Opinions on Equitrac

[FoxHound]

Hello all,

 

I am looking to gather some opinions on Equitrac. However, the vendor's web page is very.. 'corporate'

 

I work for a large university and we currently use Papercut MF, however we are in the process of a new tender for devices and print management.

 

Any opinions or gotchas with equitrac (good or bad) - particularly if you have moved from/to Papercut - would be very welcome.

 

Cheers

[TechMonkey]

We moved from Equitrac to Papercut about 3 years ago. I didn't get much into it but it was very sparse, clunky and one of those systems best left alone in my opinion. I think I was told that we were a couple of versions behind at the time so there may have been improvements, or even since we moved.

[River]

We changed from Equitrac to Papercut a couple of years back. Found Papercut to have a much better admin interface, much easier to configure and more. Wouldn't want to go back to Equitrac!

[Sylv3r]

We've never used equitrac but it was one of the options we considered. After doing a bit of research as people have mentioned above it seemed particularly clunky and nothing seems to be setup out of the box and most reports etc had to be setup manually.

[MatthewL]

I have never know anyone ditch PaperCut, most I find seem to move to it from other systems such as PCounter, Equitrac or Safecom.

 

What doesn't PaperCut do that you want it to? I find PaperCut does everything and more, there are modules available to expand certain areas, also I find if things are missing I raise it to them and they do get added in in time.

[eddyc]

We are a large secondary school in the South West with around 1,500 users and we are about to get rid of Equitrac and replace it with papercut.

 

We originally started out from no managed print solution and began with equitrac around 6 years ago. The system did work well for us but as new versions have come out, some of the features we depended on were deprecated out of the package with nothing in the release notes about it.

 

After weeks of going back and forth with Nuance and our managed print company they said that the loss of features was due to deprecation and in fact, some of the features we were using were never intended to work in the way that we used them.

 

Some of the things that stopped working were transparent job redirection (i.e if a job over 100 pages in sent to the follow me queue, it should automatically message the user to say that it has gone to the reprographics hold queue and to release it from there ). This process should be completely transparent but now we've had to make do with publishing the reprographics queue and sending out a reject message to users who try and send jobs which are over 100 pages and they then have to manually resend that job to the correct queue. The whole process has become much more clunky in the more recent versions and I would advise against it.

 

eddyc

Edited March 6, 2018 by eddyc

[Big_Ted]

equitrac will have better control over your print jobs as it uses its own ports - it can do some stuff papercut currently cant do.

the downside is you need to change ports etc, papercut just sits on top of working print setups and is a lot easier to manage and look after.

ask for a demo, see what you think. They will both offer secure find me printing, anything extra is a bonus.

[eddyc]

equitrac will have better control over your print jobs as it uses its own ports - it can do some stuff papercut currently cant do.

the downside is you need to change ports etc, papercut just sits on top of working print setups and is a lot easier to manage and look after.

ask for a demo, see what you think. They will both offer secure find me printing, anything extra is a bonus.

 

This has now changed in the latest version and they now use standard TCP/IP ports

[TechMonkey]

it can do some stuff papercut currently cant do.

 

Could you expand on this? It would help people making a comparison.

[nicholab]

Papercut is quicker to deploy and manage and properly less resources intensive. I believe that equitrac requires 3 servers as part of the system. If papercut is serving your needs now I would put it as a requirement of any new tender. Edited March 10, 2018 by nicholab

[PotNoodleTech]

Moved from equitrac to papercut here.

 

Papercut is far superior in every way that I can see. It's modern and really easy to use/manage.

 

Equitrac on the other hand looks and feels like it was designed in the year 2000.

 

No contest for me - papercut 100% of the time, every time!

[nadeem]

Strangely, I was about to say I quite like Equitrac, we've been using it for around 6-7 years, and at the time it was better for all our use cases that anything else.

 

P.S. the version we have does not require 3 servers

[buzzard]

For me, every organization I've ever worked at, after seeing Papercut, either NG or MF have moved from their existing print management solution. I wouldn't dream of moving back, its the simple most change with the greatest impact. BYOD printing is so simple we very rarely get any support calls from them. Before with Equitrac it was a nightmare, we did only have one Equitrac server btw, but just pulling reports or making minor changes where tedious. It might have moved on in the last three years but it would have to have had a major overhaul for it to compete with Papercut. I'd put it in the tender as a requirement, or if you do want to consider Equitrac ask the vendor for a trial install and see evaluate it.

[SMc-Tech]

i realise that this is a couple of year old thread, but wondered if anyone had any more info?

I know of a few places using Equitrac that need to update to the newer version - this alone will cost more that completely moving to Papercut. Then at least with Papercut, you know the upgrades are free.

 

The only thing i think Equitrac does better than Papercut is the embedded scanning from photocopiers. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

[DaveTheTech]

I haven't used Equitrac, but have set up Papercut.

Scan to email was an absolute breeze, even more so with their newer versions - we went from version 16 to 19.

As far as the users are concerned they select the scanner feature, click scan to me and hit go.

[localzuk]

The embedded scanning in Papercut is excellent.

 

We gcds it set up so you can scan direct to your Google Drive, so that PDF files are made searchable via the built in OCR capabilities etc...

 

What can Equitrac do that Papercut can't in this respect?

[PaperCut]

Hey FoxHound!

 

Mikaela from PaperCut here, just checking in. We know this post is from 2018, but we're always here to listen to the good, bad and ugly feedback on why you are considering moving away from us. It helps us improve our products for current customers, who seem to be rallying around this thread (thank you!). If you'd like some help on how we can better accommodate you, then slide into our DMs on here or email us at [email protected] before you 'officially' break up with us 3

Edited November 6, 2020 by PaperCut

[SMc-Tech]

We are advising the people we deal with to move too Papercut as its much better than Eq.

I agree Papercut is very easy to setup scan to me etc. In fact, I really like how it points out when you may have forgotten a setting - I setup one recently and forgot to do the SMTP server setting and it popped up and it reminded me, as I had turned on the integrated scanning.

 

The only thing I've noticed is large scans can hold up the Papercut client, whereas I haven't had the same complaint with Eq.

[Anthony_Infoman]

We used to run Equitrac in our school for a couple of years but then we moved to MyQ Solution, found the UI very easy to use