Freshservice Reviews

Pros

Layout is clean and easy to understand. Has fun 'gamify' system which lets my techs compete with with other for prizes with the system keep score. This is available on our subscription level. Also has SLA monitoring for those pesky KPI requirements. Can setup a catalog of services and items for end users to 'order' with a workflow approval process. Can integrate with chat and phone. Great all around alternative to Zendesk. Doesn't nickel and dime you to have basic features.

Cons

List of Integration possibilities are pretty small in comparison and hasn't really grown in the several years we have been using it.

Pros

We rely on the ticket system primarily to manage steps to resolution and archive past interactions and solutions. FreshService provides this functionality with little back-end effort on our part. Though somewhat limited, we do appreciate the ability to customize our portal.

Cons

Adding MSP's can be a confusing process. As it stands, you have to open a trial account then merge it into your main Desk. Last time we did this, FreshService failed to convert the account properly and we ended up being billed for the "trial" account. It took us several weeks to get the billing resolved. I recommend working with a live agent right off the bat to make this happen as smoothly as possible.

Alternatives Considered

HappyFox Help Desk, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Spiceworks, Vivantio and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Freshservice offered more features for less than comparable services. The Agent and Administrator online interface is also aesthetically appealing and easy to tailor to our needs.

Pros

FreshService is one of those frustrating products where the potential is so high and overall execution is done very well, but is let down by ridiculous bugs and even worse support. If Fresh could get to grips with this then I'd score them *very* highly. Unfortunately, they have not proven to be able to achieve this.

Cons

Reporting is dire. Bugs galore in modules you would not expect. Obvious features are missing, you try to work around them... and encounter a bug.

Pros

Intuitive UI. Easy to self-study and self-deploy. Global wide search is very useful as well

Cons

Not enough integration. Can't connect with other systems

Pros

The ease to set it up : you can do it yourself without technical support. It comes with an app so it works on mobile devices as well, convenient if the laptop stops working.

Cons

You cannot change the webportal to your liking unless you have webdesign skills.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Customer Service Management

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

Costs

Switched From

TOPdesk

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Costs (yes, I'm Dutch..) the tool has it all and the ease of working with it.

Pros

Freshservice has been a game-changer for our organization. The service catalog and user-friendly interface has allowed our employees to improve their productivity over the past 2+ years we have had the system implemented. The customizable forms and workflow has allowed our IT department to streamline processes and improve efficiency.

Cons

I wish the reporting capabilities were more customizable. There have been a few situations where I reached out to Frehservice for support on reports I needed but found the reports were not possible. The freshservice support team told me my reporting needs would be added to the list of potential "future enhancements'.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Customer Service Management, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

Our previous product did not have a customizable system and did not provide our employees with a way to track their tickets once created. It also lacked any type of reporting capabilities.

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Cost and ease of customization

Pros

There are several reasons I pushed to choose FreshService over other products. The value of the features I was getting with the ease of set up. Within the trial period, I had most of the set up done before I presented to my department head. The ease of switching from the previous (and archaic) system to FS for our end users was, overall, seamless. The ability to customize the product with minimal knowledge makes it easy to manage and make changes. After reviewing a dozen other ticketing systems, FreshService provided the ease of implementation and change that we were looking for.

Cons

I love Freddy and want to use it however it's limited features over the traditional portal are frustrating. I understand it's a new feature and it's in a state of constant improvement but I wanted to launch with it and was unable to because key features that we needed specifically for our company would not show up. The reports aren't quite what I thought they would be either and I will probably have to do some work with powershell to get the information I really need.

Alternatives Considered

HappyFox Help Desk, Jitbit Helpdesk, Zoho Desk, JIRA Service Management, ServiceNow, Kayako and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

The system we had was a basic portal for entering the request and then it would email it out to everyone. There was no way to properly manage, track, or pull reports on the work being done and tickets were falling through the cracks. It was making everyone's job harder than it needed to be.

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

This list is only a partial list of all the systems I looked at but I had issues with identifying what features each level had, lack of trials, unresponsive or slow customer service were some of the few issues I ran into.

Pros

Super simple for both IT managers and regular employees to learn and utilize. According on your membership plan, you have access to a wide variety of optional add-ons for your control panel. Extremely flexible, albeit occasionally annoying limitations surface.

Cons

In comparison to the things it provides, Freshservice's price tag is a touch steep, and the company's support team has occasionally experienced technical difficulties that have slowed its response times.

Pros

Automated processes and operational flow. Adding a new integration and automating task pushes is a breeze. To date, automation has allowed us to cut our work time by as much as 60 percent.

Cons

While the sheer number of configuration options may seem daunting at first, you'll quickly gain the expertise to tailor freshservice to your exact needs as you gain experience with IT service management.

Pros

I like the Self service portal and Virtual Agent, With this requestor can easily make Service request through the portal and Virtual Agent helps our requestor on basic troubleshoot problem

Cons

Improve the Customer support services , and provide a on site support is better to understanding more in this product

Alternatives Considered

Network Topology Mapper and Log and Network Performance Pack

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Compare to ServiceNow is low in cost and ease to deploy too

Pros

Easy to build requestors and submit tickets via email and communicate with the end users we support for our internal helpdesk. Easy to spot trends and ensure service level agreements for ticket response times are measured appropriately.

Cons

The inventory management system at first was very unreliable, sometimes search wouldnt pull up names or info. It seems to have been developed and works much better, but I believe the backend database or tool used could be of better quality. It has come a long way from the beginning and is markedly better.

Alternatives Considered

Spiceworks, ServiceNow, ManageEngine Endpoint Central, Autotask PSA and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

ManageEngine cost too much for what we were using it for and it was also on premises. We needed something simple and cloud based and cheaper.

Switched From

ManageEngine Endpoint Central

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Cost, ease of use, and provided the greatest benefit for a simple ticket and asset tracking system with the "possibility" of future developments in other areas of the system. We know FreshService was and is a growing company so we bet our money on the growth, we have not been disappointed, but of course would like to see more development in the areas of change management and maybe some more asset tracking features. Also, the customer service and support is STELLAR, I would say better than any vendor or product we use previously or currently. Bravo on the customer support, please never change how great that is, its more important than people might think.

Pros

- Very little initial configuration needed - features work out-of-the-box
- User experience (UX) very very good - modern, quick and easy to use, looks great
- Workflow automations and orchestrations allow significant and valuable automation with little work
- Sandbox mode allows safely making and testing changes, and syncing them into production easily
- Ticket approvals system works very logically and very well

Cons

- Sandbox sync sometimes fails and needs Freshworks support intervention
- Only the main requester can access the ticket, and it's not possible to add others to see the ticket
- No first-party SSO integration - we have to use a 3rd party plugin for SSO & SCIM which only syncs user attributes when they re-login
- Agent permissions are not granular enough to allow us to lock down the number of admins as much as we want
- WYSIWYG editor has quite a few quirks around new lines and styling

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

- Jira Service Management requires significant building and configuration, and out-of-the-box Freshservice is pre-configured ready to go, and any configuration you do is a bonus, not a requirement. - Jira's user experience is very outdated and slow, wasting our agents' and requesters' time.

Switched From

JIRA Service Management

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

- ServiceNow requires even more building and configuration than Jira, and requires programming using AngularJS, a now deprecated framework, and we would need to hire programmers who specialise in it and configuring ServiceNow - ServiceNow's user experience is also pretty outdated and slow compared to Freshservice

Pros

I like the fact it is simple in use and that I can offer my clients a solutions/helpdesk functionaliteit for manuals. As well manage my ITIL processes and asssest from 1 solution.

Cons

I am missing some helpdesk features I had before with Freshdesk. I think I had to 'give' in some of those nice features with the solutions, where you could index a page and make templates.

Alternatives Considered

TOPdesk

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

I needed an all in solutions with assest management, change and problem management

Switched From

Freshdesk

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Price

Pros

The FreshService interface is pleasant and pretty intuitive to work with. We had been using a different ticket system for more than a decade. Nonetheless, the switch to FreshService was relatively smooth for the whole team. I think the major reason is that the interface feels rather natural or comfortable to work with.

The same kind of intuitiveness is also seen under the hood (Admin panel), which is where a lot of other systems fall short. Even though Fresh Service packs a ton of features under the hood, you are not battling against a maze of intertwined difficult-to-manage configurations. I personally don't need to do a lot of changes in the configuration (I'm rather the "backup" for those kind of things), but when I do, it doesn't take me too long to find out where I need to adapt what setting.

I had to contact Fresh Service support a few times and so far always got a satisfactory reply in a decent reply time.

Cons

With all of the above said, it also lacks some features you could see as "basic" or "take for granted" here and there.

Agents can't configure an "out-of-office" period themselves.
There's no possibility to set up a custom dashboard per agent.
My major pet peeve is the text editor, which options are very limited (can't send a reply with a paragraph in fixed with font, can't edit the source ...) and which sometimes behaves unexpectedly (some odd behaviour with linebreaks, weird cursor position when pasting text ...)

And finally, while there is integration with Jira, I have the feeling it tends to break quite easily. We've probably had it more half- or not-working-at-all than working as it should. This makes it unreliable, requires manual effort and follow-up and really undoes the usefulness of having integration at all.

Pros

It's literally "pay and use". Zero footprint in your current IT architecture, everything is habdled via any compatible web browser. And yet it includes advanced ITSM functionalities such as asset management and CMDB, in which you mdeploy Probes and Agents to Windows, Linux and Mac devices to scan and inventory hardware and software. And like every other Freshworks solution, it's very customizable interms of UI, automation and notifications, as well as integrations with third-party solutions and via API for developers.

Cons

Perhaps adding new modules. Freshservice deals with this by integrations and automations, but out of the included modules (Tickets, Problems, Changes, Releases, CMDB, Projects, Solutions and Reports) you can't, at the moment, add a new one, such as Facilities or HR for example. However, provided that the included modules cover most, if not all, or ITSM's basic needs, and that the mnost generic modules (such as Tickets) are easily adaptable and customizable, that's not much of a problem.

Pros

Incident and Service requests is the module I like the most, specially because IT support can

Cons

Inventory and Software management.

The agent installed in workstations sporadically stops working and IT support must install the manually for it to continue reporting on the asset. When deploying hundreds of assets, this becomes very tedious.

Also, the Probe used to scan network and synchronize AD with Fresh lack a lot of functionality and it doesn't provide enough information about a multitude of non-workstation assets after scanning.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Price and ease of deployment.

Pros

Ease of use, customer support and nice layouts

Cons

Some things not configurable which makes us having to do workarounds

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Customer Service Management

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

Cost

Switched From

Hornbill

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Cost

Pros

Freshservice is a wonderful service management product! We use it for handling all our tickets and service requests. It differentiates between incidents and service requests so you can create a whole catalogue of hardware/software items that users can request. You can add approval requirements to these service requests and can create custom workflows to automate certain processes for incidents and requests.

Cons

The Project Managment module is a little underwhelming. Feels a little underdeveloped and the visual interface and functionality fells somewhat lacking. We use the Kanban method of project management and Freshservice doesn't give us the ability to manage projects using that method. It uses lists and gantt charts. However, and a service desk management tool it is great!

Pros

Makes managing support very easy, love working with Fresh Service and the link to Jira works brilliantly

Cons

The searches could be a bit better if additional filtering options were added to narrow down the search when looking for historical tickets

Pros

Ticket Management and Change Management are the two areas i appreciate the most. Over the years we have engaged with the Fresh Service support teams and community forums to provide feedback - which has been listened to and implemented in future updates.

Cons

The alert management profiles and rules could do with an overhaul - at the moment we are having to setup multiple alert rules against a single Alert profile based on the content of the alert.Would be great to generate alert rules based on If / Or / And Statements.

Pros

Freshservice follows the ITIL process which means it is easier to structure in a way which works for our business. Tickets can be raised by internal users or customers outside of the business allowing for greatly improved communication. Tickets are easy to manage in terms of responses and audit trails. The service catalogue is a great feature, this allows us to capture all the necessary information first time every time. Outside of tickets and communication there are a vast amount of admin features, one we commonly use is dispatcher. This allows our business to create rules for tickets/service requests that hit the helpdesk. This in turn saves time and further increases productivity. The ability to create reports is a great way to identify where we can improve and provide a much improved service to our users.

Cons

While the admin features are vast, on occasions it can be difficult to locate what you need unless you know your way around. However, it's not impossible and with time does become easier.

Pros

Freshservice has most of the features you need. It's customisable and expensible to a point which allows for other features to be added.

Cons

Some of the UX can be frustrating. The search is very lacking and often doesn't find the results you need. The "Solutions" feature for knowledge management is quite basic and can be frustrating to use.

Pros

I like the ease of use - It has been really easy to roll out to the userbase

Cons

Lack of customisation on forms and categories - I cant change labels etc

Alternatives Considered

SysAid and SolarWinds Service Desk

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

We needed a fresh start

Switched From

SysAid

Pros

There's a lot of pros to FreshService.

The automated routing (dispatcher) system is excellent and extremely configurable. You essentially are able to make if-then statements with a ton of different variables to route tickets to groups or agents, along with custom notifications.

The ticket form, self-service portal, and service catalog are all very customizable and excellent resources as well.

Cons

The only thing that can be frustrating with FreshService is the tiered payment system that requires different payment amounts for different features.

While Freshservice is affordable, it can be frustrating when you see a cool feature and want to try it out, only to find that your particular tier does not support it.

Pros

Follows ITIL practices, stable, UI, mobile app, lots of options from an administrator point of view. Service catalog works really well. Freshservice is constantly adding new functions and listening to user requests. The ability to link work items across entities such as incidents to problem, problem to change and feature requests to changes helps to tell a story of every work item and lets you get into the details when needed.

Cons

The user portal allows customization but it can be a challenge to work within the framework provided and has limits. License management is still a bit limited and challenging.