ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus vs SolarWinds Web Help Desk comparison

ServiceDesk Plus is comprehensive help desk software with integrated asset and project management capabilities built on ITIL framework. ServiceDesk Plus is trusted by more than 100,000 organizations across 186 countries and is available in 29 different languages. With ServiceDesk Plus, IT organizations can leverage ITIL processes while unifying their help desk, asset management and project management activities in a single pane of glass.

It is fully integrated and easy to set up - without extensive customization or integrations. It has rich automation that helps eliminate pesky manual processes for quicker ticket resolution and higher end user satisfaction.

Features

ServiceDesk Plus comes with a great balance of features to suit your business needs. The features available are listed below.

Incident management: Gain control of your help desk

With incident management you can pin incidents to the right technicians to ensure accountability and automate ticket workflows with automatic ticket dispatch, business rules, escalation, service level agreement, notification rules or alerts, preventive maintenance for timely ticket resolution. In other words, you can manage the entire lifecycle of an incident!

Problem management: Go beyond firefighting

Problem management helps you analyze the root cause and reduce recurring incidents in your IT, raise a new problem from within an incident, link related incidents to a problem and close them all at once! Further, you can provide temporary workarounds till you find a permanent fix to the problem.

Change management: Manage changes with precision

Manage your changes with precision. Streamline planning with roll out and back out plans, take informed decisions in the assessment, prioritization, and scheduling of changes with inputs from the Change Advisory Board (CAB), automated workflows to ensure that there are no more unauthorized or failed changes.

Asset management: Track and manage assets with ease

Discover, track, and manage your IT hardware and software assets in one place. Optimize asset utilization, avoid vulnerabilities, and ensure license compliance.

IT project management: Deliver IT projects on time

You can now manage multiple IT projects and requirements, plan releases, track progress, collaborate with team, and measure results, or in other words, manage all your IT projects efficiently. Break a full-blown project into milestones and tasks, set roles and provide access permissions, track the utilization of your resources, monitor the overall progress of your IT projects using colored Gantt charts, and do more to steer your IT projects to success!

Purchases and contracts management: Track IT purchases and contracts

Automate your supplier interactions and IT purchasing functions with full traceability and visibility, maintain master records for various vendors and track purchases from ordering to receipt and invoicing, reduce delays and cut unnecessary spending, track IT hardware and software contracts to improve compliance, associate assets and get proactively notified of contract expiry.

Self service portal: Deflect tickets from your service desk

Help users solve repeat incidents using a knowledge base and deflect tickets from your service desk, keep end users informed on ticket progress/approvals through automated notifications or make company-wide announcements of any outage or unplanned maintenance, auto suggest solutions during ticket creation and provide easy templates to create tickets.

Service catalog: Showcase your IT services

Showcase the offered IT services to your end user and give a new face to your IT. You can customize your workflow of delivering the service request specific to each service category. You can also setup approval process and service level agreements for each service request.

CMDB: Get the bigger picture

ServiceDesk Plus CMDB ensures effortless management of your entire IT infrastructure. Track and manage all configuration items and map their relationships and dependencies. Visually analyze the impact of changes and outages for informed decision-making.

Service level agreement: Ensure timely service delivery

Create SLAs and provide quality services on time to your end users. With the intuitive SLA management in ServiceDesk Plus, escalate proactively to four levels of hierarchy to ensure that your SLAs are met.

Reports: Derive decisions with the right data

Generate over 150+ inbuilt reports, custom reports, query reports and flash reports pertaining to various service desk modules like requests, problems, changes, assets, surveys, contracts, and purchase. Use real time dashboards to accurately reflect health of the service desk, create relevant custom reports and add them to your dashboard and take strategic decisions based on the current trend of your help desk performance!

Extensions and integrations: Collaborate easily with other IT systems

Enjoy tight integration with software that monitors and manages your networks, applications, desktops, and Active Directory. Get what you always wanted - 360 degree visibility of your IT!

SolarWinds Web Help Desk simplifies service management with unified ticketing, asset, knowledge, and change management. Key features include:

1. Maintain asset inventory by managing the use, availability, and health of IT assets, and tracking this over time.
2. Control change management, It regulates and manages change requests through automated approval workflows and panel voting options.
3. Employs robust reporting and monitoring using a built-in reports and dashboards to track ticket status, technician performance, and customer support needs.
4. Automate ticketing management that Automate service request management through ticket creation, assignment, routing, and escalation.
5. Centralize your knowledge management, Leverage a built-in help desk knowledge base to create and maintain KB articles and promote end-user self-service for common issues.
6. Meet your SLAs, it has "SLA breach approaching" notifications and date-specific SLA reminder alerts that help customize escalation and de-escalation workflows.