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Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)

    Score6.4 out of 10
    N/ACherwell 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

    Salesforce Agentforce Service

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AService Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It provides tools for case management, knowledge base, omni-channel support, automation, and analytics, enabling companies to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.

    $25

    per month

    Pricing
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Starter Suite
    $25
    per month
    Pro Suite
    $100
    per month per user
    Enterprise
    $165
    per month per user
    Unlimited
    $330
    per month per user
    Agentforce 1
    $550
    per month per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    Chose Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
    Cherwell's ability to customized is really its greatest feature. If you are looking for out of the box features only then you can really go with nearly any provider. Cherwell allows an experienced developer to really build things that will be useful to the organization.
    Incentivized
    Salesforce
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    94%
    Would buy again
    29 Answers
    91%
    Would buy again
    52 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    27 Answers
    88%
    Delivers good value for the price
    43 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    31 Answers
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    53 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    19 Answers
    88%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    88%
    Implementation went as expected
    22 Answers
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    39 Answers
    Features
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
    10.0
    53 Ratings
    20% above category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    7.9
    81 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets10.052 Ratings8.179 Ratings
    Expert directory10.041 Ratings7.857 Ratings
    Service restoration10.035 Ratings00 Ratings
    Self-service tools10.051 Ratings00 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications10.038 Ratings8.267 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation10.048 Ratings6.962 Ratings
    ITSM reports and dashboards10.051 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings8.779 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings7.978 Ratings
    ITSM asset management
    Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
    10.0
    44 Ratings
    21% above category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    -
    Ratings
    Configuration mangement10.042 Ratings00 Ratings
    Asset management dashboard10.041 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy and contract enforcement10.031 Ratings00 Ratings
    Change management
    Comparison of Change management features of Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
    10.0
    50 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    -
    Ratings
    Change requests repository10.048 Ratings00 Ratings
    Change calendar10.044 Ratings00 Ratings
    Service-level management10.045 Ratings00 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    8.7
    76 Ratings
    8% above category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings8.567 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.874 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    7.9
    81 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings7.758 Ratings
    IVR00 Ratings7.937 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings7.451 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings8.880 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings7.870 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Small Businesses
    Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
    Score9 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
    Score9.2 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Ivanti ITSM
    Score6.4 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (57 ratings)
    8.7
    (100 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (13 ratings)
    6.1
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    8.9
    (5 ratings)
    8.2
    (22 ratings)
    Availability
    8.2
    (3 ratings)
    8.4
    (45 ratings)
    Performance
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.7
    (16 ratings)
    7.0
    (20 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.9
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Professional Services
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    • Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
    • The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
    • Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Cherwell lacks modern UI capabilities such as responsive forms and CSS styling for web portals.
    • Built-in reporting engine is hard to use and resource intensive to run.
    • No patching model for small platform fixes, must upgrade to receive platform code changes.
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    • We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    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)
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Discontinued Products
    Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    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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    Salesforce
    Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.
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    In-Person Training
    Discontinued Products
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Discontinued Products
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Discontinued Products
    We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    • We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
    • The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
    • Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Salesforce Agentforce Service Screenshots

    Screenshot of Workflows and OrchestrationScreenshot of Service CatalogScreenshot of Contact Center