Freshdesk vs. SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Freshdesk
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses of all sizes to deliver customer support. Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Additionally, Freshdesk lets the user automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, to stay on top of customer support. Freshdesk also offers out-of-the-box features like an AI-powered support chatbot,…
$0
Up to 10 agents per user
SolarWinds Service Desk
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service catalog, knowledge base, and SLA management tool. The integrated agent-based asset management solution collects contracts and licensing data from Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems.N/A
Pricing
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 10 agents
Growth
$15
per month per agent
Pro
$49
per month per agent
Enterprise
$69
per month per agent
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Considered Both Products
Freshdesk

No answer on this topic

SolarWinds Service Desk
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Samanage's overall functionality along with its simplicity of use is what won out. ManageEngine had too much under the hood that we didn't need that would bog us down. Asset Panda did not have enough. Freshdesk offered a similarly controlled offering of features without the …
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
We first used Freshdesk several years ago and moved to Zendesk because the features were not where we needed them to be. Moved from Zendesk to Desk.com because we wanted to integrate with Salesforce and Desk was included in our contract. Desk.com was discontinued and we …
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Zoho has a multitude of products that may be great for some companies, but I found the product didn't feel like it was polished or done well. More of a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none.
Freshdesk and Zendesk had a lot of modern features but lacked the ability to host multiple …
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
When we transitioned to Solarwinds Service Desk, it was the only hosted service that was HIPAA compliant. Having a HIPAA-compliant solution was a requirement to allow us to support our health care clinics.
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
SolarWinds pricing packages allowed an easier entry into the system, while others had either large upfront 'setup' fees. It was branded Samanage at the time, and it was able to offer the necessary features with an intuitive UI, reliable web-based hosting through AWS, a good …
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
We wanted a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that was easy to deploy and also had features we knew we wanted in the longer term. SolarWinds won out due to the ease of forms-and-workflow through its Service Catalog and the integrated asset inventory.
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Samanage was light years ahead of Spiceworks and at a fraction of the cost of many competitors.
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
No asset management available for the other products at the time, which is why we went with Samanage.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.4
145 Ratings
6% above category average
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
8.0
96 Ratings
2% below category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets8.7141 Ratings9.395 Ratings
Expert directory8.195 Ratings7.956 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications8.43 Ratings8.967 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation7.64 Ratings8.176 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission8.8142 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket response8.7142 Ratings00 Ratings
Service restoration00 Ratings7.357 Ratings
Self-service tools00 Ratings8.085 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards00 Ratings6.486 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.3
130 Ratings
7% above category average
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
-
Ratings
External knowledge base8.4116 Ratings00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base8.3120 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.3
138 Ratings
8% above category average
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
-
Ratings
Customer portal8.1116 Ratings00 Ratings
IVR8.143 Ratings00 Ratings
Social integration8.572 Ratings00 Ratings
Email support8.7138 Ratings00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration8.284 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
6.9
81 Ratings
17% below category average
Configuration mangement00 Ratings6.973 Ratings
Asset management dashboard00 Ratings6.980 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement00 Ratings6.963 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
8.0
79 Ratings
4% below category average
Change requests repository00 Ratings8.663 Ratings
Change calendar00 Ratings7.743 Ratings
Service-level management00 Ratings7.871 Ratings
Best Alternatives
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Small Businesses
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP Service Cloud
SAP Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(212 ratings)
7.9
(118 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.8
(14 ratings)
6.5
(8 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(35 ratings)
8.9
(7 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(4 ratings)
8.7
(7 ratings)
Performance
8.5
(4 ratings)
8.9
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(33 ratings)
8.0
(92 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Online Training
7.9
(2 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.4
(142 ratings)
8.9
(3 ratings)
Configurability
8.5
(3 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.8
(2 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(4 ratings)
8.9
(4 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.0
(2 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.8
(2 ratings)
7.7
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Likelihood to Recommend
Freshworks Inc
Using a collection of Skill Based Ticket Assignment, Ticket Allocation, and alerts, we’ve been able to bring our average resolution time to under half our previous time. This is done by making sure the right tickets get to the right agents, and by ensuring agents are followed up on to ensure they do not forget deadlines on tickets in their queue. Furthermore, tickets which would be open for weeks due to lack of a client response are now closed automatically following a prompt email to the end-user
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SolarWinds
If you are looking for a way to support a company and bill based on the outcome this software works really well. If it's a quick password change there was no charge, but if it's troubleshooting things you click the box to charge. It works really well for this. Also bringing all your assets into this and associating them to a client works well. I can't think of anything that this software would not be less appropriate for. It works well for what we use it for.
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Pros
Freshworks Inc
  • Follow up on all conversations that enter and are easy to use by the employee and save responses ready for use.
  • Find out the average rate of the number of conversations that occur in the company and conduct the analysis.
  • There is a feature it allows one to take a permit in the name of the employee who responds to the conversation and to know the problem faced by the customer and the solution.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Approval flows: You can have multiple layers of approval required for the tickets and service requests you design. This helps us show auditors that access to privileged systems and data was formerly reviewed and approved by the appropriate managers.
  • Easy to design forms: You don't need to spend hours reading the documentation to figure out how to create forms. It's simple enough that you can just jump right in and start creating them with minimal training.
  • Lots of options and features are available for you to include in your forms.
  • Integrates well with SAML-based SSO and has capabilities for MFA.
  • Easy and useful search function. Need to find that ticket from last year that you worked for a particular user or issue? Just search by keyword or username, and it'll quickly find the ticket.
Read full review
Cons
Freshworks Inc
  • Ticket templates and canned responses should be able to be used interchangeably. We frequently have the same response in both fields.
  • The spam filter can be a little too aggressive. We have had issues with tickets being accidentally marked as spam then filtering incorrectly for weeks at a time.
  • Freshdesk doesn't quite have the right integrations with our other providers (Vonage, and Avochato, to name a few).
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • There is potential to greatly improve the capacity for cascading attributes. Currently, categories are limited to a top-level category and one subcategory. This leaves a fairly shallow decision tree.
  • Greater flexibility to modify the layout of incident request forms.
  • More integration options for cloud file-sharing platforms. Solarwinds Service Desk has tie-ins to Dropbox but not other vendors.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Freshworks Inc
We are extremely happy with Freshdesk and can foresee using it for the next year. We might only consider using a different platform if our average daily ticket volume reaches four digits and its AI isn’t enough to handle our needs by then. While we haven’t tested this yet, we have read reviews that it’s AI capabilities are lacking
Read full review
SolarWinds
My renewal is soon coming up, it is fairly likely I will renew again for the 5th year. I may consider evaluating what else is out there, It was requested by my staff to not make a change. They feel that SSD fits our needs, is easy to use and should keep it.
Read full review
Usability
Freshworks Inc
I gave it a rating of 9 out of 10 because they delivered on everything we asked them to do. Easy to setup, easy to deploy to end users, easy to customize, easy to enter tickets and so much more. Our experience with their support is top notch! After opening a ticket for support they call use back within 10 minutes every time!
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SolarWinds
Solarwinds Service Desk has a very "user friendly" interface. Everything looks nice and neat. And, learning how to use the system is very easy. It provides multiple services that are easy for most people to grasp, and allows for great organization of incidents and assets. Support for Solarwinds Service Desk has a good response and resolution time and are easy to work with.
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Reliability and Availability
Freshworks Inc
I have encountered a lot of errors in the Freshdesk, however, they tend to resolve it on priority or at least they will share the timeline by when this can be resolved. Most of the time the issue has been from the other partner's end. They take time to resolve their vendor issues and they don't have any timelines in case of developed app errors.
Read full review
SolarWinds
Because the data is stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) there are very rarely any outages. There have been some times when the product has been slow to load, but because the interface is web based it could be anything between my computer and AWS that was causing the issue. But also, because the application is web based it can be access from anywhere which makes it very convenient
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Performance
Freshworks Inc
The reports take a lot of time to download if the time period is large. Also, the tickets take their sweet time to open and load. It is not fast as Zendesk. Only 30 tickets are visible in a single go and there isn't any option to select all. If we need to change the pages and dashboards it takes a lot of time to open.
Read full review
SolarWinds
When the system is working, the pages load very quickly. We run reports all the time in the system. The reporting can be extremely complex or very simple. Either way, we have not had any issues with the reports. We do not currently integrate Solarwinds Service Desk with any other software.
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Support Rating
Freshworks Inc
The main thing about Freshdesk user service is that once a request has been made for information about a feature of the platform, the support team responds to tickets quickly, within a day of writing and submitting them, with information that is concise enough so that there is no need to ask for help on the same topic again.
Read full review
SolarWinds
SolarWinds support department will respond to you quickly from the time of purchase to after-purchase instructions & supporting, and the company is great in customers support. In buying a software, our organization always has a priority for the seller and support and accountability is very important to us, and the manufacturer or seller must be responsible and supportive.
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In-Person Training
Freshworks Inc
In-person training is provided to all the agents and it is very easy to learn the basics of the Freshdesk interface. Solving tickets via dashboards, replying to the guest queries in bulk via Freshdesk. The training which is a bit hard is creating the logic according to the ticket flow and intergeration.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Freshworks Inc
This tool is no doubt easy to learn but in-person training is a lot better than online training. It takes time to grasp things in the online training, however, in pandemic we have done all the training online. Apart from a bit more time we haven't faced any issues with online training.
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SolarWinds
When we first purchased Samanage (now Solarwinds) they provided us with an informational training session to show us all of the basics on how the service works and showed us everything we were interested in using. There are still some areas of Solarwinds that we do not yet utilize but I know if we choose to use them in the future we would be able to schedule another session with our representative to have them show us what we need to know.
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Implementation Rating
Freshworks Inc
Not applicable. I have never used a support desk system before and FreshDesk had already been implemented at my company before I joined. I am not involved in financial decisions and I have no opinion on buzzwords like "time to productivity" and "time to value"
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SolarWinds
The implementation process for our organization was fairly simple. We set up an email address to receive the emails from the system (for incident creation), and we allowed the system to spoof our IT email to respond to requests. Solarwinds helped us with the rest of the implementation, and it took less than a week to get the system fully operational.
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Alternatives Considered
Freshworks Inc
FreshDesk was the best combination of ease of use and price. While inexpensive, even the lowest tier offered more functionality than the other guys, and the learning curve is almost nonexistent so it's easy to add new agents and get them up to speed quickly instead of having them spend days getting use to the UI.
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SolarWinds
We chose SolarWinds Service Desk for its user friendly platform compared to what we had. Its was easier for requestors to submit tickets, provide feedback, merge tickets, build a suitable approval process. Our organization had a hard time going back and forth with the end user on providing a status on their request or issue, where most users just didn't follow through or lost interest in their issue. We would have to send multiple emails to get any type of feedback and that's something we did not want to keep on doing.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Freshworks Inc
The pricing we had taken is on yearly basis but the subscription and billing frequency that we have is on monthly basis. I would not want to make any changes to it, it is a seamless process with all the contract terms and we both agreed on it. It should be as per the customer's need.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Freshworks Inc
The product they have developed is amazing. They have made different products for emails, tickets, chats & calls as well. It is flexible according to multiple departments. The finance team can use it, the Customer support team is using it, we can use it in call centres, emails etc. We can use these tickets internally as well to create child tickets and assign them to different departments for query resolution.
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SolarWinds
We have over 500 computers and tablets across our organization and this has helped us greatly in keeping track of where computers are and who is currently using it. I can see this product being useful to groups both larger and smaller than us and I really appreciate this product.
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Return on Investment
Freshworks Inc
  • Freshdesk is certainly better than nothing, or a simple shared inbox
  • Freshdesk is frustrating to incorporate social media with
  • Freshdesk excels at ticket management
  • Freshdesk needs to do more to bring it into alignment with business, rather than 'just' service desk needs.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • We are more easily able to quantify user satisfaction with support.
  • We are able to develop SLAs that quantify and define the obligation of our support teams.
  • The actual cost of Solarwinds Service Desk per agent user is high in our estimation. The more you implement this platform across your organization, the more tightly tethered you are to this solution.
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ScreenShots

SolarWinds Service Desk Screenshots

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