Cherwell is a mature, complete ITSM solution ... that can do WAY more than just ITSM

Cherwell technical support is superior. Even when they don't know the answer to something they will find out how to help you.

We had a disappointing experience just after purchase because our salesman failed to include an implementation package into our purchase. This was in violation of Cherwell's own policy so we never found out why he did this. If it would have been a self-hosted instance, it probably would have been OK, because I just would have set it up myself using their (surprisingly good) self-help implementation documentation. But it was NOT self-hosted, it was hosted at Cherwell-on-Demand. So I didn't have access to their server where it needed to be implemented.

I was waiting for someone at Cherwell-on-Demand to contact us to get us rolling, and no one ever did, because our salesman did not hand us off to the implementation team. So I called technical support. They were very confused at first because they kept asking me who were were working with on the implementation team. Once I finally got them to the point of understanding that we had no implementation help whatsoever, they were amazing. They went way past their normal role and even the manager of the entire Cherwell support team in Denver got involved. They got me the help that I needed (which really wasn't much help, just turning on the hosted server and setting up a connector) quickly and apologized to me for the salesman's failure.

This implementation help is just a first example, however. I've opened about three or four tickets (for regular operational issues and routine maintenance) since we've been using Cherwell over the last 3 years and in every case, I got the answer I needed quickly and all of my questions were answered.

Cherwell is a good choice for any sized enterprise that needs an extremely customizable IT help desk solution that triggers (again, entirely customizable) automated actions, spawns workflows (and auto-spawns tasks and sub-tasks for them) for multiple IT technicians and multiple tiers of technicians. It can do project management, change management, asset management, all the same things that the others can do and far, far more. If you do NOT need a highly customized help desk solution and if you don't need automated workflow creation and task tracking, then you could buy a less expensive solution that you can use out of the box without any of the frills. But as I said, Cherwell can do a lot more than just IT help desk, and it has a huge array of "plug-in" / "add-on" features, most of which are free, that make every Cherwell implementation completely unique to the enterprise that uses it. Cherwell is just right for a company that wants to manage and customize the help desk application with a PTE resource. I manage it myself at my company, and I spend very little time maintaining it now that it's solidly established ... although it's so much fun to customize that I wish I had more time to add new features and play with it. I do strongly advise some training for the admins ... your Cherwell admins MUST take the online, instructor-led introductory admin class to kick you off, and you MUST have implementation help from Cherwell to setup your instance, especially their hosted offering, over which you don't have database admin control (you can't even turn it on to get it working without their help). But after that, there is very little support needed from your own in-house Cherwell admin resource, unless, of course, you are constantly growing the solution to make it do more. I can see how that could happen because Cherwell can do almost anything. I can imagine some departments wanting to make it into the swiss-army-knife of IT .. and HR .. and facilities .... and physical security ... and you could spend many hours down the rabbit hole doing that if you wanted to.