Helpjuice vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)

Helpjuice is an excellent platform when you’re looking to modernize the way you create documentation. Many companies, especially larger corporations, are stuck in the past, utilizing PDFs and share drives to house and access procedures. With Helpjuice, we now have a centralized web-based platform that provides everything from analytic functions to standard templates, user-specific features, and more. My team specifically chose Helpjuice during the pandemic, when all the tech writers from my company (including myself) were moved into a single team. We needed to find a platform that would allow us to align our publishing standards while also moving us forward in the way we publish procedures. That platform was ultimately Helpjuice. Helpjuice certainly offers a variety of features, but one of the few drawbacks is that it does not incorporate or seem to integrate with any specific ticketing tool. While this isn’t an issue for me or my team, as we are required to use a specific tool internally, I can imagine that someone looking for a complete package with multi-step workflows and an intake process would not find Helpjuice adequate.

Incentivized

SolarWinds WHD is well suited if you have a limited budget, as it costs less than many help desk software packages that are more full featured and modern in their design. It is not well suited to an environment where you want to manage inventory, users, purchases and tickets all in one package. It has an asset feature that we don't use but that looks quite limited. We track our assets and users separately from this.

Incentivized

• We were looking for a publishing feature where there would be some required oversight.
• We have really enjoyed the AI Tool of Wizardshot as it has helped reduce the time spent writing articles.
• The analytic dashboard to see who has contributed what and which articles are the most clicked on is wonderful

Incentivized

• Customized reporting allows us to track our service and support better, and find where we need improvements. This allows us to constantly upgrade our service levels and keep the customers happy.
• Detailed tracking and response to the end users have led to quicker remediation of tickets. We are able to see where we need a better response or where to add additional resources for support.
• Overall metrics allow us to staff properly for our tickets by location and remote users.

Incentivized

• Article feedback disappears when resolved, would like to see a integration with Jira which we now use to track feedback changes.
• Analytics for the AI search would be appreciated. Currently we have no idea how many people are actually using this feature.
• A way to train the AI search bot. Currently there is no way to up/down vote answers or indicate how accurate or helpful an answer is.

Incentivized

• Because of AD integration, users sometimes try logging in with their email address and not AD credentials. The user then calls stating they can't put a ticket in, it would be nice if there was a method of matching the AD Email field with a login.
• Setting up new techs with the building they are responsible for can be a little messy
• I would like to see the UI updated. It looks old, even in the latest releases.

Incentivized

We are definitely going to be sticking with Web Help Desk for the foreseeable future since the product is very inexpensive for the features that it provides, the integration that it has with our existing systems, and the ease for managing users, assets, locations, and tickets. Web Help Desk is a great product that is backed by even better support, which is well worth looking into if you are considering moving to a new ticketing system.

Incentivized

HelpJuice is really amazing as a starter knowledge base vendor. They have great customer service and the ability to customize your website is endless. However, it is difficult to scale up.

Incentivized

I give it this rating based on my experience with SNOW which I would rate lower because it is so difficult to find anything in SNOW. It might be better with more time to configure but we "had a box to check" and it met that requirement and I haven't had time to refine it.

Incentivized

SolarWinds is a great customizable and affordable ticketing system. We use SolarWinds Web Help Desk for IT and Software
Development trouble ticket tracking and resolution. The reporting that
SolarWinds provides is great since it helps us discover problem areas and fix
those areas so they don't keep reoccurring

Incentivized

Take the time to roll out a test VM to configure and make changes to before doing a live deployment, this way you don't end up with a VM that has been tweaked and re-tweaked until it's perfect and instead end up with a final, polished product. I would also recommend taking the time to read through the support forums for figuring out minor issues that may pop up, chances are that you aren't going to be the first one to encounter them. When all is said and done, SolarWinds Support is VERY responsive and you shouldn't hesitate to contact them.

Incentivized

Prior to using Helpjuice, I was using Microsoft Publisher to create all the training materials and manuals for multiple divisions within my company. It was awful. It would lag whenever I opened larger manuals, it operated like software from the late 90s, it was not intuitive, from a design perspective, and after migrating to a MacBook Pro as my work computer, I discovered that the program was NEVER created for Mac OS, requiring me to run Windows on my MacBook whenever I had to update any procedures that hadn’t yet migrated to Helpjuice. What a nightmare.

Incentivized

Web Help Desk is definitely lacking in the UI/UX department compared to most other ticketing systems I have used int he past. It's very utilitarian; however, what it lacks in UI it makes up for in extensibility and customization. The main issue that the developers need to address is the use of a Web Objects back-end.

Incentivized

• As I mentioned, my productivity in terms of working around issues, asking for help, etc. is greatly reduced on a DAILY basis.
• I spend as much time finding bugs and filing tickets as I do writing content, and this was especially true at the beginning.
• The Doc Center looks nice, so you'd never know the pain behind it.

• Amazing impact on our Organization, we are much more organized since we implemented SolarWinds Web Help Desk
• The ROI is in the statistics! The application cost pennies to run compared to what the product will do for your organization.
• I challenge you to find a better product for the price!
• Our documentation has improved since we implemented SolarWinds Web Help Desk

Incentivized