HelpWire for IT Teams & Help Desks: What We Recently Built

Three updates we shipped this year were direct responses to what IT teams, help desks, and MSPs kept asking for. Put together, they change what kind of team can run its day-to-day support work on HelpWire. Here’s what we built, why, and how to actually use each one.

Early on, an operator could connect to a device, work the ticket, close it, and move to the next one. So it didn’t suit if you were the only IT person covering forty employees and two of them pinged you within five minutes of each other.

Now, you can run multiple active remote sessions at once, each one live in its own tab, without suspending or closing the others.

How this looks in practice: Say you’re running an unattended maintenance session on a back-office machine and a second employee flags a printer issue mid-task. Instead of ending the maintenance session, you open a new tab, connect to the second device, and handle it while the first session keeps running. When you’re done, you switch back to the first tab exactly where you left off. Nothing in either session gets interrupted by the other.

Linux unattended support

Plenty of small IT teams manage a mixed fleet – Windows desktops and Macs for most staff, and a Linux box or two running as a dev server, for example. We only offered unattended access on Windows and macOS for a while.

But now HelpWire supports unattended access on Linux, currently on Ubuntu (18.04-24.04), CentOS 8/9, and Fedora 41.

Setting it up: Add the Linux machine as a client the same way you’d add any device, and send the install link. Once the client installs HelpWire and grants consent, request unattended access from the Web Portal. From that point on, you can reconnect to the machine any time it’s powered on and online – no one needs to be sitting at the keyboard.

One thing worth flagging, honestly: on X11-based sessions, you get full unattended access, including the login screen. On Wayland, you can reconnect to an already-logged-in session, but you can’t get past the login screen unattended. That’s a limitation of Wayland itself, not something we can route around yet.

Use case: Patch an Ubuntu build server overnight or restart a service on a CentOS box without driving to the office, all without either physical access or the need for a workaround.

Operator permissions

If you had two or three people using the same HelpWire Web Portal account, everyone could see every client folder. So your contractor doing overnight support for one customer could technically browse into another customer’s devices entirely by accident.

To fix that, we built operator permissions. An account Owner can now control exactly which client groups each operator can see and work with.

How to set it up: In the Web Portal, go to Settings, then Operators under Company Settings. Pick the operator, and assign them to specific Client Groups. From that point, the operator’s view of the portal only shows the clients you’ve assigned to them.

Where this matters: You can onboard a new contractor for one client without giving them a look at your whole book of business. Or keep an internal help desk team separated by department – say, retail floor support versus back-office IT – so nobody’s poking around devices outside their lane by mistake.

How this stacks up against TeamViewer and AnyDesk

Here’s a straight comparison on these three specific points, using HelpWire’s top tier against TeamViewer Corporate and AnyDesk Advanced – the closest equivalents on the other side.

	HelpWire Business	TeamViewer Corporate	AnyDesk Advanced
Multiple active sessions	Every operator seat runs its own concurrent session. 10 operators can work simultaneously without buying extra capacity.	Comes with 3 connection channels covering up to 30 licensed users. Each channel supports up to 15 sessions in tabs. But only 3 people can be actively connected at once unless you buy more channels.	Starts with 2 concurrent connections out of the box. To scale past, you need to add connection add-ons (up to 50 on this tier). For unlimited additional connections, you need Utimate plan.
Linux unattended access	Newly added this year: Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora, with full access on X11 and reconnect-only (no login screen) on Wayland.	Linux support has existed for years, including unattended access on supported distributions.	Linux support has existed for years, though native Wayland compatibility is limited. X11 is recommended for dependable unattended sessions.
Operator permissions	Owners assign operators to specific client groups to control exactly which clients each person can see and work with.	Fully custom user roles – up to 100 of them – with granular permissions across dozens of functions, from ticketing to billing access.	Several roles can be assigned, but not customized. If you want to build your own custom roles, there’s the Ultimate tier available.

Note: TeamViewer Tensor and AnyDesk Ultimate both exist above these tiers for larger deployments that aren’t comparable to what HelpWire is currently built for.

If you want to see what else is on the way, our roadmap is public. You can also browse the full feature list to see how well HelpWire caters to your needs.