Brightly Asset Essentials™ vs. TOPdesk

SchoolDude has been great for us to easily submit maintenance requests, keep them organized for tracking, and simple for staff to view and respond to.

Incentivized

TOPdesk is a comprehensive service management software ideal for IT-departments, managing incidents in handling change requests. Also fiscality management can use it to keep track of assets and booking of rooms for meetings e.g. Also the registration of employees can be managed by TOPdesk and is therefore ideal for HR department. A scenario where it is less appropriate would be production planning.

• For maintenance requests, Dude Solutions Help Desk documents the request and then allows the custodial staff to record updates for the staff member to see. So, the request and solution are available for all parties involved.
• For building use, I find some of the features helpful including the ability to see if what you are looking for is available before you book it.
• Overall, Dude Solutions Help Desk is not difficult to use.

Incentivized

• TOPdesk provides a clean and modern interface for all of its modules. Many of the modules have a similar look and feel, which makes it easy for users to utilize each one.
• Its workflow system allows administrators and developers to define what needs to occur when certain events happen. This can ensure that processes happen in the correct sequence.
• TOPdesk includes a vast API system to allow for external systems to integrate with it, and for TOPdesk to communicate with external systems.

Incentivized

• The overall user interface is bland.
• Switching to the IT application takes opens in another tab.

Incentivized

• Knowledge Base - The creation is a bit buggy. For example: Image resize only works in Firefox
• Keep Alive - We keep getting "Website is not up to date" from time to time
• Dark Mode is missing
• Save settings - I have to sort the lists every time I open them. If there is a way, it is not easy to find

We have a multi-year contract and plan on keeping the database growing with our inventory. Techs are getting used to it and seem to like the ease of use and reliability of the cloud system. We have never seen it go down before and maintenance windows have been short and easy to work around.

Incentivized

Sometimes I think some things are hard to find. I often do not know if I have to search in Settings or in Modules. In some cases the user has to do a lot of clicks for example to link a key to a user. Something could work a little smarter.

Incentivized

Like I said somewhere else in this review: the helpdesk of TOPdesk is top of the bill! In the Netherlands, that is. I can not plea for the helpdesks in other countries, but I guess the TOPdesk organization will make sure the quality of the helpdesk is the same in every country.

Incentivized

Although being a SAAS solution, TOPdesk performs pretty fast. One can imagine that any SAAS solution is slow or has hiccups, but we have not experienced such with TOPdesk. Pages load quickly, logging in goes smoothly. We have made reports on premise in the past - that always took some time, as you might expect with such complex tasks. It seems that in the SAAS solution TOPdesk somehow has managed to make it even faster!

Incentivized

I find the basic concept and use of Dude Solutions Help Desk to be good, but I think it could use an update to look and work more smoothly. The maintenance aspect of Dude Solutions Help Desk is definitely better than the scheduling tool. The maintenance request does have a decent set-up and does offer clear communication between the staff member and custodial staff. The scheduling tool needs a calendar feature and the ability to receive a notification in your calendar. Both tools do have an email service that directly sends updates to your email.

Incentivized

TOPdesk is easy to use and affordable with all the major features required for any organization to smoothly manage its services. We were not quite sure at the beginning if we should go with the TOPdesk for IT service management but we started getting used to it in just a few months. Now, after using it for 3 years, it has been a backbone tool of our organization. The customer support provided by TOPdesk is fast and reliable.

Incentivized

We had Topdesk in-house here training staff for almost a month (2-3 hour meetings 3x a week.) It was invaluable and we were able to take that training and share with the rest of our IT staff. Once implemented we were able to fly from there. The challenges we found were in how to get started. Once started the knowledge base offered from Topdesk has been invaluable.

Incentivized

Online training documentation is easy to access and consume. There is no real challenges with finding information on how to use the product and some really helpful knowledge base items that show us how valuable these options are in our own implementation of it. The online training we've used has been self driven

Incentivized

It was a challenge to port over years of the same thing and we ended up keeping old ideas in Topdesk that we will eventually weed out as time passes and we learn how users view categories and flows of tickets. Planning is key but bear in mind that just because you used to do it this way doesn't mean you still have to

Incentivized

I have used a ticketing system through FirstClass that does not come anywhere close to where SchoolDude is in ease of use and quality of a program.

Incentivized

We used to use Maintenance direct - it also had limitations in what we were able to utilize it for. The biggest thing we did use if for was utilities. I'm still working on the comparison to the TOPdesk Utility module to see if it fulfills our requirements from a reporting and financial standpoint. We selected TOPdesk over the Maintenance upgrade due to it being more user friendly and we could focus our time on getting things completed rather than setting up users and monitoring their activity. The ability to put TOPdesk on mobile devices for the technicians has been huge for us. We can do real-time work order assignments while they are in the field. Our old system did not do this.

Incentivized

TOPdesk is very flexible and scalable. Every department in you organization can you the software. Perhaps some persons need some training, but that can be provided by TOPdesk ot some keyusers.

Incentivized

• We can calculate the need for IT workers based on work orders.
• We can track issues at buildings and what buildings may need more help.
• A simple approach where it makes it easy to get work order information rather than emails and phone calls.

Incentivized

• This year we moved to a unified hardware budget where IT now orders all assets from our budget. Asset management is key to that goal. TOPdesk has enabled our department to move forward with of Computer Lifecycle program of replacements.
• TOPdesk did come with a cost, we went from using the free Spiceworks solution to a paid solution with TOPdesk. But I firmly believe the benefits outweigh the cost.
• We had started to have stability issues with our old helpdesk solution. With TOPdesk I have had no downtime and by it being cloud-based we no longer have to have onsite servers.

Incentivized