CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. Freshdesk

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CA Service Management
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
CA Service Management, including CA Desk Manager, is a fully-featured ITSM platform, now from Broadcom. It competes with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, FrontRange ITSM, Cherwell Service Management etc. It is based on technology acquired by CA in 2010 with Nimsoft, and is now supported by Broadcom since the 2018 acquisition.N/A
Freshdesk
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses of all sizes to deliver customer support. Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Additionally, Freshdesk lets the user automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, to stay on top of customer support. Freshdesk also offers out-of-the-box features like an AI-powered support chatbot,…
$0
Up to 10 agents per user
Pricing
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerFreshdesk
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free
$0
Up to 10 agents
Growth
$15
per month per agent
Pro
$49
per month per agent
Enterprise
$69
per month per agent
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CA Service ManagementFreshdesk
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerFreshdesk
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerFreshdesk
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
8.6
6 Ratings
5% above category average
Freshdesk
8.4
145 Ratings
6% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets9.76 Ratings8.7141 Ratings
Expert directory8.75 Ratings8.195 Ratings
Service restoration8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-service tools8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications7.96 Ratings8.43 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation9.76 Ratings7.64 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards7.55 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings8.8142 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings8.7142 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
9.2
6 Ratings
12% above category average
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Configuration mangement9.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Asset management dashboard10.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
9.1
6 Ratings
9% above category average
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Change requests repository9.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Change calendar8.64 Ratings00 Ratings
Service-level management9.55 Ratings00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
-
Ratings
Freshdesk
8.3
130 Ratings
7% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings8.4116 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.3120 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
-
Ratings
Freshdesk
8.3
138 Ratings
8% above category average
Customer portal00 Ratings8.1116 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings8.143 Ratings
Social integration00 Ratings8.572 Ratings
Email support00 Ratings8.7138 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings8.284 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerFreshdesk
Small Businesses
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP Service Cloud
SAP Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerFreshdesk
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(12 ratings)
8.7
(212 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
4.1
(6 ratings)
9.8
(14 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(35 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(4 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(33 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.4
(142 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(3 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(4 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerFreshdesk
Likelihood to Recommend
Broadcom
It is a suitable tool for a large organization with extensive user needs. It is not for a small shop as it may be over-engineered for smaller organizations that don't have teams that can manage a solution of this size. It does have some significant hardware and configuration needs, but that should not deter customers from deploying it in-house. I've seen it deployed in the cloud as well as in-house; the downside to deploying it as a hosted solution is you're forever at the mercy of the vendor for customizations, and they cost an arm and a leg. The simplest things take a long time and cost much more money than necessary, so you can't truly get a custom solution and end up with mostly vanilla services (unless you have very deep pockets.)
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Freshworks Inc
Using a collection of Skill Based Ticket Assignment, Ticket Allocation, and alerts, we’ve been able to bring our average resolution time to under half our previous time. This is done by making sure the right tickets get to the right agents, and by ensuring agents are followed up on to ensure they do not forget deadlines on tickets in their queue. Furthermore, tickets which would be open for weeks due to lack of a client response are now closed automatically following a prompt email to the end-user
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Pros
Broadcom
  • A large community where, if help is needed, is usually very helpful and quick to respond.
  • Various sites with good information on various issues. If you have a problem, there's a good chance some else already had it and documented it.
  • Fairly easy installation of the product if recommendations are followed and prep-work is done.
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Freshworks Inc
  • Follow up on all conversations that enter and are easy to use by the employee and save responses ready for use.
  • Find out the average rate of the number of conversations that occur in the company and conduct the analysis.
  • There is a feature it allows one to take a permit in the name of the employee who responds to the conversation and to know the problem faced by the customer and the solution.
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Cons
Broadcom
  • The right-click feature is disabled in this application and users are unable to copy and paste with mouse or touchpad.
  • The application also freezes quite a bit and a user will have to quite often close and reopen browser to get it functioning properly.
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Freshworks Inc
  • Ticket templates and canned responses should be able to be used interchangeably. We frequently have the same response in both fields.
  • The spam filter can be a little too aggressive. We have had issues with tickets being accidentally marked as spam then filtering incorrectly for weeks at a time.
  • Freshdesk doesn't quite have the right integrations with our other providers (Vonage, and Avochato, to name a few).
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Likelihood to Renew
Broadcom
While the concepts of Service Desk and EITM were solid. The user interface, tool capabilities, and integrations fell behind the rest of the industry. Too often it seemed like CA bought and rebranded products without fully integrated them with their other products. It was a coat of paint, without the parts under the hood being updated. The overhead for administration was too high and the reporting capabilities were absolutely amongst the worst I've seen.
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Freshworks Inc
We are extremely happy with Freshdesk and can foresee using it for the next year. We might only consider using a different platform if our average daily ticket volume reaches four digits and its AI isn’t enough to handle our needs by then. While we haven’t tested this yet, we have read reviews that it’s AI capabilities are lacking
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Usability
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
I gave it a rating of 9 out of 10 because they delivered on everything we asked them to do. Easy to setup, easy to deploy to end users, easy to customize, easy to enter tickets and so much more. Our experience with their support is top notch! After opening a ticket for support they call use back within 10 minutes every time!
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Reliability and Availability
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
I have encountered a lot of errors in the Freshdesk, however, they tend to resolve it on priority or at least they will share the timeline by when this can be resolved. Most of the time the issue has been from the other partner's end. They take time to resolve their vendor issues and they don't have any timelines in case of developed app errors.
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Performance
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
The reports take a lot of time to download if the time period is large. Also, the tickets take their sweet time to open and load. It is not fast as Zendesk. Only 30 tickets are visible in a single go and there isn't any option to select all. If we need to change the pages and dashboards it takes a lot of time to open.
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Support Rating
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
The main thing about Freshdesk user service is that once a request has been made for information about a feature of the platform, the support team responds to tickets quickly, within a day of writing and submitting them, with information that is concise enough so that there is no need to ask for help on the same topic again.
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In-Person Training
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
In-person training is provided to all the agents and it is very easy to learn the basics of the Freshdesk interface. Solving tickets via dashboards, replying to the guest queries in bulk via Freshdesk. The training which is a bit hard is creating the logic according to the ticket flow and intergeration.
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Online Training
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
This tool is no doubt easy to learn but in-person training is a lot better than online training. It takes time to grasp things in the online training, however, in pandemic we have done all the training online. Apart from a bit more time we haven't faced any issues with online training.
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Implementation Rating
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
Not applicable. I have never used a support desk system before and FreshDesk had already been implemented at my company before I joined. I am not involved in financial decisions and I have no opinion on buzzwords like "time to productivity" and "time to value"
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Alternatives Considered
Broadcom
We are too integrated with CA Service Desk Manager to disassociate anytime soon. We found the more we used the product the more we needed to customize it in order to better integrate with our business processes. There are other alternatives that have many built-in features that had we have foreseen our future requirements... would have chosen ServiceNow or Remedy as our "go-to" ticketing product.
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Freshworks Inc
FreshDesk was the best combination of ease of use and price. While inexpensive, even the lowest tier offered more functionality than the other guys, and the learning curve is almost nonexistent so it's easy to add new agents and get them up to speed quickly instead of having them spend days getting use to the UI.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
The pricing we had taken is on yearly basis but the subscription and billing frequency that we have is on monthly basis. I would not want to make any changes to it, it is a seamless process with all the contract terms and we both agreed on it. It should be as per the customer's need.
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Scalability
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Freshworks Inc
The product they have developed is amazing. They have made different products for emails, tickets, chats & calls as well. It is flexible according to multiple departments. The finance team can use it, the Customer support team is using it, we can use it in call centres, emails etc. We can use these tickets internally as well to create child tickets and assign them to different departments for query resolution.
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Return on Investment
Broadcom
  • Having CA Service Desk Manager within the company has increased the satisfaction of customer service from 68% to 95%. Teams are getting better customer survey scores and making better efforts to meet their SLAs.
  • CA Mobile app has provided agility and collaboration among IT Users and Customers.
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Freshworks Inc
  • Freshdesk is certainly better than nothing, or a simple shared inbox
  • Freshdesk is frustrating to incorporate social media with
  • Freshdesk excels at ticket management
  • Freshdesk needs to do more to bring it into alignment with business, rather than 'just' service desk needs.
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ScreenShots