Cherwell Service Management vs ManageEngine Desktop Central | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 7.7 out of 10

Based on 81 reviews and ratings

Score 8.3 out of 10

Based on 31 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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Simple to use for managing endpoints (mass deployments, imaging, remote control) [and] simple to learn for new users. Simple to implement.Not very good at reporting Software Inventory and not suitable for controlling non-office assets (Additional add-on needed).

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Cherwell Service Management

ManageEngine Desktop Central

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

ManageEngine Desktop Central

Configuration mangement

Asset management dashboard

Policy and contract enforcement

Cherwell Service Management

ManageEngine Desktop Central

Change requests repository

Change calendar

Service-level management

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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System inventory - ManageEngine scans every computer, listing a detailed report of all hardware and software.
Patch management - Microsoft products and most third party software receive security updates on a regular schedule without user intervention.

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Verified User

Technician in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 5001-10,000 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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Sometimes it will report that systems are missing patches when they are really not.
I wish it was able to pull warranty details for computers directly instead of having to enter manually.

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Company Owner

Groundswell ProductionsComputer & Network Security, 1-10 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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ManageEngine Desktop Central 6.0

Based on 1 answer

The other tools we use do not have an inventory management tool. Also not many tools we use intergrate well with this product.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 501-1000 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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ManageEngine Desktop Central 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Responds well to basic needs:1. Update2. Image/Re-image endpoints3. Mass deployment4. Pop-Up communications

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 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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ManageEngine Desktop Central 8.0

Based on 7 answers

They do an excellent job but there is always a little room for improvement. Otherwise they do an excellent job!

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Company Owner

Groundswell ProductionsComputer & Network Security, 1-10 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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We selected ManageEngine Desktop Central because it is easy to implement, and their support is very good. It has very good functionality, rolled into one, in how well it handles these features. Also, there is nothing that compares to the cost-effective nature of this product. We recommend ManageEngine Desktop Central. It's one of the best solution from the market.

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CIO (Chief Information Officer)

UK Flooring Direct Ltd.Consumer Goods, 501-1000 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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The impact has been positive. Being able to manage entire sets of assets, rather than addressing them one at a time, has been huge. The ability to deploy an application without disturbing an end-user is great as well.
No negative impact on ROI.

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IT LAN Administrator

Information Services FirmInformation Services, 51-200 employees

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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

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Rating Summary

Cherwell Service Management

ManageEngine Desktop Central

Cherwell Service Management

ManageEngine Desktop Central

Cherwell Service Management

ManageEngine Desktop Central

Cherwell Service Management

ManageEngine Desktop Central

Cherwell Service Management

ManageEngine Desktop Central

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