ServiceDesk Plus is free help desk software from ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation.
$10
Starting Price Per Month
SolarWinds Service Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service catalog, knowledge base, and SLA management tool. The integrated agent-based asset management solution collects contracts and licensing data from Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems.
We used Spiceworks for approximately 9 years before moving to Samanage. While reviewing many systems available, we decided on Solarwinds Service Desk for the following primary reasons:
We went with SWSD because of the ease of usability. The UI was very easy for everyone who tested the various platforms to understand and navigate. We also felt that the customer service and support of the Samanage team was above the rest. Knowing that any solution we went …
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.
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.
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.
Reporting tools; the report features can be a little limited, it can be quite tricky to get the information you want displayed in detail
You can set required fields within the ticket template, which should mean the user has to complete them before they can submit the ticket, however this often doesn't enforce correctly
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.
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
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.
As any other feature-rich software package, starting out with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus has a little bit of a learning curve, but it usually doesn't take very long until you can use the basic features. Training new technicians on the use of the software does not take very long, and for users to submit tickets it is as easy as sending an email.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
