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."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."
"The solution has been stable."
"It has a very easy, flexible model. You can open up a particular module and work on the next. That's what we did. Overall, it provides a simple way of getting your support teams up and running. That was one thing that I thought was quite easy to do."
"We find its ability to track what's going on with each request very valuable. We are also able to merge ticket requests and assign them to different groups in the company. We have another department that uses the same system."
"The most valuable features of Freshservice are the notifications, customization, and flexibility."
"It has reduced the time to look up who is responsible for a service, and it has reduced the time to finalize a service request because it now goes directly to the person who is responsible for the service in that location. So, a service request is handled quickly and directly by the person responsible for it."
"I do like the workflow automation capabilities, where based upon certain actions, it will automatically go and route tickets to a particular person. It is fairly user-friendly."
"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."
"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."
"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 has been stable."
"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 solution is very easy to work with."
"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."
"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."
"Freshservice could improve the integration with Microsoft Outlook."
"Some of the ways that tasks are reported on and shown can be better. You can't see tasks in your regular ticket list view. You can't see a combo view of tasks and tickets. It is a little bit difficult to get a solid overview of your list of things to do. You can only see them in separate views, instead of one single view."
"We'd like better integration with other products."
"Not integrated with Google."
"The ability to customize the user interface is a bit lacking, and the reporting is a bit lacking because they're very stringent upon what you can pull reporting-wise within Freshservice. They have a lot of built-in reports that are very nice, but when it comes to customizing these, they just provide you with certain data. When you try to build your own report wizard, you aren't able to go and select some of the data that is shown in some of the reports that come with Freshservice. This is something that we have brought up with our account representative, and we have suggested these as feature updates in the future. We're still waiting on them to go and implement something like that."
"The round robin ticketing feature that they have is not ideal."
"Their analytics need improvement."
"We haven't had any issues with the stability of Freshservice. However, we have had some issues with data imports, we have noticed that large amounts of data can get stuck. This is something that we haven't seen in other solutions."
"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 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."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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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