Cherwell Service Management vs Trello

• 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

• Easy color categorization of the "Cards" (which can represent anything from projects to tasks)
• Ease of use overall - you can divide work into columns and move it from column to column depending on status
• You can create multiple boards, which are spaces to store tasks (for different work contexts, or even private boards)
• You can easily share boards with another person
• You can easily assign tasks (Cards) to persons
• You can store information in cards, like files and short format text

Read full review

• 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

• Swim Lanes - they are nonexistent. There is a third-party tool to add them but it's buggy as all get out
• View - I am not sure how to do it but I really wish I didn't have to pick between viewing all cards with no detail or one with all detail. Maybe the ability to collapse and expand?
• Integrations - It would be amazing if I could easily pop action items from Gmail over to Trello, but right now I can only copy text or upload screenshot attachments.

Read full review

• 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.

Read full review

• The more time I put into developing our Trello systems, the more ROI we seem to get. We have to re-evaulate for each unique project, but it typically pays off.
• We managed post-production for 3 seasons of TV on Trello - breaking each scene down into cards and a list being an episode. Once the organization was done, this saved massive amounts of time for my post-manager as he was able to direct new editors to the board and very easily explain how to jump in the mix and get started. We managed to accomplish a massive amount of work with a small team with a very simple project management system.
• Trello has been difficult to implement in a broad-strokes sort-of way. For example - when onboarding a new project/client, we have to stop and think about how a given board needs to be set up, who needs to have permission to it, and where and how the information will be shared. We had to remove almost all conversation from Trello cards and move them to slack channels in order to keep up with all the conversation as it became far too convoluted. It's not as pre-defined or process-oriented as a basecamp, which doesn't always hurt, but it does often require more time to get started on a project.

Read full review