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

The constant level of improvement is well suited for organizations that are on a similar path. There is great support from account managers, technical resources, documentation and other programs. The UI is intuitive, the system is easy to learn and navigate.

Incentivized

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

• 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

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

Incentivized

• Workflow management is hard to troubleshoot
• Some default fields can't be changed
• FAQ has no history
• Work flow management can't be managed via API or a command line
• Service Requests and contracts have no possibilities to choose how pricing will be calculated, like per month, per user, per year, per lifetime...
• Automatic backup of assets and FAQ is not possible

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

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

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.

The support experience has been a bit hit and miss. While it's always quick to get in touch with someone, when it comes to more complex issues, like one we encountered, Freshservice was unable to provide a solution despite the extensive troubleshooting we did on our end. Additionally, the AI chatbot has occasionally provided incorrect answers. However, for simpler queries, the support has been excellent and responsive.

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

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.

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

Customization of FreshService was so much easier than ChangeGear. Creating forms for end-users was difficult and didn't always work the way we wanted. The nail in the coffin was when we had a support call set up, and the IT Director was on the phone waiting, but no one joined the call. I can't speak on what the product is today, but it was JAVA-heavy, and everything was manually updated.

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