MSP Documentation Software: What Gets Used and What Gets Abandoned
Most MSPs have documentation software. Most MSPs do not have documentation. The tool is not the problem. The problem is that documentation only gets done when it does not feel like extra work — and the tools that get abandoned are the ones that never figured out how to make it not feel like extra work.
What MSP documentation software actually needs to do
There is a category confusion baked into how most MSPs think about documentation software. They evaluate it as a storage tool. Where do we keep our runbooks? Where do we store credentials? Where do we put network diagrams? Those are the wrong questions, because storage is not the job the tool needs to perform.
The job is retrieval under pressure. A technician is on a call with a client whose server will not boot. Three other tickets are open. The technician needs the firewall credentials, the backup configuration, and the contact for the on-site vendor — in under two minutes. Whether the tool has those three pieces of information is one question. Whether the technician can locate them in under two minutes while managing the call is a different question, and the second question is the one that determines whether the tool gets used.
Well-organized information for the MSP owner who set it up often means a maze of nested folders for the technician who needs to find something fast. Storage-first tools serve the person who organized the data, not the person who needs it under pressure.
Built around search, asset linking, and consistent data structure across clients — so the technician can navigate client A the same way they navigate client B, without remembering each client's unique folder hierarchy. Consistency under pressure is what makes tools sticky.
Documentation software that optimizes for storage tends to have well-organized information for the MSP owner who set it up and a maze of nested folders for the technician who needs to find something fast. Documentation software that optimizes for retrieval is built around search, asset linking, and consistent data structure across clients, so the technician can navigate client A the same way they navigate client B without having to remember each client's unique folder hierarchy.
This distinction separates the tools that survive long-term from the tools that get populated for the first three months and then quietly stop being updated. If adding information to the tool is harder than the value the technician gets back from it, the tool loses. Every time.
Documentation software fails not because technicians are undisciplined, but because updating it was added on top of the workflow instead of embedded in it — the same pattern that kills monthly client reporting programs.
The main tools: an honest comparison
The MSP documentation software market is not large, but it is not simple either. There are tools built specifically for MSPs, tools originally built for other purposes that MSPs have adopted, and tools at the edge of the category that overlap with vCIO and QBR workflows. Each has a legitimate use case and a profile of MSP it is wrong for.
IT Glue
IT Glue is the category benchmark. It was built specifically for MSPs, which means its data structure matches how MSPs actually organize client environments: companies, contacts, configurations, passwords, documents, and flexible assets that can represent anything from a switch to a software license. The platform's depth of integration with major PSA and RMM tools means that a significant portion of client asset data auto-populates rather than requiring manual entry.
The complaint that drives MSPs toward IT Glue alternatives is not product quality. It is pricing trajectory following the Kaseya acquisition. MSPs who have been on the platform for several years report meaningful cost increases with contract renewals. For a 10-person MSP that does not need the full breadth of IT Glue's enterprise features, paying $29 per user per month — with that number likely to increase at next renewal — is a different value calculation than it was three years ago.
IT Glue remains the right choice for MSPs with 15 or more technical staff, deep PSA integration requirements, and IT environments complex enough to need advanced asset relationship mapping. The feature set justifies the cost if you are actually using the feature set.
Hudu
Hudu is the most credible IT Glue alternative currently in the market. The core documentation functionality covers the same ground: company-centric structure, password management with access controls, asset linking, document templates. The UI is cleaner and faster than IT Glue's, which is not a superficial observation — it directly affects whether technicians open the tool under pressure or reach for something else.
Hudu's pricing model is a flat monthly rate rather than per-seat, which changes the math significantly for growing MSPs. A team of 8 paying $37 per month is paying the same amount whether they add 2 more technicians next quarter. That predictability is worth something independent of the per-seat comparison at any given headcount.
Where Hudu still trails IT Glue is in integration depth and maturity. The PSA connections work, but they do not yet reach the granularity that IT Glue's long-standing integrations provide. For MSPs whose documentation workflow depends heavily on auto-population from ConnectWise or Autotask, that gap is real. For MSPs doing primarily manual documentation entry, the gap is mostly irrelevant.
Confluence
Confluence is a general-purpose wiki that MSPs with existing Atlassian stacks sometimes use for internal documentation. It is not built for MSP client environments — there is no company-centric data model, no native credential management, no PSA integration — but for internal SOPs, runbooks, and process documentation, it is a capable tool if your team is already Atlassian-native.
The risk with Confluence is the flexibility trap. Because you can structure it any way you want, you have to decide how to structure it. Without a standard template for MSP client documentation, each person who contributes to Confluence creates their own structure. What starts as flexible becomes inconsistent, and inconsistency is what kills retrieval speed under pressure. Confluence works well for MSPs with a dedicated person who owns its information architecture and enforces standards. Without that, it drifts.
SharePoint
SharePoint appears in larger MSP operations, typically those with 30 or more staff where the organization is already running Microsoft 365 deeply and wants documentation to live in the same ecosystem. The platform can be made to work for MSP documentation, but it requires significant configuration investment that is not MSP-specific — you are building a documentation system on top of a document management platform rather than using a system that was designed for the job.
For most MSPs below enterprise scale, SharePoint as a documentation platform is a sign that the evaluation was driven by existing licensing rather than by the requirements of the job. The licensing argument is worth something; the product argument for MSP use is weak.
MyITProcess
MyITProcess sits at the edge of the documentation category. Its primary function is vCIO and QBR workflow: structured client technology reviews, recommendation tracking, and the documentation that supports strategic client conversations. It is not a replacement for IT Glue or Hudu — it does not store credentials, network diagrams, or technical runbooks. It is a complement for MSPs running a formal vCIO practice who need a tool to make strategic review cycles consistent and client-reportable.
MSPs evaluating documentation software who encounter MyITProcess in their research should recognize that it is solving a different problem. If your gap is technical runbooks and credential storage, MyITProcess does not close it. If your gap is consistent vCIO delivery, it is worth a serious look.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing | Key consideration |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT Glue | MSPs with 15+ staff needing deep PSA/RMM integration and advanced asset linking | $29+/user/mo | Post-Kaseya pricing trajectory; evaluate total cost at renewal, not at signup |
| Hudu | Growing MSPs wanting IT Glue-equivalent functionality at flat, predictable pricing | $37/mo flat (small teams) | Integration depth trails IT Glue; gap matters more if auto-population is core to your workflow |
| Confluence | MSPs already running Atlassian tools who need flexible internal SOPs and process docs | From $5.75/user/mo | Requires strong information architecture ownership; no MSP-specific structure out of the box |
| SharePoint | Larger MSPs standardized on Microsoft 365 with existing admin capacity | Included in M365 | Significant configuration required; not built for MSP documentation patterns |
| MyITProcess | MSPs running formal vCIO practices needing structured QBR and recommendation tracking | Contact for pricing | Not a replacement for technical documentation; solves a different problem in the documentation category |
Why IT Glue alternatives are growing
The growth of Hudu and similar IT Glue alternatives is not primarily a product story. It is a pricing story with product implications.
When Kaseya acquired IT Glue, the acquisition changed the commercial dynamic in ways that MSPs have felt at renewal time. Kaseya's broader consolidation strategy — acquiring Datto, IT Glue, VSA, and a range of other MSP tools — created bundling pressure that many MSPs experienced as leverage rather than value. If you are not in Kaseya's consolidated stack, your IT Glue renewal pricing may not reflect the same economics as it did before the acquisition.
This pricing pressure opened a market for alternatives that could match the core functionality at a more predictable cost. Hudu entered at the right time with a clean product, a clear IT Glue migration path, and a pricing model that made the total cost calculation simple. The MSPs moving to Hudu are not doing so because IT Glue broke. They are doing the math and finding that the cost delta does not match the marginal feature gap.
This matters for MSPs evaluating documentation software now: the category comparison is not static. IT Glue's pricing at your renewal may be materially different from the pricing in the review you read last year. Run the numbers against your current headcount and your renewal date before deciding which direction to go.
The adoption problem: why documentation software fails
The failure mode for documentation software is consistent across tools and across MSP sizes. It goes like this:
- Initial investment: An MSP buys a documentation platform. The owner or senior technician does significant setup. Key client environments get documented. The platform looks useful.
- The quiet drift: A quarter passes. New techs join without formal onboarding to the platform. Clients change their infrastructure and documents do not get updated.
- The workaround: Technicians under pressure start finding answers faster by texting the senior tech than by navigating to the right asset. The path of least resistance wins.
- Silent abandonment: The platform gradually stops being the source of truth, even though nobody made a decision to stop using it.
The root cause is that documentation was added on top of the workflow rather than embedded in it. When closing a ticket and updating documentation are two separate steps, the second step competes with every other task waiting in the queue. Under pressure, it loses. The platform that requires discipline to maintain will be maintained until the team is under pressure, which is exactly when it needs to work and exactly when the maintenance falls behind.
Tools that reduce this friction by auto-populating from integrations do not eliminate the problem, but they change the ratio. If 60% of the information in the platform comes from the PSA and RMM without anyone manually entering it, then manual documentation only needs to cover the 40% that cannot be automated. That is a meaningfully different maintenance burden, and it is the primary functional reason IT Glue built deep integrations and Hudu is building toward them.
The other approach that works is embedding documentation as a step in the ticket resolution process rather than an after-action task. MSPs who enforce documentation as a ticket closure requirement — where a ticket cannot be closed without linking it to the relevant asset record and updating any fields that changed — have materially better documentation coverage than MSPs who ask technicians to document after the fact. This is a process decision, not a tool decision, but it requires a tool that makes that embedded step fast enough that technicians do not resent it.
The same failure mode applies to client reporting
The pattern that kills documentation software is not unique to documentation. It is the same pattern that kills monthly client reporting programs.
An MSP decides to send monthly reports to clients. The owner or an account manager builds a template. The first month goes well. The second month goes out a few days late. By month three, the process requires a reminder from the owner to get done. By month five, it stops happening consistently, not because anyone decided to stop, but because the process requires more effort than the team can sustain alongside everything else they are doing.
The failure mode is identical: a process was added on top of the workflow without removing the friction that makes it hard to execute consistently. Documentation that requires a separate manual entry step after every ticket will be maintained inconsistently. Reports that require a separate manual assembly step every month will be sent inconsistently. The tool is not the issue. The model — manual process added on top of an already full workload — is the issue.
The solution to both problems follows the same logic: reduce the human effort to the point where the process can run without discipline carrying it. For documentation, that means tools like Hudu that pull from integrations so technicians are not manually entering what the PSA already knows. For reporting, that means removing the manual assembly step entirely.
Removing the manual step from client reporting
Your team's time has a better use than assembling client reports. The documentation work that actually protects your business — technical runbooks, network diagrams, updated credential records, current SOPs — requires human attention that cannot be automated. The monthly report that pulls ticket counts, SLA performance, and uptime from your PSA and RMM does not require that same human attention. It requires a reliable process that runs without your team managing it.
Roviret connects to your PSA and RMM via read-only API, builds branded PDF reports to your specifications, and delivers them to your clients on a fixed monthly schedule. The integrations we support cover the tools most MSPs are already running: ConnectWise Manage, Autotask, and Halo on the PSA side; NinjaRMM, Datto RMM, and N-able on the RMM side. Setup takes 48 hours. After that, the reports go out every month without your team doing anything to make them happen.
When your PSA's API changes, we update the integration. When you add a new client, they go into the delivery queue. Your team's role after initial setup is limited to reviewing the occasional flagged anomaly before a report goes out. The platform management, the template maintenance, the monthly execution — none of that lives with you.
The cost is $600 per month for your full client roster with a one-time $1,500 setup fee. Before committing, you can see a finished sample report built from your actual data. There is no point in describing what the reports look like when you can see one in 48 hours.
Your team should be writing runbooks, not assembling reports.
Roviret handles the client reporting side so your team's attention stays on the technical documentation that actually protects the business. We connect to your PSA and RMM, deliver branded PDF reports on a fixed monthly schedule, and maintain the integrations when your tools update. $600 per month flat. See a finished sample before you decide.
Get a free sample report →Frequently asked questions
What is the best MSP documentation software?
IT Glue is still the category benchmark for MSPs who need deep PSA and RMM integrations and a mature, well-supported platform. Hudu is the strongest alternative for MSPs who find IT Glue pricing hard to justify post-Kaseya acquisition. Confluence works well for MSPs who need flexible internal wikis and already run Atlassian tools. The best tool is whichever one your technicians will actually open when they are under pressure on a ticket.
Is Hudu a good IT Glue alternative?
Hudu is a strong IT Glue alternative for small to mid-size MSPs. The UI is cleaner, the pricing is more predictable at a flat monthly rate rather than per-seat, and the core documentation functionality covers the same ground as IT Glue for most day-to-day use cases. The areas where IT Glue still leads are depth of PSA integrations, network documentation features, and the maturity of its asset linking. MSPs migrating from IT Glue typically find the core experience comparable and the cost savings significant.
Why do MSPs abandon their documentation software?
Documentation software gets abandoned when updating it costs more effort than finding the information another way. If a technician under pressure on a ticket can get the answer faster by calling a colleague than by navigating to the right asset in the documentation platform, the platform loses to the phone call every time. Tools that auto-populate from PSA and RMM integrations reduce this friction because the information appears without requiring a separate documentation step. Tools that require technicians to manually input everything after completing a task compete directly with the technician's desire to close the ticket and move on.
