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Cherwell Service Management [EOL] vs Freshdesk comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
661
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Cherwell Service Management...
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (29th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (26th)
Freshdesk
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (3rd), Field Service Management (3rd), Help Desk Software (5th), Knowledge Management Software (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Thobile Moeketsi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Sasria SOC Ltd.
Having everything in one location has significantly improved our efficiency and reporting
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 log tickets directly from system to system. We haven't got there yet and I'm not sure it's possible but it would determine the product's capability to integrate with other systems.
Gauri Thakur - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Portfolio Projects at Microland Limited
Integrated support workflows have provided a unified view but need broader enterprise flexibility
Freshdesk's scalability could be improved for larger businesses across departments. Its intuitive interface is appealing for small to medium-sized businesses. However, when you look at larger enterprise levels, ServiceNow operates more efficiently. This scalability is an area where Freshdesk could expand its offerings. Additionally, I don't have too much hands-on experience with Freshdesk ticket routing. I need to check with the service desk team if they've used it. Similarly, for analytics capability, I haven't explored much on Freshdesk, but I have done it for ServiceNow. I have seen a lot on ServiceNow and the BMC Remedy, so I can speak better for them. I haven't had the chance to look at it so much that I can do a comparison. I haven't had much experience with Freshdesk's reporting. Within its paradigm of customer service management, Freshdesk is quite scalable. But I've said that inter-department and the interoperability is better off in ServiceNow than in Freshdesk.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The recorders are highly beneficial when automating web scraping or web automation tasks."
"The error handling and troubleshooting are very good, and it is easy for a developer to know what happened in any particular line of code."
"It's really easy to use. We have a number of people at our firm who are now certified RPA developers that had no development background. They did that just by the online training in some cases. In some cases, it was the online training, as well as a three day class that we brought in-house and had taught."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"Because it reduced the time duration of our processes, our costs went down."
"It eliminates redundant work from our offshore team to free up FTEs."
"RPA is a feature that really helped eliminate errors during the execution of structured business processes."
"We are using it to backfill a lot of our resources who are retiring, so we are hiring less people as we go."
"The dashboard is very useful to get a quick overview of current tasks."
"The best feature is the ability to create functional dashboards, where the IT manager can interact with its data through the dashboard using the drill down feature."
"We use the solution every day and quite extensively."
"The most valuable features are problem management and change management."
"Implementing CSM has made us very efficient and we're now able to plan changes and the steps required for implementation."
"Clear processes with transparent responsibilities led to more efficiencies within the teams."
"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 dashboard and the reporting functionality are the solution's most valuable features."
"We're able to respond to customer inquiries much faster and with better information."
"The built-in customer satisfaction surveys made it easy for us to see areas that need improvement, and the ticket automations allows us to set priorities on incoming tickets based on who is submitting it."
"There is the option to create different roles for specific users. We make use of groups for each customer service team which has been very effective. We are able to apply different sets of rules for each group which determines how they interact with customers and escalate issues."
"Our customer service is built around it, and has been for years."
"The UI is easy to use."
"Omnichannel is one of the most valuable features of the solution."
"It's a product that is very easy to use and very user-friendly."
"The most valuable features of Freshdesk that I have found useful are the quick and automated customer handling that uses AI and self-service options along with collaboration tools, which I plug into Slack, allowing my developer team to know directly what errors come from the main core of our website."
 

Cons

"When it comes to reading email, this solution is unstable and improvements need to be made."
"Initially, the implementation was tough."
"In high-availability, we have two Control Rooms acting as a cluster so if one fails the other one will take over. But that's not our environment operationally, and the latest information we have is that they identified another product bug."
"I don't use the technical support a lot. It feels like a lot of time that they will ask us to check the user manual."
"What we currently have with Fortress IQ needs to mature more, and I say this since people spend weeks creating PDDs documentation."
"The version that we are using has been difficult for us to code. As changes are very frequent, we have to make sure the code can be updated automatically so we don't have to make a change every time a user makes a change. Then, the user doesn't have to update us and we don't have to push a change to production. We have found a workaround with the help of the Automation Anywhere support people for this."
"Sometimes the tool is timing out, which would be a good thing to have resolved."
"I would like to see a comment feature that allows you to embed comments/notes into an action sidebar, without having to actually take up a line of code in order to write such a statement."
"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."
"We need to be on VPN in order to set up and access the solution, and that has created some challenges."
"Application service mapping, GRC, SecOps, and things like that need improvement."
"Access is only available if we're on VPN."
"They need to improve their mobile interface, as well as features regarding the extension of the mobile access to the end user."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"Agile delivery should be supported."
"The stability, specifically in the on-premises deployment model, could be improved."
"More automation would be beneficial, as it could greatly improve our efficiency and reduce manual tasks."
"The solution's inbound calls could be improved."
"Freshdesk could improve its capabilities. It's missing the article formatting, and the overall look and feel make it not easy to use. The administration instructions on how to manage the automation, capability, and integration with third parties, such as chat or bots, are very important in these types of solutions."
"There are a few things we have asked for, like a forward button. When a ticket comes in, we forward it, but it doesn't sync up with the forward."
"An area for improvement in Freshdesk would be enabling all features regardless of company or user size."
"The dashboards are useful but could be so much better. As a product manager, and data scientist, we couldn't use the dashboard for analytics and had to move the data in Power BI."
"I give it a seven because the usability is not bad, but it is not entirely out of the box; for the pricing, seven is an average score for the product."
"We have many cases where a ticket comes in, and it ends up having multiple team members working on it. It would be really nice to be able to assign a single ticket to multiple people, rather than having to create the parent-child hierarchy that they have set up. It generates a proliferation of tickets that I really don't want to have. Having to jump from a parent to one child and then to another child makes it harder for me to be able to see the entire case from end to end. A simple example is our new hire process or our termination process. We have people who leave. We also have people who come on board. We have got multiple people participating and doing things related to the leaving or onboarding process. Currently, I have to go to different tickets to be able to see whether all tasks are really done or not. If I could assign lots of people to one ticket, it would be really nice."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The initial setup and licensing fees are high, and although it saves costs in the long run, reaching the break-even point can take at least six months."
"Automation Anywhere is cheaper than UiPath and Blue Prism. From a market point of view, Automation Anywhere is reasonable. Any organization can adopt Automation Anywhere."
"In the Indian market, I feel that for mid-size companies, such as ourselves, that having multiple bots costs a lot. If Automation Anywhere wants to expand in the Indian market, they will need to look at their pricing."
"Approximately, for a developer, it is around $750 for a license a year. For Bot Runners, it is about $550."
"The control room access gives the ability to create different roles, which helps when purchasing additional licensing."
"Yearly, our licensing costs are about $90,000 to $100,000. There will be additional licensing costs when we add more Bot Runners to our infrastructure."
"It looks like it will be right around $115,000, not counting IQ Bot, which we won't renew until later."
"No one is balking at the cost. They are market rates and will change, but no one is saying, "That is ridiculous or impossible." They are saying, "Show me the ROI and prove that the cost is accurate.""
"For an ITIL user, the cost is probably about 50 bucks a month."
"We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
"We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. Weirdly enough, we pay more for Freshdesk than we do for Freshservice. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. You can get different bundles, and you can always move to different plans that are standard. Freshservice can go anywhere from $19 up to $120 per agent, per month. There is such a wide range, and it is very customizable to your needs."
"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
"The best system plan is enterprise. It costs basically 79 Euros per agent per month when it's billed annually and 95 Euros per agent per month when it's billed monthly."
"It is costly."
"The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
"We pay approximately $70 per agent to use Freshdesk. We have 10 agents, which is approximately $700 or $800 per month. It is a fixed license, there are not any additional fees."
"The price could be better, but it's okay. Compared to ServiceNow and JIRA, Freshworks offers a competitive price. There are also additional licensing costs because you need Microsoft Outlook. Each new email account costs around $15 to $19."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business157
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise558
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
Ask a question
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What needs improvement with Freshdesk?
I think the main problem with Freshdesk is the deep settings, interface, and analytics. When you need complex cross-f...
What is your primary use case for Freshdesk?
My main use case for Freshdesk is customer support tickets. A specific example of how my team uses Freshdesk for cust...
What advice do you have for others considering Freshdesk?
My advice for others looking into using Freshdesk is to consider that compared to Zendesk or Salesforce, where the se...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Ausenco, Highlights for Children, B/E Aerospace
Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, Zendesk and others in Help Desk Software. Updated: August 2026.
911,473 professionals have used our research since 2012.