Cherwell Asset Management (discontinued) vs. Freshservice

For small industries, it can prove to be a better solution as Cherwell offers comparatively affordable costs for small organizations. But for larger companies, there are many other solutions available in the market that are less complex and offer a variety of additional features. It can be a little complex to use because of its high configuration.

Incentivized

Freshservice is well suited for companies looking to implement ticketing / case management across the organization, but only if IT will be using it. Otherwise, I'd recommend Freshdesk. IT departments that don't function in the ITIL style of incident, request, change, and project management may find it overkill if they are only looking for a simple Help Desk solution.

Incentivized

• Automation
• Integrating with other systems
• Full control over how ITSM platform is set up and used

• The smartphone app is very well designed and adding assets from there is very easy
• If you have questions or support, the support desk is fast to respond and setup a meeting to explain the features
• Very customizable and everything can be easily changed with a wizard
• Reporting feature does what it needs to do and is not complicated to work with
• The overall ticketing system is very good and we have not run into any issues
• The whole system is incredibly responsive and does not hang or freeze

Incentivized

• Very costly licenses.
• Requires comparatively high amount of configuration.
• Comparatively complex to use other solutions available in market.

Incentivized

• To have more options on what to do with the emails that arrive in the support mailbox (which goes to Freshservice), Setting some special rules or detailed filtering is not possible.
• Non 3rd party tools to connect to Intune are missing. Additionally, the third-party tool available in the store is not satisfactory. It would be nice to have native support for importing devices from our Azure cloud.
• The contract requires you to prolong your contract end-date by two years instead of just one year, which to us is a bit aggressive.

Incentivized

We are pretty invested in Freshservice right now and have integrated it pretty heavily into our environment, so it would be hard to move away from it. For the most part, we are happy with Freshservice and the ease of use it gives us in managing tickets through the system. The only complaint we've had is customer service.

Incentivized

The UI design of Freshservice is simple and intuitive. You don't have to be a technical expert to navigate your way into the different pages/modules available. There are no buttons that are hidden in plain sight. Even our HR team required little to no help when they started using Freshservice.

Downtime is minimal (it does happen but not often)

Incentivized

Most reports are quick, however, it can take some time for emailed exports to come via email. It would be helpful to have the exports live in the system rather than having to wait on emails.

Incentivized

Cherwell support has been excellent! Always available to take our emails and calls and get back to us quickly.

Support from OEM is decent but needs improvement. Sometimes OEM also needs to understand the criticality of the customer and help as an Ad-hoc, which is somewhat lacking at Feshservice. Although the normal support team is well-equipped and helps according to the matrix, if something critical for the partner or customer requires immediate attention, it still goes through the L1-L2-L3 levels, which wastes a lot of time.

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

Creating the correct groups for the stakeholders and enabling the right notifications are one of the most important aspect of the implementation. Creating Change templates will also help in the long run and it's a good practice to create one, if applicable.

Cherwell Asset Management is a quite known and affordable solution for Asset management for organizations where there are more than 800-1000 users as it provides a complete integrated solution. There are many additional features that are available in Cherwell which is not available in other solution, like tracking of cost, management of procurement, etc.

Incentivized

Easy setup and a lot of customization which can be made. They offer the full ITSM tool for 75$ per agent and all the PRO are included in the package, which makes it easy to calculate and use. There are only a few add-ins that you need to pay for, based on the number of agents or the number of executions.

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

• Consolidated other systems into a single platform

• We had no ticketing system at all so we had no idea of the workload, we now do
• We have been able to go from nothing to seeing workload to identifying areas for improvement by having the metrics
• We have lowered MTTR every month since turning on fresh service
• We have increased 1st all resolution every month
• We have been able to start talking about real SLA's with the business

Incentivized