Freshservice Reviews

You can connect the system to an IDR when you receive a call. That was an easy use case to implement. Also, you can use a ticketing system for internal tech support issues within the company. It was oriented toward both the end customer and the internal customer.

It improved the organization's workflow by making managing all the information and tickets in a single system much easier.

One of the things I liked about Freshservice was how easy it was to implement. While it doesn't have extensive customization capabilities, the available options are sufficient for certain sizes of companies. You don't need to customize your ticketing system much. Freshservice is a great solution because you can implement it very quickly. You can upload your catalog, and you're done in maybe a week or two.

I think it would be great if the tool had another version that is more customizable. From what I remember, there were some limitations regarding the number of assets you could track. In a more robust version, the number of assets increases, but I think it would be better to have something more customizable for all versions, especially the most robust version. This would be great for larger customers.

I rate Freshservice's stability as ten out of ten. 

I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten. 

I have contacted technical support. It wasn't very easy. Even as a retailer partner, sometimes it was difficult to get someone from tech support to address an issue, especially if it involved changing labels or fields. Getting support for these kinds of issues was challenging.

The tool's deployment is easy. I rate it a ten out of ten.

A customer can do it themselves. 

In the Latin American market, companies may not generate the same revenue as American companies of similar size. Therefore, while the return on investment could be good for an American company, it might not be as significant for a Latin American company.

I don't think it's expensive for the US or some European markets. Still, when I used Freshservice in Mexico, some customers found it a bit pricey, especially considering the platform's features. I think the pricing is fair for use in the European market, but it might be perceived differently in Latin America.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

It's a major lead to work with the IT architecture.

The admin feature is the UI, so it's very clean. The asset management and its model are valuable as well.

Day by day, they keep on adding more features which are making the application very slow. We're we're facing some slowness. For example, the analytics part takes a very long time to load.

The chat portal is not that great. It would be good if they could enhance the chat portal, and give us some options to customize it. 

I have been using Freshservice for three years.

We have faced some stability issues, which were fixed by the actual service team pretty quickly. I rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

It is a scalable solution. Presently, twenty thousand users are using the solution. 

The technical support team is very good. 

Positive

We were using Zendesk, then we evaluated other service desk applications. Freshservice is really easy to use, and it has some of the code features that we wanted, and that is why we chose it.

The initial setup is straightforward. Our main implementation strategy was to kind of move our existing agents and existing users as well as migrate almost four hundred thousand tickets to the platform. First, we created all the different fields. We imported all the users and mapped them to the correct queue. I provided access to the agents in different groups. After that, we migrated our tickets. It took almost two weeks to migrate everything and set up.

The integration was done in-house. 

We have seen a return on investment.

The pricing is reasonable.

I recommend the solution. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We are in a broadcast environment, making around 40,000 hours of TV every year. Our primary use case is for responding to tickets where the end user receives telemetry. It's a little different from traditional IT help desks and is geared towards live TV production. Our support engineers work in shifts and this product is also a  way of handing things over from one shift to the next in an efficient way with visibility. We are customers of Freshservice.   

This solution has provided us with a level of ticket traceability that didn't exist previously. We now have statistics and data that tell the story of what our support engineers have been doing. It's improved speed and reliability.

The fact that the solution has an app and you can scan barcodes is amazing. With smartphones, you can asset-tag things, scan them, and then see them on your phone while you're on the move. It's crucial for us because our engineers aren't always sitting at a desk in front of a laptop.

Freshservice is also excellent at searches. We now have an ITV-wide asset database and no longer purchase things that are already on the shelf in another office. It covers all our UK sites, so that if we're searching for a part or for a piece of equipment and it's in another location we can have it sent over to us. 

It would be good to have the product integrated with Google because that's our corporate tool of choice. I'd also like to see a notice board where you can list a summary of the top 10 items being dealt with each day. It's something that would be very helpful.

I believe they're working on a chatbot but we haven't seen that as yet. I'd like it to include a space where questions asked to a chatbot can be self-triaged in terms of support or with the ability to point you towards a knowledge-based article. We've been doing some of that ourselves but it would be good to have it through a chatbot.

I've been using this solution for around six years. 

The solution has performed perfectly for us. The Google search powered engine has always been extremely quick to return results. We've always found it to be very reliable and it's a good fit.

The product is easily scalable with a variety of options. You can get a license immediately if you need an extra agent such as a freelance support engineer. 

The customer support has always been very engaged and they're good at communicating. I appreciate that they let us know if someone is leaving the company or moving to a different department and they introduce the replacement. It's very professional.

Positive

I previously used ServiceNow but I'd say that Freshservice is way more user-friendly. I think it's slightly more competitively priced than ServiceNow as well.

The initial setup was really straightforward. I think we were up and running in a couple of hours or so. We then had to move from an American instance to a European one for our cyber rules, so we rebuilt it for that. We had our own team working with the Freshdesk team to design an asset database, keeping in mind that not all of our equipment, such as cameras, has an IP address. They helped us rework some of the categories and fields of the database to suit our equipment.

We have around 50 to 60 agents using the solution. If you add our interactions with people, it's helping us serve a client base of around 10,000 in the UK. We recently discussed getting additional support engineers to deliver some of the extra load and that will probably increase by about 10 each year. 

The solution doesn't require any maintenance from our end. There are sometimes notifications from Freshworks but it doesn't affect us.

It's difficult to quantify ROI, but the improved efficiency and access to our library and kit list, means we're saving by not buying additional equipment that already exists. It's also saved a lot of time because people are able to respond to tickets and provide a dropdown answer whereas previously responses were by email.

The licensing model we have costs us around $66,000 per year.

Our users like Freshservice and our customers like it too because they know where they stand. We like that we can do some in-house, internal PR around our teams. We can provide metrics about answering tickets within a defined period, and how many tickets were processed in a month. It's very good PR for a support team that is otherwise only seen when there's a problem.

I would recommend testing this solution with your use case. There are a variety of different industries using it; car manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and banks. I think we were probably one of the first in the broadcast industry to take it on. If it doesn't immediately stand out as a good fit, the company is very open to developing the solution to fit your business. 

This is a great product and I rate it 10 out of 10. 

For the most part, we're doing some asset management with it. We've got about nine departments that are handling their ticketing requests through it through our service catalog. We use it for workflow building and integrations within as well.

As far as organizing the ticketing between departments and the analytics, we can draw from the different types of tickets that we have across our catalog. 

The analytic aspect of it is fairly good. It's broken down pretty much on an agent-per-agent basis and even within groups as well. 

It's pretty versatile in that regard. 

Depending on the size of your organization, is pretty standard and useful. It's really dependent on the size of your organization. For example, in our use case, we're about 5,000 employees right now, and we've outgrown the product at this point.

The only thing I would have against it right now is that the workflow automation is not as granular as we would like it to be, at least for the size of our organization.

The round robin ticketing feature that they have is not ideal, especially in the cases of, for example, if you have multiple groups and there are similar users in different groups. If the round robin-ing feature is turned on at any point for that user, depending on the workflow automation, the ticketing will just go to that user instead of going to a particular group. It's not as accurate as it should be.

When we have new hires that come in, we have a new hire ticket that comes in from our HR department that comes into the IT department so that we can start preparing the equipment and getting the credentials ready. And then, once we create credentials, we need to send that over to an onboarding department that then provides the credentials to the end user and onboards them the day of.

Now for all those tickets, we're talking about two or three tickets by the time we have to ship equipment. Since we have to ship equipment too during Covid, by the time we have those three tickets created, we need to have one group that encompasses everybody that would be involved in that whole procedure so that we'd be able to all have visibility within those tickets. Otherwise, I can't see HR tickets based on the group rules we have set up. HR can't see our IT tickets. 

There was a level of security in place there. We had to create a group that encompassed everybody. The problem there was that since the IT department has a round robin-ing feature set up so that when tickets come in, they're auto-assigned to us, all the tickets that were created within that group that we created to encompass everybody were just coming directly to us, which didn't make sense.

We had to have the ticket initially come into our team, basically, and then we'd have to reroute the ticket. It was just a whole added process and it just became overly frustrating. That's part of the reason why we're moving away from the platform.

I've been using the solution for about four years now. 

The stability is pretty solid. We've never had major outages or any workflow issues that weren't caused by an administrative error. It's been pretty stable as far as a ticketing platform is concerned.

The solution is scalable. However, it depends on how many users you have within your environment. Right now, we have 4,000 users.

We are planning to move away from the solution and therefore will not increase usage. We're downgrading it pretty much to an archiving feature by year's end.

I've only used them a couple of times. However, in every case that they've helped me out with, they've been very professional, and they've helped me resolve the issues. 

I haven't really had to use them. That's indicative of their service to begin with.

Positive

We were using Jira prior to FreshService. They moved away from it in favor of Freshservice, and now we're moving into ServiceNow.

For Jira, the number of users that we currently had at the time didn't necessitate the number of licenses we were going to need. Now we're at the point where we've got probably about 102 agents within Freshservice and it's not that it's quite costly, however, we need something a little bit more robust at this point.

I wasn't there when they did the initial implementation. They actually implemented it about four months prior to when I started with the company.

That said, for the most part, myself and one other person have been predominantly managing the entire administration of the deployment since. I've mostly been managing it on my own for about a year and a half now.

From what I understand and what I've seen as far as the backend is concerned, it was simply just a matter of tying it in via API with our active directory. We have pretty much an auto-visioning feature that was happening with Active Directory until we implemented Okta as an IDP. We now push the group from AD into Okta, which then provisions into Freshservice.

On the day-to-day management side of things, it's doable under one user. It depends on the need from the business as far as what you're trying to provide, as far as the catalog is concerned. If extensive asset management needs to be done or monitoring needs to be done, that will definitely add to the overhead of management. We don't do the majority of that. Even the asset management we don't even maintain anymore as we're planning on moving out of the solution.

We've noted an ROI as it's served as our go-to platform for the last four years.

As far as keeping track of your requests versus agents are concerned, you definitely get a complete, concise list of all your active users versus disabled and suspended. It's not the most ideal in terms of trying to find a user that's in the table as you would actually have to use their search field on the main platform, and hopefully, you'll get the spelling correct. Otherwise, you'll have a hard time finding the user.

That being said, on the user table, it's broken down by the first letter of their first name. So you'll have, what's it called, links per letter of the alphabet. So if I'm looking for myself, for example, I would have to click E and then go down the list page by page individually to try and find it.

As far as user management is concerned, it's a little bit frustrating from the user management perspective. However, from the ticketing perspective, it's a very solid tool. You'll have previous tickets that you could search through if you're looking for particular issues. It's effortless to find. You could search back through the history of a user's ticketing. The asset management tool is where the ROI is, provided that you're keeping it up to date. Again, the analytics portion of it is pretty solid and they just upgraded as well. Now, it's like a reporting and analytics feature that they have as opposed to just scheduled reports that we would run every now and then.

The price depends on the version you are using. 

Currently, we're not on the full enterprise version. We're on the one right underneath enterprise. It's like a professional pro version that's been grandfathered in from four years ago. I don't think they offer it anymore. We're basically paying about $100 USD per agent per month.

Previously, the company was looking at ServiceNow; however, at the time, the number of users we had in the business didn't justify the cost of the purchase of ServiceNow.

It's a good solution. The reason why we're moving out of it is due to the fact that it can't give us what we need anymore in terms of being granular enough to use multiple services.

At least as far as the workflow automation is concerned, I'd advise new users to try and compartmentalize the workflows as much as they can and not try to add too much into one particular workflow as it just ends up being just a long list of different workflows that are hard to maintain down the line. This is what we realized in the beginning. Then, we started compartmentalizing a little bit more by department, basically.

The asset management needs to be kept up to date fairly frequently, depending on how much equipment you're using and how you're tying it into your users. If it's Macs or Windows, if you have an alternate MDM solution in place to manage your assets, then you wouldn't necessarily need Freshservice to manage assets.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use it for receiving internal services provided by IT, HR, VR, facility management fleet, financial affairs, and legal affairs. It is used for any service provided internally by our departments. We have a large number of branches and departments. We have about 40,000 requesters.

We have multiple levels of services. We have central services and geographical or location-based services for the same type of service. For example, in HR, we have a training team. There are some services that are managed or provided by a central L&D team, and there are some services that are handled by the local L&D team. 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.

Recently, they added custom objects and updated the analytics, which was really helpful. A feature called Business Rules for Forms is helping me to facilitate accessibility for users.

There are some limitations in reporting. For example, I would like to have a report of conversations or replies. I have discussed the improvements with them, and they are working on them. They will update it for my request in the next release. I'm waiting for that.

There is a limitation in the profile field, which is required for our business. For example, if I need to add another manager for financial approval, there is no look-up field under profile.

I have been using it as a requester for five years, and I have been using it as an admin for one year.

It is 80% stable. Some users face issues in Chrome and Firefox. So, we sometimes have to be involved with the users to check.

Our account manager follows up with me week by week. If I need to add a license for an agent, it can be easily done. We have 444 agent users, but we have about 40,000 requesters.

Its usage is intermediate currently. We are planning to increase its usage. We are currently calculating how many users we are looking to add.

Until last June, I was contacting them, but we recently had two visits from the FreshWorks team. They offered to support us directly, and I can WhatsApp them any existing tickets sent to their support. I would rate their technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We didn't use any similar solution previously.

It was complex, but now, it is better. Previously, it was really hard, and I had to change a lot of workflows. With recent updates, especially in 2021, there has been an improvement in the performance, workflow, and number of data updates I need to make.

In terms of administration, I am mainly responsible for updating or changing anything, but the admin who was leading before me is also there for support if I am not available.

In terms of maintenance, some checks are required to see if there is any issue. Sometimes, a user is able to submit a request, but some of the required fields are missing. I receive a list of tickets with no required fields, and then automation or workflow doesn't run. The request doesn't get assigned to any group. I have requested them to update it, and they worked on it for about three months. They fixed it, but after one month, the same issue came back.

Its ROI is good at this cost, but any costs over this will be hard to handle. If they increase that cost, our business may look for another solution. Its cost for us, as an IT department, is fine, but for other businesses, its cost is high. For example, HR has about 250 licenses. That cost will be over their budget.

It is $34 per license, per agent. Currently, we don't see any add-ons at extra fees.

We looked up other solutions briefly. We couldn’t find a solution to cover our needs or our requirements because we are using it for HR and VR.

You have to check all documentation and change logs because this is the core of the upgrade and enhancement in your service desk. That helped to improve my help desk and my services desk teams.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to provide service desk assistance to clients. 

One use case is with a client in the insurance industry. Customers who have issues with their insurance send emails for assistance that are routed to us through the solution. We created five support group classifications to address particular insurance issues.

We currently use Azure servers only for connection and to authenticate Office 365 mailboxes. For now, we do not link the solution with Azure's products.

Our company's productivity has improved. 

The solution is very responsive with a 97% success rate in funneling customer tickets. 

A chat bot needs to be added to the portal.

Only one channel is available on the portal for service tickets. We would prefer one channel for tickets and one channel for chat support via a popup that is accessed from smartphones. Other products such as ServiceNow allow two channels. 

The solution has bugs with language translations. For example, our company translated the portal to French but some items remained in English.

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable for users. We currently have 2,000 users and 150 agents who provide service. We utilize PowerShell when creating users and groups because it simplifies the task. 

Scaling to unlock cross-group or other features requires a pack upgrade. 

The technical support staff are responsive and reactive. 

We contacted support when we were having issues with language translation to French. They responded quickly and corrected the bug that was causing some phrases to remain in English. 

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

We previously used Microsoft's SCSM that is the part of SCCM used for managing tickets. After we were attacked by ransomware, we decided to migrate to the solution. 

The initial setup and implementation are easy. 

It took us a month to create various catalogs of service for our client and fully deploy. 

I installed the solution with assistance from a coworker. 

A team of seven technicians provide ongoing maintenance such as adding users or groups. 

The solution has an annual licensing model.

The standard pack is currently orchestrating 2% of our tenants. Our goal is to use the solution to manage all orchestrations but that requires a bigger budget. 

We also have to upgrade to gain access to cross-group or other features.

Pricing is rated a six out of ten. 

We evaluated the solution, ServiceNow, and a third product. After meeting with a manager at Freshservice, we decided it was the best solution for our needs. 

We purchased the solution's standard pack but it does have limitations. For example, we created five groups to match particular service levels. But, users in group one cannot see group two's tickets unless they are a member of group two. 

This is problematic for our insurance client because tickets for children need to be linked to tickets for parents, even though they are are not in the same service group as individuals. Cross-group features are not available unless we upgrade from the standard pack. 

Environments that require two cloud channels might fare better with ServiceNow. 

The solution is easy to deploy even with no prior experience. The portal is simple to use and customize.

The standard pack provides a good starting place for managing client services. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I implemented the solution for a client, and it's used in the typical service management processes, including incident, problem, and change management. It's also used for fleet and facilities management. It has a built-in project management functionality, but that isn't used at the moment. Generally speaking, the out-of-the-box modules are used, with customisation.

It has allowed the client to implement service management processes that didn't previously exist in the business and to have more visibility and control of process tickets.

The most valuable feature is the sandbox, which allows the testing of new configurations, automations, and workflows before puting them live on the production system.

The most significant area for improvement is consistency across the different modules, as they are not intuitive. It makes me think the modules have different development teams with no consistent approach. From an end-user perspective, I can do certain operations in one module, such as incident management, but not in problem management, for example, and I don't see why that should be the case. An example would be the way that bulk actions has been implemented. It would be good to see more consistency in the development process. 

An additional feature could be a new module for test management; it would be good to see a module enabling the creation and management of test scenarios, test scripts, test requirements, and scenarios. The solution doesn't do that out of the box, and though it may be possible to do that with a lot of configuration and workflow customisation, it would be great to see a dedicated test management module.  

I have been using Freshservice for just over a year. 

The tool is highly stable; we've never had any outages or downtime. Freshworks employs a continuous delivery method with Freshservice, so new releases and updates are integrated seamlessly as they are released. There is no impact on the end-users or the agents, so the solution is very stable.

The product is highly scalable. The only barrier is the cost. The more agents, the higher the price, although the more we buy, the cheaper the agents become. As the solution is cloud-based, users access it via URL, which helps make it very scalable.

We have 800 to 900 end-users in total, with 20 or 25 admins.

I've contacted customer support on multiple occasions and there are two main considerations; response time, and quality of the response, with their ability to understand the issue being an important factor in the latter.

The response time is pretty good, as the support system is a live chat. Email is available, but live chat is much easier as it offers a more immediate response. I found their ability to understand the issues quite poor; it took a lot of back and forth. Generally, they couldn't solve the problem and had to take it further to the developers, and I think part of that is that the work I was doing was very detailed and in-depth. I encountered many bugs that an average end-user wouldn't, and many of the issues turned out to be bugs, so the resolution took a long time.

Neutral

The client previously used SysAid and the switch was made because SysAid wasn't flexible enough for the new business processes that were to be implemented.

The initial setup is very straightforward, especially the out-of-the-box configuration. Freshworks provided what they call a transition support specialist to assist us, so the setup was simple.

The deployment was relatively seamless; we configured the solution in an offline state which took about a week and deployed it from there. We shared the URL within the company, and end users accessed it using that. In total, it took one to two weeks for the setup and basic configuration. We did a lot of customisation, workflows, and automation, which took much longer than two weeks.

As the solution is SaaS, it's very light in terms of maintenance; we have two staff with global access to monitor it. One staff member could do that, but we use two for resiliency.

I implemented the solution as a consultant for one of my clients, so it was a mixture of in-house IT resources and vendor assistance.

We see an ROI from the product.

I can't recall exactly how much the licences are, but it is somewhere in the middle compared to the rest of the market. The more licences that are purchased, the cheaper it becomes, and I think the solution offers good value for money.

We ran a procurement exercise that began with online research using review and comparison sites like PeerSpot and Capterra, looking into all the major service management tools against a defined set of business requirements.  Based on our requirements, we shortlisted down to six companies - SysAid, Solarwinds, Freshworks, Hornbill, Halo, and TOPDesk.  We then sent out RFI documentation to the six companies.

For the next stage, we had demos from five of the companies, during which the functionality of each tool was tracked, measured, and scored. We had in-depth discussions regarding the scoring and then we ran trials of Freshservice and Hornbill Service Manager.  Further scoring after the trials resulted in Freshservice scoring the highest, so that's the one we went with.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The product is excellent out of the box, but there are inconsistencies in how Freshworks implements it. It works great for organisations that don't want to customise and create their own processes. The out-of-the-box processes with minor tweaks will suit most organisations, but it becomes more difficult for those who wish to adapt their own specific business rules and processes. In hindsight, Freshservice isn't the solution we should have chosen, as it's just not customisable enough.

There is plenty of help available for Freshservice; there's a user forum where you can post questions and get responses from other users. There's also a great deal of online documentation, the links provided by Freshworks, which connect you to their knowledge base.  Additionally, there is an immediate customer chat function, so a great deal of support is available for any issues that may arise. I would advise other users to use the resources and do the required reading.

We're using the product for an HR service center.

We had a historical kind of email-based contact center. What it's allowed us to do is bring everyone in our department into the journey of customer experience and customer service. When you're just dealing with Outlook and mailboxes, those are typically only limited to certain teams. This allows us to scale. It allows us to scale and engage other people that may be required to help support a ticket. We may need a certain level of expertise or help from a subsidiary area, allowing us to bring them into the conversation much more quickly without losing sight of the ticket or the customer. You don't get lost in multiple emails. You can, essentially, manage everything off an initial inquiry.

We really like the Freshchat widget that allows people to engage with our FAQs on any kind of webpage or web property. We really like that. 

We really like the auto-routing. 

The rules-based automation that they've got built into auto triage and auto disseminate to the right groups. 

We really like the auto-responses, as well. 

Their dashboard and their ability to follow the history of the ticket to see who's all engaged is very useful. It allows us to see who's engaged with it.

Their analytics need improvement.

Some of their integration could be better as well. 

Maybe this might be new in some of their newer versions. However, the chat should be an inherent part and shouldn't be a separate module.

The way they run their service portal, it would be nice if you didn't require users to log in. If they could go to a login agnostic model and be able to, using AI, auto triage and recognize if somebody submitted a ticket before, they should be able to do that in an automated fashion. They shouldn't force users to log in anymore.

I've been using the solution for about two years. 

We've had no issues with stability or downtime at all.

The solution can scale well. 

We have a couple of different deployments. In our specific deployment that I'm attached to, we would have about 40 users.

We have seen growth inside of our organization. We're not the only team that uses it. There's a second team, and they're much larger. They have about 150 users.

We've seen other scaled deployments for other purposes because of the success we've seen with Fresh. Will we see more growth in our specific HR area? Probably not. We're a small HR shop.

They're not very good at technical support.

Neutral

I've used some of the Oracle products, like RightNow. I've had some ServiceNow utilization, as well.

The initial setup wasn't easy or difficult. It was kind of in the middle. There's a lot of configuration you can do on your own. There is some stuff where you've got to involve your IT department. Overall,  that's what I like about Fresh compared to something like ServiceNow. It's pretty lightweight. It's pretty scalable and has a much simpler ease of implementation.

It requires very little maintenance. Maybe we had one person attached to it. However, it wasn't a full-time job for them. We don't have to have an in-house Fresh technical expert. It's pretty easy to figure out.

We did it in-house with some of the initial onboarding direct from Fresh.

We have seen an ROI.

I'm not sure of the exact cost. I recall it being pretty small. 

When considering options,  I looked at Oracle again. We were looking at ServiceNow and Fresh, and we decided to go with Fresh, at least for short to medium term.

I don't know what version we are using, however, in terms of what modules we're using, we're using Freshservice and Freshchat.

Like anything, the tool doesn't fix your service issues. It can help, however, you got to have the right philosophical mindset and your process fundamentals in place because the tool isn't always your silver bullet. 

In terms of your process and your philosophy, I find doing an implementation like Fresh should get you in that mindset. The other piece of advice I would give people contemplating this is, for example, where I love dashboards and data, and Fresh doesn't do the best job in this space. It's not implementation and done. There's always fine-tuning required, and there's always room for improvement. That's where it's important to look at your data, look at your utilization, and always go back and challenge some of your concepts once it's implemented.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

At my previous organization, we had an alliance partnership with Freshservice. Part of that alliance involved me implementing Freshservice for North American and Europe clients. Freshservice is an ITSM product. The PLC would be done by the thresholds and as part of the alliance, and we would implement the Freshservice ITSM solution for the clients. It's completely based on the customer requirements, which modules need to be implemented. We will do the data collection, the requirement gathering, et cetera, and we will do the solution and implementation for the Freshservice to cater to the client's needs. As part of this, we'll do the infra, we'll do automation, orchestration, and everything as part of this integration with multiple sources. We'll do the portfolio management.

We like that the product is a SaaS-based service. You can just register and within five to minute minutes, you are ready to go.

It's very intuitive. It's not complex or anything. Anyone with some IT knowledge, IT service management knowledge, can just spin up an instance within the cloud and register for an instance. He can just go through configurations very easily. 

Maximum, within a week, if you have a basic ITL, if you have good technical instance, you can spin up an instance with a basic idea of some incident management for these catalogs.

The product itself comes at 60% to 70% configuration. It's already done for you. Out of the box, there are around 40 plus service catalogs available. You simply need to customize your requirements. The product is loaded with all the features you need.

At the moment, they are adding a lot of functionality to the product. It is beginning to mature. 

This product is very good for small and mid-level markets. However, I'm not sure about the enterprise level. I'm not sure about expanding to a 100,000 to 200,000 user base or more. 

We'd like to see a CMDB, a Configuration Management Database, in the future. 

I used the solution about six months ago at my previous company.

The solution is in the cloud and very stable. there are no bugs or glitches. 

The scalability may be limited. I'm not sure it can handle enterprise-level deployments. 

I've done implementations for up to 2,000 users. 

The users are unlimited. The licensing is based on how many agents and end users you have; there is no limit.

There will be a team managing the tickets. They are mainly on the service desk or customer support. As an end user, you will be raising a ticket and I'll be looking at the ticket. If I need to log into the system and look at the ticket, I need a license. It's based on that agent licensing.

Once you log into an instance, there is always chat support available. You can also email them. they are very easy to get a hold of. 

Neutral

The initial setup is very easy. It's a SaaS product. You just sign up and get going within ten to 15 minutes. 

The licensing is based on how many agents you have or need to manage tickets.

The licensing can be based on a monthly or yearly renewal.

Different payment options are available.

The pricing is available on their website. The pricing plans and everything is available. The cost is completely based on which plan you choose, as there are around four categories. The cost is completely based on the features the company must have.

I was a customer and end-user.

It's a SaaS product. The product is continuously evolving and growing, although I'm not sure how well it would benefit an enterprise-level organization. However, in general, it's good. It's a really agile platform. 

We cater to small and medium-sized clients, and this solution is perfect for us.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I was mainly using it for the functionality related to changes, such as tracking and reporting production changes going into our live systems. I also used it for APIs for the automatic generation of changes based on triggers from Jira.

In terms of deployment, I'm pretty sure it was SaaS, and in terms of version, it would've been a fairly recent version because they'd only been using it for about a year or so.

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 were able to automate a lot of internal processes, such as onboarding of new users via forms, which had integrated notifications. It was really easy to do. Form management was very good. That was probably the main benefit. The automation of the support calls was the other part from which we got a lot of benefit.

On the changes side, I found the workflow network quite easy to set up. I didn't need a lot of hand-holding in that. I didn't have to go through training as such. The flows were pretty basic to set up, which made it fairly simple.

The additional fields that were required for our change process were easy to set up. I was able to get it up and running pretty quickly. I was working as the head of the project management team. I got a few of the guys onto that, and then we rolled it out.

We did an evaluation of the project functionality. That was a fairly new area they were launching. It was fairly underwhelming, but they were gradually building out this area. That was one area where I felt they still have a long way to go. We did a review of our project management tool internally within the company, and it was one of the choices, but it didn't match up anywhere close to any of the other tools we were considering. It wasn't a good match.

On the reporting side, when we were doing reporting, one thing that was a bit of a limitation was when you had a data list containing a list of changes that have occurred for the whole time and you had to fit the list onto a page. If the list went over the page, it would just truncate it at the page. You wouldn't get all your data. So, it didn't work. That was one big stand-out for me. What we tended to do was convert things into a more readable format, and then we had more targeted exception reporting, but it would be nice to have a full list of things that could be automatically generated and that can flow over pages.

In terms of additional features, their strategy is quite good in that they incrementally change things. They must be using some sort of agile methodology. They tend to be doing these little releases along the way, and then they say, "Oh, we've got this new feature." I would definitely encourage them in that area. It is working for them. So, on the project side, being able to easily add risks and issues and more complex dependencies were probably the key areas in the project space where I saw that they let themselves down, but it was just a burgeoning area that they were launching into. It was just part of their initial offering. The plans for the future were still fine.

I used it in my previous role at another organization. I was there working on Freshservice for about seven months, and I was working with it a few times a week in various capacities. The last I worked with it would be in February.

I didn't see any real issues with it. I was there for about nine months, and I might have seen two outages in that time. I also didn't see any performance issues coming through on that.

Scalability didn't seem to be an issue. It was probably about working out the best licensing model. We had some administrative people, and we had users as well. For Freshservice, we had about 150 users.

I didn't have a direct connection to Freshservice's support itself. I used to go to our local support. Our IT help desk was the first line of support, and then they would contact the Freshservice desk if needed.

I was involved in the changes area. The base of Freshservice was already in place, and that was being managed by our support manager. So, the initial setup for me was around the changes area. It came out of the box and then it involved deciding whether or not we add additional fields. We added the additional fields that we required, and then gradually, we would check out the workflow and then say, "Okay, we want to have an approval step here." We'd then add an approval step. So, we incrementally worked on it as we saw it and then tested it all the way through, and when we were ready, we made it available for a sample group. We could then test it out.

We didn't do it as a big bang approach. It tended to be segregated to a particular system area, and then we rolled it out to other areas after that. That seemed to be a good strategy for us.

In terms of duration, for the changes piece, we had a working prototype within about six weeks, and that included documenting how we wanted it to run. If I had to look at just the configuration time, it probably took about four weeks to work through configurations. That was pretty quick for the changes side. 

For the APIs, it was probably a similar duration. There was a bit of requirements gathering and working out. We had trigger conditions where we wanted to trigger a workflow so that it automatically creates a change based on a trigger condition within Jira. The longer part was just setting up the base integration. The actual configuration with the actual tool was probably of the order of two to four weeks.

In the initial base setup, there was just me and another person. When it came to the rollout, we were up to about six different project managers, and there were a couple of integration people. There were probably 10 people all up. 

We also had API integration. We worked with an integrating company to do that. 

In terms of maintenance, there are definitely patches that come through all the time, but that tended to be managed through the support area. I wouldn't have as much visibility on that side.

It was a middle tier. It wasn't an expensive one. 

It was a tier model usage. Licensing costs varied between admin users and regular users.

ServiceNow was one. It was a much more comprehensive solution as compared to Freshservice, but it was also more expensive. ServiceNow is definitely more robust in terms of features, but Freshservice has a much better ability to configure. It is very flexible that way, from my experience.

Being a smaller company, we tended to keep fairly tight on cost. We didn't really want to spend a lot of money. My understanding was that ServiceNow was much more expensive, but I wasn't close to the details. Freshservice was considered to be about right for what they wanted to pay. It was in the middle of the range in terms of the subscription cost.

I would recommend it if you're looking for a really quick way of getting your help desk up and running with a ticketing system and some pretty cool automation with emails, notifications, etc. It is easy to set up and maintain, and it is reasonably priced for what it is.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It is a solid product. It doesn't do everything that ServiceNow does, which is my only comparison point, but it definitely has good features for the price.