A customer of mine had LogMeIn Pro just to access a single pc from a couple of phones every now and then. One day it suddenly stopped working. As it turned out, in the three years they had been using it, the price had hiked from about 100 EUR to over 350 EUR. Having no idea who charged them that much and what for, they reversed the credit card transaction. Since then, they've moved on to RealVNC. It's 1/10th of the price and works just as well if not better. Don't let the name discourage you; the product has very little to do with the old and inefficient VNC protocol anymore. I was hesitant to try it, but it's been a very positive experience.
I'd recommend that your customer checks out [Chrome Remote Desktop](https://remotedesktop.google.com/). It's completely free, simple to set up, and seems to perform way better than VNC. Plus no need to open firewall ports or worry about encryption and security – that's all handled for you.
Just for the record, you don't need to worry about any of that with RealVNC either, and the protocol seems way more efficient than any other VNC I've used. Frankly, I think the product should be renamed to get rid of this bad association. It's way more similar to LogMeIn Pro than TightVNC, for example.
It’s a terrible user experience for anything other than clicking on things. Can’t use a lot of keyboard shortcuts because they trigger browser behaviours. An issue that didn’t exist when they had a chrome app. The website always breaks in some form. Is laggy. If you’re using windows and the lock screen happens and you come back. Copy/paste stops working.
> Don't let the name discourage you; the product has very little to do with the old and inefficient VNC protocol anymore.
But RealVNC's products are all built on that same VNC protocol...? At least I see many things referencing it and nothing indicating that they don't use it.
That's the question I have; can you access the remote login screen with realvnc? My understanding was you couldn't do that with vnc on windows, have to use rdp.
If it's still based on VNC, for sure it's much more efficient (and user-friendlier packaged) than any of the open source competition I've experienced over the years. So much that I think that still using the name VNC does them more harm than good.
I think perhaps you're unfamiliar with the open source competition. Most of the open source VNC servers support something like H.264 which while a little dated, is still quite efficient, especially for the low-latency streaming needed for remote desktop applications.
The only novel-looking thing I see on RealVNC's website is adaptive bitrate, which I don't think I've seen in the open source servers.
You know, I might be. In that case, please enlighten me with a counterexample. Anyway, the point isn't to pick on the competition. I'm merely saying that RealVNC is a fine, fairly priced product with a rather bad name. Many people, myself included, have a dismissive initial reaction based on memories of old-fashioned (slow, hard to set up over the internet) VNC. At least with RealVNC, it's nothing like that anymore, whereas with TightVNC for one, it still pretty much is. I use the latter as well, but only for light usage on local networks—acceptable and better than it once used to be, yet a completely different experience.
