Freshservice vs. SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)

Freshservice is a complete ITSM solution. I have used some others over the years and moved away from them to Freshservice. I have implemented Freshservice in 2 new roles over the years, and everyone has loved it. The functionality that it incorporates, enabling IT teams to become ITIL compliant is truly useful. Compared to 5 other ITSM tools that I have used over the last 10 years, Freshservice is far better.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Workflow automation
• Knowledge base articles for users and agents
• easy to add categories & sub category and make them compulsory so that ticket cannot be closed without filling the information
• it works with email address very simple to create different department and queues

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Change Management - Current system is geared towards full software or system change management. It would be great to have a simple Yes/No approval without having to utilize their workflow tools.
• Data selection filters - Overall, their data filters are very good, but it would be useful to have "Last Week" and "Last Month" in the date selectors.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It's overall value in our organization is extremely high and it has become an essential part of our business.

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.

Incentivized

On the I.T. side, the time to ramp up and understand how FreshService operates only took a few hours. After that, it was off to the races with configuration and customization. From the start, with minimal assistance, our end users found FreshService to be incredibly intuitive. At launch, we expected most to submit tickets via email, however, our analytics has shown that end-users actually prefer the portal for managing their I.T. tickets.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I contacted support once and the person handling the request was very helpful. The staff is very competent. In my opinion communication could be improved as the level of spoken English is very high. I was unable to understand some words, in fact two people participated in the second meeting.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

think of what you want to do with FreshService : a clean start or a migration. Migration can be done with csv files, it's easy to do but you need to test it first.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I've used monday.com for ticketing, but Freshservice is made for it and the asset management feature adds value. NinjaOne's ticketing is not built out so we only use it for its RMM features. Atera has a nice ticketing platform and looks similar to Freshservice but they do not have an onboarding feature and other integrations that Freshservice has

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Freshservice has allowed our organization to better track the amount of tickets that come in for a particular individual. This allows us to better support a user that is having multiple of the same issue over an extended period.
• The communication to the user has greatly increased due to the automated messages that Freshservice has built in.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized