Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) vs. Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

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.

Spiceworks Help Desk from the user end is very simple. Once you submit your technology needs, I automatically receive an email stating that my ticket was received and is being processed. It's also helpful to have the VNC feature so that my IT department can automatically VNC into my computer if it's a quick fix. At times Spiceworks Help Desk can be tricky because as someone who's not in a Tech role at my company, it can be hard to describe what I need assistance with writing.

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.

Incentivized

• It helps to multitask, even on the go with the mobile App.
• We can customize to meet your needs with automated responses, notifications, and templates.
• Detailed reports allow managers to keep track [of] and analyze data.
• Allows for a database to store notes helpful for future tickets.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• I have always wanted a way to redirect a support request into another IS bin, such as a development task.
• It's possible to extract the data from the Spiceworks database, but it would be helpful if the process to do so were easier.
• Improved ability to customize the system generated emails to improve the formatting and company branding.

Incentivized

There has been little experience of downtime. It is well received by end users. The ability to customise it to integrate into existing systems is good. The organisation is realising cost savings through the information it provides. There is continued investment to develop the product by our own staff. In most instances there is not a requirement for client software to run it as a simple web browser will do.

Incentivized

There is no contract to renew, since it's free. Spiceworks has helped me so much that I couldn't imagine trying to replace it with a different product. I'd have a hard time finding a single product that does everything that Spiceworks does, let alone one that does it as well as Spiceworks and for free

Incentivized

I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.

Incentivized

1. Its free. 2. Its easy to install. 3. You can have it up and running in under 1-hour. 4. You get dashboards that are easy to read so you know the state of your network. 5. You can create your own reports and not just the ones already installed. 6. Excellent tool for network administrators and security practitioners. 7. Did I mention that its free?

Incentivized

Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues

Incentivized

We use it both locally on our own server so up time is decided by us and we also use the hosted help desk. We have never had an outage of that.

Incentivized

The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules

Incentivized

We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.

Spiceworks has been working out of the box, and some of the basic customizations have been successful with just our internal staff handling. We don't have any other issues with the tool. It provides us with the inventory information we want in a quick and concise report in a variety of formats for our team.

Incentivized

We had a 'train-the-trainer' session from Cherwell to some of our users who were unfamiliar with the product, and we had an individual who 'championed' training internally and provided several training classes over the period of a few weeks for new Cherwell users. We also had a team who traveled to remote sites to conduct in-person training there too.

Incentivized

The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.

Incentivized

Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins

Incentivized

If you can spin up a VM to run it on, you'll thank yourself later. If you have remote sites, set up a local server (or dedicated computer) at each site and set them up as remote collectors for the main site. You'll save time and bandwidth

Incentivized

ServiceNow was administrative heavy and required more than one admin. Also expensive for smaller customers. Remedy was scaled more for enterprise customers where we are small to mid-sized. FootPrints - we replaced FootPrints with Cherwell due to a lack of BMC putting any further development into the product. It was an aging platform with no real future growth.

Incentivized

EGroupware UI is clunky and hard to use, Jira is great but the pricing is expensive in comparison with spice works that has a free version and you can test it out properly before buying and make a correct decision based on your business plan and company objectives with the right software.

Incentivized

We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable

Incentivized

• Cherwell is more expensive (of course) compared to the home-grown ITSM solution that we previously used, so it has cost us more in capital outlay and it will continue to do so. But it has drastically reduced the number of end-user issues that have "fallen through the cracks". It makes assistance triage easy because you can customize the prioritizing of tickets by both urgency and priority of your tickets as well as by VIP status of the user.
• Our internal end-user satisfaction with the IT department has drastically improved since implementation of CSM. Our technicians don't forget to finish up a task with many tiny details and that's because Cherwell's workflows provide the technician with a list of the steps needed to finish up the task. We've become a much more popular IT department and leadership has noticed. I can't put an ROI number on that but it's priceless to me.
• Technician errors in user onboarding and offboarding have virtually disappeared, saving us hours and hours of technician time. Again, I haven't calculated the ROI but it's probably a good 20% or more of our tier 1 technicians' time that has been saved. Higher-tier technicians are obviously not as affected since they weren't usually the ones who were neglecting the details, but even they have enjoyed more efficiency and better prioritization of their time.

Incentivized

• Positive - Allow organizations to implement structured Help Desk procedures.
• Positive - IT can begin to quantify their tickets and uncover needs within the organization.
• Positive - IT can develop a solid roadmap with [the] management of future needs, equipment refresh schedules, etc.
• Positive - IT can pinpoint employees who may need extra training or updated equipment based on historical ticketing data.

Incentivized