What users are saying about

Cherwell Service Management vs Vision Helpdesk

Cherwell Service Management
81 Ratings
Vision Helpdesk
6 Ratings

Cherwell Service Management

81 Ratings
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Score 7.7 out of 100

Based on 81 reviews and ratings

Vision Helpdesk

6 Ratings
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Score 5.1 out of 100

Based on 6 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

Cherwell Service Management

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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Jane Updegraff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jane Updegraff
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Vision Helpdesk

I think that there is probably nothing that Vision Helpdesk can't do given enough work to customize it. The problem is that you almost have to have someone dedicated to knowing everything there is to know about the system and then have them be the administrator of all the customizations and feature additions you want. It's great that it can do so much, but it's not great that it's so complicated and has very little out-of-the-box configurations.

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Lane Edwards | TrustRadius Reviewer
Lane Edwards
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Feature Rating Comparison

Incident and problem management

Cherwell Service Management
8.4
Vision Helpdesk
6.8
Organize and prioritize service tickets
Cherwell Service Management
8.7
Vision Helpdesk
8.0
Expert directory
Cherwell Service Management
8.3
Vision Helpdesk
—
Service restoration
Cherwell Service Management
8.0
Vision Helpdesk
—
Self-service tools
Cherwell Service Management
8.5
Vision Helpdesk
—
Subscription-based notifications
Cherwell Service Management
8.1
Vision Helpdesk
8.0
ITSM collaboration and documentation
Cherwell Service Management
8.4
Vision Helpdesk
—
ITSM reports and dashboards
Cherwell Service Management
8.8
Vision Helpdesk
—
Ticket creation and submission
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
6.0
Ticket response
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
5.0

ITSM asset management

Cherwell Service Management
8.3
Vision Helpdesk
—
Configuration mangement
Cherwell Service Management
8.3
Vision Helpdesk
—
Asset management dashboard
Cherwell Service Management
8.7
Vision Helpdesk
—
Policy and contract enforcement
Cherwell Service Management
8.1
Vision Helpdesk
—

Change management

Cherwell Service Management
8.6
Vision Helpdesk
—
Change requests repository
Cherwell Service Management
8.4
Vision Helpdesk
—
Change calendar
Cherwell Service Management
8.6
Vision Helpdesk
—
Service-level management
Cherwell Service Management
8.7
Vision Helpdesk
—

Self Help Community

Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
5.0
External knowledge base
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
5.0
Internal knowledge base
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
5.0

Multi-Channel Help

Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
7.0
Customer portal
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
8.0
Social integration
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
7.0
Email support
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
6.0
Help Desk CRM integration
Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
7.0

Pros

Cherwell Service Management

  • 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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David Crawford | TrustRadius Reviewer
David Crawford
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Vision Helpdesk

  • The best thing for us - the timer. It's really cool. We can start the timer and end it when support finishes. It's very important for working with other companies we give support for.
  • Good-looking, with good visualisation and usability dashboard.
  • Ticket transfer between support users, comments, ticket printing.
  • The best price and functionality, comparing to other help desks.
  • Support. Best support I have seen on internet. Helped with setup, and helped with few minor questions.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Cons

Cherwell Service Management

  • 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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Robbie Speers | TrustRadius Reviewer
Robbie Speers
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Vision Helpdesk

  • Chat feature.
  • Remote desktop.
  • Get more integration with other software and Mobile apps.

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Max F | TrustRadius Reviewer
Max F
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Likelihood to Renew

Cherwell Service Management

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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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk 9.1
Based on 1 answer
For us it's really best solution.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
View all 1 answers on this topic

Usability

Cherwell Service Management

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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Michał Sabat | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michał Sabat
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Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk 8.2
Based on 1 answer
Really simple, good-looking interface, many features and customizations

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Support Rating

Cherwell Service Management

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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Zachary Louis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Zachary Louis
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Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk 6.0
Based on 2 answers
Support from Vision Helpdesk was rather lackluster. We uncovered a bug pretty early on in our use of the system and it took them about a month to fix it. Our internal admin of the system had to keep pestering them to get it fixed. It wasn't critical to our business but was something we needed fixed and it just seemed like they didn't care that much about fixing it.

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Lane Edwards | TrustRadius Reviewer
Lane Edwards
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Alternatives Considered

Cherwell Service Management

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 | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michael J Mandeville
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Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk was more open for an NGO while the other companies were more attended on the "big-money", which we don't have as an NGO. Second point is that Vision Helpdesk is very easy and simple to use. Not too much installation, programming etc.

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Y Ce | TrustRadius Reviewer
Y Ce
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Return on Investment

Cherwell Service Management

  • 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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Brandon Joseph | TrustRadius Reviewer
Brandon Joseph
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Vision Helpdesk

  • Most cost-effective help desk software I have researched from Kayako to SAAS [products] like Zendesk.
  • We got more features and easy customization done with Vision Helpdesk which where not possible for Zendesk and Kayako was too costly.
  • Ticket tracking has been easier and faster with Vision Helpdesk; for our web hosting business we prefer a download version which is not possible with SAAS help desk providers ( Zendesk or Freshdesk).

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Max F | TrustRadius Reviewer
Max F
View all 4 answers on this topic

Screenshots

Cherwell Service Management

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Pricing Details

Cherwell Service Management

General

Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

Cherwell Service Management Editions & Modules

—
Additional Pricing Details
—

Vision Helpdesk

General

Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level set up fee?
No

Vision Helpdesk Editions & Modules

On-premise Edition
Help Desk Software$71
Satellite Help Desk$141
IT Service Desk$211
  1. Per Seat per Month
SaaS Edition
Help Desk Software$71
Satellite Help Desk$141
IT Service Desk$211
  1. Per User per Month
Additional Pricing Details
—

Rating Summary

Likelihood to Recommend

Cherwell Service Management
7.9
Vision Helpdesk
5.0

Likelihood to Renew

Cherwell Service Management
8.5
Vision Helpdesk
9.1

Usability

Cherwell Service Management
8.0
Vision Helpdesk
8.2

Reliability and Availability

Cherwell Service Management
9.0
Vision Helpdesk
—

Support Rating

Cherwell Service Management
8.6
Vision Helpdesk
6.0

Implementation Rating

Cherwell Service Management
—
Vision Helpdesk
9.1

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