Confluence vs Cherwell Service Management | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 8 out of 10

Based on 1078 reviews and ratings

Score 7.2 out of 10

Based on 79 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

Atlassian Confluence is extremely well suited for capturing knowledge and sharing it with your organization. Whether that takes the form of blog posts, technical documentation, or project status reports, Confluence can handle it all. Anytime that written documentation with detail would be valuable to your organization, Atlassian Confluence is THE tool to use.The only time I'd say that it is less suited for use is as a substitute for a face-to-face conversation. Sometimes people will use Atlassian Confluence as a communications vehicle when an in-person dialog would be much more expedient. Of course, you could always capture the output of that conversation as a Confluence page!

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Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development

Pharmaceuticals Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Cherwell is a good choice for any sized enterprise that needs an extremely customizable IT help desk solution that triggers (again, entirely customizable) automated actions, spawns workflows (and auto-spawns tasks and sub-tasks for them) for multiple IT technicians and multiple tiers of technicians. It can do project management, change management, asset management, all the same things that the others can do and far, far more. If you do NOT need a highly customized help desk solution and if you don't need automated workflow creation and task tracking, then you could buy a less expensive solution that you can use out of the box without any of the frills. But as I said, Cherwell can do a lot more than just IT help desk, and it has a huge array of "plug-in" / "add-on" features, most of which are free, that make every Cherwell implementation completely unique to the enterprise that uses it. Cherwell is just right for a company that wants to manage and customize the help desk application with a PTE resource. I manage it myself at my company, and I spend very little time maintaining it now that it's solidly established ... although it's so much fun to customize that I wish I had more time to add new features and play with it. I do strongly advise some training for the admins ... your Cherwell admins MUST take the online, instructor-led introductory admin class to kick you off, and you MUST have implementation help from Cherwell to setup your instance, especially their hosted offering, over which you don't have database admin control (you can't even turn it on to get it working without their help). But after that, there is very little support needed from your own in-house Cherwell admin resource, unless, of course, you are constantly growing the solution to make it do more. I can see how that could happen because Cherwell can do almost anything. I can imagine some departments wanting to make it into the swiss-army-knife of IT .. and HR .. and facilities .... and physical security ... and you could spend many hours down the rabbit hole doing that if you wanted to

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Senior Systems Administrator

DRT Holdings, Inc.Aviation & Aerospace, 501-1000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Task Management

Gantt Charts

Scheduling

Workflow Automation

Mobile Access

Search

Visual planning tools

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Chat

Notifications

Discussions

Surveys

Internal knowledgebase

Integrates with GoToMeeting

Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts

Integrates with Outlook

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Versioning

Video files

Audio files

Document collaboration

Access control

Advanced security features

Integrates with Google Drive

Device sync

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Organize and prioritize service tickets

Expert directory

Service restoration

Self-service tools

Subscription-based notifications

ITSM collaboration and documentation

ITSM reports and dashboards

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Configuration mangement

Asset management dashboard

Policy and contract enforcement

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Change requests repository

Change calendar

Service-level management

Pros

Confluence provides the ability to any employee to create content as they see fit, democratizing the content creation process
The parent and child relationships between pages makes organizing your content much easier.
If you're also using Jira as your task management software, the native integration allows you to work in both systems and share content and data between the two, seamlessly.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Information Services Company, 51-200 employees

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After proper training on setting up the views and servers, Cherwell did a good job separating various department ownership of tickets. Our work views weren't cluttered with irrelevant information.
There is a lot of information that can be embedded into tickets. Such as sub-task assignments that could contain almost the same information as a ticket itself. Lot of customization options.
Custom personal dashboards were nice, once I figured out how to do it. Not everyone wants to see things the same way as other people, and being able to move touch points where you want is always a plus.

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IT Consultant

Great Lakes Health ConnectComputer Hardware, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

Search. The search functionality of Confluence is not that great. When typing a search there are often dozens or hundreds of irrelevant pages and you can't see enough in the search results to know which page you are looking for so it can sometimes be hard to find information you are looking for.
Over-notification. If you subscribe to an active group, you will get a notification every time something changes. This means that if someone is actively updating during a meeting (taking minutes), you could receive several notification for the same set of changes.

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Chris Snelling, CFA

Investments and Treasury Manager

TASC (Total Administrative Services Corporation)Financial Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Sometimes comments made on a ticket do not generate emails to the technician who owns it, and they will not know there is an update from the customer without checking it
Sometimes I will see an error pop up when copying text but it can easily be closed
Sometimes the time-out window for staying logged in does not appear on top of other applications so I will not know it's logging me out

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Computer Technician

DTSInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Confluence 10.0

Based on 15 answers

I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.

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Charles Thomasset, MBA

Director, Project/Process Management

Lehigh UniversityHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees

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Cherwell Service Management 8.5

Based on 4 answers

We stay on maintenance for support and upgrades. We rely on this product for our internal operations and need to have a maintenance contract so there is some vendor support in the event of a disaster, so we opted to renew. The more recent versions of Cherwell also have some new exciting features that we're also hoping to be able to implement.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Usability

Confluence 8.6

Based on 9 answers

Confluence can - and in my personal opinion, it will - be a bit hard to use in the first moment. Atlassian is a great company and is eager to help you with any question you have, though. The interface seems to be a bit clumsy at first but the customization options are enough to make it easier and simpler. In general, Confluence is easy to use when you understand what each section does, but this can take a while.

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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cherwell Service Management 8.0

Based on 1 answer

Cherwell Service Managment is a really good tool because it allows us to create tickets in the app, from the web, or from emails.

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Network System Administrator

QuadPrinting, 10,001+ employees

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Reliability and Availability

Confluence 10.0

Based on 4 answers

It is always on, always ready. It is very adaptable and reliable.

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Verified User

Consultant in Marketing

Insurance Company, 51-200 employees

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Cherwell Service Management 9.0

Based on 2 answers

No answer on this topic is available.

Performance

Confluence 9.8

Based on 8 answers

Pages load very quickly, which makes it useful for quickly obtaining information. The search functionality is also very quick and is able to parse through all of the documents to provide the most relevant results for the query. Other information based software gets bogged down, but so far Atlassian Confluence maintains its performance.

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Senior Firmware Engineer

Spirent CommunicationsTelecommunications, 1001-5000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Confluence 8.5

Based on 41 answers

I have not had a lot of support experiences with Atlassian, but of the few I have, I wasn't very satisfied with the results. I found that multiple people would respond to the issue at various stages, requiring re-communication (even though the support system stores everything and shows it to both them and you). Often responses came at odd hours, resulting in 24+ hour turnaround on basic responses, even if you respond right away. Support often asks you to do things which require downtime, and don't seem sympathetic if your organization requires that downtime to be done off-hours. This makes it difficult to resolve issues in a timely manner, if at all.I must note that I have not opened a support incident with them in close to 2 years, and it's my understanding from colleagues that there has been much improvement. My comments and ratings reflect my older experiences.

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Systems Engineer

Cold Spring Harbor LaboratoryResearch, 501-1000 employees

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Cherwell Service Management 8.5

Based on 16 answers

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.

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MSC Operations Engineer

Software Information SystemsInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Implementation Rating

Confluence 9.0

Based on 3 answers

Great process overall

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Verified User

Consultant in Marketing

Insurance Company, 51-200 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

Atlassian Confluence is a great choice for our company when compared to the 2 other knowledge base software services we have previously used. The software is more robust and has more plug-in services, such as Jira. This has been tremendously useful for us to gain visibility into project planning vs. actual hours logged. The other software platforms did not have this functionality.

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Alexandria Alvarez Gerbasi

Chief Administrative Officer

OVS Group LLCOil & Energy, 51-200 employees

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CIT had used HEAT for 15 years, which was about 10 years more than we should have. Our HEAT implementation was extremely customized and though we used HEAT well and our processes were melded with HEAT, there were many areas for improvement. Tickets would get lost or a task would be lost or the ticket would go through many hands without proper documentation. It was just fairly clunky and not very scaleable.

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Michael J Mandeville

Support Center Technical Lead

Calvin College Information TechnologyHigher Education, 501-1000 employees

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Scalability

Confluence 10.0

Based on 1 answer

This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.

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Verified User

Consultant in Marketing

Insurance Company, 51-200 employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Return on Investment

Overall, I think the impact of Confluence has been positive. As a remote team, it simplifies process and communication for us.
Confluence streamlines group work and tasks to make it clear who is doing what they should be doing
Some of my employees do complain that confluence is hard to use and that they can't navigate around very well.

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Holly Wallace Nielsen

Sales Manager

Incorporate MassageHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 51-200 employees

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Having a single SaaS instance of Cherwell has allowed our organization for the first time seamlessly transfer tickets across regions and allow for unprecedented communication between our groups. We look forward to opening the tool to all global IT teams and incorporating all major modules (Problem, Change, CI & Knowledge and more!) where we'll finally all be on the same tool and various IT data will finally all be in a relational database.
Ongoing costs can be lowered because we now have enough in-house expertise to manage most of our routine Cherwell modifications and management.
Once Cherwell is fully implemented at our organization, we'll be able to do with several separate systems and databases where all IT information is currently stored which will make things more simple and cost-effective to maintain.

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IT Support Manager

ImerysMining & Metals, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Confluence Editions & Modules

On-premise Edition

Server	10.00¹
Server	2700.00²
Server	5300.00³
Server	10,200.00⁴
Server	19,800.00⁵
Server	30,000.00⁶
Server	45,000.00⁷
Server	90,000.00⁸
Server	150,000.00⁹
Data Center	15,000.00¹⁰
Data Center	30,000.00¹¹
Data Center	52,000.00¹²
Data Center	79,200.00¹³
Data Center	105,600.00¹⁴
Data Center	132,000.00¹⁵
Data Center	143,000.00¹⁶
Data Center	154,000.00¹⁷
Data Center	165,000.00¹⁸
Data Center	176,000.00¹⁹
Data Center	187,000.00²⁰
Data Center	198,000.00²¹
Data Center	209,000.00²²
Data Center	220,000.00²³

10 Users - Perpetual License
25 Users - Perpetual License
50 Users - Perpetual License
100 Users - Perpetual License
250 Users - Perpetual License
500 Users - Perpetual License
2,000 Users - Perpetual License
10,000 Users - Perpetual License
10,001+ Users - Perpetual License
500 Users - Annually
1,000 Users - Annually
2,000 Users - Annually
3,000 Users - Annually
4,000 Users - Annually
5,000 Users - Annually
10,000 Users - Annually
15,000 Users - Annually
20,000 Users - Annually
25,000 Users - Annually
30,000 Users - Annually
35,000 Users - Annually
40,000 Users - Annually
40,001+ Users - Annually

SaaS Edition

Free	0.00¹
Standard	5.00²
Premium	10.00²
Enterprise	Contact Sales

Free for 10 Users
Per User Per Month

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Cherwell Service Management Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

Confluence

Cherwell Service Management

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