Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) vs. TOPdesk

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.

As TOPdesk is pretty intuitive it is often not needed to instruct colleagues on how to use TOPdesk. Most modules and fields do explain themselves. This means there aren't many additional instructions needed for the applications itself. Most information we do need to support our colleagues on based on organizational processes, not our ITSM tool of choice. And if there is more information needed, the knowledge base system can be used for this. On the other hand this could create the idea that no additional instructions are needed. Which might be true for the application itself, but not for how it is being used within your organisation

• 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

• TOPdesk provides a clean and modern interface for all of its modules. Many of the modules have a similar look and feel, which makes it easy for users to utilize each one.
• Its workflow system allows administrators and developers to define what needs to occur when certain events happen. This can ensure that processes happen in the correct sequence.
• TOPdesk includes a vast API system to allow for external systems to integrate with it, and for TOPdesk to communicate with external systems.

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

• My biggest issue is with the duplication of tickets and not being able to combine them.
• Our implementation could have gone better.
• It would be nice if the system could scan for assets and not rely on manual creation of assets.

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

We are very content with the application. We use it now for 1 year and we are still learning. We still discover new features withing the application that help improve our efficiency and customer-friendliness and reduce costs. We feel like we can still improve the use of TOPdesk within our organisation and make more use of more modules.

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

Sometimes I think some things are hard to find. I often do not know if I have to search in Settings or in Modules. In some cases the user has to do a lot of clicks for example to link a key to a user. Something could work a little smarter.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Like I said somewhere else in this review: the helpdesk of TOPdesk is top of the bill! In the Netherlands, that is. I can not plea for the helpdesks in other countries, but I guess the TOPdesk organization will make sure the quality of the helpdesk is the same in every country.

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

Although being a SAAS solution, TOPdesk performs pretty fast. One can imagine that any SAAS solution is slow or has hiccups, but we have not experienced such with TOPdesk. Pages load quickly, logging in goes smoothly. We have made reports on premise in the past - that always took some time, as you might expect with such complex tasks. It seems that in the SAAS solution TOPdesk somehow has managed to make it even faster!

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.

Most if not nearly all questions are answered within the same or a few days. The helpdesk is very knowledgable about their product and are always willing to help. The only downside is that for more difficult questions it can take a while due to the experts being further removed from the helpdesk. But they are always willing to answer questions, even if they are not directly related to a problem with the service.

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

We had Topdesk in-house here training staff for almost a month (2-3 hour meetings 3x a week.) It was invaluable and we were able to take that training and share with the rest of our IT staff. Once implemented we were able to fly from there. The challenges we found were in how to get started. Once started the knowledge base offered from Topdesk has been invaluable.

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

Online training documentation is easy to access and consume. There is no real challenges with finding information on how to use the product and some really helpful knowledge base items that show us how valuable these options are in our own implementation of it. The online training we've used has been self driven

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

It was a challenge to port over years of the same thing and we ended up keeping old ideas in Topdesk that we will eventually weed out as time passes and we learn how users view categories and flows of tickets. Planning is key but bear in mind that just because you used to do it this way doesn't mean you still have to

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

Spiceworks is an easier-to-use Help Desk solution but it lacks all other features that Topdesk has. Freshdesk was just too much for our environment. It was cost-prohibitive for our intended use. TOPdesk fit our org size and budget better than the others.

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

Topdesk is a saas solution. As far as we can notice, there are no scalability problems. We are a small organization, so performance issues are for now not an issue

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

• TOPdesk self-service portal has allowed our employees to quickly report and solve the incidents saving more time for productivity.
• Employees are able to tackle common incidents from the knowledge base giving more efficient business operation.
• It has helped us to create a smooth working environment while growing the organization capacity and production quality.

Incentivized