Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
$29
per month per agent
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
ServiceDesk Plus is free help desk software from ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus was a good product that offered good value for money but its automation is quite poor for us and the support we received from them was very hit and miss. The product is also looks dated and has not changed much over the years. Jira Service …
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Freshservice
Freshservice is on par with ManageEngine SD Plus in terms of: 1. No/Low code configuration, 2. ITSM module certification 3. SLA 4. CMDB etc. However, the level of support that ManageEngine offers with its post-sales engineer is better than that of Freshservice. While using …
The user-interface, Marketplace, out-of-box Orchestrations and ability for Admins to perform product specific configurations at much easier and faster pace is a much loved feature of Freshservice, when comparing it with other ITSM solutions.
Freshservice is much faster and sleek and easier to use. if you want easy setup go with Freshservice. if you want to have clunky, hard to edit, etc. go with ManageEngine. The problem is ME has too much stuff it offers and not enough room to fit it.
FreshService is easier to use and to train your team. It is cheaper too and the support it gives is really nice. You can feel that are not alone while you are setting up the portal and the feedback is very prompt. I do not say that the others are bad, but they really do not fit …
Brilliant for an ITIL Service Desk solution for use by IT department.
Can be used to manage incoming IT emails automatically ticketing them
and replying to users reducing work load of first line support. Can be
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.
ServiceDesk Plus is very easy to configure at the start, and then adjust the categories and rules as the implementation is refined. Its greatest strength is the ability to program without requiring a full time administrator. There is very little jargon involved. Reporting not so much. The canned reports are useful but do not always cover some of the basics. Fortunately, the user groups freely share report definitions so one could springboard from something close to your desired result.
Ticket logging for end users, so they can see the progress on their help requests
Asset management; it has an agent that can be installed on machines which can then feed back information on installed software, active times, logged on user etc
Project management; larger projects can be managed within ManageEngine ServiceDesk as well as end user help tickets, where progress/milestones etc can be recorded
Active Directory import of users, so that it automatically updates when users are created/deleted and links their accounts in ManageEngine ServiceDesk with their email address as well to enable email alerts
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.
When trying to select the top row ticket, you have to be careful not to select all tickets. Happened to us twice and we assigned all open tickets to one technician. Took a few minutes to correct.
Site is sometimes a bit sluggish to respond. Don't know if that is an issue with our network infrastructure or the program itself, though.
When users send emails to the help desk, we sometimes experience delays until the tickets appear on the site for the technicians.
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.
we are looking at other tools like Zendesk which may replace ServiceDesk. We are currently evaluating both tools to see which one would serve our needs better
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 is still very cumbersome, lots of data entry on the back end to build how we want it but it is still not completely user friendly. Many functions still dont work and contacting someone for help isnt always easy or we get told solutions for issues we have just arent built yet.
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.
Our network administrator usually gets a good response when contacting ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus customer service. They are quick to respond and so far have been able to eliminate most of our issues. We have been through several upgrades of the software over the years and have no issues to report in regards to customer service.
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.
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.
Spiceworks was free, which obviously had both benefits and limitations - I will say that the community around Spiceworks has always been great. If we could replicate that experience with the ME user base, it would be terrific.
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+.
The tool does not scale well from an ROI perspective. As you add a customer, you must add a new instance, hence a new license.
The tool is probably on the expensive side (34,000 USD per 130 technicians per year).
There is no usage beyond incident, change, and problem management. The CMDB feature is extremely limited and cannot generate additional ROI. There is no knowledge-base or integration with other software (other than ME Desktop Central).
