

Freshservice and OpenText Service Management (SMAX) are competing in the IT service management space. Freshservice gains an edge with its ease of deployment and cost-effectiveness, while OpenText SMAX stands out due to its advanced features and scalability.
Features: Freshservice offers a modern asset management system, efficient incident tracking, and robust automation capabilities. It integrates seamlessly with multiple platforms, boosting flexibility. OpenText SMAX provides advanced customization options, AI-driven functionalities, and exceptional scalability, making it suitable for larger enterprises.
Room for Improvement: Freshservice could enhance its customization capabilities and expand its feature set for larger organizations. It might also benefit from improved scalability options. OpenText SMAX requires easier configuration for non-technical users and could improve its user interface. Additionally, its pricing could be more flexible to accommodate smaller businesses.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Freshservice offers straightforward setup and accessible support, ideal for quick implementation without technical hurdles. OpenText SMAX demands more technical expertise for deployment but provides comprehensive support, catering to complex business environments.
Pricing and ROI: Freshservice incurs lower initial costs, appealing to budget-conscious businesses with its predictable pricing and favorable ROI. OpenText SMAX, though more expensive initially, offers significant ROI through its extensive capabilities, particularly benefiting enterprises operating at scale.
Faster resolution means the average ticket resolution time decreased by roughly twenty-five to thirty percent since alerts are automatically converted into tickets and routed to the right team.
Automation has contributed significantly, resulting in reduced resource counts, which equates to savings in money and time.
With using Freshservice, only two technicians are needed per one shift, but without Freshservice, for the same company size, we need about four technicians per shift, so it saved money and time.
Ultimately, we saw a 77% reduction in average resolution times with a return on investment realized within 6 months.
However, they have improved over the period of two years.
Their documentation is also good, making setup easy without needing frequent support requests.
Support for OpenText Service Management (SMAX) is better.
As our organization has grown and ticket volume related to AWS resources increased, Freshservice handled the extra load without any performance issues.
It offers global performance with multi-region data centers to ensure faster responses while adhering to strong security and compliance standards such as GDPR and SOC 2.
Freshservice is easy to use for scalability.
The service runs smoothly most of the time, and performance has been consistent even when ticket volumes and AWS alerts are high.
Freshservice is quite stable as they host it on AWS.
Freshservice provides a stable environment for our needs.
OpenText Service Management (SMAX) has some stability challenges that are crashable and not stable at times.
There's limited experience with the CMDB or asset management features.
Asset management can definitely be improved because it doesn't pick up every single device on the network or every single piece of information.
Reporting is useful, but the customization is still restricted, and it would be great to build more detailed reports that combine multiple data sources, especially for cloud-related operations.
One important thing we think should be included is a module for metrics, similar to Google Analytics, that focuses on the metrics of the tool usage.
The custom reports that were already prepared work fine.
Different scenarios require different workflow configurations.
Switching from previous ITSM tools has led to a 50% reduction in licensing costs.
The solution offers flat licensing and appears to be cost-effective.
The price was very comfortable for our organization to proceed with the migration from Freshdesk to Freshservice.
OpenText Service Management (SMAX) is okay, not expensive and not the cheapest.
The most valuable features include ticket routing, automation in triage, data control, and flat licensing.
Incident management is very helpful, and the system is straightforward, making it easy to use for our enterprise-level company.
Overall, Freshservice provides cutting-edge AI automation for agents and end-users, effortless no-code workflows and ITIL-aligned operations, robust asset, incident, change, problem, and major incident management backed by the live CMDB, unified service desk with self-service and multi-channel support, and strong analytics reporting features, making it a powerful tool for any IT function.
Our feedback is that because OpenText Service Management (SMAX) portal is very easy to use, we see customers abandoning their legacy ways of reporting like phone calls and emails, concentrating everything on a portal, which provides end users with more visibility of what's happening because they can control the status of their requests, allowing IT a faster way to intervene and solve issues.
Reporting tools and sophisticated customization options are available with different capabilities.
Configuration is available for different scenarios including change request, incident management, and problem management.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Freshservice | 4.2% |
| OpenText Service Management (SMAX) | 2.1% |
| Other | 93.7% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 24 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 15 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 3 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 4 |
Freshservice is an intelligent, cloud-native service management solution. It provides efficiency and agility through AI to create a contextual and intelligent experience. The solution also empowers employees to work whenever and wherever they need to work. Freshservice powers integrations and workflows at the enterprise scale, building upon an open platform and marketplace with connectors and APIs that you can extend and customize.
Freshservice Features
Freshservice has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
Freshservice Benefits
There are many benefits to implementing Freshservice. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Freshservice solution.
A Senior Helpdesk at a non-profit says, “I 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.”
PeerSpot user Cesar Q., CIO at Grupo Kasto, mentions, “The analytics are very good. The solution offers very nice incident management. The overall functionality of the product is excellent. The change management is helpful. They have an agent that we installed in every single asset. We have the inventory for all assets automatically. Contract management is very valuable for us as an IT department, as we have the information for every single computer across the company. We are starting to use the project management aspects right now. We have different projects and we have all the information in the same solution, in the same place. It makes everything more centralized and easier to access. The user interface is very nice and the solution is easy to use. You don't need to be an expert in order to navigate around and use the product. You don't need to read a lot of manuals in order to figure everything out. It's pretty intuitive.”
A Network Analyst at a real estate/law firm shares, "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."
OpenText Service Management Automation X delivers efficient service management automation with user-friendly configurability across IT, IoT, HR, and finance sectors. It enhances business processes through integrated incident management and natural language processing with virtual chatbots.
OpenText SMAX blends user-friendly design with broad language support and robust storage. It enables organizations to deploy in both on-premise and cloud environments using Kubernetes. SMAX excels in business process improvement, incident management, and uses intelligent agents for autonomous alerts and issue resolution. However, it requires enhancements in integration capabilities and documentation, third-party product connectivity, and contract management. Users face challenges with process automation and search functionality, demanding greater customization and flexibility.
What are the key features of OpenText SMAX?Banks and telecom companies primarily employ OpenText SMAX for service management automation, leveraging its ESM and ITSM capabilities. Deployed on-premise and via cloud, organizations in regions such as Saudi Arabia focus on integrations and upgrades, using SMAX as an end-user portal for incident management.
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