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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
660
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 Control Room is the most important feature, where we can manage the bots and publish to various bot runners in the environment."
"The features that help us satisfy the needs of the customer to overcome mundane activities using task bots and meta bots are the most valuable along with the rich controls in the control room. The developer team is able to capture all the necessary steps without much hassle with the visual designer and the ability to test each step of automation has helped in delivering error-free automation to our customer."
"The most valuable feature is that it is intuitive. It is designed so business users can use it with a drag and drop functionality to develop automation of business processes. Since they are the experts on business processes, there are probably the best ones to create the automation."
"We have automated a few processes, which take four to five hours to do manually, and when we automated these processes that time became less than one hour with RPA."
"The turnaround time of building bots is quick. We are deploying around four bots per month. The turnaround time to get a design, build, and deploy is very fast. This is very good for us. It has helped us out when scaling up in a better manner."
"Before Automation Anywhere, the insurance companies used to transfer data manually from one app to another, but after introducing them to automation the speed and accuracy have been outstanding."
"With the help of these features, we can automatically fetch data from invoices and websites, which is followed by the automated data entry into the webpage and ERP system."
"Automation Anywhere helped our organization to get our training and implementation needs successful by providing both community edition and partner edition. Automation Anywhere seamlessly handed off exceptions to employees from Automation Anywhere bots."
"The most valuable features are problem management and change management."
"The dashboard is very useful to get a quick overview of current tasks."
"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."
"All our activities are carried out in the one place."
"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."
"Implementing CSM has made us very efficient and we're now able to plan changes and the steps required for implementation."
"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."
"We're able to respond to customer inquiries much faster and with better information."
"It's a product that is very easy to use and very user-friendly."
"The ticketing system is smooth, but since we use a free version, we do not have many facilities available."
"Freshdesk offers way more flexibility, the people there are really dedicated and human, they want you to be happy with the product, and it is much more affordable than Zendesk."
"The most valuable features of Freshdesk are the automation of tickets to assign them to different agents, and the managing of documents is easy."
"Freshdesk has allowed us to measure and track the response and resolution time of tickets which has been reduced from seven to eight hours down to 30 minutes to one hour."
"Omnichannel is one of the most valuable features of the solution."
 

Cons

"When we need to upgrade the bot version for various applications like SAP, the compatibility issues could be easier to resolve. The financial team is using version 5 or 6, but the automation engineer recommends only version 6 because it is more compatible. I think Automation Anywhere could handle these compatibility issues better."
"I really appreciate the user interface of Automation Anywhere, but I would like to see some improvement on some of the automation around screen processing. This includes adding some artificial intelligence on the way that bots actually can read the screen and know when things change and be able to adapt to those changes."
"The technical support has been a little slow to respond to our inquiries."
"It would be better to make it more user-friendly so that individuals with no experience can pick it up pretty quickly."
"There was a time when I would have rated it at around fifty-fifty percent, but now Automation Anywhere uses AI for customer support."
"Automation Anywhere's current requirement for upfront annual payments limits flexibility for customers."
"I think it is a little bit of an ongoing struggle, because we don't deal with the infrastructure. We have a separate infrastructure team that sorts all that out. So, sometimes there are communication issues just trying to get our internal IT team onboard to run through the installs and that sort of thing. But, definitely with the new cloud version coming onboard, we'll be looking toward going to that. Hopefully it'll resolve some of that friction that comes about through the install process and complexity."
"There is room for improvement in terms of costs and procurement considerations."
"The support from the actual manufacturer is poor."
"They need to improve their mobile interface, as well as features regarding the extension of the mobile access to the end user."
"The stability, specifically in the on-premises deployment model, could be improved."
"Access is only available if we're on VPN."
"We need to be on VPN in order to set up and access the solution, and that has created some challenges."
"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."
"Application service mapping, GRC, SecOps, and things like that need improvement."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"Freshdesk I do not like as much. It's much more time-consuming; it's much more complicated."
"Their support wasn't the best, it took a little bit for the person to understand what I was trying to say."
"However, the challenging part comes from getting exactly what other departments needed from Freshdesk, especially the sales department, which requires good collaboration to extract the needed data."
"We have encountered lots of issues from observations of our QA, such as concatenated new lines displaying '=0' and differences between line spaces, and we are still waiting for resolutions for others, such as not being able to recover lost data or tickets."
"The solution's inbound calls could be improved."
"For integrations, we need to write code that communicates with their system in order to enable certain functionality in the system. This is a lot of work for their customers."
"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."
"Freshdesk's major drawback is its limitation in integrating tools for App Store and Play Store reviews, and social channels like Twitter, which come with additional costs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a bit expensive compared to other RPA tools on the market."
"Including the AWS setup and everything per license, it costs us around $10,000 on an annual basis. I believe that is pretty reasonable considering the teams that we have."
"We have saved a lot of money on taxes based on the stuff that we run."
"Its cost is good."
"Despite being less expensive than UiPath, Automation Anywhere remains cost-prohibitive for many small and medium-sized businesses."
"It's cheaper than other similar solutions."
"They give us a good deal on the licensing because we bundle and customize things. If you ask to get a bulk business deal, you will receive more benefit. If you take other products from the suite, like IQ Bot, you can also receive a deal on the licensing."
"It is the most economically friendly and it provides you with a lot of functions."
"For an ITIL user, the cost is probably about 50 bucks a month."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
"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."
"The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
"It was definitely not expensive. It was two grand or maybe three grand total for a year. It has just straight and simple standard licensing fees. There is no additional fee."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
11%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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.
910,350 professionals have used our research since 2012.