Many of our customers have been receiving notices from LogMeIn informing them that the popular LogMeIn Free service is no longer going to be offered, and that customers can either upgrade to a paid LogMeIn product or their service will be cancelled in 7 days. Ouch! Since we’ve had a lot of people asking what our recommendations are, we’re going to answer here on the blog.
Option 1 – Pay for LogMeIn (Recommended)
We have been recommending LogMeIn for years because of two main reasons – it’s free and it’s excellent. LogMeIn has continued to add features and improvements over the years including mobile access, advanced troubleshooting tools, cross-platform compatibility, clipboard handling, security options, etc. We think it’s easily worth paying for. If you want to pay you have two options:
- LogMeIn Pro. $99/year for 2 computers. Includes all advanced features. Discounted first-year rates are being offered to LogMeIn Free customers (as low as 50% off).
- LogMeIn Central. $300/year for up to 100 computers. Doesn’t include all Pro features but has some nice central management tools. We recommend this if you have over 6 computers that you want to access remotely (businesses, pay attention).
- Note that the two can be combined, but for most of you this won’t be necessary.
Option 2 – TeamViewer (Good for Home Users)
The folks at TeamViewer (teamviewer.com) have been competing with LogMeIn Free for years with their free offering. It’s pretty similar to LogMeIn, with a strong feature set and polished functionality. The catch: it’s only free for home use, not for commercial/business use. We don’t know how they differentiate, but it might not be worth it for businesses to find out the hard way. This is our recommendation for home users who don’t want to pay.
Option 3 – Chrome Remote Desktop (for Anyone)
Google released a browser plugin for Google Chrome (our favorite web browser) called Chrome Remote Desktop (if you aren’t using Chrome you can’t follow that link, try this one instead) which handles LogMeIn Free-like functionality. You install it through your browser, but you don’t have to keep the browser running to maintain remote access. It’s bare-bones, no mobile app, no advanced features, but it’s free and not likely to stop being free ever. Our only concern is that Google has a history of jumping into side ventures and then eventually pulling the plug on them – we love Google for their main products like search, gmail, adwords, etc. but are a little wary of using their experiments for business purposes.
More Information, Other Options We Haven’t Tried
Here’s a list of some more resources including options we haven’t tried and a few other blog articles on the subject:
- Official Blog Posts from LogMeIn: link 1, link 2
- An Article from Technibble (a good IT blog) covering other options: link
- A PC World article: link
- An Article from TechShout: link
If you need help with this decision, feel free to contact us for business IT support or residential computer repair.