We looked at Zendesk and Samanage. We gave them quite a detailed analysis of the requirements we have as a business for it and the benefits of the different systems and SysAid came up as the clear winner.

The differences were that a lot of the built-in features just work like the categorization and the routine. SysAid came out highest. A lot of the stuff was, "Well, we can't do that, that'll be coming out in the new release." And it's like, "Well, SysAid does it now. So why would we wait?" It was just the whole feature set that out-of-the-box was better.

Customization was a big one actually. Samanage would allow us to create our own fields, which is the same as SysAid's cascading fields, the text inputs, and things like that. But you couldn't report on any of those custom fields, they kept them in a separate database and it was not integrated with the rest of the system. Whereas SysAid is perfectly integrated, you can then use it for reports. You can do workflow based on development fields.

We looked at a couple options. Previously, I have implemented BMC Remedy, so we looked at BMC Remedy. We looked at another vendor called Cherwell. A couple of years ago, we looked at ServiceNow, but we think SysAid is definitely worth the money that we spent. ServiceNow was just way too fancy and expensive for us. So, we looked at the usual vendors and decided SysAid really works for us.

ServiceNow does a lot more in terms of integration and automation. I'm sure SysAid also has some automation. I don't know how well it does in terms of integration. That is actually one of the next things we are working on with SysAid to implement: Automate Joe and some of their other automation parts. That will probably be sometime later this year as we were actually in the middle of conversations with them, then we all got sidetracked. I am hoping that before the end of this calendar year we will try to do at least some automation within SysAid. 

We do other kinds of automation already in our agency, but it's mostly using PowerShell scripts or a third-party automation. So, we are not new to the concept of automation. We just haven't done it within SysAid.

They have explored other solutions, but always stuck with SysAid.

We did evaluate other solutions but we decided to go for SysAid as it was the easiest to implement and in the beginning, it was the cheapest. We could implement it on-premise, we could already implement all of our email systems so we can use all our internal email systems from the very beginning. It was easy to set up for the initial test use. 

We looked at SupportWorks, Service Now and Remedy, but we went with SysAid. We noticed a huge price difference between those solutions and SysAid.

I have analyzed a few products, however, among them, SysAid is, in comparison, very easy to configure and customize.