Performance: LogMeIn Versus TeamViewer

I use a MiniX Neo headless mini PC as a jumpbox into my home network. For the last couple years I had been running LogMeIn as the remote access client to connect back into the device, but with the recent pricing increase and lack of support for the iPad application I decided it was time to switch to TeamViewer. I knew that having an agent running on the device at all times would cause a performance hit, but I didn’t realize just how bad that hit would be.

This graph is from the LibreNMS monitoring solution I have running in my home network. The big black arrow points to where I swapped from LogMeIn to TeamViewer. As you can see, the difference is damn near night and day.

With TeamViewer, on average I’m seeing a 50% reduction in resource usage. I haven’t changed anything else about the configuration, and all the services that were running before are still running now. The only change is that LogMeIn has been replaced by TeamViewer.

In short, if you’re looking to figure out which of the two has the lighter agent and requires less overhead, use TeamViewer.