Cherwell Service Management vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cherwell Service Management and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"All our activities are carried out in the one place.""Its integration features, orchestration features, and discovery tools are the most valuable. It is also pretty stable, and it can be as scalable as you want.""The most valuable features are problem management and change management.""The dashboard and the reporting functionality are the solution's most valuable features.""Clear processes with transparent responsibilities led to more efficiencies within the teams.""The dashboard is very useful to get a quick overview of current tasks."

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"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us.""In the early stages of our company, all requests were done in notebooks, and none of it was centrally managed. But now we have a central tool which is an entry point for all requests that come in.""The solution is very easy to work with.""SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable.""The brand name is the most valuable aspect of this solution for me. It's IBM. It's a global company that supports this product, it's not something open source or something like that.""The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one.""A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset in the company and from which date.""What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized. You have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them."

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Cons
"The stability, specifically in the on-premises deployment model, could be improved.""Access is only available if we're on VPN.""Application service mapping, GRC, SecOps, and things like that need improvement.""Areas for improvement would be the service catalog and customer catalog, which is not very user-friendly. The shopping cart experience is also terrible - you submit and go straight to the cart, you can't continue shopping or see your overall cost."

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"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time.""Overall the user experience, as opposed to the system and databases, could be improved. It does work as it should and it's good, but they should invest more in the user interfaces to be less data oriented and more appealing for the user.""The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces.""Support has been the biggest problem for us. I understand that because we use the product of a global company, some changes are not quick to deploy.""The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon.""It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool.""The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends.""What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "For an ITIL user, the cost is probably about 50 bucks a month."
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  • "It's basically for a big company because of the costs. A small company can't afford the licensing cost. For medium and large companies, it's the best product. The price of the license is on the higher side compared to others."
  • "The licensing we have for IBM Control Desk is on a yearly basis. They have a concurrent license and an administrative license. And with these, you get all the products. There aren't any additional fees for extra add-ons or anything like that."
  • "The license for IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is paid yearly and is on a per-user basis. You buy the product and pay for its license yearly. IBM is changing the licensing structure, but for now, it's a yearly license. There's no additional cost. It's just the license that you need to pay for to use IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."
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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:All our activities are carried out in the one place.
    Top Answer:We need to be on VPN in order to set up and access the solution, and that has created some challenges. Even though it uses our Windows login, we still have to be on VPN. The product should be able to… more »
    Top Answer:We use the solution for IT service management, it's the key process for recording incidents or problems, and change management. We are customers of Cherwell and I'm an enterprise architect.
    Top Answer:A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset… more »
    Top Answer:The license for IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is paid yearly and is on a per-user basis. You buy the product and pay for its license yearly. IBM is changing the licensing structure, but for now, it's a… more »
    Top Answer:What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most… more »
    Ranking
    19th
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    1,300
    Comparisons
    653
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    477
    Rating
    9.0
    22nd
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    611
    Comparisons
    337
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    1,117
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    SmartCloud Control Desk
    Learn More
    Overview
    Cherwell Service Management is a powerful IT service management (ITSM) solution that provides IT organizations the flexibility needed for rapid configuration and customization, minimal overhead, and frictionless upgrades at a fraction of the cost and complexity associated with legacy ITSM solutions. Cherwell's codeless design architecture means you can add new functionality without modifying a single line of code, integrate easily with third party applications, and upgrade without fear of breaking what you've built.
    IBM Control Desk on Cloud offer an access to a user friendly self-service, automated service management, and seamlessly-integrated, best-practice based service desk capabilities. IBM Control Desk provides the IT service management (ITSM) needed to simplify support of users and infrastructure. It also offers a unified IT asset and service management software provides a common control center for managing business processes for both digital and physical assets and enables control, governance and compliance to applications, endpoints and assets to protect critical data and prevent outages. Control Desk is IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant, accessible through mobile devices and integrates with social media and development tools.
    Sample Customers
    Ausenco, Highlights for Children, B/E Aerospace
    St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization53%
    Government11%
    Computer Software Company5%
    Retailer4%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    Government9%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise58%
    Large Enterprise32%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business67%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise67%
    Buyer's Guide
    Help Desk Software
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software. Updated: April 2024.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cherwell Service Management is ranked 19th in Help Desk Software with 6 reviews while IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews. Cherwell Service Management is rated 7.2, while IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Cherwell Service Management writes "Having everything in one location has significantly improved our efficiency and reporting". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". Cherwell Service Management is most compared with ServiceNow and Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, whereas IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with ServiceNow and SymphonyAI IT Service Management.

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