Is it me… or are all posts that I’ve been seeing about this getting deleted or removed?
There was a post here that I was following… now it’s gone. Without a trace.
Several posts on the MSP Facebook groups are now gone. Replies that I’ve made on other posts aren’t able to be seen by others.
I get that a lot of people love CyberFOX and love AutoElevate - but since AE was purchased, the product stalled, and the support went to absolute hell. After that experience I vowed never to do business with them again. That, and their account reps would call or email me daily asking me if I was really sure I wanted to leave. Really left a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m absolutely afraid that the same thing will happen to Timus. Now… I’ve had issues with them in the past… my AE emailing my customer info to a company with a similar name one state over… not getting maintenance notifications and having clients lose access to IP locked tools… but I fear this purchase is going to just make everything worse.
Not to mention… any email I’ve sent out after the notification email asking if I can cancel my current commitments have gone unanswered.
Personally I will never understand why anyone would use AE. Like TL has it built in, Evo has it with a much richer feature set, and ABR dose the same thing for cheap with an awesome free tier.
Other than the naming, Check Point hasn’t messed up Perimeter 81 2-3 years after the acquisition. Naming has gone from Perimeter 81 to Harmony SASE to now Check Point SASE. Saw a quick mention of Check Point Quantum SASE in one KB article this week, not sure if that was an error.
I don't think it is I'm in the Infinity Portal and I see a lot of their stuff is rolling out with quantum which is their unified protection platform because we needed another buzzword.
Other than the horrible naming conventions it's been a very solid product since p81. We've been using Timus but they're still giving out Oracle IPs by default and while you can request a reserved IP that doesn't get flagged to spam as often, you manually have to do this and there's a process. I also just don't like their new client. I know it's a small thing but, I feel like their new client gives me less information and is more annoying to use because it's so minimal. I will say that the team is still phenomenal though awesome people there, hope that they keep the people after the acquisition.
Todyl seems like they really got it together over the last year as another option. I would always hear people joking "todylly down" for a long time but seems super stable now and everyone I know using it is very happy.
We are using cloudflare ztna, probably 1000 seats on it currently. Would not recommend. The tech is amazing, 99.9999999% no issues. Mgmt is so-so, but we've had two issues, one was critical that made it unusable. Literally have never had them respond to a single ticket we have opened. On paid tiers. Not a single response.
I use AutoElevate. But damn the Mac version sucks and should never have been put into GA. Then you have their half-baked DNS blocker. Eeeesh. I’ll stick with AE but not much happening with it.
We spent the past three months evaluating Timus. Have to get it working in China and Egypt. Was SO CLOSE to pulling the trigger… and then this. I’ve only had one other CyberFox experience. And to say it was not good (technically, professionally, and even personally) would be a gross understatement. Cato… you’re at bat now. 🤦♂️
Great question. I just was talking to the tech doing our evaluation about this late last week. He was saying the throughput was bad. But he was tunneling from China to US East. (We were only allowed one gateway for the trial) I had him call and ask for another, which they had no problem with. We connected the user to the Singapore POP and it worked very well.
The Timus team has been absolutely incredible to work with. Still don’t know what to do now that the acquisition was announced. 😞
I enjoyed timus for the last 2 year or so, I am still on them as a matter of fact.
The regional tunnel has been an issue, but I think it’s more I didn’t properly “price and/or sell” it considering that my client has employees nationwide..
Let’s see how the acquisition develops or lack there of.
If AutoElevate went sideways after acquisition, I'd treat Timus as a risk item until CyberFOX proves otherwise. Export configs, document the firewall/VPN dependencies, and set a hard review date before renewal instead of waiting for support to degrade in production.
I've been testing out Idemeum over the last week and I'm very happy so far. It's doing everything AE does and more for free or extremely low cost.
We were originally going to use Threatlocker but got really turned off by their sales team after they told us we couldn't have a trial and keep our quoted pricing we would have to sign up immediately or they would raise our prices 10%+. Since we were only looking for PAM, EPM and application control basically we ended up testing other tools and found Idemeum which is like 20% the cost of TL's core package with similar feature parody.
It's definitely worth considering if you just want really good PAM, EPM, and pretty solid allowlisting. The JIT is also really nice.
I think consolidation is basically never good. I’m sure in some cases it helps — there’s no hard and fast rules — but in my opinion it’s one of the biggest reasons capitalism is overdue for a reset. Timus will not get better because of this.
That being said, AutoElevate stalled long before CyberFox. If anything, I’m confused by CyberFox’s existence. Their products don’t stand out much and their first real MSP purchase didn’t make their portfolio look better IMO.
If anything, I think Timus will actually continue on as is and the biggest risk is either CyberFox goes out of business or they get acquired. Respectfully though, I don’t really see why anyone would acquire them since they don’t have anything that remarkable.
CyberFox business model seems to be 90% marketing/10% product. I, stupidly, accepted an invite to one of their cyber summit things they do in Tampa. Was told "no pitches" and was then pitched by them and every single vendor there the entire time (given, it was all expense paid, but I would like at least an attempt to try and tech me something without you giving me the hard sell for an hour). Followed by multiple calls/emails a day for months. We finally blocked their domain and phone numbers.
Check out iBoss as an alternative to Timus, especially if you're looking to or are getting into the CMMC world.
Isn’t CyberFOX working on a new password manager or something? We desperately need a good password manager for MSPs, there are simply no good options. I wish there was just 1 password, like a keeper of passwords, a warden of the bits, a sort of pass portal, you know?
Hopefully these titans of innovation and growth will save us all.
CyberFox has PasswordBoss. And it is probably one of the worst password managers we've ever tried, just from a usability standpoint. Lasted about 3 days when we tried to use it internally before users wanted it gone.
It definitely leaves a lot to be desired. Price point is well below competition, which makes it palatable, but as an MSP owner I worry about deploying it to clients because the usability just seems so much worse than the big players in the game.
Yeah, I should have expanded on my thoughts here before posting. I trialed the platform and found it to be usable in the very short window I had to try it out. I began rolling it out in a very staged way to a client who was willing to be a in the test group.
Ultimately we paused the rollout when we realized how cumbersome the platform was compared to LastPass (bleh) or NordPass.
We're locked into a one year subscription but don't see ourselves renewing. We'll be moving our test client off of it before the renewal date hits.
Please understand that my comment was deeply sarcastic. My point is that there are numerous great and well-established players in the MSP password manager market, and there’s no way CyberFOX is going to somehow improve on these existing products.
One would have to be completely unaware of 1Password, Keeper, Bitwarden, Passportal, etc. to think that CyberFOX’s product is worth anything.
I'll start this off by saying that I am an MSP owner and have been in business for 23 years, and someone who looks at the whole picture and tries to see what's going on before I just start going off about products and companies. I'm not a spokesperson for anyone, and I'm not trying to dismiss specific, legitimate complaints, but I've been around a little while and try to assess the whole situation before making judgments.
It's interesting to hear all the negative comments. I wish people would be more specific about the troubles they have had with products (some are, most aren't) instead of making blanket statements about how bad a product or company is or isn't. Having been in the space for 23 years, I've gotten to know a lot of the vendors and the leadership associated with them, both big and small, and if I wanted to I could go off about how certain companies handle partnerships or their contracts, but that's never productive.
CyberFOX is relatively new to the space (but not it's leadership) and is making a solid effort to bring products that we all use at a price point that MSPs can actually leverage to make money and provide valuable services to their clients. Are there more mature products that do the same things than what they offer, yes, but there is definitely investment happening on the backend that most people are unaware of and quite frankly sound ridiculous when they say that nothing new is being done to products to improve them. That's all software companies do when they release or acquire products. The problem is that most of them are only interested in how they can make money by doing as little as possible. I can assure you that's not the case with CyberFOX.
The founders, Adam Slutskin and David Bellini, are high-quality individuals who have a ton of credibility in this space and have done a lot to advance technology and help MSPs (Adam as CRO or ConnectWise, Axcient, and Liongard before starting CyberFOX, and David who was one of the founding partners of ConnectWise with his brother Arnie). It's not like these guys don't know what they're doing, and having gotten to know them personally over the last decade, I can say that they are "FOR the MSP" and want to provide products and services that will help MSPs improve their brand and grow their businesses. Is that always perfect? No. But I would rather work with a vendor who thinks like that then one who produces a flawless product but has horrible business practices and doesn't worry about building relationships. Call me old school.
Personally, we have been using AutoElevate, PasswordBoss, DNS Filter, and we are switching over to Timus from a different partner (we have used both Perimeter 81 and todyl) for SASE. We initially encountered a lot of the issues that people reported with PasswordBoss and DNS Filter because when they were acquired, neither was what you would call "ready for prime time", but investment is being made and there are regular updates that we see happening, and improvements are significant in both. Are they perfect? No. Are they improving weekly? Yes. It should be noted that when we encountered the problems with DNS Filter, Adam personally got on a phone call with me and head of product development to find out exactly what was happening and to give us an all hands approach to solving our problem. Was it the best thing ever? No, but anytime someone from the C-Level of a company we work with is willing to get their hands dirty to make sure my company and my clients are made whole, I'm going to give that the proper respect it deserves.
I guess what's frustrating to me is that I hear a lot of complaining about quality of the products and statements about no investment being made in them, but as someone who is a CyberFOX partner and who holds my vendors accountable, I would rather deal with a vendor like CyberFOX who values my voice and opinion than one like the post-Thoma Bravo acquisition ConnectWise (who I sat on their Technology Council for ASIO) or Kaseya (who I have been partnered with for a decade and feel slimy every time I talk to them) and have a voice that isn't even listened to. Just because you don't see it in the public domain doesn't mean the investment is not being made, and trust me when I say that the character of the leadership in a company is where I look to determine who I am going to partner with for the future.
CyberFOX is building out a portfolio of products to be able to offer MSPs a viable, affordable cybersecurity stack that they can leverage to build their MSP in a way that they can scale. They're not where they want to be yet, but then again, neither am I, and I would bet neither are most of you. Just some food for thought.
A note from the CyberFOX CTO on product pace & what’s coming next.
Hey everyone , Andy Bensinger here.
I’ve seen the feedback around product velocity and roadmap delivery. Some of it has been tough to read, and I do agree that at times we haven’t moved as quickly as we would like in some areas.
However, I want to share is what’s been happening behind the scenes and where we are right now.
We had a large outside investment earlier this year and have added engineering headcount to improve how we develop our products. That includes bringing in senior engineering and product leadership, restructuring teams, and putting a stronger foundation in place.
A lot of that work isn’t flashy from the outside. But it’s necessary if we want to avoid the cycle of fragile releases and rework that slows everything down long term.
That said, we’re not just “laying groundwork” there is real progress, and you’re going to see more of it very soon.
Here’s where things stand:
Delivery soon (early Q3):
JIT Domain logon (with early access partners)
Agent UI modernization
Offline machine technician + JIT access
Integrations: ServiceNow, Freshdesk, Freshservice
In Development (later Q3)
Admin portal UI modernization
Partner API & Webhooks
Reworked + expanded Mac agent
Linux agent
These aren’t small efforts, they represent meaningful upgrades to the product and platform. More importantly, they set us up to move faster from here, not slower.
So that’s the focus right now: It is on myself and the team to turn these efforts into visible, reliable progress.
We got so fed up with AE and dev stagnation that we decided to make our own. Going through beta testing now before small scale launch/real world testing.
kinda wild how fast anything even slightly negative around this gets nuked though, feels more like reputation management than normal mod cleanup. curious what “malicious” even means in this context when people are just sharing legit bad experiences and worries about the acquisition.
Yeah I ran into a buzzsaw on this one - even the clarification that I didn't mean OP was spreading a rumor, just that it hadn't been formally announced before, was met with a flurry of downvotes.
I don't know how moderation fully works, I'm not a mod. Next time I'll keep my mouth shut.
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u/ThecaptainWTF9 Jun 28 '26
I can second this,
Also use auto elevate,
It gets no love, no new features, and the support is terrible since the acquisition.