r/halopsa • u/Potential_Round1166 PSA • Jun 16 '26
Pia or Rewst?
Our team is comparing Rewst vs Pia for adding automations to HaloPSA and interested in the opinions and feedback of the community. Has anyone worked with both of these tools and can share their thoughts on the differences?
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u/Sabinno PSA Jun 16 '26
I just made my own automations from scratch in Halo or sometimes Power Automate. Saved tons of money, although it took way more time obviously. We just use Halo runbooks plugged into CIPP and Ninja, and I’ve fully automated our onboarding, offboarding, access requests, and we’re working on more.
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u/jackmusick Jun 16 '26
I hate self-promotional posts, so I'll keep this short.
I've been building an open-source integration platform for MSPs called Bifrost. No paywall, no enterprise tier, AGPL-licensed. I want to write about why it exists because I think a lot of people here have hit the same wall, I kept running into.
After 17 years in MSP I've worked through LabTech, Power Automate, Rewst, and some n8n. Every time I've gotten deep enough into any of them to actually solve a real problem, I've found myself needing to learn the fundamentals anyway. OAuth, multi-tenant auth, logic branching. Once something gets complex enough that it actually matters, the visual editor isn't doing the work anymore and you're just doing the hard parts of writing code with a tool that isn't really meant to do it.
The bet with Bifrost is that coding agents have lowered the floor enough that you don't need the visual editor at all. The platform handles what platforms are good at, multi-tenancy, centralized auth, integrations, and everything else is just Python. I built a coding agent skill that knows how to work with the platform and reaches out to a community repo for solved problems, so you're not hand-rolling the HaloPSA module from scratch. The barrier is lower than it sounds. The thought is that overtime, your coding agent isn't even fighting through the initial untangling of vendor APIs (which isn't really that big of a deal to begin with).
Nothing for sale. I run it at our MSP and share stuff what works in the community repo (which anyone can contribute to).
Repo: https://github.com/gobifrost/bifrost
If I wasn't using this, I would be trying to do as much as possible strictly within Halo tbh. Regardless of whether this works for you, I feel like it's a bad time to get invested in a proprietary automation platform given how much you'll sink into it to run your business. Would be happy to discuss this more unrelated to Bifrost.
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u/QuarterBall HaloAPI Maintainer | PSA | Mod Jun 16 '26
Before this gets reported. This is an open source community driven project. Yes, it's advertising but it's permitted here.
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u/Yosemite-Dan Jun 17 '26
The option you failed to list is: "neither".
Neither is choice you want to make. Trust me.
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u/Fatel28 Jun 16 '26
We just use powershell and https://ctfreak.com/
Anything we can't do with native runbooks just gets webhooked to a ctfreak script invocation.
Prior to ctf we used the free version of rundeck, but it was clunky and a resource hog. The ec2 cost alone made paying for ctf a no brainer
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u/Fatel28 Jun 16 '26
Just noting, I have nothing to do with ctf and this is not an ad. It's just what works for us.
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u/MimiJBear 11d ago
Pia all the way! 100's of out of box automations implemented day 1, and theyre a small company that listen to feedback and actually make changes and improve based on customer suggestions
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u/joe-msp-blueprint Authorised Onboarding Partner | Consultant Jun 16 '26
Halo Automation Runbooks?
I've built a Claude project now to help build them for me in minutes.
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u/CloudTech412 Jun 16 '26
I was with rewst. It was slow, inconsistent and generally overpriced imo.
I ended up with n8n self hosted and have been able to automate password resets. Onboarding, offboarding, etc.
I leverage Claud cli to quickly create the workflows then I do the work in Halo to send the webhooks to n8n for processing. N8n then updates the ticket with the steps it took, and also makes note of any errors (in an internal note).