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.
$19
Per Month Per User
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Compared to Cherwell, SDP is much much faster, and easier to deploy, set up, and use. But it does not have automation, and has limited customization. Since it is smaller and easier, it does not require any development effort. On the other hand, it is far more expensive, considering its lower capabilities, and its licensing model is not concurrently based (each technician uses up a license, even if the technician is not actively logged in and using the tool).
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.
ServiceDesk Plus has helped our organization see what issues we face on a more global picture and we are able to take the time and resources to correct them in a timely manner.
The only negative part about ServiceDesk Plus is it can become costly when you see and use all the features it has to offer.
