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
Freshservice
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
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.
Freshservice is a great solution if you plan to use multiple modules and incorporate multiple business units. The all in pricing allows exploration of the many capabilities of the platform without worrying about cost as it is set per agent per month. If you only need ticketing the price in my opinion is not competitive. Also, as Freshservice does so many thing, they do them all adequately. So for the all in pricing you are giving up having top tier product in each module.
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.
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.
Figuring out the automations is sometimes tricky. For example, if you want to pull the information for an asset and put in the service tag into the ticket then this uses Liquid filters which are sometime hard to understand
Would love to see a more feature rich CMDB built into the assets module
Reporting is not granular enough and some reports are nearly impossible to generate
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)
Freshservice is pretty ingrained in our IT processes and policies. A replacement would take quite a while to do, but we are mostly satisfied with the service so we have no plans on moving.
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.
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.
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
There are days where it can get a bit slow for a short time, but these are rare and I wouldn't exactly blame it on their product. The system itself processes requests very quickly.
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.
I contacted support once and the person handling the request was very helpful. The staff is very competent. In my opinion communication could be improved as the level of spoken English is very high. I was unable to understand some words, in fact two people participated in the second meeting.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
1. Cost - I have always had the best cost provided by Freshservice as compared to others 2. Functionality - far more functionality is provided by Freshservice 3. ITIL enabled ITSM tool with better support for different ITIL modules 4. Reporting - easiest to produce reports in Freshservice 5. Workflows - Workflows are far superior and easier to configure as compared with other products Service Now is great for the above as well, but it comes at a far greater cost as compared.
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
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
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.
Freshservice has allowed us to handle approximately 20% more tickets and incidents per month, compared to our previous legacy system.
Back & forth communication between our techs and end users was very poor prior to Freshservice. Freshservice has changed all that. Email and other communication is now very fluid and easy for both groups. Communication has increased significantly.
Supervisor reporting and management are also much better. It's much easier and quicker to get information about how things are going. The "at a glance" dashboards are very effective and I use them daily.
Freshservice has a technician leaderboard that has caused our techs to push themselves to surpass their counterparts. The end result is that tickets get resolved more quickly and our end users get their issues resolved faster.
