[Review] ABtutor 7

[zag]

We've just purchased ABtutor 7.11 so here is another one of my reviews.

 

About ABtutor

We use it as a classroom management monitoring software. Basically seeing what the kids are doing on screen. Blurb from their website "AB Tutor® from AB Software Consulting is computer and internet monitoring software that provides teachers, trainers and administrators with PC remote desktop access and control and classroom esafety at a very affordable price. AB Tutor is the perfect teaching tool for networked classrooms and labs, allowing you to simply and effectively control, manage, monitor, demonstrate, support and collaborate with your students."

 

Reliability

Excellent reliability so far with the software, we've never had a crash or timeout so far and the software has been reliable. I saw reports from someone else on edugeek saying they were having problems but dont see it at all myself. We have 5 teachers using this software and its worked every time. Overall very impressive.

 

Performance

Its really important that a piece of software like this preforms well, we had major problems with iTalc taking 100% cpu. So far Abtutor idles at around 4% cpu and not much more while doing tasks. It was a little slow to load when using the autodiscovery mode but this is to be expected. Once you put the computers in room groups its virtually instant.

 

Screenshots

 

Cost

The cost of abtutor is outstanding. We paid £1,440 for 1000 clients and 6 teacher licenses. Compared to Lanschool, Netsupport, net control and Impero this was about half the cost. All of those quotes were over 3k which I was astonished at to be honest. Overall very happy with the cost. If we had gone for a site license with 2 managers it would have cost less than £500!! The licensing also works very well for Abtutor, you can login to their website and free up licenses as and when you need to. Just remove a license and give it to someone else at any time. We have found 6 is easily enough for our whole school to use in ICT classes.

 

Competition

We upgraded from iTalc and there really is no contest. Its so much better in terms of speed and reliabilty. I can't believe we waited so long to do it. I had a trial at Lanschool and Impero and also demos at BET but my feeling was they were bloated and slow for what they were. We really only need the monitoring aspects of the software and for it to be reliable. The other software, as previously mentioned was vastly overpriced with only a few extra features like ipad control or user polls. Impero did have some nice features over and above the others but the price put us off. In my opinion the extra costs for these types of software were simply not worth it.

 

Conclusion

ABtutor 7 is an excellent product well worth the money. It does everything we need and is easy to use and has a great price (compared to the competition) too.

Edited September 24, 2012 by zag