Argos OS and ConnectWise.
ConnectWise is one of the most established vendors in this industry, with a PSA that a very large number of MSPs run their businesses on. This document contests how the catalog is assembled and how it is sold. It cites two items from the public record, links both, and states the scope of each exactly as the record states it — including where that scope is narrower than a competitor would like it to be.
2 sourced entries · 0 unsourced allegations · 0 prices quoted for either party · prepared by Intelligent Automation, LLC · last reviewed 2026-07-27
Everything wrong with us, before anything about them.
You are about to read a young vendor criticize an established one. That is only worth your time if the young vendor goes first.
Now the comparison.
A deep PSA, surrounded by separately-built products.
ConnectWise Manage is a genuinely deep PSA. It handles agreements, procurement, time and invoicing at a level of detail that reflects decades of listening to MSPs, and its reporting can answer questions ours cannot answer yet. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and any comparison that opens by calling their PSA weak is a comparison written for people who have never used it.
Around that PSA sits a catalog assembled over time — remote access, RMM, backup, security operations, documentation — much of it acquired, each piece arriving with its own codebase and its own database. The result is unified at the login screen and at the invoice. Underneath, the products remain what they were when they were bought, and the space between them is bridged by connectors, an integration marketplace, and, in practice, by your technicians.
That is the structural argument, and it is the same one we make about every roll-up: acquisition merges the billing, not the data model. A marketplace is what a platform builds when its own parts cannot address each other by key.
One login screen. Or one data model.
A strong core product, a catalog acquired around it, and a marketplace sold back to you as the connective tissue. The seams are real work, and the work lands on your team rather than on the vendor’s.
- The alert and the ticket are strangers — the monitoring system knows, the PSA finds out when a person retypes a hostname.
- The client is spelled differently in each product, because no product owns the authoritative record.
- Compliance evidence is rebuilt by export and re-import, every quarter, by hand.
- Remote access and monitoring reach every endpoint you manage, which makes that tooling the highest-value target in the chain for everyone, including the people attacking it.
This is a property of assembled catalogs, not an accusation about any particular team.
One Kernel, written before the products: identity, the client graph, the event spine and the audit spine. The products are made of it rather than calling it.
- A detection, a ticket, an asset and a compliance control all reference the same client row by key. Renaming a client tells nobody, because nobody had a copy.
- 100%• of emitted events delivered. The event is written in the same transaction as the fact it describes, so it cannot be lost without losing the write.
- One append-only• audit log for the entire platform — 165,000+• hash-chained records, with the database itself refusing an UPDATE.
- The chain head is timestamped into Bitcoin block 959874•, a ledger we have no authority over. That is the one claim on this page you can check without us.
Counterweight, again: zero• customers. Architecture is a hypothesis until other people’s businesses are running on it.
The comparison, with a scope column.
Including the rows where they win. A table with no losing rows in it was not written to inform you.
| Dimension | The roll-up model | Argos OS | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| PSA depth | Decades of accumulated detail in agreements, procurement, time and invoicing. Deeper than ours in places. | A modern PSA on a shared data model — ticketing, SLA, CRM, CPQ, contracts, projects, assets, change management and finance — but younger, and narrower in the long tail. | theirs, honestly |
| Data model | Separate databases per acquired product, bridged by connectors and a marketplace. | One client graph. Every product resolves a client through it rather than keeping a private list. | architecture |
| Alert to ticket | An integration, maintained by whichever side cares more. | An event on the spine. Signal lands as a ticket with the evidence already attached — nobody copies hostnames between consoles at 2 a.m. | our own environment |
| Audit trail | Per-product logging in per-product formats. | One hash-chained, append-only log across the platform, enforced by the database rather than by policy. | our own environment |
| Independent verification | Platform integrity is a vendor assertion. | Chain head anchored in a public blockchain at a block height a stranger can look up. | independently verifiable |
| Compliance plane | A separately licensed product, integrated to the PSA. | 18• frameworks assembling live evidence from the same platform that runs the tickets. Included, not integrated. | our own environment |
| Containment authority | Varies by product and module. | Reversible network isolation that takes two human approvals• — and which is dry-run verified, not production-proven•. We lose this row today. | roadmap |
| Pricing model | Quote-gated, per-seat and per-module. No number on the public website. | Per technician, published openly at launch. Today our price field is empty, which is the row where we and quote-gating look identical. | roadmap |
| Contract shape | Multi-year terms with automatic renewal are the widely reported norm in this segment. Read your own agreement — we have not read it. | No annual or multi-year agreement, 30• days free at launch, white-labeled, no card, no onboarding fee. | our published offer |
| Ecosystem | A large integration marketplace and a deep bench of consultants who already know the product. | Neither. There is no Argos consultancy market, no third-party plugin economy, and no pool of technicians who have used it before. | theirs, honestly |
Two entries. Stated the way the record states them.
One. ConnectWise ScreenConnect carried an authentication bypass rated CVSS 10.0• — the top of the scale, not near it — affecting versions up to and including 23.9.7, and mass-exploited in 2024. Source, linked rather than paraphrased: nvd.nist.gov — CVE-2024-1709 ↗
Two. In May 2025 ConnectWise disclosed that a sophisticated nation-state actor had breached its environment•, and the scope they reported was a small number of cloud ScreenConnect customers, with Mandiant engaged. The associated vulnerability, CVE-2025-3935, is rated HIGH — it is not a 10.0, and anyone telling you it was is either careless or selling you something. Source: nvd.nist.gov — CVE-2025-3935 ↗
We could have written “ConnectWise was breached by a nation-state” and stopped the sentence there. It would have been technically true, considerably more frightening, and completely dishonest about scale — and it is precisely the move this entire website exists to attack. A vendor who will inflate a competitor’s incident will inflate its own metrics, and you have no way to tell which one you are reading.
So: a disclosed breach at a major vendor is a serious event and worth knowing about. It was also, by that vendor’s own account, limited in customer reach and disclosed rather than discovered by journalists. Both halves are true. We publish both halves.
And the qualification we put on every one of these pages: any vendor can ship a bad CVE, including us, and one day we will. When it happens it goes on our claim ledger with a status and a date, because a ledger that only holds flattering rows is a brochure.
The argument we are making from these two entries is structural, not moral. Remote-access tooling that reaches every endpoint you manage converts a single intrusion into hundreds of client incidents. The more of that surface one vendor concentrates — and the more quarterly growth pressure sits behind it — the more that blast radius is a business decision somebody else made on your behalf. Argos concentrates surface too. Our answers are a crown-jewel control plane with no public ingress, an audit log the database refuses to alter, and a chain head anchored outside our control. Those are architecture, not immunity.
We have been the customer holding the empty box.
We report 1,301• tickets resolved end to end. Our real number is higher — we ran on SyncroMSP and Freshdesk before this, and that history didn’t come with us when we left. We can’t prove it, so we don’t count it. That’s why Argos exports everything, any day, at no cost. We’ve been the customer holding the empty box.
If you have been on ConnectWise for years, that scar is the most useful thing we can offer you in this conversation — not as a sales line, but as a warning we earned. Ask us, or any vendor, exactly what leaves with you and in what format. Then ask what it costs to get it, and whether the answer is written down anywhere. Ours is: everything, any day, no charge. Yours should be written down too, whoever you buy from.
our own environmentAnd the corresponding honesty about migration risk: sunk integration work is a genuine asset. Your custom workflows, your report definitions, your billing automations and your technicians’ muscle memory all have value that does not appear on any invoice, and none of it transfers. We would rather you weigh that properly than discover it in week three.
When ConnectWise is the better choice, and it genuinely is.
- You are already deep in the ecosystem and the integration work is sunk. Years of configuration, custom reports, billing automations, third-party integrations chosen from their marketplace, and a team fluent in the product. That is real capital. Migrating it to a platform with zero• customers is a risk-adjusted decision that will often, correctly, come out against us.
- You need PSA depth in the long tail. Complex agreement structures, procurement flows, and the specific report your controller has depended on for a decade. Their PSA has had far longer to accumulate that detail than ours has.
- You want a hiring pool and a consultant bench. You can hire a technician who already knows their product, and you can call a consultant who has configured it a hundred times. Nobody has ever configured Argos except us.
- You need the vendor to still be there in ten years. A reasonable requirement, and the one where our answer is weakest. We are small, new and externally unproven, and no amount of good architecture changes that arithmetic today.
Where we think we are the better buy: you want the alert and the ticket to be the same object rather than two systems exchanging copies; you want the security and compliance plane included on that same data model rather than licensed alongside it; you want to verify what the vendor says without asking the vendor; and you want to be able to leave with everything you put in, on any day, at no cost. If that describes your next three years, keep reading the rest of this site — starting with the parts where we lose.
Two documents keep this one honest. What isn’t finished yet lists every gap we would not put in front of your clients, and exactly why. The claim ledger holds every number on this site with its scope and its evidence — and the build refuses to compile a page that cites a claim the ledger does not contain.
Don’t trust us. Check us.
Run it beside what you already have.
Argos OS soft-launches September 2026. The whole platform, white-labeled to your brand, free for 30• days — no card, no onboarding fee, no lock-in. We stand it up for you, and you export everything on any day you like.