Likelihood to Recommend As a one-person IT department, Atera is almost like having another person to help, especially as we integrate the AIT functionalities. We have several locations spread over nearly 200 miles, and Atera has enabled me to remote in and fix something that before would have had to wait until we could justify an all-day or overnight 300 mile round trip.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Support, if you need them they are there and they always have the answers you need. The AI scripting features allow you to really hit the ground running. You can give it a prompt and it will give you a script that will be very close to what you need. All you have to do is polish it up and test it out. I love having the ability to use multiple remote access tools, in the event a machine has an issue with one of them, or if a cloud service goes down, you have a fallback. The shared script library is an amazing resource for troubleshooting and streamlining. The development teams are open to adding features and have done so frequently based on user requests. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Some basic functions need some extra work Some basic things are behind paywalls Feature board is not credible. Ideas taking very, very long to implement Atera has no clear road map SNMP monitoring needs a make over and needs more options Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew As of right now, we have found nothing that can offer as many features as Atera does along with the affordability. They are doing monthly releases each month and not just making small changes (shared scripting library, chocolatey support, Install packages, Splashtop SOS support, Scheduled tickets to name a few). The uptimes are great and accessibility to the dashboard has yet to be limited. We are a happy customer and bordering on fanboy status now
Read full review 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)
Read full review Usability This has been a great platform to handle both service requests and device maintenance. Without it, we would have to do manual ticket creation through another platform that does not link with a RMM making the help desk inefficient and frustrating both Employees and the Executives of the company. The addition of AI makes all of this even easier!
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Support Rating Atera support provides answers to my questions lightning fast. They have never left me feeling like I'm out there on my own. I can ask questions by email, or by chat, or by opening a ticket with them and they are always on it quickly. They also have a forum where other Atera users can help you if you need it, and you can also add feature requests via the forum.
Read full review 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.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered Atera was the clear winner for us. The interface and tools were very easy to learn and setup. Atera's licensing incorporates good feature sets and value levels. Some of the other products were difficult to setup and lacked good flow between tools. The value proposition was also not as good.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model
Read full review Scalability 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
Read full review Professional Services 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
Read full review Return on Investment We have been able to add new employees/devices without increasing my staff to support them. The value of charging per technician verses per device cannot be stated enough. Without that pricing, I wouldn't be able to budget enough to pay for all of the things I get with Atera. They have a customer portal which allows the end user to check on submitted tickets, open new tickets and recommend any new features. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots