Freshservice

What I liked most about Freshservice was the no-code setup and design of most of the services within the tool. It is very easy at being able to design the functionality that you would need your Enterprise Service Management tool to undertake and then implement it within a matter of days. This was very important to our organization because our experiences with other tools that did this were that they were either too simple to undertake the task or they required advanced knowledge or development to complete. Additionally, Freshservice is pretty simple from the administrative side too. For example, there were lots of options to set up users automatically and integrate with tools in their marketplace. We were able to automatically create and delete our employee accounts via Okta but there are more options that you can use. We also needed workflows that synced with our development tool, Jira. Instead of agents having to switch between the two tools, we have provided options so they can simply just use Freshservice to create and update these tickets from our side. We see a lot of value in things like this being added without having to pay extra to do so. Finally, I think the end user experience is second to none. The portal is easy to navigate and search. While it is certainly not the best looking, it is still pretty competitive with the best ESMs available in the world. The no-code portal designer does allow you to customize the look and feel as much as possible though, so you can build what you need. Also, using Business Teams to layout a custom agent experience for each team works really well from an administration standpoint.

- User-friendly, especially for non-technical staff submitting tickets - Onboarding was simple and the backoffice interface is intuitive - The built-in asset management features, while limited, allow us to have some visibility into equipment without the need for additional tools

What I appreciate most about Freshworks IT Service Management is its ease of use combined with powerful automation capabilities. The platform is intuitive for both administrators and end users, which significantly reduced the learning curve during rollout and improved user adoption across the organisation. The automation and workflow management features stand out. Automated ticket routing, SLA tracking, and escalation rules helped streamline our support processes and reduced manual intervention. This improved response times and ensured accountability within the team.

The main thing I dislike about their tool is the tradeoff of flexibility within their app ecosystem. Many of their orchestration tools fall short of full customization because of this. For example, if I want to send a custom Web Request to something, I would have to build that outside of their orchestration tool. This is a bit difficult to do since it basically means I have to authenticate to two separate integrations to use the same feature. Given that their workflow is sort of like Okta Workflows, I was hoping it allowed for more of the custom actions stuff like Okta Workflows does. Additionally, I was not a huge fan of their Slack integration when we had it. It was not very customizable and I felt like other enterprise service platforms had a better look and design to them. Although the AI functionality works very well, I feel like adoption at our company has been slow for using Slack Chat bots in general. It was also very buggy too and business rules did not affect the Slack Bot as well which made the customization options for this limited. Certain features would stop working and we had to uninstall it several times to fix it. They should really work on improving the UI of that tool and maybe improve some of the features to be customized to the organization instead of fully relying on machine learning to provide you options. One last problem I have with the tool also relates to the customization of how the AI works. As of today, the Freddy AI features are kind of out of the box and you really can't do anything about it other than shutting it on or off. Given this, I don't think the feature is useful at all. It needs more workflow and customization like every other part of Freshservice to become useful.

- There are limitations in customization and integration, especially when trying to automate multi-step workflows - Reporting is less flexible than desirable, making it harder to extract the insights needed for proactiveness - Some modules are very limited, making them almost unusable for any serious use cases

While Freshworks IT Service Management delivers strong core functionality, some of the more advanced customisation and configuration options can be complex and require additional time to implement correctly. Certain workflow adjustments and automation rules required careful setup and testing to ensure they aligned with our internal processes. Reporting, although powerful, sometimes requires additional configuration to extract very specific or highly customised insights. Building more regular reports can take time, particularly if you are not deeply familiar with the reporting structure. That said, once properly configured, the platform performs reliably and delivers strong value.