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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    ETO Software (legacy)

    Score7.2 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    ETO Software is a legacy case management solution supported by Social Solutions, acquired by Bonterra, and later sold as Bonterra ETO. The application is not the company's current case management solution.N/A

    Zoho Desk

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/AZoho Support is a Saas help desk / ticketing system aimed at SMBs. I competes most often with Zendesk, and Desk.com.

    $9

    per month per user

    Pricing
    ETO Software (legacy)Zoho Desk
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Free
    $0
    Express
    $9
    per month per user
    Standard
    $20
    per month per user
    Professional
    $35
    per month per user
    Enterprise
    $50
    per month per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    ETO Software (legacy)Zoho Desk
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredRequired
    Additional Details—A discount is offered for yearly billing.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    ETO Software (legacy)Zoho Desk
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Zoho
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    87%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    85%
    Implementation went as expected
    11 Answers
    Features
    ETO Software (legacy)Zoho Desk
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of ETO Software (legacy) and Zoho Desk
    Feature
    ETO Software (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoho Desk
    8.5
    5 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings9.05 Ratings
    Expert directory00 Ratings7.14 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings7.14 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings8.95 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings8.95 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of ETO Software (legacy) and Zoho Desk
    Feature
    ETO Software (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoho Desk
    9.8
    5 Ratings
    20% above category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings9.85 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings9.85 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of ETO Software (legacy) and Zoho Desk
    Feature
    ETO Software (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoho Desk
    6.6
    5 Ratings
    19% below category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings6.83 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings6.15 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings5.44 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    ETO Software (legacy)Zoho Desk
    Small Businesses
    Bonterra Apricot
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Bonterra Apricot
    Score9.2 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    ETO Software (legacy)Zoho Desk
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.0
    (44 ratings)
    8.8
    (23 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    1.0
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    1.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.0
    (12 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.8
    (11 ratings)
    Online Training
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    5.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    ETO Software (legacy)Zoho Desk
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    ETO Social Solutions should be avoided until they start caring about the problems generated by their software. In regards specifically to the ARMS suite utilized by the entire state of California, until the ETO software learns how to speak with SOMS, and unless it can be customized by knowledgeable people who consult with front-line users. It is not appropriate to provide the state legislature with bad data. I have 6 years of experience with it and I have multiple sources of agreement from fellow users throughout the state.
    Read full review
    Zoho
    Zoho Desk is a great customer service tool. It is very easy to track the ability to receive tickets and send responses in Zoho Desk. There are lots of options for customization. The knowledge base feature is very extensive and powerful. It makes creating internal and external FAQs easy.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • ETO's customization allows for the use of so many different and unique applications.
    • The ability to build extremely customized reports also allows us to get very detail oriented results or very broad building wide stats.
    • The additional added features such as workflow, referrals, and ETO Engage are useful in their own way and add more ways to better track and record data while simplifying some end-user processes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    • It provides a simple widget code with a few clicks once you decide to integrate it with your website or application.
    • There is a very user friendly dedicated mobile application for Zoho Desk for Android and IOS devices.
    • You can easily track all of your tickets and agents from the dashboard interface.
    • You can insert tags with each ticket to group them into specific categories for analysis and troubleshooting.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • The user interface is not intuitive and exceptionally difficult for non-tech savvy people to learn.
    • The system is not as customizable as we were led to believe at the initial purchase.
    • The system does not interface well with other systems. Organizationally we are moving towards data integration, and we will likely replace ETO because of this limitation.
    • Considering the limitations of the system, the cost is quite high. We've seen only marginal benefits of this system over pen and paper, and the ROI is not promising.
    • The initial build process was very frustrating. We didn't understand what the developer was billing us for. Something like simple touchpoint forms was billed for more hours than it would seem to require.
    • A system like this should be both fully mobile compatible and have offline functionality.
    • We would benefit from more nuanced security settings.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    • The biggest drawback that I am facing while using the platform is that their ticketing system is not that great [in my opinion]. It does not give us the option to add sales tax and other charges in the invoices which leads to a big problem for us.
    • [I feel] its customer support needs improvement.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    As a technically savvy person with experience learning new database software systems I find ETO relatively straightforward now that I've been trained in it's use. However, many of our staff are less technically savvy and the learning curve for ETO can be grueling for many, who require frequent troubleshooting and support from me. Additionally, there are small quality of life improvements that would increase usability even for me - such as allowing multiple tabs to be open simultaneously or being able to use the browser's "back" and "forward" buttons.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    I give [Zoho Desk] [an] overall usability score of 9. This is partly due to the search functionality needs improvement. There are several times where I am left unable to find a ticket and have to generate a new one. I am hoping in the future that they will make some changes!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Discontinued Products
    Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Discontinued Products
    Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    As Zoho Support is based in a different timezone to ours it can be an issue that we cannot get an immediate response to an issue. But I will say that once their Support is in the office they are fairly good to respond. they have resolved almost all issues I have told them about, but Zoho have also made system changes and not communicated these beforehand which means we are faced with something new and cannot get support on this until their support team is in the office
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Discontinued Products
    Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Discontinued Products
    Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    When we made our decision several years ago Social Solutions had just acquired Apricot. At that time it was recommended to use ETO based off our revenue stream. However, it seems like Social Solutions has put in a lot more time and effort into Apricot over ETO and it seems more modern and user friendly. I think it is worth a second look once our contract expires
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    We selected Zoho Desk as we needed a platform that was going to allow the business to grow through both usage and staffing numbers. We wanted something cost-effective but still offered standard features in an effective cloud-delivered solution but would still allow customization by our internal dev team, to derive better value from the service where it natively didn't do what we needed it to. FreeAgent was okay for a while, but Zoho Desk has allowed a vast improvement in our service offering to end customers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • I would say that at this point the overall ROI has been negative as we aren't getting much more out of our data by the switch we made to ETO, but the cost is much higher. I anticipate that will change as we get better at using ETO.
    • Most users that have switched to ETO in our organization prefer it to what they were using before and some are more appreciative of the value they can get from the data.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zoho
    • Zoho Desk has created an organised sytem of support which alows me to help my customers more efficiently.
    • By saving resolutions as articles, Zoho Desk has provided a training resource for current customers and support staff as part of solving problems.
    • All new customers become part of a database of customers who continue to receive support and education from forums created by the articles and customer questions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    ETO Software (legacy) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    Zoho Desk Screenshots

    Screenshot of Log and monitor phone conversations, convert them into new tickets, or attach them to existing ones. Convert social media interactions and live chat into tickets at the click of a button.Screenshot of Bring a Help Center directly into a website to strengthen self-service. Chat with Zia, an AI-powered conversation assistant. Customers can chat with Zia right from a mobile app or website. Zia processes their questions and suggests appropriate solutions from the Knowledge Base.Screenshot of With advanced process automation, internal processes can be setup within the help desk, implement them automatically, and make sure that all processes are followed precisely.Screenshot of Instant responses for instant happiness. Respond to customers the minute they reach out with Zoho Desk's embeddable chat widget. Customers can get in touch with agents instantly, right from the Help Center, so agents can respond and help them find answers faster.Screenshot of Monitor a team's performance, customize and schedule reports. Custom dashboards can be created.Screenshot of Zia brings together predictions across anomalies, sentiment, trending ticket tags, and more into a common dashboard for decision-makers to consume. They can drill down further into the details from the same dashboard to investigate further.