looking around.
That search led to Syncro. The pricing model fit on day one: per-technician, RMM and PSA in the same product, costs scaling with headcount rather than endpoint count. Syncro worked well for a few years. The RMM side was reasonably mature. The integrations were solid.
The problem was the PSA side, which the founder describes as more important to their day-to-day than the RMM ever was.
“With Syncro, the RMM was the focus. Ticketing was a bolt-on, and PSA was just a combination of a couple different things. PSA, and ticketing especially, is more important to me than RMM.”
Between 2020 and 2024, Syncro’s pace of development slowed. New features stopped shipping at the rate they had previously. Feature requests went unanswered. Support thinned out.
“It seemed like it was kind of at the end of its rope. A stale platform.”
By the time Syncro reset under new leadership and re-energised its roadmap, the founder had already started looking elsewhere.
The Switch: A Year-Long Evaluation, Then a Clean January 1 Start
The founder first heard about Gorelo on Reddit, where they lurk regularly in r/msp. They reached out to Mikel directly, did a demo, and walked away more sold on the person than the product.
“Gorelo was still very early at that time. He had been running it with his business. But the concept, the way Mikel speaks, the ideas he has, and the future he saw for it is what really turned me on to the platform.”
Over the next year, they kept watching. A second demo. A trial account. More research. By the end of that year, the decision was made, and they planned the cutover for January 1, the cleanest possible start to the calendar year.
“I think we officially started with everybody on January 1st. That’s when we started moving clients over. We’re still importing things. You can’t just stop everything to move systems. You have to trickle it in and do it as you can.”
By May, four months in, they had processed over 1,000 tickets on the new platform while still finishing the import of older client data. The Syncro contract had ended. They were fully off ConnectWise. The only legacy tool still in use was ScreenConnect, which they were already in the process of moving off as Gorelo Connect rolled out.
What Changed: Five Things Worth Naming
Billing got pulled off the founder’s desk
Before Gorelo, the founder was personally involved in the billing workflow every cycle, reviewing tickets alongside dispatch, checking time entries, and processing invoicing line by line.
The Gorelo workflow runs differently. A tech closes a ticket. Dispatch approves it. The invoice generates automatically from the contract criteria already set up. The founder previews the invoice, confirms it, and it syncs to Xero.
“Previously, I was doing the billing workflow and reviewing tickets with dispatch. Gorelo has taken that time off my plate.”
A Time Spent Report that answers client questions in seconds
A client called the founder asking how many hours they had used so far that year. Pre-Gorelo, that question would have required compiling data from multiple places. With Gorelo, the founder ran the Time Spent Report, filtered by year, and gave the client the number while they were still on the phone.
“Having that information at your fingertips while you’re on the phone with a client is huge.”
Other platforms had the underlying data. The difference was the presentation. Gorelo had built the report someone clearly needed.
The Contract Profitability Report turned out to be the surprise
This one came as a shock during onboarding. Once contract data was in Gorelo and support time was logging properly against each client, one of their larger, higher-paying clients revealed a contract generating far less profit than the founder had assumed. The dollar value of the contract had masked the support volume the client was consuming.
“The contract profitability report was eye-opening. It helped us see that one of our larger client contracts was less profitable than we expected once support time was factored in.”
The data had always existed in some form. The platforms just never presented it like this. Gorelo shipped that report on day one.
Scheduled recurring tickets replaced a manual daily task
Because the company does a heavy co-managed business, their dispatcher used to spend part of every day creating tickets manually for recurring co-managed work. Each ticket had to be opened, populated, assigned. Daily.
In Gorelo, those tickets are scheduled to auto-create on the right cadence. Dispatch verifies they look right and moves on. The recurring admin task is gone.
Scripts ported cleanly because they were already in PowerShell
The founder anticipated the scripting question before the migration started. They had already begun moving automation out of ConnectWise Automate’s proprietary scripting language and into PowerShell well ahead of the move.
“We were moving a lot of scripting outside of the RMM. Automate had a native scripting language that was proprietary to Automate. We moved a lot of that out to just PowerShell, which a lot of MSPs are probably doing as well. Porting scripts from Automate to Syncro or from Syncro to Gorelo is not as big of a deal because your PowerShell scripts are just being called natively on the computer.”
That single piece of preparation made the RMM side of the migration almost trivial.
Stack consolidation that compressed the tool count
The pre-Gorelo stack was busier than it needed to be. Syncro for RMM, PSA, and ticketing. Intuit for invoicing. ScreenConnect for remote access. Bitdefender and Webroot for endpoint security. Multiple subscriptions, multiple integrations to keep alive.
In the year leading up to the migration, the company moved off Bitdefender and Webroot to Huntress plus Microsoft Defender, the stack that integrates natively with Gorelo. They implemented CIPP for Microsoft 365 management. They moved accounting from Intuit to Xero for cleaner Gorelo billing integration.
After Gorelo went live, more consolidation followed. ScreenConnect is being phased out as Gorelo Connect (Gorelo’s RustDesk-based remote access) rolls out. Teamwork.com will go once the team fully embraces Gorelo’s Projects module. External estimating tools will go when Gorelo’s Estimates feature ships.
Migration approach: parallel, trickle, no big bang
The founder is direct about how the migration unfolded. They did not stop the business from switching platforms. They could not.
“You can’t just stop everything to move systems. You have to trickle it in and do it as much as you can.”
Client data moved over via CSV. One client with several hundred users had a malformed row during the first import. The team flagged it to Gorelo support, who fixed it and re-imported the file. By month four, the bulk of clients had moved across, old contracts were being sunset on their renewal dates, and Gorelo was the daily driver.
Co-managed IT works inside Gorelo
About half the company’s operations involve co-managed IT, where clients have their own internal IT teams and the company supports them rather than fully managing every endpoint. That model often gets handled poorly by pure-MSP platforms.
Gorelo handles it cleanly. Co-managed clients get granular access to their own tickets, the RMM for the assets they care about, and work created on their behalf when their users contact the help desk directly. Mikel was upfront early on that access control was “90 to 95 percent there” with some refinement still to come. For long-standing co-managed clients the company has worked with for over a decade, that was an acceptable answer.
“We’ve had no problem supporting co-managed accounts in Gorelo from a ticketing, billing, or RMM standpoint.”
What Gorelo doesn’t solve yet
The founder is candid about parts of the migration still in progress.
Documentation hasn’t moved. Hudu is still in use. Moving the documentation library would take weeks of manual lift, and no clean automated importer exists between documentation platforms today. The team’s view is that someone would need to build an n8n workflow or custom API import to do it efficiently. For now, Hudu runs in parallel.
The report builder isn’t shipped yet. Standard reports plus filterable list views have covered the company’s needs at this stage. Shops that depend on bespoke custom reporting will plan around the standard set until the builder arrives.
These are real gaps, openly named. The founder weighs them against what was gained and concludes the trade was worth making.
Results at a Glance
| Metric | Before Gorelo | With Gorelo |
| Hours saved per week | n/a | ~8 hours across the org |
| Annual hours saved | n/a | ~416 hours |
| Tickets processed in first 4 months | n/a | 1,000+ |
| Founder’s billing involvement | Line-by-line review with dispatch | Final approval only |
| Co-managed ticket creation | Manual, daily | Scheduled, auto-created |
| Contract profitability visibility | Manual analysis | Built-in report (one large contract revealed as unprofitable) |
| Time Spent Report response to clients | Manual compilation | Filtered + answered in seconds |
| Billing workflow | Owner reviews tickets, manual invoicing | Tech logs time → dispatch approves → invoice generates → Xero sync |
| Tools migrated or consolidated | n/a | 4 (ScreenConnect → Gorelo Connect, Teamwork.com → Gorelo Projects, external estimating → Gorelo Estimates, accounting moved Intuit → Xero) |
| Migration approach | n/a | Parallel, January to May, no service interruption |
In the founder’s own words
“Gorelo is led by technical people who have actually run MSPs and use the product day to day. That is a huge differentiator.”
“The whole billing workflow is very seamless compared to how we used to do it. From an admin standpoint, the way tickets flow into billing is seamless and efficient.”
“The contract profitability report was eye-opening. The data was always there in other platforms. It just wasn’t presented in such a concise manner.”
“Because Mikel runs an MSP himself, he understands the pain points and how things should be set up.”
“When our techs have a feature request or complaint, Gorelo takes it seriously and implements improvements quickly.”
What this MSP would tell others considering the switch
Asked what advice they would give to an MSP hesitant to switch platforms, the founder’s answer was direct.
“Just rip the band-aid off. I felt the same pressure. This works, it’s not the best, it’s not what I want, but it works and everybody knows it, so let’s just stick with it and ride it out. That’s one mentality. The other is, you just have to rip the band-aid off and move to a new platform because it’s better for you in the long run. You’re sacrificing short-term pain for long-term gain.”
The reasoning is sunk-cost math. The longer you stay on a platform you’ve outgrown, the more time your team spends fighting workflows that drag. The longer you delay, the more new features you miss adopting at the rolling edge. They timed their migration so they could pick up Projects, Estimates, and every new feature shipped through the year, rather than catching up later.
“Don’t sink too much time into your existing platform just because it works.”
For MSPs going into a Gorelo trial, the founder’s suggestion is to start with the workflows that matter most to your own operation. For this 10-tech hybrid, that meant billing, contracts, and the recurring co-managed ticket setup. Get those working first. The value lands fastest there.
P.S : Customer name and company name have been anonymized at the customer’s request. All other details, including specific tools used, metrics, timelines, and direct quotes, are accurate and verified.
| ABOUT GORELO Gorelo is an all-in-one PSA and RMM platform built by MSP operators for MSPs with 2 to 30 employees. It brings together ticketing, remote monitoring and management, documentation, billing, and client management in a single platform, designed to be operational from day one without implementation fees or dedicated training. Start your free 30-day trial at gorelo.io |
