Cherwell Service Management vs Spiceworks Help Desk | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 7.7 out of 10

Based on 81 reviews and ratings

Score 8.7 out of 10

Based on 225 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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It's a great helpdesk solution - we currently have five years of data within it, roughly 25,000 tickets. The older edition is a great inventory and software license tracking tool. It is easy for users to use the interface and submit tickets and requests on the web, and its email integration is solid. The new version is a below-average system monitoring tool, only giving up/down status and a few other metrics.

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Director Of Information Technology and HIPAA Privacy Officer

Continuum of CareHospital & Health Care, 501-1000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Organize and prioritize service tickets

Expert directory

Service restoration

Self-service tools

Subscription-based notifications

ITSM collaboration and documentation

ITSM reports and dashboards

Ticket creation and submission

Ticket response

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Configuration mangement

Asset management dashboard

Policy and contract enforcement

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Change requests repository

Change calendar

Service-level management

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

External knowledge base

Internal knowledge base

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Customer portal

IVR

Social integration

Email support

Help Desk CRM integration

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 helps to multitask, even on the go with the mobile App.
We can customize to meet your needs with automated responses, notifications, and templates.
Detailed reports allow managers to keep track [of] and analyze data.
Allows for a database to store notes helpful for future tickets.

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Software Support Specialist

Kerkering, Barberio & Co.Accounting, 51-200 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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I have always wanted a way to redirect a support request into another IS bin, such as a development task.
It's possible to extract the data from the Spiceworks database, but it would be helpful if the process to do so were easier.
Improved ability to customize the system generated emails to improve the formatting and company branding.

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Verified User

Supervisor in Information Technology

Chemicals Company, 51-200 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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Spiceworks Help Desk 9.7

Based on 29 answers

Spiceworks is a free tool, so there would be no hesitation if we are required to upgrade it. We have installed Spiceworks on a dedicated server with more than enough resources to get the most from this tool, so we will have this running in our department for years to come.

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CISO (Chief Information Security Officer)

SAVANNAH STATE UNIVERSITYHigher Education, 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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Spiceworks Help Desk 8.7

Based on 8 answers

Spiceworks is user friendly and easy to set up. It can be customized to suit your needs. If there are any problems, you can go to the community forums for support and be in contact with many IT Pros, as well as the Spiceworks support staff and development teams who are always happy to help users out

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Systems Administrator

Withers & RavenelCivil Engineering, 51-200 employees

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Reliability and Availability

Cherwell Service Management 9.0

Based on 4 answers

No answer on this topic is available.

Spiceworks Help Desk 10.0

Based on 6 answers

We use it both locally on our own server so up time is decided by us and we also use the hosted help desk. We have never had an outage of that.

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Systems Administrator

Costa Del MarSporting Goods, 51-200 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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Spiceworks Help Desk 8.6

Based on 49 answers

Spiceworks has been working out of the box, and some of the basic customizations have been successful with just our internal staff handling. We don't have any other issues with the tool. It provides us with the inventory information we want in a quick and concise report in a variety of formats for our team.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Retail Company, 201-500 employees

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Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Spiceworks Help Desk 10.0

Based on 13 answers

If you can spin up a VM to run it on, you'll thank yourself later. If you have remote sites, set up a local server (or dedicated computer) at each site and set them up as remote collectors for the main site. You'll save time and bandwidth

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Jennifer Metcalf

Systems Analyst II

ClaycoConstruction, 501-1000 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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EGroupware UI is clunky and hard to use, Jira is great but the pricing is expensive in comparison with spice works that has a free version and you can test it out properly before buying and make a correct decision based on your business plan and company objectives with the right software.

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Héctor Aguilar

Ruby on Rails Developer

Chunch.esInformation Technology & Services, 1-10 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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Positive - Allow organizations to implement structured Help Desk procedures.
Positive - IT can begin to quantify their tickets and uncover needs within the organization.
Positive - IT can develop a solid roadmap with [the] management of future needs, equipment refresh schedules, etc.
Positive - IT can pinpoint employees who may need extra training or updated equipment based on historical ticketing data.

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President

Geeks-r-Us, Inc.Computer & Network Security, 1-10 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

Spiceworks Help Desk

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

Cherwell Service Management

Spiceworks Help Desk

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