Remote Connection Software

What remote connection software is today's modern programmers and SCADA operators using these days? Teamviewer, VNC, Ammyy, Splashtop...etc. Looking for an alternative to TeamViewer that allows a number of PCs to connect to a single licensed site PC. Must not require firewall port forwarding or opening. Thanks! RB

Give Chrome Remote Desktop a try. But I've been at places where the corporate networks lock down that too so YMMV.

What exactly do you want to do?

For our PLC's / HMI's - VPN Tunnel, is the only way we do programming, debugging, remotely.

Now if I just want to monitor a remote location, we would probably use VNC.

If we need to take control of a PC we would try to use something like "Logmein".

VNC and RDP are both great (free) solutions, but the trick is that on their own they need need a direct connection (often with static IP addresses) with open firewall ports and more.

TeamViewer is definitely the Big Player in this market. It rolls VPN/Remote Control and more all into one tool. Its dang useful. All devices talk back to a central server (concept is called a rendezvous server), eliminating IP address concerns. I think it works over HTTPS, to avoid firewalls.

If you have a VPN with a rendezvous server, then you could connect to your local site and VNC/RDP over the VPN. Just about every Automation vendor has a VPN solution, plus all the enterprise solutions from the normal business world.

I use a couple https://www.remoteutilities.com/ for my everyday use and team viewer for troubleshooting with customers, try Remote Utilities... its free and works great for PC control

For your information, Teamviewer Host is free to distribute.
You only have to pay for the channels that make the remote connections from your home site to the remote site. So if you already have Teamviewer, distributing the Host costs nothing extra.

My company hesitated to buy TeamViewer licenses because they're relatively expensive. We stretched the free use, and accumulated a bunch of throwaway Google accounts for Google Remote Desktop, and futzed around with LogMeIn and Hamachi appliances.

Then we bought a batch of TeamViewer licenses for our Controls team, and they've saved us tens of thousands of dollars in travel and lodging, and saved our customers downtime measured in the millions.

I use Google Remote Desktop to get between my home PC and my work PC, but I use TeamViewer for every connection to a customer site.

I realize your post specifically said "no TeamViewer, and no firewall configuration", but I can't recommend that. TeamViewer has been the easiest to set up, most reliable to maintain, and has the best feature set (VPN is essential and file transfer is pretty good).

We switched to Anydesk and saved a boatload of money. It is very similar to Teamviewer at a fraction of the price. There are two things that I miss from Teamviewer:

1) passwords are not saved with the account, so on each machine that you connect from, you have to enter the password. You can tick a box to generate a token to skip the entry on the next connection from that machine, but it doesn't transfer to the account so if you use three or four different machines, you will have to enter the password for each remote site at least once on each machine.

2) the mobile app doesn't connect using your account, so it doesn't even have access to your "address book". I rarely use the mobile app, and most plant operators are only concerned with connecting to one remote device, so it is a minor inconvenience. You have to enter the "partner ID" and password to connect. The mobile app does store the remote sites to which is has connected and it allows them to be renames and allows storing of a password encryption token just like the desktop app.

I think the claim is that this makes it more secure. I do believe their claim that it performs better than Teamviewer based on first hand experience using both on machines with known sketchy or redirected ISP services.

For a hardware based VPN appliance, we have been using StrideLinx with good success (zero problems).

AnyDesk was new to me but I just gave it a test drive and I'm very impressed!