Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite vs. Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Agiloft's Flexible Service Desk Suite includes the elements needed to manage a complex service desk: Internal Help Desk, External Customer Support, Change Management, Asset Management, RMA Management, and complete ITIL/ITSM capability. According to the vendor, these fully integrated applications work together to form a single system of record for all of an organization’s IT service processes, for 360-degree visibility and control. The vendor says their solution is designed to adapt and scale to…
$65
per month
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels, including email, the web, chat or social media. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017. Former users are encouraged to migrate to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.N/A
Pricing
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk SuiteMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Free Trial
$0
per license/per month
Professional
Contact sales team
Professional Extended
Contact sales team
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Enterprise Extended
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk SuiteMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk SuiteMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk SuiteMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
9.4
2 Ratings
14% above category average
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Service restoration10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-service tools10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards7.12 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
9.0
2 Ratings
9% above category average
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
-
Ratings
Configuration mangement8.12 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
10.0
2 Ratings
18% above category average
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
-
Ratings
Change requests repository10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Service-level management10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk SuiteMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Small Businesses
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.1 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.1 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Score 9.1 out of 10
Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk SuiteMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(12 ratings)
6.7
(10 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(9 ratings)
6.1
(10 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(2 ratings)
2.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(2 ratings)
7.5
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk SuiteMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Agiloft
Agiloft is most suited to meeting the needs of an organization that requires rapid and frequent process changes for critical processes, and values empowering the people who do the job to determine how best to automate it - essentially rapidly growing, democratic organization.It's hard to imagine an inappropriate scenario to use Agiloft, but one that comes to mind is organzations requiring a complete, finished, highly structured solution that they do not want to change over time. Agiloft is designed with the expectation that clients will adapt it to their needs so many functions are left undone, rather than throwing a "kitchen sink" at the customer and letting them choose what they need.The best way to work with Agiloft is to take the training class, then have a small success with a small team, involving the employees and first level management in the deployment. They'll tell everyone else how much they like it. This reduces the possibility of slow development cycles and an undue dependence on outside expertise, while maximizing the return on Agiloft's investment in easy customizability.
Read full review
Microsoft
The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
Read full review
Pros
Agiloft
  • Fully GUI based interface that has drastically reduced the time to add new features/workflows.
  • The product was very easy to deploy and add features like Single-Sign On and user provisioning from our internal DataWarehouse. Again, vendor support was a big help while implementing those features.
  • The workflows include a very comprehensive rule-based system that can trigger various actions like escalations, emails, changes of request state and more. All without any coding. Again, fully GUI based.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
  • Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
  • Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.
Read full review
Cons
Agiloft
  • With flexibility comes complexity, so we have needed to use consulting time to implement some of our needs. The learning curve can be steep, but the product can accommodate nearly any scenario.
  • At one point we seemed to have some performance issues, but those seem to be in the past.
  • The text messaging integration would be nice.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
  • The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
  • Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
  • The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
  • It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Agiloft
We're comfortable and happy with our purchase of Agiloft. Our end users have been happy with the tool, and appreciate the time savings and efficiency it has gave them. Agiloft also appears to actually care about you being a customer, which makes a difference to me.
Read full review
Microsoft
Parature has been the best option for this campus in terms of what we use it for and there is no alternative
Read full review
Usability
Agiloft
For the most part, it is an easy and intuitive system to use. There are many small things that could be improved to make the system work even easier. However, overall it is very easy to use if you have a good grasp on computer programs and using them to build things. I do not have any computer science or programming background, and I am able to use this system with few problems.
Read full review
Microsoft
It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Agiloft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
Read full review
Support Rating
Agiloft
We often hear back very quickly with answers to our questions. They also support their answers at times with screenshots and videos to help further explain their advice and suggestions. The only reason it isn't a 10 is because sometimes using only the online support system, sometimes things aren't communicated as well as they would be over the phone. However, we know if there is a major issue going on, we can call Agiloft for support.
Read full review
Microsoft
Nothing ever seemed to get resolved
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Agiloft
Most of the other CRM software packages we evaluated were either too complicated or time
consuming to setup and customize, or they were too expensive, especially since many
of the companies charge additional fees for each additional module or function
you want to use.
Read full review
Microsoft
There are services that do bits and pieces of what Parature does. We liked the idea of having one service that meets our needs
Read full review
Return on Investment
Agiloft
  • Helps us organize tasks and projects and the data associated with each project
  • Helps us organize our resources to meet the demand of issues and events
  • This has helped us keep moving forward during times we otherwise would have pulled back.
  • Completely revolutionized our way of work life. Upwards of approx 300 percent productivity and complexity..
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Parature allows for better Customer Service
  • Can follow up automatically for tickets
  • Will automatically close tickets that haven't been responded to.
  • Allows customers to reopen tickets easily and not allow them to be missed.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of