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.
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NinjaOne
Score 9.3 out of 10
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NinjaOne automates the hardest parts of IT, delivering visibility, security, and control over endpoints. The NinjaOne endpoint management platform increases productivity for IT teams and managed service providers, and comes with unlimited onboarding, training, and support.
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Pricing
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
NinjaOne
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
NinjaOne
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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NinjaOne is a subscription service with a charge rate per month. For more detailed pricing information, contact NinjaOne directly to request a demo or to start 14-days free trial.
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.
I like the constant development most. We now have MDM for all of the tablets and phones, which is great for a lot of the point of sale devices where they aren't necessarily logged into the device with a M365 account for Intune management. We like the NinjaOne remote tool over Splashtop or other remote software we've seen. It just works and has nice integration for printing, and file access without remoting onto the PC. The same goes for being able to run command line or PowerShell without removing the user from his or her session. It is unobtrusive to the end users.
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.
Remote connections: the NinjaRemote client is spectacular and very easy to use and navigate. It quickly connects to customer systems so my engineers are able to work. As a bonus, they also offer a really good mobile app to connect to client systems.
Antivirus: Bitdefender Endpoint Protection is built directly into the NinjaOne portal. This makes deploying and maintaining AV very easy.
OS Patching: NinjaOne makes it very easy to handle patching across multiple clients and locations. It is very easy to use and doesn't take long to set up.
Support: NinjaOne support is always very prompt and helpful.
Documentation: the NinjaOne Dojo is a one-stop shop for all of your FAQs, guides, and forum needs. You can find almost anything here to help you deploy and maintain NinjaOne.
Automation Library: NinjaOne comes preloaded with a large number of ready-to-go automations. They also provide you with a scripting module to create your own.
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 have not had any real issues with NinjaOne and as long as it keeps doing what it is meant to do, I do not plan on looking elsewhere. I need software to be stable and NinjaOne is stable.
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.
Ninja's interface is clean and simple. Overall usability from an interface perspective is good. Some items, policies and scripting for instance, are a bit cumbersome and it's really not clear how to implement with a best practice mind-site. Ninja RMM got the job done for us but as we pushed our needs more into automation and efficiency we felt it wasn't keeping up with our speed of growth. There is definitely usability in the product, and it will get the job done, but there are other RMM's out there that fit better in our business.
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.
Support has been very responsive and my account rep Brian K. has communicated with me continuously making sure we had everything we need. Not like other MDMs where they sign you up and that's the last you hear from them. NinjaOne makes sure you use the product to its best application and you are successful and continue as the product features grow.
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.
For ease of use NinjaOne seems to be easiest to get up and running and just how they present everything seems easier than the other solutions we looked at and then bottom line was it had the features we wanted and the price was very reasonable compared to the other vendors.
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.
