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

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

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

Friendly user interface.
Copy screenshots directly into the form (although there's a bug for the last 3 months that screenshots are displayed double in edit mode.)
Plenty of fields to configure for more complex workflows.

Cons

Default categories and labels with awkward naming (synonymous use of "Tickets" and "Incidents" for "Issues", "Change" for "Change Request", "Problem" for "Bugs")
No possibility to convert issues to change requests. Agent needs to recreate the entire case in the back resulting in significant adminstrative overhead.
Reporting is practically inexistent.
REST API not covering many functions and object attributes. (You cannot substitute reporting externally.)
HTML editor limited and bugged. (CSS code in support articles not supported, Bootstrap not supported, code gets changed or reformatted upon saving articles)
No access to the file and image repository.

Frankly, with every new cosmetic change and "functionality no can do" message from the Team, I am growing more and more wary of this application. At this point, I am thinking of it as an overpriced form tool with practically no reporting, a gimped Knowledge Management base, and an asset list functionality that quickly drains your wallet.
I am spending significant time rewriting issues as change requests in order to subsequently manually attach them to the original issue ticket and explain to the user why I would want to close his ticket after all. Writing knowledge articles is best done in a separate HTML editor. The Text Editor lacks basic functionality, removes formatting and images in unpredictable ways with undoing, and stores images and files in a central repository you have no access to.
You might as well do that with a forms tool readily available on the internet.

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

Freshservice is very easy to use, both for IT admins and end users. The interface is clean and intuitive, and the documentation is comprehensive. Freshservice has excellent customer support and they respond to issues/queries immediately.

Cons

The customization options can be a bit overwhelming, especially for new users. The reporting engine is bit slow, especially for large datasets.

Pros

I like the ease of use of the system and that we can have asset management, knowledgebase, and incident management all tied together.

Cons

We have had issues with some of the integration pieces, but have sorted most of them out with Freshservice support. We still have a couple of issues we are working out, but overall we have been pleased with support services.

Pros

API, access control, activity dashboard, activity tracking, speeding up resolution times, improving access to systems, escalation, notifications, streamline service management across all business lines in an enterprise, SLA are the most impactful features and it is very easy to use.

Cons

As an user nothing found bad about freshservice while services are very good and it help us to provide solution at once place for all users. No integration with other business process.

Pros

Ticket System workflow is the best to use.

Cons

it is a learning curve to use the workflow

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Price and ease of service

Pros

Great ticket-management tool for our Marketing function. 40+ users.

Cons

As an IT-ticketing-borne tool, it does not always cater to the needs of a Marketing team. For more sophisticated Marketing planning, collaboration and reporting, we have now started using Freshservice.

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

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

The way it can be used to report on bottlenecks and problem areas as well and programmed to tackle them is a game changer. It's great but you do have to know what changes impact others and I think it could be made more clear even for those with experience it wouldn't hurt and for those learning it would speed up the learning curve a lot.

Cons

Inconsistencies in user interface. Menus and options and ways of changing things differs on newer or older modules. Also the Employee Onboarding is great but a pain to adjust if you wish to change the Stakeholder order and initiators. Also linking to AD groups for requesters and agents would be ideal.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

KACE was old and lacked options. I had FreshDesk experience and suggested FreshDesk but we landed on FreshService which make FreshDesk look like BETA software.

Switched From

KACE

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Previous experience using FreshDesk and how it was beneficial to our needs.

Pros

I have used several products before and Freshservice is by far the favorite because it has automation, integrates with many vendors and software that we currently use such as Dell and JAMF

Cons

The Admin setting section is hard to navigate through sometimes and hard to find settings I want

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

Moved from an on-prem ticketing system to cloud. The previous product was not reliable and would crash often

Switched From

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

Reasons for Switching to Freshservice

Better pricing and ticked all the requirements we were after

Pros

I love the automation and customization that is possible.

Cons

The only cons are that there is some minor missing functionality with automation (for instance, automatically creating a new ticket based on the properties of an existing ticket). I would still say it meets 99% of our needs though, so my only complaints are just nitpicks.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, Zoho Desk, ServiceNow and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

We needed more robust functionality and the on-prem version of Spiceworks was no longer being supported. With our desire for automation and approvals workflows, Freshservice was an obvious step up.

Switched From

Spiceworks

Pros

The ease of use is a huge plus to us and to all of the end users, it is very straight forward for everyone to use, well integrated into the company super easily and multiple ways to access via the website, mobile app or even just an email, makes our jobs much easier, and the hardware management is also a huge plus being able to track it all

Cons

They are working on it now but I wish it had a better tracking of what was installed in certain hardware, at the moment they do not show all of the components just most of the major ones, would be a nice thing to have it all

Pros

Reduce the emails that are sent to different members of the IT team and host them all in one place that provides easy access, reminders, prioritisation, staff allocation, feedback, knowledge base and more, all in one place

Cons

Not a negative as such but the points-based system does encourage health competition with teammates, but each job only gives a set number of points, not on a scale so a simple job of creating an account and installing a whole new fibre network can earn you the same, whether it a 2 minute or a 2-month job!

Pros

We have been using fresh service for more than a year, it is ok as a ticketing system & perform the daily task

Cons

It is a complicated system compared to the other one we have been using, we had a problem generating the Team's ticketing report to do the yearly appraisal, so it has failed us in one of the most important yearly assessments, so it is either the Admin knowledge or the system has issues, but in both cases it is a bad experience, unlike other systems we were using

Pros

Simple to use - one of the main reasons we went with FreshService was that during a trial of many other systems FreshService was by far the easiest to setup and configure. This means more time doing other projects rather than administering the helpdesk system.

Powerful Automations - my trial version had the new Smart Workflow addon which made creating complex workflows very easy and simple. There is still room for improvement and some fields cannot be used in automations e.g. Impact or Urgency.

Self service catlog - its a nice to have and allows easy segregation of Service Requests compared to Incidents, the custom forms are nice although would be better to dynamic i.e. drop down of all requesters for example.

Branding - nice branding options and easy to use giving full access to CSS / HTML although not as easy to manipulate as ZenDesk.

Self Service Portal - We haven't rolled this out to end users yet but the portal is easy to use and with the branding options can be customised. The embedded widget is also useful and can be embedded into SharePoint.

Cons

Reporting - very limited compared to some systems although improvements are on the road map.

Software Assets - confusing to use as you have to track each software item as an asset, cannot easily search on what is installed on computers across the database. Again improvements coming on the road map.

Dashboard is useless - current implementation of the system gives a very basic overview of the system and an activity log. We don't use it as it doesn't provide any useful information.

Certain Form Fields - you cannot change the default fields or even hide them without using JavaScript, this means I have had to create custom fields to tell my agents to ignore certain fields which isn't ideal. Also the categories list is shared among tickets, our change requests differ from our incidents.

SLA breaches - compared to ZenDesk it isn't as easy to see when a ticket is due to breach SLA. Currently the ticket interface only shows Resolve Due date and not response due date, the response due just appears in the main ticket view when its close to expiry. Not ideal but workable.

Pros

The FreshService implementation team was very easy to work with and provided excellent customer support. They did a great job of keeping us on the timeline we had set. General tech support is very good as well. I always get a response within a day. I've also enjoyed working with their robust API so that I can make customizations.

The ticketing system, which is by far the most commonly used feature, is excellent.

Cons

The knowledge base feature leaves some things to be desired. There is no ability to create a template so that multiple people can write articles with a consistent look. The user side can be customized with Javascript and CSS, but the agent side can't be. The result is that knowledge base articles look different, depending on who is looking at them, and whether the article content is included in an e-mail or being accessed from a URL.

The project management feature is confusing and not particularly intuitive. Especially when it comes to altering dates for tasks that must happen in a sequential order.

Pros

ease of use for admins to control tickets via simple to use interface

Cons

new features take several revisions to get working correctly / fit for OUR purpose

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Customer Service Management and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Freshservice

better UX

Switched From

SysAid

Pros

SaaS based product so no on premises hardware or software. Setup is more than 10 minutes that some of the marketing indicates, but definitely not a complex setup. Once you understand the workflow things become fairly intuitive in setting up the software. The ability to process tickets from one screen, enabling you to reply, enter case notes and disposition the ticket from one screen is very good. Like anything there is a learning curve involved, but it becomes very straightforward to Administer. This is very important as I am handling issues, closing tickets and assisting end users so I do not have the time to spent an hour a day doing routine maintenance tasks. The technical support team is also very helpful.

Cons

Most of the issues have not been with things that do not work as much as do not conform to our individual work flows and processes. A few things that are challenges include that pasting into tickets using the portal does not work. Any screen shots or images depicting issues and end user is facing need to be added as attachments. By default you are given a long and not intuitive URL for your Portal. While you can create a custom URL it requires purchasing an SSL certificate or the connection is not secure. If a User submits a ticket via email and at a later time tries to create an account on the Portal it will advise them that the email is in use. To resolve this they just need to request a password reset, but it is not intuitive to the User, they think something is wrong.

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

The nuts and bolts of service catalog, tickets for agents, basic asset management and automation within the platform are all solid and entirely usable. We have been using it for a few years because it does the basics well, is robust, and is fairly priced for the quantity and quality of its features.

Cons

Ticket management is cumbersome as soon as you want to manage or prioritise your workload. The kanban view is limited. Ticket management exists only in list form. There is no effective way to plan your working week. This might be ok if you're handling only issues but if you're producing anything, it's very limiting. Ticket management should be this platforms bread and butter but it is only basic.

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.