SolarWinds
Web Help Desk is ticketing and IT asset management software. It is designed to
simplify help desk management. This solution includes built-in ticketing
management, asset management, change management, and knowledge base
capabilities.
N/A
Zendesk Suite
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Zendesk is a customer support solution with built-in ticketing, conversational messaging, and live chat, designed to help businesses of all sizes and industries deliver personalized service at scale. Zendesk's AI agents are trained in CX to help Service teams resolve customer issues faster and more accurately while still providing a human-centered experience. Zendesk ultimately aims to help businesses improve time to value, reduce effort per ticket, and keep costs low.
$69
per month per agent
Pricing
SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)
Zendesk Suite
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Suite Team
$69
per month per agent
Suite Growth
$115
per month per agent
Suite Professional
$149
per month per agent
Suite Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)
Zendesk Suite
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
SolarWinds also offers Perpetual licensing starting at $1129 per technician.
[SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)] works well in education, I'm responsible for over 500 classrooms, thousands of users and computers. Using WHD to keep track of who has what devices and which devices need to be retired has helped the user experience. I'd recommend this product to anyone managing an IT department.
Benefits of Zendesk Suite: Support across channels In the case of a retail company with chat, email, WhatsApp and social DMs all piling up together, agents do not have to change tabs - everything comes into one screen in the Suite. An example could be a representative for this e-commerce company on a sale weekend when they have live chat up, and also must deal with emails and complaints on social. Zendesk Suite handled all of this interaction seamlessly. Knowledge base + self service: A SaaS platform receiving constant flow of "how do I reset my password" questions. You set up a help centre once, and are able to deflect hundreds of tickets for months and years. Even better when combining with Answer Bot, where the bot begins suggesting articles without even a human interacting with the tickets. Scaling customer service teams: A startup that has just expanded from 5 customer service representatives to 50 customer service representatives. Zendesk Suite automates routing, SLAs, macros, and analytics, when it could never work with Google Workspace + sticky notes. This is especially helpful when managers want to be able to report or analyze ticketing conversations to see trends in perhaps their backlog, or a customer service representative is running into consistent workflows. Globalization: A company with support teams that are spread across time zones and languages. Zendesk Suite enables for business hours, language packs, and localized help centers. It even comes with routing either by skill or region
Email notifications are pretty good; you can add hidden notes, close/resolve/update tickets just by selecting the appropriate link in the email that is sent when a ticket is created or edited.
It provides a great deal of information to both the user and tech.
It allows us to automatically update asset information with our mobile device management system by using an extension.
We are definitely going to be sticking with Web Help Desk for the foreseeable future since the product is very inexpensive for the features that it provides, the integration that it has with our existing systems, and the ease for managing users, assets, locations, and tickets. Web Help Desk is a great product that is backed by even better support, which is well worth looking into if you are considering moving to a new ticketing system.
Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.
It's not cloud based so users have to be on the network to submit a ticket. It doesn't plug into Google or Microsoft Azure so all inventory has to be manually entered. It seems like solar winds is allowing the product to slow fall into obsolescence
I used to work without a ticketing service, and everything was handled on an email provider, this made it very difficult to track, no integrations to the software complicating the use of internal tools or other software like Guru, Zendesk Suite wasn't hard to learn, in fact it was very easy, very straightforward, and I was an admin learning to use several tools at the same time.
SolarWinds is a great customizable and affordable ticketing system. We use SolarWinds Web Help Desk for IT and Software Development trouble ticket tracking and resolution. The reporting that SolarWinds provides is great since it helps us discover problem areas and fix those areas so they don't keep reoccurring
We rarely need to contact their support team, but when we do they are responsive. However there have been notable times when communication between myself and the support rep was challenging despite me providing clear explanation of the issue, screenshots, and a thorough explanation of the goal we hope to achieve. It took several back and forth attempt, on a few occasions, to get resolution on an otherwise simple request
Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.
Take the time to roll out a test VM to configure and make changes to before doing a live deployment, this way you don't end up with a VM that has been tweaked and re-tweaked until it's perfect and instead end up with a final, polished product. I would also recommend taking the time to read through the support forums for figuring out minor issues that may pop up, chances are that you aren't going to be the first one to encounter them. When all is said and done, SolarWinds Support is VERY responsive and you shouldn't hesitate to contact them.
There is not a lot of implementation, it's all setup and you just start using it. We did do some email to ticket setup and that worked really well. The only thing that didn't work for us was the Salesforce integration, maybe your mileage will vary.
I used ManageEngine ServiceDesk and ServiceNow at previous jobs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk was in place when I came to this job and I was disappointed when I started using it as it has a more clunky, less intuitive interface, and lacks the features of those products. And it gets frustrating because sometimes it doesn't work right. Like I will open a ticket and click on the button to add a note and instead it will close the Notes section. So then I have to close and reopen the ticket and try again. Same with closing a ticket. I change the Status to "closed" and click on "Save" and it doesn't save. So I have to keep repeating this until it works. Also, it's lacking features like the ability to unmerge or split tickets, that I had in other products. And sometimes when users reply to tickets it creates another ticket instead of adding it to the existing ticket and then we have to merge tickets. Also, it's lacking the integration with users and assets that those other products have.
Even these two have a ticketing system but that I also used previously but Zendesk Suite has a very clear ticketing system - it does not take much time to understand and use it, the interface is easy and the automation system also works up to the expectation, it is not just easy for the users but for us from the backed support as well, it is so user-friendly.
Overall we have become more efficient using this tool and our ROI for implementing this has been great. By having a service tool that can manage inventory, tickets, as well as change management just to name a few, our company is better off in our support.
The core business community has seen quicker responses to tickets through use of the ticketing tool. Business continuity has had less disruptions as we are better able to anticipate or respond to issues.
Finance has been happier with our ability to do cost analysis by using the various tools in SolarWinds help desk.
Customer Success looks at ticket resolution surveys as part of their CSAT scores and either thanks their customer for a positive review or reaches out if it's a negative review.
Sales uses Zendesk to make sure their new prospects are getting POCs properly set up quickly and fix any issues while they do a trial of our tool.
Onboarding uses Zendesk to quickly make sure new customers implementations and user access are set up to help them start implementation faster.
