Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
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
Salesforce Service Cloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Service 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 Service Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter Suite
$25
per month
Professional
$80
per month
Enterprise
$165
per month per user
Unlimited
$165
per month per user
Unlimited+
$165
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
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 Service Cloud
Considered Both Products
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
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.
Salesforce Service Cloud

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
10.0
53 Ratings
21% above category average
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
77 Ratings
9% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets10.052 Ratings9.175 Ratings
Expert directory10.041 Ratings8.553 Ratings
Service restoration10.035 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-service tools10.051 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications10.038 Ratings8.963 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation10.048 Ratings8.360 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards10.051 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings9.375 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings8.974 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
10.0
44 Ratings
20% above category average
Salesforce Service Cloud
-
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 Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
10.0
50 Ratings
18% above category average
Salesforce Service Cloud
-
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 Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.9
72 Ratings
14% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings8.863 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.970 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
77 Ratings
13% above category average
Customer portal00 Ratings8.554 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings8.634 Ratings
Social integration00 Ratings8.747 Ratings
Email support00 Ratings9.276 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings9.066 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Score 9.4 out of 10
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)Salesforce Service Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(57 ratings)
8.9
(83 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(13 ratings)
7.4
(8 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(5 ratings)
8.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(3 ratings)
9.5
(28 ratings)
Performance
6.4
(1 ratings)
8.6
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
7.6
(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 Service Cloud
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.
Read full review
Salesforce
It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with
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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.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
  • Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
  • Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system
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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.
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Salesforce
  • There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
  • Costing is high.
  • Maintenance is more.
  • Expertise is required for implementation.
  • The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues
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Salesforce
Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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Salesforce
Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Discontinued Products
We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Salesforce
  • Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
  • The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
  • Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
  • Limited to annual subscription model
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ScreenShots

Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Workflows and OrchestrationScreenshot of Service CatalogScreenshot of Contact Center