Freshservice vs. Gist

Freshservice is well suited for companies looking to implement ticketing / case management across the organization, but only if IT will be using it. Otherwise, I'd recommend Freshdesk. IT departments that don't function in the ITIL style of incident, request, change, and project management may find it overkill if they are only looking for a simple Help Desk solution.

Incentivized

If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.

Incentivized

• The smartphone app is very well designed and adding assets from there is very easy
• If you have questions or support, the support desk is fast to respond and setup a meeting to explain the features
• Very customizable and everything can be easily changed with a wizard
• Reporting feature does what it needs to do and is not complicated to work with
• The overall ticketing system is very good and we have not run into any issues
• The whole system is incredibly responsive and does not hang or freeze

Incentivized

• Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
• Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
• Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.

Incentivized

• To have more options on what to do with the emails that arrive in the support mailbox (which goes to Freshservice), Setting some special rules or detailed filtering is not possible.
• Non 3rd party tools to connect to Intune are missing. Additionally, the third-party tool available in the store is not satisfactory. It would be nice to have native support for importing devices from our Azure cloud.
• The contract requires you to prolong your contract end-date by two years instead of just one year, which to us is a bit aggressive.

Incentivized

• Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
• The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
• Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.

We are pretty invested in Freshservice right now and have integrated it pretty heavily into our environment, so it would be hard to move away from it. For the most part, we are happy with Freshservice and the ease of use it gives us in managing tickets through the system. The only complaint we've had is customer service.

Incentivized

Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder

Incentivized

The UI design of Freshservice is simple and intuitive. You don't have to be a technical expert to navigate your way into the different pages/modules available. There are no buttons that are hidden in plain sight. Even our HR team required little to no help when they started using Freshservice.

It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.

In our 3 years of using Freshservice, we've experienced several outages in the first 2 years. There were times where it only took minutes or hours but there are also times where it took a few days. Each time, Freshservice remained transparent and constantly communicated their progress. We haven't had one in the past year which indicates Freshservice have improved their servers.

Pages load quickly but internet connectivity can also play a big role. Integrations doesn't affect the performance but internet connectivity may be a big factor. As a company with most employees working from home, different network providers from different areas/countries can have different experiences. Search load time needs improvement.

Support from OEM is decent but needs improvement. Sometimes OEM also needs to understand the criticality of the customer and help as an Ad-hoc, which is somewhat lacking at Feshservice. Although the normal support team is well-equipped and helps according to the matrix, if something critical for the partner or customer requires immediate attention, it still goes through the L1-L2-L3 levels, which wastes a lot of time.

Incentivized

Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.

Incentivized

Training was enough to use the base website

Incentivized

Their documentation is pretty good, but only available in English. This makes it difficult for some of our users to understand. There are also some basic video courses available.

Incentivized

Creating the correct groups for the stakeholders and enabling the right notifications are one of the most important aspect of the implementation. Creating Change templates will also help in the long run and it's a good practice to create one, if applicable.

Easy setup and a lot of customization which can be made. They offer the full ITSM tool for 75$ per agent and all the PRO are included in the package, which makes it easy to calculate and use. There are only a few add-ins that you need to pay for, based on the number of agents or the number of executions.

Incentivized

Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.

Freshservice allows flexibility with contract terms and pricing model. Monthly and annual payments are allowed. The unit pricing needs a bit of improvement. It would be great if they offer unit pricing per capability instead of one pricing for all the capabilities. Small businesses have different use cases and not every agent needs all the modules available.

We were able to scale easily across multiple departments. As our company keeps growing, we have not needed to change anything in terms of scaling since we started using Freshservice. There were no changes to the admin and end-user experience from when we were a 1,000-employee company vs to our current head count of 2,000+.

We did not have professional services.

Incentivized

• We had no ticketing system at all so we had no idea of the workload, we now do
• We have been able to go from nothing to seeing workload to identifying areas for improvement by having the metrics
• We have lowered MTTR every month since turning on fresh service
• We have increased 1st all resolution every month
• We have been able to start talking about real SLA's with the business

Incentivized

• They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
• I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
• I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.