BMC Helix Remedyforce vs. Freshservice

[BMC Helix Remedyforce] is probably best suited for an MSP who needs to keep multiple clients separated. If you were an internal IT department I think the additional features it has would be lost. When dealing with an MSP who needs to know what software and what issues have effected specific clients it is very well suited to do that.

Incentivized

Freshservice is a great solution if you plan to use multiple modules and incorporate multiple business units. The all in pricing allows exploration of the many capabilities of the platform without worrying about cost as it is set per agent per month. If you only need ticketing the price in my opinion is not competitive. Also, as Freshservice does so many thing, they do them all adequately. So for the all in pricing you are giving up having top tier product in each module.

Incentivized

• An admin user is able to quickly create a request definition with all of its components from one screen. We use to have to go to the 7 or 8 different screens to create each piece of the request definition.
• Ability to update multiple Incidents/Service Requests at once with the update button. This allows essentially an inline edit functionality within Remedyforce.
• Change management schedule is a great feature as well to be able to see how changes align and what there expected start dates/times are.

• Asset Management Module: The features I like most in this module are the discovery agent software, which allows us to collect device information without manual intervention, and the simplicity and robustness of the module itself.
• Service Catalog: This feature allows us to create forms tailored to specific service requests based on group requirements. The ability to customize forms greatly helps both us and our end-users provide the necessary information to fulfill their requests.
• Workflow Automator and Business Rules: These two allow us to have some automation in place, eliminating some of the manual steps and decreasing the number of human errors that may happen due to manual changes.

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor/regulate the volume of tickets when you integrate with your monitoring software. We have so many items that trigger alerts, creating a ticket for each is somewhat overwhelming. Would like to be able to better control when an incident should be created.
• Being able to report on Service requests and tasks together would be nice. Right now I have to do it separately as they are in different buckets, so to speak.
• Remedy console is an improvement from where it started but can still be a cleaner interface for a tech to be able to work out of for their day to day work.

• Figuring out the automations is sometimes tricky. For example, if you want to pull the information for an asset and put in the service tag into the ticket then this uses Liquid filters which are sometime hard to understand
• Would love to see a more feature rich CMDB built into the assets module
• Reporting is not granular enough and some reports are nearly impossible to generate

The total amount of time spent from installation to configuration for a minimal ticketing system was 2 hours. Maintenance and customization for the application can be completed with a great amount of ease. In addition having a customer portal is an added benefit that pays for itself

Incentivized

Freshservice is pretty ingrained in our IT processes and policies. A replacement would take quite a while to do, but we are mostly satisfied with the service so we have no plans on moving.

Incentivized

Easy to navigate and use GUI. We have many infrastructure team members from various departments using Freshservice and their on-boarding and training was very straightforward and we have not received much, if any negative feedback from non-technology users in regards to overall usability, interface or functionality.

Downtime is minimal (it does happen but not often)

Incentivized

There are days where it can get a bit slow for a short time, but these are rare and I wouldn't exactly blame it on their product. The system itself processes requests very quickly.

Incentivized

They care about your success.

Incentivized

I contacted support once and the person handling the request was very helpful. The staff is very competent. In my opinion communication could be improved as the level of spoken English is very high. I was unable to understand some words, in fact two people participated in the second meeting.

Incentivized

Training was enough to use the base website

Incentivized

Their documentation is pretty good, but only available in English. This makes it difficult for some of our users to understand. There are also some basic video courses available.

Incentivized

Learning industry best practices or gaining insight on them from either BMC or an implementation partner would have saved some headaches we faced after roll-out.

Incentivized

Use case and requirements have to be very specific. Each business is different so it's very important to be as clear as possible with your initial requirements when communicating with the on-boarding/implementation team.

I previously worked with tools like Service Manager which were difficult to configure, administer and maintain. The support options were very limited. Remedyforce has local US support, dedicated reps, and a more developed infrastructure to work from to support an organization. This runs on the Salesforce platform so worrying about server failures and unscheduled outages was no longer going to be an issue for us. Self service, knowledge base, and change control were just a few highly utilized features that helped employees support themselves and automate very manual processes.

1. Cost - I have always had the best cost provided by Freshservice as compared to others 2. Functionality - far more functionality is provided by Freshservice 3. ITIL enabled ITSM tool with better support for different ITIL modules 4. Reporting - easiest to produce reports in Freshservice 5. Workflows - Workflows are far superior and easier to configure as compared with other products Service Now is great for the above as well, but it comes at a far greater cost as compared.

Incentivized

Was not able to update us proactively about our renewal causing lost of access

Incentivized

The software is very scalable from a small to mid sized team. The features have seemed to scale exceptionally well.

Incentivized

We did not have professional services.

Incentivized

• Remedyforce has allowed us to eliminate other solutions that provided similar features. By now using one true ITSM we have been able to save money which in higher education is always a concern.
• The reports and dashboards allow for a birds-eye view of our daily operations and provide managers and executives the information they need to make important cost saving decisions.

• Freshservice has allowed us to handle approximately 20% more tickets and incidents per month, compared to our previous legacy system.
• Back & forth communication between our techs and end users was very poor prior to Freshservice. Freshservice has changed all that. Email and other communication is now very fluid and easy for both groups. Communication has increased significantly.
• Supervisor reporting and management are also much better. It's much easier and quicker to get information about how things are going. The "at a glance" dashboards are very effective and I use them daily.
• Freshservice has a technician leaderboard that has caused our techs to push themselves to surpass their counterparts. The end result is that tickets get resolved more quickly and our end users get their issues resolved faster.

Incentivized