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Cherwell is a versatile IT service management tool that has been widely adopted by various organizations across industries. Users have …
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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Popular Features
- Organize and prioritize service tickets (52)10.0100%
- Self-service tools (51)9.898%
- ITSM reports and dashboards (51)9.797%
- ITSM collaboration and documentation (48)9.696%
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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.
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- No setup fee
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- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details
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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 Competitors
Cherwell Service Management Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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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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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
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- Recommendations
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:
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Utilize all the available features, such as workflows and customizations, to increase productivity and resolve IT and system-related issues effectively.
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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).
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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
(26-50 of 56)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 07, 2019
Cherwell is the best value for your investment
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Incident Management.
- Change Management.
- Integrating with other systems.
- Web front end.
- Unified client.
- Support for web technologies.
October 07, 2019
Overall, a really good product
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Standard Change Templates - importing existing templates is quite easy, and nominating new Normal changes into a template is a great easy process as well.
- Saved searches - When the reports don't quite give you what you need, searches are wonderful! Using the search function also gives a better depth of knowledge into what fields belong to which places in the database.
- Support requests - this has been a great way for our IT guys to resolve "customer" issues quickly and in some semblance of order.
- Back-end workflows need to speed up. Some of them seem very slow.
- Aesthetics - viewing on some of the dashboards cuts the words off, which makes it difficult to use those graphs for reporting purposes.
- I don't really have a third option - I haven't used the software quite that long yet.
October 03, 2019
Cherwell is a powerful and highly customizable ITSM solution
- 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.
October 03, 2019
Cherwell a powerful and scalable ITSM solution
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Ease of development.
- High level of customization.
- Great training platform.
- Ease of implementation.
- Some system performance and stability issues need to be addressed.
October 02, 2019
Cherwell is a mature, complete ITSM solution ... that can do WAY more than just ITSM
- Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket.
- Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add.
- Cherwell's sales staff could use some improvement in the "paying attention to the little guy" area. It's true that sales people are focused on their larger potential commissions, and that is understandable, but as a small business, we were treated less than well by our Cherwell salesman. I would go so far as to say that he neglected us after we made the purchase and had a very serious complaint about what he sold us. We were sold a product without any implementation plan or package. I found out that we were probably the only customer that had this happen, but I wanted to mention t because it was huge headache to implement the product without any implementation help from the vendor.
- I think Cherwell could do a better job of keeping their USA-based hosted server farm in better working order. Their infrastructure maintenance is improving and it doesn't affect Cherwell customers that host their own on-prem Cherwell servers, but for a long while they had a lot of failures at their on-demand server farm in Denver where they host instance for the US market. We would show up in the morning and our help desk technicians couldn't login for a couple of hours. They got these issues resolved quickly enough I suppose, within a few hours. And they did upgrade their Denver datacenter about a year ago and done better at maintaining it. But we literally can't do our jobs without Cherwell working as it s our primary help desk and end-user management tool.
October 02, 2019
Cherwell Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Customization - if you can think it (and have time to develop it) you can do it.
- Good ITSM solution OOTB and can be implemented quickly for most common needs.
- Good user group and customer engagement.
- Mobile app.
- Responsive design/ADA.
- Calling customer support.
October 01, 2019
Cherwell Rocks!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Incident Management
- Change Management
- Problem Management
- The Web UI
- Overall UIX
- CMDB
July 21, 2019
Cherwell: Powerful, but slow and clunky.
- 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.
November 28, 2018
Cherwell-A useful ticketing system
- Allow a ticket to be put on pending when it can't be resolved within the SLA
- Create a task for when another technician needs to assist with the ticket, for something out
- Allow you to email customers through portal without giving your personal email out
- Sometimes comments made on a ticket do not generate emails to the technician who owns it, and they will not know there is an update from the customer without checking it
- Sometimes I will see an error pop up when copying text but it can easily be closed
- Sometimes the time-out window for staying logged in does not appear on top of other applications so I will not know it's logging me out
October 18, 2018
Product meets basic needs.
- I really like that when repetitive requests come in we can create a problem ticket and then communicate with all requesters under one incident.
- I like the flexibility in being able to add journal notes, assign tasks and one having one place to look for all information on a project. It's simple but I like that we can attach documents.
- I would like to see more project management aspects incorporated. The ability to track progress on a timeline/graph. We've customized a template for office moves but are limited in the number of steps it will track before I need to add another incident.
- I want the contact information to be more robust so that multiple people can be added to an incident and e-mailed at once instead of having to type in names in emails over and over again.
- Resolution description is buried in the e-mail template that we send.
July 09, 2018
Ease of Ticket Tracking
- Ticket Tracking
- Asset Management
- Communication between IT Groups
- Sometimes it can be slow
- The search function can be confusing
- Editing of email templates is not easily apparent
November 29, 2017
Complicated and not intuitive, but largely reduces workload
- Cherwell's ticketing system does a great job of following a designated workflow. Consistency is important for any organization.
- Cherwell allows for customized workspaces, so a user can see the things that are relevant to them. This cuts down on time it would take to sort through tickets in order to find what is relevant to a particular user.
- Cherwell would often crash, both on logging in or in the middle of entering a ticket. This was extremely difficult and time-consuming on my end.
- While it was possible to customize a workspace, the method for doing so was not intuitive.
- There was not a large help or training source to draw from in order to better oneself at Cherwell.
November 09, 2017
Well Supported
- Easy for users to create a help desk ticket for support, and receive automated progress updates.
- Easy for support staff to consolidate all open tickets, both by site as well as by issue type to identify incidents that could be related across multiple locations.
- Well integrated with Active Directory services.
- Cherwell offers more functionality than we are currently taking advantage of, which sometimes makes the support interface appear bloated.
September 12, 2017
Cherwell Service Management
- The Cherwell application has multiple processes to supply the requested information and the resolved information.
- Time Tracking is added, the cost can then be submitted to the hospital.
- Documentation can also be uploaded within the assigned ticket, to supply information to other tasked resources.
- The application is very good.
- This weekend the current version was upgraded.
- Senior management can supply full information of the time tracking with the associated ticket numbers.
March 29, 2017
A user's perceptive of Cherwell
- Simple once configured
- Many possibilities for data
- Easy for users
- Very resource intensive
- Can be overwhelming at first
- Reporting can be a bit wonky at times
February 15, 2017
Great Process Builder
- 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.
February 08, 2017
Best Help Desk System for the Money around!
- The dashboards are amazing.
- It is easily configured to meet your needs.
- The reporting/searching capability is easy to use and available to all users.
- The Service Catalog in the Customer Portal is not very user-friendly.
- The method of making configuration changes and migrating them to production is single threaded sometimes, makes it hard to make several changes at once.
February 07, 2017
A no-frills ticketing system
- 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.
February 06, 2017
Cherwell in our service desk.
- 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.
February 03, 2017
Cherwell Service Management is right for you!
- One-Steps are easy to create use and save so much time!
- We used majority out-of-the-box Cherwell features, and didn't need to spend time developing it ourselves.
- Because Cherwell has so many out-of-the-box tools, some development options are limited to what is already provided
February 03, 2017
Cherwell's product innovation is unmatched.
- 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.
February 03, 2017
I don't Code, I Cherwell
- Configuration is easy and doesn't require expensive consultants to do every little thing you need to adjust. I'm able to make minor and even major enhancements by myself. I find the development UI mostly intuitive.
- The amount of things we can automate in our Support department using Cherwell is wonderful. We've not yet taken full advantage of this but are excited at the possibilities. From automatically creating and classifying tickets to responding to customers with specific attachments they need, Cherwell is going to help us eliminate wasted time.
- Designing with Blueprints is an intelligent and efficient way to add new functionality to your Cherwell instance without all of the risk. Rollback files make it easy to "undo" any mistakes. This also allows you to develop in one environment and apply your Blueprints to the Production environment once fully tested.
- During my time working on the Cherwell implementation and subsequent modifications, I've noticed some 'out of the box bugs' that I'd like to see corrected in future versions of Cherwell. Some are simple oversights. Examples include leaving the Last Name out of the default Grid for the Customer table and some issues with the SLA date fields being set correctly in some cases.
- Cherwell really needs a distributed data center model so global customers can run a single SaaS instance and whose remote teams can connect to their nearest Cherwell server. Our teams in France and the USA currently connect to one Cherwell server in the UK and the performance/latency for our folks furthest away from the server could be better.
- The documentation could certainly be expanded upon. It does a good job explaining what everything is but doesn't go into enough detail to help you understand how to use it. Examples could be included at the bottom to help readers understand the content and how to apply it.
October 03, 2016
Cherwell, track well, and report well
- Excellent tracking and reporting
- Allows customers to enter in their own tickets
- Allows analysis of where our problem points are in resolving incidents
- Helps us better manage change requests
- Initial set up, if you are not familiar with service catalogs can be painful. The out of the box suggested ones are a starting point, but could have more breadth.
- Similarly, you have to know your business processes well to set up escalation and workflow; and setting them up can be a little time consuming.
- It's also helpful to set up forms to help ensure tickets are going to the right team - and you have to understand basic programming logic to set them up; you also need a bit of design experience to make them user friendly. These don't always go hand in hand within one person; it would have been helpful to have more sample forms.
- Some of the included color schemes are not ADA friendly, and they all should be.
August 05, 2016
Complete solution tha's easy to deploy and manage
- 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.