Freshservice vs. SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)

I have worked with several ticket systems in my career. Homegrown TicketIt, Remedy, Jira, ChangeGear, and FreshService have been the easiest to implement and use. I never have to explain how to complete a request to an end-user, as the fields are self-explanatory. We use about 80% of the product and continue to find ways to improve. Each month, some updates and fixes continually address our needs.

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

• Asset Management Module: The features I like most in this module are the discovery agent software, which allows us to collect device information without manual intervention, and the simplicity and robustness of the module itself.
• Service Catalog: This feature allows us to create forms tailored to specific service requests based on group requirements. The ability to customize forms greatly helps both us and our end-users provide the necessary information to fulfill their requests.
• Workflow Automator and Business Rules: These two allow us to have some automation in place, eliminating some of the manual steps and decreasing the number of human errors that may happen due to manual changes.

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

• Consistency across modules
• Customization especially on the portal and search
• Reporting filters are not consistent, some allow date range selection and most only allow predefined spans
• Onboarding module is WAY too rigid
• Offboarding module is not usable in it's current form

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

Freshservice is pretty ingrained in our IT processes and policies. A replacement would take quite a while to do, but we are mostly satisfied with the service so we have no plans on moving.

Incentivized

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

Easy to navigate and use GUI. We have many infrastructure team members from various departments using Freshservice and their on-boarding and training was very straightforward and we have not received much, if any negative feedback from non-technology users in regards to overall usability, interface or functionality.

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

Downtime is minimal (it does happen but not often)

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

There are days where it can get a bit slow for a short time, but these are rare and I wouldn't exactly blame it on their product. The system itself processes requests very quickly.

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 have only contacted support a couple of times but each time I did they were super responsive. It is very easy to contact support and it opens up a chat online window within your browser to talk to an agent and if they cannot answer it then they will log a ticket for level 2 support to pick the ticket up.

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.

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

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

Use case and requirements have to be very specific. Each business is different so it's very important to be as clear as possible with your initial requirements when communicating with the on-boarding/implementation team.

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

1. Cost - I have always had the best cost provided by Freshservice as compared to others 2. Functionality - far more functionality is provided by Freshservice 3. ITIL enabled ITSM tool with better support for different ITIL modules 4. Reporting - easiest to produce reports in Freshservice 5. Workflows - Workflows are far superior and easier to configure as compared with other products Service Now is great for the above as well, but it comes at a far greater cost as compared.

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

Was not able to update us proactively about our renewal causing lost of access

Incentivized

The software is very scalable from a small to mid sized team. The features have seemed to scale exceptionally well.

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

We did not have professional services.

Incentivized

• Fresh Service helped us organize, asking users to write to a specific email. This generates a ticket on our system
• The user is always informed on the progress of the ticket and the activities carried out. He feels more pampered
• Within the organization we have decreased the channels of engagement and this is extremely important for an IT organization

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