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Cherwell Service Management

Cherwell Service Management

Overview

What is Cherwell Service Management?

Cherwell Software was founded by the former CEO of FrontRage Solutions and is a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Cherwell is a versatile IT service management tool that has been widely adopted by various organizations across industries. Users have …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

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  • Organize and prioritize service tickets (52)
    10.0
    100%
  • Self-service tools (51)
    9.8
    98%
  • ITSM reports and dashboards (51)
    9.7
    97%
  • ITSM collaboration and documentation (48)
    9.6
    96%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Cherwell Service Management?

Cherwell Software was founded by the former CEO of FrontRage Solutions and is a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://pages.cherwell.com/pricing.csm.…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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ServiceNow is a fast-growing service management provider that went public in 2012. Built on the ServiceNow Now Platform, the IT Service Management bundle provides an agent workspace with knowledge management, and modules supporting issue tracking and problem resolution, change, release and…

What is Atera?

Atera is a platform that enables IT professionals to gain access, visibility, and control over all their networks and devices from anywhere. Users can manage their IT operation from patch management, IT automations, advanced reporting, alerts, helpdesk, ticketing, and it features dozens of…

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Product Demos

Cherwell 8 Overview

YouTube

Cherwell Service Management 10.0 Demo

YouTube
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Features

Incident and problem management

Streamlining ticketing and service restoration processes

9.7
Avg 8.1

ITSM asset management

Managing all IT assets and enforcing policy rules

9.8
Avg 8.2

Change management

Ensuring standardized processes for making changes to IT infrastructure

9.9
Avg 8.4
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Product Details

What is Cherwell Service Management?

Cherwell Service Management is designed for organizations seeking large reductions in software license spending, IT overhead, and software audit risk. By integrating all the data related to hardware and software inventory, application usage, license entitlements, and IT purchases, users can track and manage IT investments from purchase to retirement and abandon Excel spreadsheets.

Cherwell Service Management Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Cherwell Software was founded by the former CEO of FrontRage Solutions and is a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud.

ServiceNow IT Service Management, IFS Assyst, and CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager are common alternatives for Cherwell Service Management.

Reviewers rate Organize and prioritize service tickets highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Cherwell Service Management are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(107)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Cherwell is a versatile IT service management tool that has been widely adopted by various organizations across industries. Users have reported positive experiences with the software, citing its customizable GUI and flexible reporting capabilities. One of the key use cases of Cherwell is in the realm of ITSM and ITIL initiatives. It is utilized for incident management, problem management, change management, configuration item management, and knowledge management. The software helps organizations streamline their IT processes and improve service delivery by providing a centralized platform for managing tickets, tracking incidents and problems, and facilitating knowledge sharing among team members.

Additionally, Cherwell extends beyond ITSM to address other organizational needs. It is used as a ticketing system for various departments such as HR, facilities, and IT support. Users leverage Cherwell to handle service requests, facilities management tasks, new hire requests, and even training participation tracking. The software's highly customizable nature allows it to be adapted to different workflows and business processes, making it a valuable tool in areas beyond traditional IT functions.

Another notable use case of Cherwell is its role in improving communication and collaboration within organizations. Users have highlighted how Cherwell serves as a central tracking system for IT issues, replacing inefficient methods like email-based work assignment. By providing real-time tracking and metrics, Cherwell enhances accountability and promotes institutional collaboration among different departments.

Overall, Cherwell's ease of use and wide range of applications have made it an essential tool for organizations seeking effective IT service management, streamlined workflows, improved communication, and high-quality customer service across various departments.

Extensive Customization Options: Many users have praised Cherwell's extensive customization options, allowing them to personalize dashboards and move touch points according to their preferences. This flexibility has been appreciated by several reviewers who value the ability to tailor the system to their specific needs.

Efficient Automation Capabilities: Several users have highlighted Cherwell's automation capabilities, mentioning that it has allowed them to automate various tasks in their support department. From ticket creation and classification to responding with specific attachments, this automation feature has helped eliminate wasted time and improve overall efficiency.

Easy Configuration Process: Numerous users have mentioned that Cherwell's configuration process is easy to navigate without requiring expensive consultants for every adjustment. They appreciate being able to make minor as well as major enhancements on their own, giving them more control over the system's configuration.

Web and Mobile App Issues: Users have reported various issues with the web client and mobile app, including frequent locking up and clunkiness. These problems significantly hinder their workflow and productivity.

Lack of Apple Client: In environments that use a mix of Windows and Apple devices, some users have experienced difficulties due to the lack of an Apple client. This absence creates compatibility challenges and limits their ability to effectively utilize the software.

Issues with Active Directory Integration: The built-in remote control capabilities on tickets do not work well with active directory, causing problems for users. This issue disrupts their ability to efficiently manage tickets and collaborate with other team members.

Users commonly recommend the following when using Cherwell:

  1. Utilize all the available features, such as workflows and customizations, to increase productivity and resolve IT and system-related issues effectively.

  2. Take time for proper implementation and customization by conducting a hands-on proof of concept (POC) to understand customization needs, considering the implementation process and ease of system configuration, and allowing enough time for implementation and user acceptance testing (UAT).

  3. Seek support from the Cherwell community by attending user groups and seeking guidance during the implementation process.

Overall, users recommend fully utilizing Cherwell's features, dedicating sufficient time for implementation, customization, and training, and seeking advice from the Cherwell community for successful use of the software.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-23 of 23)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell is used at our company for not only the IT department, but HR, Marketing, Facilities, and other teams to support our users in the different departments.
  • Highly customizable
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to obtain stats and metrics
  • Quicker turnaround on upgrades and bug fixes
  • Needs a better web version
  • Performance on hosted versions
Cherwell is the best ITSM platform in the market. It's unfortunate that Ivanti is stripping it for parts for their Neurons toolset and the going to sunset it.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Cherwell Service Management as a plattform to manage our ~4,500 tickets per month for all our IT service management related processes as well as some non-IT processes. Based on ITIL v3, we have implemented mature processes for all relevant ITIL processes, including Incident Management, Request Management (including RfC), Change Management, Problem Management, Service Level Management, to name just a few. Having approximately 350 active supporters who are supporting around 9,000 active end-users and managing ~30,000 configuration items. Our ITSM processes are linked to some non-IT processes such as a billing and sales as well as HR. We have been using Cherwell Service Management with a complete custom implementation since 2016. A team of 2–4 developers is implementing everything in-house.
  • Allows us to implement our workflows with low-code approach, so that you do not need true developers (writing code) but only tech-savvy process designers
  • Excellent flexibility in the plattform to implement whatever topic we require
  • Very good licensing model (easy to comprehend + manage)
  • Bad web components: web portal and browser client are not up-to-date with modern web technologies
  • Large “codebases” become very hard to refactor after growing to a certain size
  • The promise of zero-hassle upgrades has not worked once for us over the years (it’s still okay, though)
Especially for companies looking to implement their processes in-house with a small team of tech-savvy people, this can be a real asset. Use it if you have already bought it. I would not start using CSM at this point in time, though, since Ivanti is actively pushing customers towards the new Neurons for ITSM platform.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cherwell Service Management as an enterprise service management solution - where our IT department is actually NOT the largest consumer of the tool! We have branched out from the typical ITSM processes in Cherwell to use it for managing new store openings, DC safety incidents, and numerous finance-related workflows unique to our organization. We are able to consolidate more and more of our organizational functions within a single pane of glass, which is precisely the reason (and one of the many benefits) of purchasing Cherwell.
  • Workflow Management
  • Automation
  • Integrations
  • No-code/low-code content development
  • Flexibility to use on multiple operating systems
  • Updated web UI/UX
  • Standardized form creation
  • Improved machine learning
  • Built-in AI chat bot
Cherwell is a well-rounded product that can really be utilized as far as one's imagination can stretch. I've used the product in both a corporate and medical environment, where the tool was used for vastly different reasons (i.e., ITSM, business & retail functions, vs hospital orderlies & medical equipment tracking in a CMDB, etc.). Cherwell is so versatile that you can really use it to develop any workflow or process that is unique to your line of business - there are more than enough functions and tools available within Cherwell to effectively manage any enterprise solution your organization needs. The major drawback of flexibility is supportability. Given that you can essentially develop anything you want (content-wise) in Cherwell, it can quickly become highly complex and difficult to support by anyone other than the original developer. Documentation is key (F-spec & T-spec especially!) when developing larger solutions in Cherwell.
Glenn Crooks | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell service manager assists us with automating all of our business processes. This assists us with processes outside of ITSM and Beyond ITSM. The ease of use of the product makes solution design and development a breeze. I can do everything from cradle to grave from designing to reporting on the processes that have been built.
  • Automation of Business Processes
  • Dashboard
  • ITSM
  • Business Intelligence (Reporting)
  • Web interface
  • UI / UX
I am very happy overall with Cherwell Service Management. It helps me as a solution architect to solve any business problems that are presented to me. The only issue was the reporting as it is very resource heavy and difficult to develop. That is the most time-consuming portion of the overall solution.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The business uses it for Incident, Request, and Problem Management. They use it for the CMDB, service catalog, and customer portal. We have built API integrations with other applications and receive imports from multiple sources to update our CMDB. The client is used by various departments including those outside of IT.
  • Automation
  • API Integrations
  • Customization
  • Customer Service
  • Modern UI
  • Adaptive Forms
Cherwell Service Management is best suited for medium to large companies in my opinion. The out of the box options are extensive and I believe a smaller company would not be able to fully utilize what is available. Having one or more full time employees who work to develop within the Cherwell platform is important. Cherwell's strength's are in its ability to be customized to meet your organization's needs.
Steve Clime | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our IT department had no Incident Management system until July of 2020. Everything was done on white boards, note pads, and spreadsheets. No real collaboration between the help desk and other departments like systems administration, networking, security, programming.

Implemented Cherwell to begin tracking and managing Incidents for our retail support team and 130 mid-west grocery stores. Have since expanded to managing assets (endpoints, mobile devices, network hardware, servers). CMDB's are configured for all teams with some automation.
Worked with a third party to implement a contract/license management system to track all IT based service contracts, Microsoft licenses, etc.
Converted our old change management system to Cherwell in summer of 2022 and streamlined the process with automated approvals and calendar entries. Service Management metrics have helped identify problematic areas where training can be applied to end users.

The only real negative is the current administrative console is client based not web. When Ivanti rolls out the converged platform with Neurons, I will be glad as the interface will be HTML5 and easier to use.

  • Incident and Problem Management
  • CMDB endpoint tracking
  • Change Mangement
  • Automation with one-steps
  • Administration Console is legacy
  • Self Service Portal hard to set up without outside assistance
  • Integrations with external applications like SCCM, VMware, AD
Well suited in an IT environment where you have limited staff. It can be managed by one administrator.
Reliability of the SaaS environment has been excellent.
Flexibility in developing automated workflows to open, manage, and close Incidents.
Change Management due to ability to modify OOB to meet the needs of our staff.
Contract Management allowing us to be notified when a contract or license is up for renewal and setting reminders.
Integrations are not easy to create and manage.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell Service Management is the solution if you are looking for a user-friendly ITSM tool. We use it for service requests/incidents, change, and problem management. The GUI is user-friendly and is easy to modify as per the company requirements. Data stored, can be extracted in all forms of reports and dashboards in order to showcase the trends for the last few months.
  • Logging Tickets.
  • Creating Dashboards.
  • Knowledge Database.
  • Analytical Reports.
  • Reporting Charts can be better.
  • Web portal has issues in seeing journals which is better in Cherwell client.
  • Web portal and Client should have same features.
It is best suited for companies day to day ITSM needs. It is user-friendly and modifications in the tool are much easier as compared to others in the market. Also, it is cost-effective.
Megan Hartz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Cherwell Service Management for our main IT workflows including Incident, Service Request, Customer Self-Service, Change Management, and Asset Management. In addition, IT supports the use of Cherwell for Enterprise Service Management in core functions like HR, Finance, and Student for service desks and customer self-service. Finally, Cherwell is used as a business process engine for a variety of unique workflows that support all the areas already mentioned but also research services, auxiliary services, and healthcare customer service. We use Cherwell in many situations where the business function needs a quick turnaround on digitizing a workflow, setting up a business unit for service ticketing, or the business function is so unique that a custom application is required.
  • Low code solution development for business processes
  • Fantastic customer support and customer community
  • Exceptional value for the price
  • Highly usable out of the box for traditional ITIL processes
  • Cherwell lacks modern UI capabilities such as responsive forms and CSS styling for web portals.
  • Built-in reporting engine is hard to use and resource intensive to run.
  • No patching model for small platform fixes, must upgrade to receive platform code changes.
Cherwell [Service Management] is the perfect tool for any organization big or small that needs a solution to handle inter-departmental and customer facing business processes and services. Cherwell offers a complete suite of tools that allow you to maintain a robust service catalog, publicize those services through a web portal, and gives your end users a way to engage with self-help and self-service. In addition, Cherwell's low code architecture makes configuration and customization a breeze without a concern of rendering the system unusable and un-upgradeable. Cherwell is designed for change and we find that we are able to easily manage ever changing workflows with ease. If you are a small organization, you can set up and maintain Cherwell with minimal staff. If you are a large organization with complex business needs, you can leverage Cherwell to solve a wide variety of business problems rapidly.
July 21, 2021

Cherwell Review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell is used extensively throughout the organization so that users can log service requests for Human Resources. For the Information Technology department, it is used for service delivery and asset management.
It is able to direct requests that are made to the correct team and manage massive inventories of stock with most of this being done without the need for any programming skills.
  • Service requests.
  • Incident management.
  • Process scheduling is fiddly.
  • Word wrapping during text entry sometimes does not happen properly. You need to pop out the text box to see it properly.
Managing stock is great. We control the whole asset life cycle with Cherwell. Complex automation is possible by combining PowerShell and one step, although a fair degree of expertise is required to do this. For instance, our HR system will now create user accounts in Active Directory and applies the correct privileges. It will so expire the accounts when a member of staff leaves the organization. The person's equipment will be delivered to the correct location with the appropriate tickets sent to correct teams to facilitate this.
July 20, 2021

Cherwell - ITSM

Keene Marin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Wisconsin DNR uses Cherwell as an Agency underneath the primary organization - the Wisconsin DOA. It is used throughout enterprise IT, but implemented only in that capacity, and is not used by all technology support groups within the DNR. We are striving to get to full usage of all available implemented features, but are not quite there yet.
  • Automated workflows are done very well. There is a broad and configurable set of automations available, which allow for effective incident routing.
  • Reporting is very flexible with all the options available, dashboards and graphing in an automated manner can be an effective delivery or ITIL reports.
  • Web based clients allow for some good basic functionality, which are good for customers, or end users.
  • Within our deployment model of Cherwell, there are core functional pieces that have to be configured at the top level, rather than the sub levels, which make some areas difficult to manage. For example, if one agency wants to use feature x in one way, but another agency wants to configure the same feature in a different way, then consensus has to be gained first. Its not as fully flexible in the base configuration space as would be ideal.
  • Automated email processes, especially in the volumes that the State of Wisconsin goes through require some tweaking to allow them to fire in an effective way. We sometimes see problems with backlogs of these.
  • Licensing based on concurrency and usage is a very modern approach, however, it leads to challenges in how customers use it. For example, we have automated log-off's in place for the local clients in order to manage our own usage, to maintain reasonable costs.
Change Management approval processing is a good example. Cherwell, as an ITSM tool, is effective at executing the different change configurations, and requiring distinct approvals to proceed forwards.
David Crawford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Cherwell as our central IT ticket tracking system across the entire university. It was also used in a minor setting to track room usage by some departments, but its main function was IT ticket submission. We had several positions (help desk phone calls, lab technicians, etc) that used Cherwell portals we designed to submit issues only, and these issues would escalate where appropriate to other departments like ours.

Cherwell addressed the void we had of not having a central tracking system for IT issues. We used to only use emails for work assignment and tracking for all faculty and student IT problems. This was meant to replace that entirely.
  • After proper training on setting up the views and servers, Cherwell did a good job separating various department ownership of tickets. Our work views weren't cluttered with irrelevant information.
  • There is a lot of information that can be embedded into tickets. Such as sub-task assignments that could contain almost the same information as a ticket itself. Lot of customization options.
  • Custom personal dashboards were nice, once I figured out how to do it. Not everyone wants to see things the same way as other people, and being able to move touch points where you want is always a plus.
  • While I understand that a lot of customization can be up to an organization, the platform was always a huge pain when going beyond the installed client. The web client and mobile app were very problematic and clunky, locked up frequently.
  • My university was 50% Windows/50% Apple, and there's no Apple client.
  • The built in remote control capabilities on tickets for client machines didn't play well with our active directory. We always just used a different program.
  • Error handling could have been much better. Accidentally assigning ticket items to "non-existent" resources could crash the client. Such as if the resource was removed before a worker's view was refreshed.
  • Tickets can go into limbo very easily, and seemed to require more development than it should to protect us from doing that. This is because there's a lot of different ways to do the same thing. Too many touch points all over the place in the UI.
  • Too many ticket priority options. Clients could be assigned personal higher priorities through VIP status, tickets could be given their own priorities that conflict with client status, and SLA deadlines could assign other conflicting priorities. There were more but these were the most problematic if you're using Cherwell in a situation where you have limited developer time to nail down all the inconsistencies every day.
  • There was an arbitrary time tracking feature on tickets that attempted to gather data on how long certain resources took, but because the UI was very cumbersome this was more of a pain to do and was very inaccurate of the actual work it takes to do certain things.
Well suited if you have people dedicated to developing the views and back-end C# client, and if you work in a more silo type environment.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Cherwell is the framework for the ITSM/ITIL initiative in the organization. It's being used a the system for Incident, Problem, Change management and it is expanding as the Configuration Item and Knowledge management.
  • Incident Management.
  • Change Management.
  • Integrating with other systems.
  • Web front end.
  • Unified client.
  • Support for web technologies.
It is well suited for the Customer Service Portal and Customer Service Fulfillment along with Change Management. The framework allows you easily to grow out of IT.
Richie Ritter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell Service Management is used as our ITSM tool to support clients of the Division of IT. We utilize Cherwell for may functions including Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Knowledge, and CMDB. Over the years we have continually expanded the use to cover new organizational needs.
  • Customization: Cherwell allows us to create custom solutions that address the specific challenges we face. From a very simple "feedback" form with a single text field to a more complex process with approvals allowing users to update information about their Configuration Items.
  • Integration: We pull data into the Cherwell system through various sources and different methods. We might use API calls to a web application to retrieve data, or directly connect to a database.
  • Cherwell currently has a sort of split system with an "Application" on one side and "Content" on the other. This is one of the greatest strengths because it enables deep customization to the "Content" while allowing new features and upgrades to the "Application" without causing disruption. Over the years, Cherwell has added great improvements to the Out-of-the-Box "Content" and the "Application" and while you can easily upgrade the "Application" side to gain the new features it provides, upgrading the "Content" is a much bigger challenge. Cherwell is very aware of this challenge, and is working to solve it, but the more you customize your "Content" the more difficult it is to pull in new features.
Cherwell is great for logic and process-based situations where you want "X" to occur when "Y" happens to "Z".
Voncia Molock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Cherwell is helping us to implement several ITIL processes and improve our service delivery. Our vision is to look beyond IT service management and expand and explore Enterprise Service Management and use this tool as a central hub for all staff to come for help for the various service our organization provides.
  • Capturing all of the activities involved in managing incidents in an easy to navigate way.
  • The ability to link incidents, problem and change requests to configuration items in the CMDB.
  • On steps to automate various business processes to eliminate manual processes.
  • Ease of upgrades and content.
  • Report writing.
  • Dashboard creation.
I like the ability to segregate high sensitive data from the general database, especially for meeting federal regulatory requirements.
October 01, 2019

Cherwell Rocks!

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Cherwell is being used by our managed services department to assist with our several practices (intel, Power I-series, Power AIX, networking, Converged (Compute)).

Our management accesses it here and there for KPI and other important metrics. We also create customized customer dashboards for use on the self-service portal. Beyond that, we also generate ticket reports for our SDMs and other customer relations employees.
  • Incident Management
  • Change Management
  • Problem Management
  • The Web UI
  • Overall UIX
  • CMDB
Well-suited:
To provide solid incident management between your service desk and customers.
To provide Change management to assist executives and overall business up-time. Help detect change collision while looking at scheduled change times and CIs upstream/downstream.

Less appropriate:
The overall reporting features are very non-user-friendly and it can be a bit of a pain to actually get the data out that you're looking for.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell Service Management is being used as an ITSM platform for the management of the incident, change, problem, knowledge, and CMDB. It is being used by IT only to support the rest of the organization and outside customers. Its key strength is its capabilities for multi-tenant, concurrent license, automation, and integration with other platforms. It acts as a one-stop-shop for all ITSM functions.
  • Customization: Cherwell is a platform, so it can be built to do anything you can think of. However, you will require significant development resources.
  • Automation: there are vast capabilities for automation and integration with other platforms. Of course, significant DevOps capabilities are required.
  • Unlike some other ITSM tools, it has everything, such as knowledgebase, project management, CMDB, and integrations.
  • Cherwell is slow. Very very slow. This is somewhat understandable because it is a very complex tool and a lot of things are happening in the tool, but it still needs to be a lot faster. It takes over 7 seconds to load an incident. The web client is faster, but it doesn't have all the features of the rich client (installs locally).
  • Absolutely terrible UI: there's a left search pane, a right search pane, and a whole bunch of tabs at the bottom. What you get in the end is a screen that is divided into many small sections, and each section has large contents inside them so that you have to scroll left/right and up/down for many of them. It's the worst UI I have ever seen. Now add this to the slow speed mentioned earlier, and all your users hate it.
Cherwell is extremely powerful and cost-effective, thanks to its rich feature set. It can also be said that support from the vendor is also great. This makes it suitable for a very large and multi-tenant environment that requires a lot of customization, automation, and integration. This assumes that you have a lot of smarts and talent to develop and administer the tool.
February 15, 2017

Great Process Builder

Michael J Mandeville | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell is used by the Information Technology department at Calvin College as our Information Technology Service Management tool. At this point, Calvin Information Technology is the sole user of the software, but there are plans to expand the usage across the organization in the future. Cherwell replaced our outdated solution we had been using that was hampering our communication and causing many process mis-steps.
  • Offers a great ITIL framework out of the box
  • Allows for a lot of customization and hooks into other software
  • Sets up an out-of-the-box process for a ticket lifecycle if you don't have a process already set
  • Creating and running reports is ridiculously, impossibly complex and complicated
  • The product is so open-ended it's almost too broad. We have ended up creating a lot of in-house customizations to the product that would have been nice to have out of the box.
  • Dashboards are great to have but they are awful in implementation. They are not dynamic and act more like a Bitmap file made in Windows 95 Microsoft Paint than a dynamic webpage. It would be nice if Dashboards were dynamic and were more like HTML or a web-based platform. It doesn't make sense why web design products like WIX exist yet the dashboards are needlessly complicated and have static image borders, sizes, etc.
I would say Cherwell is best suited to an organization that needs to create a process for taking in and bringing work tickets through a process that has struggled with implementing a process. Cherwell can be bent to an existing process, but it's going to take a lot of customization and work. Cherwell works best if you adapt to its out-of-the-box process, which may be difficult if you already are working within a set standard of procedures and process and Ticket lifecycle.
Evan Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[We are] currently utilizing Cherwell primarily as a ticketing/ticket tracking system with some minor asset management roles tied into it. It is being used by the IT department as a whole across our entire organization. It helps to ensure prompt response times and accountability among IT employees that are assigned particular issues.
  • Ticket Handling and routing. Being a larger organization getting tickets routed to the proper internal groups to resolve is key.
  • Maintaining level of service. Without any ticketing system we would be hard pressed to keep track independently of issues/calls/emails received.
  • Asset management. Utilizing a web link to inventory new equipment assignments aids in troubleshooting with users as the equipment is bound to their userid. So when a ticket is generated for their ID a snapshot of what equipment they have and possibly are calling about is presented.
  • The interface is somewhat clunky to navigate and at times finding where things are located takes some time.
  • If you are idle too long in the application it will constantly pop up a message that you have been logged out due to inactivity but you cannot then close the application without having to end the task from the task manager in Windows.
If you are a single consolidated IT group it will excel for you as a ticketing system. The asset management portion could be a little more robust, but again this could be in relation to the interface of the product/version we are using. If you are a decentralized IT group then another platform may be better suited.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently Cherwell is being used just in the service desk. This has greatly improved the effectiveness of the service in handling incidents and outages. Several other teams are starting to look at the project tracking portion of Cherwell. We aim to get all of infrastructure using this tool.
  • Incident management is clear and easy to use. The business specific changes that were made, were easy to complete.
  • A great web portal.
  • Updates push out upon logging into the client.
  • Problem management text messaging reports are not great.
  • I wish Cherwell had more Mapps.
Any service desk would benefit from Cherwell. Any business that is looking for a tool that will support many teams' IT or not, would benefit from Cherwell. If a company already had several tools in place across many teams, it could be difficult to completely implement this across the business.
Kevan Welsh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cherwell for Incident, Problem, Knowledge, and Project management, as well as as for our HR and Facilities teams. It keeps everyone in sync with all of the compartments of IT, HR, and Facilities, tracks anything we can think of, and allows for flexible reporting to leadership as whenever necessary.
  • Blueprints and One-Steps all for maximum flexibility and endless possibilities. Password resets, account onboarding/offboarding automation, self-service portal, and many many more.
  • Form building allows virtually endless possibilities for capturing data from end users or technicians alike. Publish them in the client, the web client, or the portal and help gather requirements from the beginning to ensure efficient use of resources.
  • Report building is very easy and configurable. Build customer variables, charts, graphs, matrices, and more without having to know any coding languages.
  • The performance of the system seems process heavy. Often takes a while to load specific screens.
  • Out of the box features on upgrades seem inconsistent on when and where they are applied for fear of overwriting previous custom work done in the system.
  • Organization of one-steps could use some work. Certain folders can only be accessed from particular regions of the orange or blue pills.
Cherwell can be built for literally anything. I can't think of a single area it wouldn't make sense. It is built on top of a data driven infrastructure that is highly configurable and can meet the needs of anything you can think of. Tracking phone calls, ordering of services, and reporting out all of those metrics are easy.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cherwell Service Management for enterprise IT Service Management. We are currently using Incident, Change, Problem and CMDB. We are in the process of implementing Purchasing and Asset Management.
  • Single platform that is easily managed.
  • Customer service and support is outstanding.
  • Continuous improvement of the product - new features (which are frequently customer driven) are added regularly at no additional cost.
  • Very easy to learn for users, administrators and developers.
  • Licensing model is simple and flexible - can implement perpetual and subscription in one instance. Migrate from SaaS to on premises or third party cloud with little effort and at low to no cost.
  • Database is not overly normalized. Very easy to understand and query.
  • Documentation is improving but is still incomplete.
  • "Codeless" architecture is great and easy to learn but it would be nice to have the a "power user" interface option to allow writing of things like expressions rather than click through drop downs.
  • Web UI is a bit slow and still not on par with the features of the client application.

Cherwell is a great choice for all organizations looking for an IT Service Management solution. It can scale to any size organization and training and support is great for those just getting started with ITIL-focused support.

For organizations seeking a platform that provides extensive capabilities beyond IT Service Management there may be better choices.

Tim Westen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using Cherwell Service Management for our ITSM process across all of our various business units. We have implemented the following ITIL processes, Incident/Request, Change, Problem, Service Catalog, CMDB (asset management) and an IT Equipment Requisition process at an enterprise level. We have started to roll out IT Project Management and are in the process of defining additional requirements for SLAs. We have approx. 480 technicians using the application to manage their work at various levels based on business unit.
  • The codeless configuration of Cherwell has been able to meet all of our demanding business needs. From data integration to complex process workflows we can respond and deliver the added value our business needs.
  • Cherwell does offer a great customer experience. There has not been one occasion when I have not been impressed with their commitment to the customers experience.
  • The development tools are robust and the time to develop had drastically been reduced from previous tools sets, this allows us to focus on gathering solid requirements for iterative changes rather than lengthy development cycles.
  • Our solution can be managed and grow with limited number of resources available. We continue to expand and grow as out business requires while maintaining 2 FTE.
  • Cherwell is in the process of balancing the speed to market of functionality and robust testing of those releases. We have come across a couple of issues in a particular release that have caused us issues that required configuration of workarounds or us having to skip the release until the function is resolved.
  • The web client for technician use still is not in par with the rich client. Cherwell has made the commitment to develop web first but the client parity of the rich and web clients is still not there.
  • The ability to be able to Select multiple rows from a result list and then run an action (one step) on them would be a huge win for my environment. Right now you can run a query and run an action against all returned results but it is dependent on the query results, which can be difficult to narrow enough for the general user.
Cherwell is great at the basic ITSM/ITIL processes and transactional type ticketing that occurs within CSM or Facilities management. We would like to utilize the tool more for Project management within IT and start to promote it beyond but the out of the box module is not robust enough to be solely used. Integration with specialized tools is the current method and is acceptable.
February 04, 2015

Cherwell Changed my Life

Denise Naylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cherwell is being used by 170+ teams, and 1,700+ technicians across the organization for Incident/Request Management. Incident/Request Management is being used by business areas such as Client Relations, Human Resources, Facilities, and Information Technology, to name a few. In addition, some affiliated sister companies are using Cherwell Incident/Request Management as well.
The business problem being addressed by using Incident/Request Management is to provide tracking, metrics/reporting, and accountability. Teams within the organization have been transitioning from using a team mailbox in Outlook to using Cherwell to manage requests which provides real time tracking and metrics at a glance.
Cherwell is able to provide a customized "dashboard" view that provides teams and business leaders with an easy to read, high level overview of key items which are definable on a team by team basis.
Problem Management is being utilized by the Information Technology team.
Change Management is currently under configuration and is anticipated to be implemented within the next few months.
  • Metrics/Tracking
  • Providing a real time, high level overview via the Dashboard
  • Friendly User Interface
  • Customer Service response time
  • Bugs - simple functionality that worked prior to a new release sometimes don't work after the release
Specifics scenarios where Cherwell is well suited is for Incident/Request management when multiple team members are fielding multiple requests from multiple sources. Another scenario where Cherwell is well suited is when metrics/reporting are required, as well as automated tracking/accountability. Cherwell would be less appropriate to track requests where an individual employee is fielding the requests.

Key questions to ask during the selection process are:
  • What is the issue being solved for?
  • What is the current process?
  • What is the desired outcome?
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