Freshdesk vs. SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Freshdesk
Score 8.4 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 2 agents
SolarWinds Service Desk
Score 8.1 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 2 agents
Growth
$15
per month (billed annually) per agent
Pro
$49
per month (billed annually) per agent
Enterprise
$79
per month (billed annually) 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.
Features
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.6
194 Ratings
4% above category average
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
7.0
97 Ratings
16% below category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets9.2190 Ratings8.096 Ratings
Expert directory8.1128 Ratings6.057 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications8.43 Ratings8.967 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation7.64 Ratings6.077 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission9.2190 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket response9.0190 Ratings00 Ratings
Service restoration00 Ratings6.058 Ratings
Self-service tools00 Ratings7.086 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards00 Ratings7.087 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.4
174 Ratings
5% above category average
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
-
Ratings
External knowledge base8.4158 Ratings00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base8.3162 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.8
183 Ratings
10% above category average
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
-
Ratings
Customer portal8.8155 Ratings00 Ratings
IVR8.957 Ratings00 Ratings
Social integration8.598 Ratings00 Ratings
Email support9.2182 Ratings00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration8.6116 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
7.3
82 Ratings
12% below category average
Configuration mangement00 Ratings8.074 Ratings
Asset management dashboard00 Ratings6.980 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement00 Ratings7.064 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
7.0
80 Ratings
20% below category average
Change requests repository00 Ratings7.064 Ratings
Change calendar00 Ratings7.044 Ratings
Service-level management00 Ratings7.072 Ratings
Best Alternatives
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 9.1 out of 10
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(253 ratings)
8.0
(119 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.8
(22 ratings)
6.5
(8 ratings)
Usability
9.8
(42 ratings)
8.0
(8 ratings)
Availability
7.7
(6 ratings)
8.7
(7 ratings)
Performance
5.7
(5 ratings)
8.9
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(40 ratings)
8.0
(92 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Online Training
8.1
(2 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.8
(184 ratings)
8.9
(3 ratings)
Configurability
6.6
(7 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
6.5
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.5
(5 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.7
(5 ratings)
8.9
(4 ratings)
Professional Services
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
6.9
(4 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
6.9
(4 ratings)
7.7
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
FreshdeskSolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Likelihood to Recommend
Freshworks Inc
I recommend Freshdesk for people who need to handle a large volume of inquiries through tickets and follow-ups. This platform provides tools that will improve problem-solving efficiency, ensuring customers are satisfied with the speed with which their issues are resolved. Overall, it will optimize customer service support operations and the resolution of their problems.
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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
  • The price is great for small startups just large enough to need a support ticketing system.
  • This may seem minor, but many tools don't have this: the ability to link a contact to multiple companies/accounts.
  • Agent collision detection is great for making sure agents don't duplicate each others' work!
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
  • Data Security.
  • SLA Policies where it is not customer / contract driven but agents / groups driven.
  • Audit Trail is not available in Pro version makes the tool adoption difficult from compliance perspective.
  • Chat Bot and Fresh Chat Services has greater potential to explode, but the pricing model tagged to chat bot sessions .are illogical as it limits the ability to use the fresh chat feature
  • Agent Logon Screen use earlier version of Captcha as it is annoying for the agents to login. Very frustrating experience.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Support Team's knowledge and understood the company's requirement, and always shared the insight of the usage of the tool to it s full potential, moreover the team checks periodically to check if we using the tool right and if we are facing any kind of challenges. Also they would update us on new features that can make the work easy.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Freshworks Inc
Video tutorials, questions answers round before and after testing and Fresh desk team would always share best practices on the needs. Furthermore would periodically check if we are able to work smoothly. Would send alerts to known any issues, send recommendation on new features. Freshdesk team always available when we need certain advise.
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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
Our team easily implemented Freshdesk, and as soon as we started, we were pros with it. In a matter of days, we had integrated signatures and canned responses. The biggest problem was the Help Center part, but after some time, that was also integrated. We did not know some features when we started, but that is normal.
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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 has a more modern and intuitive user interface, while Help Scout's interface is simpler and more minimalist.In case of features, Freshdesk offers a wider range of features, includes omnichannel support, AI powered automations, and advanced analytics. Help Scout is more focused on providing a simple and efficient ticketing system.
Read full review
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
I was not very involved with the purchase/contract (my company purchased Fresjdesk before I was brought on), but I will say that pricing per agent made it difficult to grow our support team. Additionally, we were kind of disappointed after our upgrade because it didn't solve our pain points as much as we expected.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Freshworks Inc
My company had Freshdesk agents from support and success. It's generally difficult to customize permissions for different agent "roles." We were a fully distributed company, so "multiple sites" doesn't apply to us. We found Freshdesk features lacking as we grew our customer base, and adding agents wasn't easy because price steeply increases with number of agents.
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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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Professional Services
Freshworks Inc
Very professional, they would always ask for the steps followed and where we went wrong, they would politely share the video recording to review in case any other team member faces the same issue
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Freshworks Inc
  • Increased response times - Client Success maintains at 98% SLA for resolution
  • Categorization of feedback and issues - custom ticket fields make it easier for us to review why clients contact us on a high level
  • Standardization of internal procedures via templates, canned responses and automations
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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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