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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

View all 13 features
  • 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)
    9.5
    95%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

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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Alternatives Pricing

What is ServiceNow IT Service Management?

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 Microsoft System Center?

Microsoft System Center Suite is a family of IT management software for network monitoring, updating and patching, endpoint protection with anti-malware, data protection and backup, ITIL- structured IT service management, remote administration and more. It is available in two editions: standard…

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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 8.2

ITSM asset management

Managing all IT assets and enforcing policy rules

9.7
Avg 8.2

Change management

Ensuring standardized processes for making changes to IT infrastructure

9.8
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

(1-25 of 56)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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)
Steve Clime | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Megan Hartz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Rand Habegger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Consistent, timely notifications of status changes with a request or ticket.
  • Logical workflows can be be customized to guide the user through a specific request or ticket submission.
  • Fairly modern UI (though not entirely consistent throughout the product).
  • Difficult to find the right category of request or ticket type (possibly more of an internal or setup issue than with the platform itself).
  • Lack of a clear menu structure (Again, possibly a setup issue).
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It has a lot of flexibility in terms of dashboard customization.
  • You can customize ticket workflows to send them to particular teams in order.
  • Effective use of metrics to make sure you are hitting your deadlines.
  • It isn't the best looking application overall.
  • It can be finicky when it comes to customization. You have to spend some time to get the results you are looking for.
  • Some of the navigation can be a bit confusing, using search function can sometimes be more difficult due to the level of granularity they want.
July 21, 2021

Cherwell Review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Manages all issues and changes in one place..
  • Great job of tracking and time management to resolution.
  • Allows managers to quickly and easily see what is assigned to all members of their team and who's responsible for what.
  • The user interface could definitely use some improvement.
  • Lacks areas for descriptions of what teams handle which problems.
July 20, 2021

Cherwell - ITSM

Keene Marin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
David Crawford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
April 29, 2021

Cherwell Service Desk

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • We are able to help parents at home thru the remote help feature.
  • Ticket creation is simple.
  • It can be a complicated interface for the technician.
  • Updating and logged information can be done in a number of places so training is important.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Allows users to submit structured and clear service request or incident report tickets.
  • Easy to see all updates and track work done on the ticket.
  • Slow overall performance.
  • Not all search parameters available in dashboard creation option.
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