Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk: A clash of Titans in IT Service Management.
In our previous post ITIL – ITSM: Key for Incident Management, we analyzed why is it important to apply ITIL best practices for IT departments.
After reading the post, two things become clear: 1) Every department needs to rely on ITSM tools to satisfy your company’s demands; and 2) Incident Management goes hand in hand with Service Management.
Now, there are many ITSM options on the market that may fit to your company. Then, what’s your best option?
Lately, two major names have been blaring on the ITSM arena: Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk. But before making your mind, we invite you to review these two excellent solutions currently available on the market.
Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk
First, let’s point out their common points. Both tools are available worldwide and serve as guideline for optimizing ITSM. Similarly, both of them have options that suites to all types of businesses, including prices.
On the one hand, we find Freshservice
In general terms, Freshservice is a Cloud-based solution for IT Service Management that comprises Service Desk. The experience of more than 10,000 users verify and support its superiority over other similar outstanding tools.
Ranking for verified users regarding Freshservice was as it follows: 5 stars for 44 reviewers; and 4 stars for other 7. Stars were always in those two ranges.
Evaluators highlighted above all its efficiency and ease of use; as well as its usefulness in Service Management and Change Management. Freshservice also saves many hours in configuration, and employment was another important feature of the product.
Beside, Freshservice is a powerful and friendly tool, with fresh and appealing appearance, understandable, modern, with flexible design and with clear and concise workflow.
Freshservice also stands out for its capability to receive and allocate tickets in short time.
Freshservice has competitive price and it also has an intuitive, elegant and orderly design, easy to configure and customize. In general, it meets all the customer’s demands.
Similarly, it has a good catalog of services, it properly aligns with ITIL standards and covers the main service processes. It also allows the expansion of additional fields and counts with an underlying base of knowledge; so you save the step of installing or license of any other platform associated
A reviewer Freshservice said: “I encourage anyone on the search for a new a software for ticket support, to take a trial and experiment with Freshservice. It is a friendly and powerful product”. Another said: “I install and use it in less than an hour”.
Additionally, it easily integrates other business systems and IT such as Google Apps, Dropbox, and Bomgar among others products.
Freshservice is also part of prestigious family: Freshdesk. It has more than 80,000 customers worldwide. We count Cisco, Honda, 3M, The Atlantic and QuizUp among them. And all of them have issued very favorable valuations over Freshservice and Freshdesk.
For example Mark Horgan, Director of Moneycorp said:
Freshservice is simple and intuitive. It prevented my team of using a complicated solution that could have taken them much time to learn how to use, with its associated high costs.
Freshservice is extremely easy to install, and customizing logos, colors and images on the platform took as short as only 15 minutes.
After installing Freshservice, Moneycorp immediately received a very positive feed back from its users. And their opinion about the interface and use of the tool was that it was very intuitive, and they got tickets in their emails. Accordingly, the use of the portal increased 33%.
Finally, the Director of Moneycorp concluded its assessment of Freshservice:
“… When a tool is intuitive and easy to use, it’s more likely that you can explore and exploit it the most. This is why I qualify it as “brilliant”.
Freshservice goes to College
Judson College in Elgin, Illinois, serves more than 1,300 clients through its IT Department. It used to employ a Help Desk tool with a high volume of incidents with students and teachers.
After studying several alternatives for IT Management, the Judson College representatives selected Freshservice information. The availability of information; appearance; support for traditional Help Desk activities; and of course, good pricing, were determining factors in their final decision.
And they choose very well: Thanks to the capabilities of Freshservice, the Judson University widely covered its expectations.
The IT Department of Judson College found in Freshservice the ideal tool for Incident Management, and Service Request. Also, the transition and Change Management was simpler; especially in the self-service area and pre-determined, standardized answers.
Likewise, the IT Department found extremely useful and simple its service catalog, customer satisfaction surveys and reports.
Additionally, its agents mentioned that tickets via email reduced from 50% to 33%; and increased up to an impressive 250% the amount of resolutions to incidents on the first call.
Also, they reported that with Freshservice, the annual incidents average related to Change Management decreased from 26 to only 2. In addition, customer satisfaction dramatically increased: The rating reached an impressive 92% in overall rating.
Of course, Freshservice has areas for improvement. One of them is that the home page still doesn’t update automatically. Same, the areas of Asset Management; Management Knowledge Base and translation to less common languages, are also sensitive for improvement.
In its favor, we say that the tool is relatively new and therefore, its developers are bound to work on them.
On the other hand, we found Jira Service Desk
Jira Service Desk by Atlassian came out to light in 2014. Conceived as self-service portal for Help Desk and managing orders; meets quite well the needs of external clients for support and development organizations.
It comes along with his twin product, Jira Software, whose license needs to be acquired independently. It also counts with the recognition of G2Crowd for his leadership in the field of software support.
Regarding the ranking, Jira Service Desk yields these results:
- 5 stars in 31 reviews verified users
- 4 stars for another 18 reviewers
- 3 stars for 7 reviewers
- 2 to 1 star for 4 reviewers
Jira Service Desk is simple to use since it counts on a website. However, some reviewers agreed that this can also be a disadvantage; because it requires an Administrator to fully configure Jira Service Desk.
In any case, the page do facilitates the assistance requests: It’s a self-service portal where users connect directly to support centers; and monitor the process of solution.
Through the portal, developers and IT Agents work together by connecting tickets generated in Jira Service Desk with Jira Software Incident Data Base.
However, this solution presents another flaw: It requires the integration with Jira Confluence Software for the management of Knowledge Base.
On the positive side, Jira Service Desk ends each task intelligently and through automated processes. It also maintains high standards regarding service-level agreements, intelligent search and workflows, among others.
We should underline that Jira Service Desk allows the use of up three service agents for a low monthly cost. If the business demands more agents, they are available for scaleable prices.
One of the biggest advantages in Jira Service Desk, it’s that the support tickets can be easily assigned to a department, or to an individual agent. Thus, the entire company gets aware of every incident ticket.
Evaluators consider it as a good tool for managing tickets, even if it lacks mobile applications to locate them anywhere. Other reviewers also highlighted its ability to generate reports and metrics, especially about the time spent in serving customers.
On the negative side, we also find some complaints about the interface. It slows down when multiple users coincide on the same task; and it lacks support voicemail. Same, observations regarding moderation of the forums were also reported.
However, the strongest criticism made to Jira Service Desk came from a company in Sweden. It notes that, even when Jira Service Desk is certified as ITSM tool based on ITIL, it really isn’t.
Foundations are simple: Although IT Departments can build and adapt all kinds of workflows; it requires many hours of consultation to support ITIL processes, and it only admits only 4 simple operational processes.
Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk in numbers
According the G2 Crowd Spring 2016, the clash between Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk was as follows:
| Description |
Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk |
|
| Customer Satisfaction | 97 | 74 |
| G2 Score | 76 | 62 |
| Ratings | 51 | 58 |
| Presence in the market | 55 | 50 |
Numbers speak louder: It’s evident that in the contest, Freshservice exceeds Jira Service Desk on 4 criteria.
Among its many benefits, highlights: 1) its capability to organize ITSM; 2) its Change Management; 3) its Incident Management; 4) its configuration and customization; and 5) the customer’s satisfaction.
Second, according to the G2 Crowd Spring 2016, in the contest Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk, Freshservice won and ranked in the second place among the top 25 Service Desk Platforms for small and medium-sized industries and enterprises.
In another comparison conducted for G2 Crowd regarding Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk; Freshservice scored 4.8 of 5 points, while Jira Service Desk scored 4.0 points.
Selection criteria in this comparison were:
- Best Customer Satisfaction
- Ease of installation and maintenance
- Best quality for Technical Support
- Simplicity of trading; and
- Product direction.
Third, Freshservice stands out for its capability to gather IT agents with users. This feature increases in the customer the feeling of being properly helped.
In addition, both sides enjoy the process, which also increases efficiency and productivity in Agents. This also generates customer confidence and encourages their loyalty to the company.
The fourth advantage presented in Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk, is appearance. Additionally to be a robust and easy to customize tool, it has a fresh and attractive design, with many possibilities for customization.
Fifth, Freshservice supports ITIL standards and processes more efficiently than Jira Service Desk. Also, it doesn’t require any Administrator to deploy, and it requires little support and fewer hours of learning to use.
Finally, between Freshservice vs Jira Service Desk, the reviewers made very little adverse critics on Freshservice. And they seem to be problems easily to overcome in the short run.
The end user’s overview, is that Freshservice is very friendly and its many features places it among the most popular of its kind. It is very easy to set, use and scale as your organization grows.
For all these reasons, we strongly recommend Freshservice as Service Desk in your company.
And the best it, you can request a free trial Freshservice by just following this link:
