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IFS Cloud Platform vs SolarWinds Web Help Desk comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

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
6.8
Number of Reviews
666
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 (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
IFS Cloud Platform
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
CRM (28th), Customer Experience Management (12th), Field Service Management (2nd), Help Desk Software (19th), ERP (20th), Activity Based Costing Software (10th), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (4th), Local Government CRM (12th), IT Asset Management (13th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (15th), License Management (2nd)
SolarWinds Web Help Desk
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (30th)
 

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.
reviewer2268153 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Operations Engineer
Integrated planning has improved production scheduling and now reduces downtime and costs
The biggest friction point I have run into with IFS Cloud Platform is user adoption, which has been the biggest challenge, as different users in the organization need to get accustomed to the new processes after years of using spreadsheets and legacy systems, requiring training and a mindset shift, along with challenging data migration and process standardization. My advice to someone considering IFS Cloud Platform with a similar workflow is to spend sufficient time understanding and standardizing their business processes before implementing it, as the technology is very powerful, but the real value comes when processes, data, and teams are all aligned. I would rate my overall experience with IFS Cloud Platform as a 9 out of 10.
GANESAN K - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Engineer at Safezone Secure Solutions Private Limited
Has supported daily operational workflows and improved approval management across departments
We actually do the reselling. We created a self-service portal for the customers, and this particular function does impact reducing IT staff workload overall. From technical standpoints, comparing SolarWinds Web Help Desk with TeamViewer, we need ease of configuration and ease of allocating, creating new fields or creating new layouts for many specific use cases. An organization can have a number of use cases when it comes to a ticketing tool. It's not a security solution; it's more of a service solution where you will be configuring the needed categories and needed fields for each department. On a scale of 1-10, I rate SolarWinds Web Help Desk an 8.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In 2018, we looked at some other products on the market, but Automation Anywhere was a perfect fit. We didn't have any issues that Automation Anywhere couldn't solve. The critical factor for us was its ease of use. We liked the drag-and-drop interface and the low-code capabilities."
"One of the features that we have used the most is an action in the Workbench called Object Cloning. We find that very reliable and very useful for implementing different business processes."
"The ease of use is its key novel feature, as I have actually trained people in finance who have not written a piece of code in their lives and they are able to pick it up."
"Automation Anywhere is the best among all other automation tools available in the market such as Power Automate and UiPath."
"When I compare it with other RPA tools, Automation Anywhere seems pretty good. It's a user-friendly tool. Anyone can easily understand it. If there is an error, you can easily debug it from the developer level. In Automation Anywhere, the error handling happens in the easiest way. In case of an error, we send an email. It's not too difficult code to understand. There's only beginning and ending error handling, which is easy to understand."
"This tool provides us with easy accessibility for adopting the new process, as it is more user-friendly, and many new resources are able to grasp the tool and start doing the automation with ease, which is basically missing in the other vendors' tools."
"We are making less mistakes and have more metrics available to understand what our problems are. Now, we can do root cause analysis and have less noise in the system during the process."
"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."
"Feature-wise, I like the way it provides inventory details...It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is the distribution module."
"The enterprise management solutions within the solution are very strong."
"Our ROI is 4.5 times our investment in 18 months."
"The product is quite flexible."
"The platform is reliable and stable."
"IFS Applications is based on industry standards that are using a multi-tier deployment model, making it much easier to integrate IFS Applications with other enterprise software packages, while its modern, easy-to-learn user interface offers many features for filtering, searching, and navigating."
"IFS has been completely rebuilt, modernized, and cloud-based so we don't need bulky software installations."
"SolarWinds is a very good application that provides you with a detailed monitoring capability of your network and assets."
"SolarWinds supports case and incident reporting. This includes logging incidents and tracking them efficiently. Additionally, it is compatible and approved by the ITIL foundation and standards, meeting world-class standards."
"The biggest advantage for SolarWinds Web Help Desk is the user interface; we were able to configure a different UI for administrators, employees, and HODs based on their hierarchy level."
"It is easy to use."
"It has a pretty good search function. If you do the advanced search, you can basically search for anything in any field. If I do a search on the request field and just put in some terms I'm searching for, I can usually find the ticket that I'm looking for."
"A person who is not in IT, but has some good ITSM knowledge will be able to configure it directly on SolarWinds, and Manage Engine."
"The solution scales well; currently is working for 60 help desk technicians (IT and non-IT) for over 2,000 users."
"Once installed, it runs like a charm and doesn't ever crash."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I think it has to be more compatible when deployed with the Citrix environment."
"Commands in Excel, Outlook, and Word automation are very limited and hence facing difficulties automating complex requirements for the above applications with V11 version."
"Queues are great but need improvement. They are helpful because most of the automations are transaction-based."
"The technical support has been a little slow to respond to our inquiries."
"We have had some difficulty with ease of use. In addition, we have had some difficulties getting it to interact in predictable ways with our in-house software."
"Working with the Automation Anywhere servers and domains have proven to be difficult. We are trying to get more licenses and servers set up, so we can run multiple scenarios simultaneously."
"I would like a couple more features where I can talk and the line comes up automatically."
"I never use Automation Anywhere in the attended space because they are bad at that, at least compared to other players like us or UiPath."
"The solution's initial setup process was complex...The technical support my company receives from the implementation partners of the solution is not that great."
"I have seen that one of the areas that my company has identified for improvement might be the rental management capabilities within the solution."
"We have upgraded to the latest version right now. We have issues with the quality. We tried to enroll in their Evergreen program which was meant to help us adopt any service update or anything that the tool’s providers come up with."
"The customer service is not good as expected but we can say its fair."
"IFS uses Crystal Report mostly, which isn't too user-friendly. Developing reports isn't easy and requires a lot of dev time. Since SAP bought it, Crystal Report has become more complicated to use on IFS. You have a dashboard for reporting that is good, but it's incomplete. Most of our clients use Power BI or some additional tooling for BI."
"The product requires heavy administrative work."
"The solution's reporting tools still require improvement."
"There are certain digital features that need to be incorporated, such as IOP."
"It would be good if there were training and tutorial videos on the Web Help Desk."
"This solution needs to have mobile application support added."
"However, it's a little outdated compared to newer products that include protection and detection."
"The interface feels clunky to me compared to some other systems that I've used. I used ManageEngine Service Desk prior to this at my previous job and that had stuff like categories that we use that I don't see in SolarWinds."
"We would like to see automation included in the next release. We would like to eliminate the L1, and L2 support, by at least 80%. To do this, we need automation with AI (Artificial Intelligence) in combination with ML (Machine Learning)."
"The working part, the deployment part, and the configuration part was a little bit complex."
"This is a good solution, but the GUI is really old-fashion and needs to be updated."
"The program seems buggy to me. Not infrequently, when I click to add a Note, the Notes section disappears instead of opening a box to add a Note."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is competitive with all other products in the market."
"In terms of monetary savings, we automated a bot in three days that has saved us $30,000 in costs."
"The cost can be reduced a little for users."
"The solution itself is free unless we want to add the support option but we have to pay for the bots we use."
"The solution is costly and the licensing is very confusing."
"I would like them to have better license management."
"Additional costs will be for the machines and the number of machines that you are using. You can deploy virtually as well as on physical machines. In both the situations, you do need to allocate a certain budget for securing the machines and where the software will be installed and running. The machines cannot be used for anything else, because only a certain bot can run at a certain time. You need to be very particular about your scheduling of running the bots, and while the bot is running nobody can use the machine. You cannot have an agent working on a machine and the bot running in the background. It has to be completely dedicated. Then there are the network bandwidth requirements and space requirements, which are additional costs apart from the licensing and software costs. The developer is also going to charge you for their coding time too."
"AA comes at a more affordable price than the other tools."
"There's an additional yearly cost for support."
"Licensing is on an annual basis, with no additional costs."
"The additional cost that comes with the solution includes the overhead of the people who are trying to fix the tool issues. These people are trying to reproduce the issue and report it to the technical support and testing with them which is huge. It is the cost of quality in the end."
"IFS Applications is expensive software, but it's on par with SAP and Oracle. It's for large enterprises and government entities and not for small and medium-sized enterprises. They have one licensing model, but if you want to have a module-specific license, they provide component-based licenses. Unlike SAP and Oracle, it doesn't have different levels of licensing. It's one level of licensing."
"There are varying license levels that you can purchase."
"The pricing of the solution may appear to be expensive for smaller companies with only tens of users; however, for larger and mid-size industrial companies, IFS is able to win deals and the pricing is competitive in the market."
"Compared to SAP, the pricing for IFS Applications was very affordable. People using the solution would find that it's worth the money."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"When you compare with ManageEngine and ServiceNow, SolarWinds is reasonable."
"They charge by the technician. It costs $117 per technician per year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business161
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise561
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

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.
What needs improvement with IFS Applications?
There are features that came up during implementation that we are not actually using today, such as field service man...
What is your primary use case for IFS Applications?
My main use case for IFS Cloud Platform is for production planning, where I typically use it for production schedulin...
What advice do you have for others considering IFS Applications?
The biggest friction point I have run into with IFS Cloud Platform is user adoption, which has been the biggest chall...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Web Help Desk?
Areas of improvement can be enhanced regarding configuration. We had the deployment metrics and usability, ease of us...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Web Help Desk?
For Zoho, we did OP Manager, Audit Security, AD Security and Asset Management, Patch Management. These things we are ...
What advice do you have for others considering SolarWinds Web Help Desk?
We actually do the reselling. We created a self-service portal for the customers, and this particular function does i...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
IFS Applications, Assyst, IFS Cloud
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
China Airlines, Electrolux Group, Babcock, Cimcorp, Sky, Multiplex, Veolia. 
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Find out what your peers are saying about IFS Cloud Platform vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.