Cherwell Service Management vs Kanban Tool | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 7.7 out of 10

Based on 81 reviews and ratings

Score 8.6 out of 10

Based on 15 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

Cherwell is a good choice for any sized enterprise that needs an extremely customizable IT help desk solution that triggers (again, entirely customizable) automated actions, spawns workflows (and auto-spawns tasks and sub-tasks for them) for multiple IT technicians and multiple tiers of technicians. It can do project management, change management, asset management, all the same things that the others can do and far, far more. If you do NOT need a highly customized help desk solution and if you don't need automated workflow creation and task tracking, then you could buy a less expensive solution that you can use out of the box without any of the frills. But as I said, Cherwell can do a lot more than just IT help desk, and it has a huge array of "plug-in" / "add-on" features, most of which are free, that make every Cherwell implementation completely unique to the enterprise that uses it. Cherwell is just right for a company that wants to manage and customize the help desk application with a PTE resource. I manage it myself at my company, and I spend very little time maintaining it now that it's solidly established ... although it's so much fun to customize that I wish I had more time to add new features and play with it. I do strongly advise some training for the admins ... your Cherwell admins MUST take the online, instructor-led introductory admin class to kick you off, and you MUST have implementation help from Cherwell to setup your instance, especially their hosted offering, over which you don't have database admin control (you can't even turn it on to get it working without their help). But after that, there is very little support needed from your own in-house Cherwell admin resource, unless, of course, you are constantly growing the solution to make it do more. I can see how that could happen because Cherwell can do almost anything. I can imagine some departments wanting to make it into the swiss-army-knife of IT .. and HR .. and facilities .... and physical security ... and you could spend many hours down the rabbit hole doing that if you wanted to

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Senior Systems Administrator

DRT Holdings, Inc.Aviation & Aerospace, 501-1000 employees

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Kanban is well suited for a fast-paced working environment for larger teams who want continuous communication with users. Kanban is good for rapid development and daily meetings for updates and statuses. Kanban is less suited for smaller teams or groups who don't require collaboration and constant communication with involved users. Kanban is time-consuming and it takes additional effort outside of your regular work to maintain and manage the tool.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Investment Management Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Organize and prioritize service tickets

Expert directory

Service restoration

Self-service tools

Subscription-based notifications

ITSM collaboration and documentation

ITSM reports and dashboards

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Configuration mangement

Asset management dashboard

Policy and contract enforcement

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Change requests repository

Change calendar

Service-level management

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Task Management

Resource Management

Gantt Charts

Scheduling

Workflow Automation

Team Collaboration

Support for Agile Methodology

Support for Waterfall Methodology

Document Management

Email integration

Mobile Access

Timesheet Tracking

Change request and Case Management

Budget and Expense Management

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Quotes/estimates

Invoicing

Project & financial reporting

Integration with accounting software

Pros

After proper training on setting up the views and servers, Cherwell did a good job separating various department ownership of tickets. Our work views weren't cluttered with irrelevant information.
There is a lot of information that can be embedded into tickets. Such as sub-task assignments that could contain almost the same information as a ticket itself. Lot of customization options.
Custom personal dashboards were nice, once I figured out how to do it. Not everyone wants to see things the same way as other people, and being able to move touch points where you want is always a plus.

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IT Consultant

Great Lakes Health ConnectComputer Hardware, 501-1000 employees

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It provides a good basic overview of where tasks are on a timeline (particularly helpful for a pull-based approach).
It provides a good collaborative space to have multiple folks commenting on multiple tasks.
It does a good job of managing very basic visual elements of an agile development cycle.

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Chris Carpenter

Staff Project Manager, Awesomizer, Fixer, Maker, Collaboration Enabler

Beckman Coulter, IncBiotechnology, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

Sometimes comments made on a ticket do not generate emails to the technician who owns it, and they will not know there is an update from the customer without checking it
Sometimes I will see an error pop up when copying text but it can easily be closed
Sometimes the time-out window for staying logged in does not appear on top of other applications so I will not know it's logging me out

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Computer Technician

DTSInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Some of the boards we have could do with more than 22 card colors, although it is enough for most projects.
Really looking forward to the iOS application, which is said to be coming in 2015.

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Verified User

Consultant in Professional Services

Events Services Company, 11-50 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Cherwell Service Management 8.5

Based on 4 answers

We stay on maintenance for support and upgrades. We rely on this product for our internal operations and need to have a maintenance contract so there is some vendor support in the event of a disaster, so we opted to renew. The more recent versions of Cherwell also have some new exciting features that we're also hoping to be able to implement.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Kanban Tool 9.1

Based on 2 answers

We are more likely than not to renew our use of Kanban. Even with its limits, it still is a good product that fulfills our needs.

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Verified User

Manager in Quality Assurance

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Usability

Cherwell Service Management 8.0

Based on 1 answer

Cherwell Service Managment is a really good tool because it allows us to create tickets in the app, from the web, or from emails.

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Network System Administrator

QuadPrinting, 10,001+ employees

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Kanban Tool 6.0

Based on 4 answers

Again, this is a strong tool for software teams using Agile that are distributed across multiple geographies. It can be good for co-located teams too, but there are better platforms on the market like JIRA that provide a more built-out story.

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Chris Carpenter

Staff Project Manager, Awesomizer, Fixer, Maker, Collaboration Enabler

Beckman Coulter, IncBiotechnology, 10,001+ employees

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Support Rating

Cherwell Service Management 8.6

Based on 27 answers

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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MSC Operations Engineer

Software Information SystemsInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Kanban Tool 7.3

Based on 5 answers

This is the best tool I had a chance to work with- since I started to use it I saved a lot of time and I made my work go smoothly.

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Verified User

Analyst in Other

Chemicals Company, 11-50 employees

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Alternatives Considered

CIT had used HEAT for 15 years, which was about 10 years more than we should have. Our HEAT implementation was extremely customized and though we used HEAT well and our processes were melded with HEAT, there were many areas for improvement. Tickets would get lost or a task would be lost or the ticket would go through many hands without proper documentation. It was just fairly clunky and not very scaleable.

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Michael J Mandeville

Support Center Technical Lead

Calvin College Information TechnologyHigher Education, 501-1000 employees

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Kanban is superior to Scrum and AGILE because it can visually organize all your projects and data into one board. Kanban integrates with JIRA which digs deeper into the project data when it is needed. By integrating Kanban with JIRA, you don't need any other tool for project management that is effective for both the business and the development teams. Kanban is recommended for any user groups who wish to increase their efficiency to deliver products, transparency for all users and on-time productivity.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Investment Management Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Return on Investment

Having a single SaaS instance of Cherwell has allowed our organization for the first time seamlessly transfer tickets across regions and allow for unprecedented communication between our groups. We look forward to opening the tool to all global IT teams and incorporating all major modules (Problem, Change, CI & Knowledge and more!) where we'll finally all be on the same tool and various IT data will finally all be in a relational database.
Ongoing costs can be lowered because we now have enough in-house expertise to manage most of our routine Cherwell modifications and management.
Once Cherwell is fully implemented at our organization, we'll be able to do with several separate systems and databases where all IT information is currently stored which will make things more simple and cost-effective to maintain.

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IT Support Manager

ImerysMining & Metals, 10,001+ employees

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Less man hours needed to perform our standard tasks.
More jobs done before deadline than ever before.
When compared to the other service we used, the pricing is very good. We didn't really calculate the ROI, but we have made significant savings, when compared to the previous solution applied.

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Verified User

Consultant in Professional Services

Events Services Company, 11-50 employees

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Screenshots

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See All (8) Kanban Tool Screenshots

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Rating Summary

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

Cherwell Service Management

Kanban Tool

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