Cherwell: Powerful, but slow and clunky.
July 21, 2019
Cherwell: Powerful, but slow and clunky.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cherwell Service Management
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 allows us to put all customers into one tool which allows us to consolidate administration and licensing.
- Cherwell is very cost-effective (1/3 the cost of ServiceNow).
- The platform's automation capability allows the business to reach a higher level of maturity and efficiency in IT service management.
- To develop and run the tool, a team of developers, devops, and administrators is required.
Cherwell is much more powerful than ServiceDesk Plus. It has all the capabilities required for ITSM. It is also much slower and less user-friendly. It requires way more resources to develop and run. Ultimately, we selected for its vast feature set.