Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) vs. Datto Autotask PSA

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Cherwell Software was a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud. It was acquired by Ivanti, and has reached EOL.N/A
Autotask PSA
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Autotask PSA is designed as a complete IT Business Management Platform for MSPs, now from Datto (resulting from the Autotask merger with Datto in 2017).N/A
Pricing
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Datto Autotask PSA
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Autotask PSA
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Datto Autotask PSA
Considered Both Products
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
Chose Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
Cherwell Service Management is a much richer system than Autotask. Autotask did well for us for managing tickets, but at least at the time, it was not a full ITSM solution. Cherwell Service Management has given us much more modularity and scalability. Autotask was not a bad …
Autotask PSA

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Datto Autotask PSA
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
10.0
53 Ratings
21% above category average
Datto Autotask PSA
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets10.052 Ratings00 Ratings
Expert directory10.041 Ratings00 Ratings
Service restoration10.035 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-service tools10.051 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications10.038 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation10.048 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards10.051 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
10.0
44 Ratings
20% above category average
Datto Autotask PSA
-
Ratings
Configuration mangement10.042 Ratings00 Ratings
Asset management dashboard10.041 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement10.031 Ratings00 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
10.0
50 Ratings
18% above category average
Datto Autotask PSA
-
Ratings
Change requests repository10.048 Ratings00 Ratings
Change calendar10.044 Ratings00 Ratings
Service-level management10.045 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Datto Autotask PSA
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
HaloPSA
HaloPSA
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Planview AdaptiveWork
Planview AdaptiveWork
Score 7.2 out of 10
Enterprises
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Score 9.4 out of 10
Planview AdaptiveWork
Planview AdaptiveWork
Score 7.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Datto Autotask PSA
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(57 ratings)
9.8
(30 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(13 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(5 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.6
(16 ratings)
8.4
(4 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Datto Autotask PSA
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
Well suited in an IT environment where you have limited staff. It can be managed by one administrator. Reliability of the SaaS environment has been excellent. Flexibility in developing automated workflows to open, manage, and close Incidents. Change Management due to ability to modify OOB to meet the needs of our staff. Contract Management allowing us to be notified when a contract or license is up for renewal and setting reminders. Integrations are not easy to create and manage.
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Kaseya
In my opinion, Datto Autotask is exceptionally complicated to set up, manage, and use on a daily basis. I would think the target market for this product would be someone managing a team of 20 - 50 people, possibly more. In my experience, for it to run properly you will need to dedicate at least half an FTE to running this product in an organization of that size per month. I would not recommend it for companies with less than 10 people or for companies that value quick communication with their clients. I would not recommend it for companies using Datto's RMM product. The integration exists, but it is clearly a bolt-on. They were not developed together and they are slow to talk to each other. Frequently you cannot add details from RMM sessions into the PSA without manually copying the ticket number, and if the ticket is more than a week old, then you can't even find it with the ticket number.
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Pros
Discontinued Products
  • Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket.
  • Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add.
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Kaseya
  • The graphical calculations on time spent on requests, how long they were open for, who worked on a ticket last.
  • Grouping by priority so you can determine easier what needs to be addressed sooner rather then later. This also helps if Account Management has conversations a technician is not aware of so they can prioritize efficiently.
  • The email updates that are sent out to the technicians so they are aware of upcoming or stale tickets.
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Cons
Discontinued Products
  • Cherwell lacks modern UI capabilities such as responsive forms and CSS styling for web portals.
  • Built-in reporting engine is hard to use and resource intensive to run.
  • No patching model for small platform fixes, must upgrade to receive platform code changes.
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Kaseya
  • The GUI is a little dated.
  • Some integrations are limited for not being a Datto product.
  • While not as complex to set up as Connectwise, it definitely requires some serious thought during the initial setup.
  • Email processing could offer more options for parsing keywords and allow for more automation.
  • The mobile app is just not worth using in my experience.
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Likelihood to Renew
Discontinued Products
Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally)
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Kaseya
After using multiple products on the market, Autotask was intuitive and easy to manage.
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Usability
Discontinued Products
I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.
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Kaseya
Datto Autotask PSA is a full featured product that can do almost anything you need. There is a significant learning curve to get started which requires several hours spent in product training. Additionally, several hours / days are needed to get clients imported, contracts configured, and integrations implemented. Once the setup and user training is complete, the product is very functional, but it's imperative to not get overwhelmed when starting out.
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Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Performance
Discontinued Products
The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Discontinued Products
We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.
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Kaseya
They are fairly quick at returning a response to a problem and have been able to fix all issues for the most part.
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In-Person Training
Discontinued Products
I didn't partake in the in-person training, but it was available. I preferred the online method instead, which was a great experience. It was nice to have someone available to bounce questions off of and demonstrate how certain functions worked.
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Discontinued Products
The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Discontinued Products
Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
Much more customizable than other products, especially when ran in a self-hosted environment. Cherwell [Service Management] allows for greater flexibility of custom development and integrations to allow for automating tasks that traditional ITSM apps are not well suited for. Cherwell [Service Management] gives you the freedom to develop your own objects with minimal licensing costs.
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Kaseya
The portion of Autotask that we've used other companies for prior to using Autotask is the Endpoint Management. The Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM) portal integrates perfectly with their PSA/CRM tools. It's alerting features are much better than the above software as there aren't a bunch of superfluous and unneeded alerts. Instead, it only alerts for things that you specify that you want. Alerts aside, for the PSA/CRM, I don't have much to compare it to as Autotask was the first PSA we tried. It's hard to imagine a PSA having more features or doing a better job than Autotask.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Discontinued Products
We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Discontinued Products
We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Discontinued Products
As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense
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Kaseya
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Discontinued Products
  • As with any standard ticketing system, it helped decrease the time before first contact with clients.
  • Our department was always concerned with keeping a low budget, and it was cheaper than most.
  • My supervisor could easily tell how many resources were being put into each employee, so we had more visibility of our team's capabilities at a given time if we needed to take on something complex.
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Kaseya
  • We were able to identify the profitability of our entire client base.
  • We identified a loss of over 1 million dollars for time unbilled consultancy fees using metrics derived from Autotask.
  • Autotask helped us serve our client base in a professional manner, it's like having an entire department at your finger tips.
  • Autotask is the heartbeat of our operation.
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ScreenShots