Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued) vs. Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)

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.

Well suited in an IT environment where you have limited staff. It can be managed by one administrator. Reliability of the SaaS environment has been excellent. Flexibility in developing automated workflows to open, manage, and close Incidents. Change Management due to ability to modify OOB to meet the needs of our staff. Contract Management allowing us to be notified when a contract or license is up for renewal and setting reminders. Integrations are not easy to create and manage.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket.
• Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Cherwell lacks modern UI capabilities such as responsive forms and CSS styling for web portals.
• Built-in reporting engine is hard to use and resource intensive to run.
• No patching model for small platform fixes, must upgrade to receive platform code changes.

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.

Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally)

Incentivized

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.

I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.

Incentivized

Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues

Incentivized

The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules

Incentivized

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.

We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.

I didn't partake in the in-person training, but it was available. I preferred the online method instead, which was a great experience. It was nice to have someone available to bounce questions off of and demonstrate how certain functions worked.

Incentivized

The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.

Incentivized

Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins

Incentivized

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.

Much more customizable than other products, especially when ran in a self-hosted environment. Cherwell [Service Management] allows for greater flexibility of custom development and integrations to allow for automating tasks that traditional ITSM apps are not well suited for. Cherwell [Service Management] gives you the freedom to develop your own objects with minimal licensing costs.

Incentivized

We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model

Incentivized

We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable

Incentivized

As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense

Incentivized

• 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..

• As with any standard ticketing system, it helped decrease the time before first contact with clients.
• Our department was always concerned with keeping a low budget, and it was cheaper than most.
• My supervisor could easily tell how many resources were being put into each employee, so we had more visibility of our team's capabilities at a given time if we needed to take on something complex.

Incentivized