We performed a comparison between Freshservice and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."What I have seen in Freshservice is there's no room for customization. Which works as an advantage in some cases and it works as a disadvantage in others. If you are someone that starts managing your IT services, it is a great solution, because there's no way to go out away from the direction of the system. You have to follow the process as it was intended for the designers of a solution because there's no room for customization or configuration."
"Its ease of use is fantastic. It is just above and beyond, especially when you compare it to something like Cherwell, Salesforce, or anything like that. It is on its own level. It is so easy to administer. The way everything is organized and the way it builds its own documentation is very good."
"You can just register and within five to minute minutes, you are ready to go."
"The admin feature is the UI, so it's very clean. The asset management and its model are valuable as well."
"The most valuable features of Freshservice are the notifications, customization, and flexibility."
"The most valuable feature is the sandbox, which allows me to test new configurations, automations, and workflows before taking them live on the production system."
"It allowed the development team to concentrate on the client’s requirements instead."
"Ability to scan barcodes and a great search feature."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"The solution has been stable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"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."
"Freshservice's technical support has issues with delays and translations."
"Freshservice has issues around how assets get picked up, requiring a lot of parameter changes within to network to ensure the system discovers everything."
"The most significant area for improvement is consistency across the different modules, as they are inconsistent. It makes me think the modules have different development teams with no consistent approach. From an end-user perspective, I can do certain operations in one module, such as instant management, but not in problem management, for example, and I don't see why that should be the case. It would be good to see more consistency in the development process."
"The product should look at BCM or ServiceNow and see if there are features that would make nice additions. It would help them stay competitive."
"I am not too happy with the page layout or screen layout since it always looks messy."
"We'd like to see a CMDB, a Configuration Management Database, in the future."
"Not integrated with Google."
"It's hard to interact directly with the users themselves."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
Freshservice is ranked 5th in Help Desk Software with 29 reviews while IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews. Freshservice is rated 8.0, while IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Freshservice writes "Provides excellent traceability along with improved efficiency and reliability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". Freshservice is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, Zendesk, Microsoft Project and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, whereas IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with ServiceNow and SymphonyAI IT Service Management.
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