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
HaloITSM
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
HaloITSM provides ITIL aligned help desk software that can be installed on premise or in the cloud. Boasting over 25 years of experience, HaloITSM has been developed to offer a feature rich application whilst maintaining a simple to use interface. Features include: Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Asset Management, Service Catalogue, Telephony Integration, as well as the best of breed mobile apps. The vendor describes the following five differentiators: 1.…
$49
per month per user
Pricing
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
HaloITSM
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
On Premise
$49
per month per user
Cloud
$49
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
HaloITSM
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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There is 15% discount for all charities, educational institutions and non-profit organisations.
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.
If you want a value for money full system, which you could use out of the box then this is the one for you. If you want a system that can take care of tasks then this is the one for you. [HaloITSM] is easily scalable with very competitive pricing. New features are added regularly based on best practices and customer requirements.
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.
The Self Service Portal is very easy to configure and the end-users have commented on how easy it is to log and manage their own calls.
Asset and User Management works very well and it is simple to link them to tickets. Looking up ticket history for particular Users or Assets is also very useful.
The ability [to] use different ticket types and templates is fantastic. The added ability to merge and clone tickets is also a great benefit.
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)
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.
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
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've made overall positive experiences with the Halo support. The only thing to increase would be some follow ups on feature requests. If someone would reach out to me, telling me wheter or not my feature request will be considered in future updates or not.
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.
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
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.
HaloITSM offered the highest level of functionality, available as standard, at our price level. Halo support during our trial period was second to none and unrestricted. We had a list of deciding factors covering the most important areas of functionality and HaloITSM covered all of these.
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.
It enabled us to allow our Service Desk Staff to work from home during COVID and this has continued ever since.
We have halved our average resolution time.
Some of the automation processes, when implemented alongside the MS Power Platform, have saved approximately 30 hours a month. This includes times when customers were unable to access the system until they had been trained. This is now automated via Halo and they get sent to on-demand training, instead of waiting up to 3 weeks for the next scheduled session.